Seven Wonders (10 page)
They were both breathing hard as Grange led her the last few steps past the Star of India, deep into the farthest reaches of the Hall of Gems. To Jendari, the most famous sapphire in the world was like a third presence in the room. The perfect dome-shaped gemstone, with its glowing six-pointed star created by the light bouncing off the crystal at its heart, wasn’t beautiful simply
because it was rare, or famous, or large. It was beautiful because it had a soul, a history.
Formed millions of years ago by natural forces, discovered almost four centuries ago in a riverbed in Sri Lanka, and donated to the American Museum by the banker J. P. Morgan, the Star had been a mainstay of the museum from its beginning. But as spectacular as it was, the Star of India’s journey hadn’t ended in the display room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
In 1964, the Star had been the centerpiece of a bizarre crime. A pair of beatnik beach bums, inspired by a Hollywood movie about jewel thieves, snuck through a bathroom window into the museum and stole two dozen irreplaceable gems, including the Star and the famous sixteen-carat Eagle Diamond, a rough, uncut gem found near the town of Eagle, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s.
Although the hapless thieves were quickly apprehended, the brazen theft would go down in history as one of the most audacious jewel heists ever conducted. After the Star of India was recovered from a locker in the Miami bus station, it attracted even larger crowds because of its infamy. The Eagle Diamond hadn’t been so fortunate; to this day, its whereabouts remained a mystery, and most experts believed the rough mineral had been chopped up and sold off in pieces.
To Jendari, though the robbery had been primitive to the point of being comical, the disappearance and return of the Star had given it significance; it was a reminder of how quickly something that seemed so permanent could vanish, and how even a small-minded person could accomplish something well beyond his status, given the right opportunity.
But if Grange considered the Star of India anything beyond another gem in the museum’s collection, he wasn’t showing. In two seconds flat, he had passed the glowing gem and hurriedly unlocked another unmarked door. A moment later, they were both descending down a narrow stairway.
The stairs ended in front of a steel door. Instead of a wave of his magnetic ID card, this time Grange punched a series of numbers into an electronic keypad attached to the door’s frame. There was a loud metallic click, and the door swung inward on automatic hinges.
Jendari found herself being led into a small, steel-walled chamber, almost devoid of furniture. In the middle of the room stood a single wooden crate about three feet tall, nearly as wide as it was long.
She realized immediately where they were. Grange had brought her to one of the numerous archival examination rooms set aside for receiving and documenting the literally millions of fossils, artifacts, and gemstones that arrived into the museum every year, from private collectors, archaeologists, other museums, and even foreign governments. The truth was, the vast majority of items that came through the museum never saw the light of a display cabinet. One could spend a lifetime crawling through the bowels of the museum, and still only see a fraction of what had been collected over the years.
Grange stood in silence as Jendari let the steel door seal shut behind them.
“I know you like to tease, Mr. Grange, but it’s not good to keep a lady waiting. Especially this lady.”
Grange grinned, trickles of sweat framing his cubic features. As one of the American Museum’s most senior curators of antiquities, Henry Grange was an expert on many things—but pleasing women was likely not in his repertoire. Thankfully, Jendari hadn’t spent the last decade funneling money into a private Swiss bank account she had set up for the curator because of his sexual prowess. To Jendari, the mysterious crate standing in the middle of this steel chamber was more exciting than anything any man could do for her.
“As you wish,” Grange said.
With that, he nearly dove across the room, retrieving a heavy iron crowbar from behind the crate. He went to work on the wood, leveraging his
considerable weight against the oversize steel nails that held the crate together.
“You can’t imagine the difficulty we had in getting this here,” Grange said as he struggled with the crowbar. “The paperwork involved in getting the permission to use the submersible in the first place was staggering. Then there were the payouts to the customs officers in Alexandria, at the stopover in Paris, and then again at JFK.”
There was a loud crack as one of the wooden slats split down the middle. Grange jammed the crowbar into the opening and then twisted with both shoulders. The entire top of the crate cracked free, then clattered to the floor.
Jendari thought she caught a whiff of salt water, though it might have just been her imagination. She knew the items in the crate had been on quite a journey since they’d been pulled out of the cavern dug into the floor of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor—halfway between the isthmus where the Egyptian city had been built and the ruins of Pharos, a tiny, ancient island, sitting right where the Nile River drained into the Mediterranean Sea. The amount of bribes that she had funded to enable Grange’s team to conduct the archaeological survey beneath the ruins of what was once known as one of the Ancient Seven Wonders of the World, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, were too numerous to count; when you added in the expense of all the red tape to get the artifacts Grange had found out of Egypt and onto American soil, it was well into the millions. But even so, Jendari had no regrets. When Grange had first informed her of the discovery of the cavern, she had been willing to pay far more to get her hands on what might be inside.
Her chest rising beneath her strings of pearls, Jendari crossed the room as Grange knelt by the open crate. She watched as he carefully lifted out two heavy objects, wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. He placed the objects side by side on the floor, then gently unrolled the wrap around the closest of the two.
Jendari gasped audibly as he pulled the statue free. It was two feet high, chiseled from what looked like polished limestone. A female warrior, holding an ivory javelin. Her right breast was missing, and there was a necklace of what appeared to be eggs hanging down around her shoulders.
