Seven Wonders (14 page)
Jack knew he wasn’t the first person to climb outside the access tunnel and make his way up to the shoulders of Christ. In December 1999, an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner had leaped off the right arm of the statue wearing a low-altitude parachute, breaking the world record for the lowest BASE jump. And in 2010, vandals had used scaffolding that had been put up to repair some of the exteriors of the statue to ascend to the head and spray graffiti all over Christ’s face.
But he was fairly certain he was the first person to scale the statue for a single, simple purpose: to look Christ right in the eye.
Holding tight to the bearded chin, Jack used his knees to lift himself until he was standing almost straight; his face came to about the statue’s wind-damaged nose. He realized he was going to have to work a little harder, climb a little farther up the Wonder’s twelve-foot tall head. With a burst of strength, he pulled himself up with the fingers of his right hand, until he was hanging from a groove where an eyebrow used to be.
Right in front of him was the statue’s left eye, about the size of a small manhole cover. Up close, it seemed as smooth as the rest of the statue, a glade of soapstone on a concrete base. But Jack was certain there was something hidden behind that blank stare.
He got his iták free from the holster along his back and carefully ran the edge around the eye. It took a good minute before he felt the groove, right up where the iris would have been, had the statue been real. It was almost imperceptible, covered in a brush of soapstone, but once the iták dug through the outer layer, Jack was able to get a centimeter of the blade into the seam. Using his free hand, he twisted the iták—and a small section of the soapstone came loose on nearly microscopic hinges, about the size of a package of cigarettes, revealing a hollow cubbyhole.
Oblivious to the wind and the ache in his fingers where he gripped the statue, Jack reholstered the iták and jammed his free hand into the cubby. About a foot in, his palm touched what felt like parchment, wrapped around something small and solid. He pulled the item free, closing the soapstone cover behind it. Then he lowered himself back below the statue’s chin and onto the shoulder. Straddling the vast deltoid with his legs, he unwrapped the parchment and lifted the object free.
Heavy, though it fit in the palm of his hand, plated in bronze that shone even in the near darkness, crafted with sophisticated precision, down to the carved, beady eyes and the hint of a forked tongue, the snake-head—the first segment from the stone tablet that Andy had taken back to the Rio hotel—was staggeringly beautiful. In all his expeditions, Jack had never seen anything quite like it. And then he carefully turned the segment over and saw something that shocked him even further. The segment was filled with mechanical bronze gears.
Jack’s mind whirled. Just looking at the segment, he couldn’t tell how old it was; but something about the artistry on the exterior of the object, the thin grooves that Jack recognized as having been made by bronze and stone
tools, he had a suspicion that the thing was extremely old indeed. Certainly, if the ditched plane beneath the overgrown canopy of vegetation told him anything, it was that the segment had been placed in the statue nearly a century ago, maybe even before the Wonder of the World was finished being built. But the craftsmanship of the snake’s head made him think in millennia, not centuries.
Certainly, there was plenty of evidence that complicated mechanical gear-work had existed for at least two thousand years. The famous Antikythera mechanism—gears designed to make astronomical calculations—had been found in a Greek shipwreck back in the early 1900s, and dated back to at least 100 BC. The Bronze Age itself, beginning 3300 BC, was defined by humankind’s discovery of the processes of mining and smelting copper which, when combined with the alloy tin, could be made into bronze weapons, armor, and tools. There was plenty of evidence that certain Bronze Age civilizations had taken metallurgy further than that.
Even so, the snake segment’s gear-work looked extremely complex; Jack had no idea what it was for, or what it could do. He realized he wasn’t going to figure the mystery out there, hanging from the shoulder of Christ the Redeemer.
He began to rewrap the segment in the parchment when a stiff wind whipped across the statue’s vast chest, nearly pulling the papery material out of his grip. He caught it just before it blew off into oblivion and noticed, with a start, that the backside of the parchment wasn’t blank like the front.
Imprinted across the papery substance was the same symbol of the segmented snake from the stone tablet. Except this time, there was a new pictogram, flush with the second segment—one down from the snake’s head:
The picture was strange, and at first Jack didn’t recognize the symbol: a humanoid figure, half-man, half-woman, holding what appeared to be a sharply pointed trident. Jack immediately began to sift through his memory banks, guided by the familiar ancient weapon, trying to figure out which
Greek or Roman god might fit the iconography. And then it dawned on him.
He was off by three thousand miles, and more than two thousand years
.
He began carefully rolling the segment back into the parchment, and was placing both into his jacket when a brilliant blue light exploded around him, briefly blinding him. For a moment, despite his scientific background, his thoughts raced to the supernatural—that he’d inadvertently triggered the rapture, and considering where he was at that moment, he was pretty sure he wasn’t heading anywhere good.
But then the blue shifted to purple, and then burgundy red. Jack squinted down past his feet and saw the banks of LEDs bursting to life along the top of the statue’s granite base. The light show had begun.
Rapture or not, it was time for Jack to get out of there, before someone noticed him hanging a few feet below Christ’s head. He began the climb back down the chest of the great Wonder, his thoughts still captivated by the bronze snake’s head wrapped in parchment, and the strange new pictogram.
Half man, half woman, with a trident in its hand.