From an archaeological perspective, it was an incredible discovery. The Lighthouse of Alexandria had been built in the third century BC, supposedly to honor Alexander the Great, who had died at age thirty-two. His successor, Ptolemy I, began construction shortly after Alexander’s death, but it was his son, Ptolemy II, who had finished what the father had started: a magnificent lighthouse, four hundred and fifty feet tall, with a furnace at its peak that rotated three hundred sixty degrees, and could be seen as far away as twenty-nine miles. It was the model for all future lighthouses—all the way until the present day.
Although it was widely accepted that the lighthouse was a Greek construction, Jendari’s own sources had led her to believe that Alexander’s death was only one of the impetuses for the construction of the Wonder. A previously funded excursion to the island of Pharos had revealed a single stone inscription that had spoken of a much earlier temple at the location where the lighthouse had been built—one with a much older history. But until now, her only proof had been those etchings on stone.
Now she and Grange were looking at something much more concrete. Although Jendari had many similar statues in her private collection—most supplied by Grange and his teams over the past decade—she was certain that the statue in front of her outdated them all. It was, perhaps, the earliest representation of an Amazon anyone had ever found.
But the look on Grange’s face told her that the statue was only the appetizer. With trembling hands, the stocky man reached forward and unrolled the wrapping from the second object.
Jendari’s eyes widened and she immediately pushed Grange aside and dropped to her knees in his place. In front of her, flush with the floor, was
a solid stone tablet, covered in ancient cuneiform. She knew from her studies of the last decade that the cuneiform was Sumerian. The age of the object in front of her had to be over eight thousand years: many millennia before the construction of the ruined lighthouse beneath which the table had been found. But it wasn’t the Sumerian writing, or even the age of the stone, that sent spikes of adrenaline through Jendari’s veins.
It was the single image in the center of the tablet. Vivid, indelible, and immediately recognizable:
“Two intertwined snakes,” Grange whispered. “The double helix.”
Jendari nodded.
“Somewhere near where your team uncovered this, there was a painting on the wall of the cavern.”
It wasn’t a question. Grange stared at her.
“Yes.”
“A tribe of women warriors, leaving a jungle, carrying a stone.”
“But—how could you know?”
Jendari didn’t respond. Her head was swirling. The stone in front of her, the image in the center, of the two intertwined snakes, was more important than anything in Jendari’s private collection.
Hell, it’s more important, more significant, than anything in the entire museum
.
“Crate them both back up, and have them delivered to my plane immediately.”
Grange nodded. Jendari rose back to her feet, her heels clicking against the steel-plated floor. She watched as the stocky curator began gingerly rolling the two objects in the bubble wrap.
Grange had no idea what his team had found. And even if Jendari had told him, he wouldn’t have understood. The pictogram on the ancient stone was just a symbol to him. Even if she had explained what it really was—the oldest representation of the Order of Eve that had ever been uncovered, evidence of the greatest civilization that had ever existed—he would have seen it as just another object for the display cases upstairs.
He wouldn’t have understood, any more than he’d have understood why, at that very moment, Jendari Saphra wore the priceless, stolen Eagle Diamond hanging down beneath her Versace sheath, the cold, unfinished gemstone nestled tight against the small of her back.
The truth was, it didn’t matter what Henry Grange knew or understood. Despite what he may have thought, he wasn’t a friend; he was just an object to her, like the diamond. As long as he had a purpose, he was significant and valuable.
When he no longer had a purpose, he would lose his value, and she would get rid of him. And when the time came, it would be as easy as taking her phone out of her crystal-studded clutch and sending a text.
The jungle wasn’t going to let them go
.
Jack pressed his face against the window as the electric train surged beneath him, steel wheels struggling against the steep, winding track cut right into the Tijuca Forest. The scene on the other side of the glass was a thick blur of tropical green; ten minutes before, the train had pulled away from the crowded platform in Cosme Velho and was now halfway into its twenty-minute journey up the side of Corcovado Mountain. The small, picturesque village on the southern outskirts of the steamy, teeming metropolis of Rio had quickly given way to a smattering of poorly constructed wooden shanties, and then it was nothing but green as the train carved its way upward, the ascent so vertical, the rainforest so thick in some places, it felt as though it would take a miracle to keep the damn thing puttering up the track.
Then again, if you were looking for miracles, this was probably a good place to start
.
He turned away from the window, toward his grad students, Andy and Dashia, who were seated next to him on a seat that would have felt crowded if he’d been sitting there by himself. Andy was hanging on to the edge closest
to the narrow aisle with both hands, a heavy duffel bag jammed against the floor beneath his legs. Dashia was between them, her oversize computer bag balanced precariously on her lap. Neither was saying anything—not that Jack would have been able to hear anything below a scream. The noise from the wheels against the aging track was only a small part of the cacophony assaulting his ears. Even though it was barely nine in the morning, the atmosphere in the car—one of two powered by twin overhead cables that ran the entire length of the twenty-three-hundred-foot ascent up the side of the mountain—was pure bedlam. Every seat was packed, and even the aisle was crowded, packed three deep in some places. It was an almost even mix of native Brazilians, many of them well-dressed Catholics making a religious pilgrimage to their country’s most iconic symbol, and foreign tourists, in shorts and T-shirts, cell phones out and cameras clicking, fanny packs bulging with traveler’s checks and credit cards.