The image was still fresh in Jack’s mind as he leaped up the last flight of stairs leading to his team’s hotel room, on the second floor of a flamingo-pink building at the end of a cobbled alley. The neon light from the disco across the street was even visible here, in a cinderblock stairwell with inch-wide slits instead of windows; garish orange and red and blue, flashing across his face as he reached for the doorknob.
He was already talking as he threw open the door, reaching into his jacket to retrieve the parchment and the snake-head.
“Get ready to have your minds blown,” he started—and then he froze, the two items still hidden beneath his arm.
The hotel room was Spartan and compact; a dresser by the door, with a black-and-white television set. A pair of double beds by the window. And a little two-seater couch in front of a knee-high coffee table. Andy was sitting on one of the beds, a little plastic specimen container in his hands. Dashia was on the other bed, her laptop open on the pillow in front of her. But Jack’s attention was immediately drawn to the couch.
“And who the hell are you?” he asked. He hadn’t meant it to come out like that, but after the events of the past two days, he was beginning to run low on tolerance for surprises. And certainly, the woman was a surprise.
Angular face, with a nose a little too small to be perfect but not unpleasant; cheekbones that could have rivaled the statue he had just climbed down; long reddish-brown hair held back behind her ears, and gray-blue eyes. She was wearing a suit, which was strange, considering that it was Rio and well after midnight. And she had the leather flight diary that Jack had taken from the plane open on her lap.
“Relax, Doc,” Andy said. “She’s not here to repossess your car, although that was my first guess when she showed up at the door. She’s a Doc, like you. Although she’s a real scientist.”
The woman attempted a smile, but it was obvious she wasn’t used to the gesture.
“Botanical geneticist, actually. Michigan State. Sloane Costa. I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but my flight got in a couple hours ago, and I was hoping you might be up.”
Jack didn’t move, his hand still cupping the parchment-wrapped snake-head.
“Do I know you?”
She shook her head, her hair barely moving with the motion.
“Although I’m a recent fan of your work. I’ve been reading your papers nonstop for the past twenty-four hours. In particular, your work on the mythological Amazonian culture intrigues me—well, enough that I tracked you down through your department head at Princeton and caught the earliest flight I could find to Brazil.”
Normally, Jack would have been happy to shoot the breeze with a fellow scientist, but he had much more important work to do. Then his gaze went again to the leather-bound flight diary, and he felt a tinge of possessiveness.
“Do you have any idea what I went through to get that?”
“It’s pretty amazing,” Sloane said. “I mean, I’m sure it’s some sort of hoax—it has to be some sort of hoax. But I think I’ve figured out what it’s meant to make us believe. I think I know whose flight diary this is supposed
to have been.”
Jack was barely listening to her. He wanted to grab the leather diary off of her lap and toss her out into the alley.
“Dr. Costa, I’m sure whatever you came here for is important, but we’re kind of in the middle of something.”
Sloane looked at him for a full beat.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something too, Dr. Grady. I came here directly from Rome. The Colosseum, actually. Because I found something strange.”
Andy held up the plastic specimen container. Jack could see a fleck of something inside.
“It’s a paint chip,” Andy said. “Dr. Costa says it was made from a pressed vine.”
“A very unique vine,” Sloane chimed in. “Of which I’ve also collected a very unique seed. That’s how I found you.”
“You found me because of a vine?”
“A very old vine. Dating back to the Bronze Age, to my surprise. After I left the Colosseum, I did some research. Turns out this particular red vine has been mentioned exactly three times in historical documents. A travelogue by the Greek historian Herodotus describing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; a war record by an aide to Alexander the Great, describing the conquest of a small village defended by a tribe of women warriors; and a poem by a papal scholar from the first days of the Vatican, about a cult of female warriors he called the Order of Eve.”
Jack blinked. The woman was watching him carefully now, and he found the experience a bit intimidating. She was sharp, that was for sure—but there was something a little terrifying about her stiffness, the way she perched on the edge of the couch, her fingers clasped above the open-flight diary.
“You can see how I got to you,” she continued. “At least two of those
documents had some relationship to mythical stories about the Amazons. And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might very well have implied a connection as well. From what I understand, as the legend goes, King Nebuchadnezzar II built them to please his homesick wife—a former female warrior captured by the Babylonians.”
Jack nodded. He wasn’t sure he liked the way she was bandying about the term “mythical” with each mention of the civilization he had dedicated the past few years to studying. But he couldn’t fault the logic that had led her to him. Still, it seemed a little crazy, traveling all that way because of a paint chip.
“That’s all pretty fascinating,” Jack started. “But I’m not sure how I can help. I don’t know the first thing about vines—”
“Actually, the vine isn’t the reason I’m here, Dr. Grady.”
And then she unclasped her fingers and pointed with a short, unmanicured nail.
Sitting on the coffee table in front of her knees was a shiny bronze snake segment, filled with mechanical gears.
The blade was incredibly sharp—a near microscopic sliver of titanium, mounted with fragments of pure obsidian, fractured down to the width of a single molecule. So sharp, in fact, that Jendari Saphra couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it flicked across the palm of her hand.
It took less than an eighth of a second for the blade to remove the half-dozen skin cells the DNA lock needed to run the protein scan—and only twice as long again before the bright red light above the vault door blinked green, indicating that Jendari’s DNA matched with the retina scan she’d already endured on the way into the mahogany-lined anteroom.