“And a few days later,” Sloane continued, placing her glasses back over her gray-blue eyes. “She vanishes. Never to be seen again.”
Jack nodded. The 747 was banking hard to the left as it cut through the cloud cover on its way to a cruising altitude.
“I think there was a book. And a movie. And a couple of documentaries.”
“There have been a number of theories,” Sloane said, ignoring him. “The most likely was that she’d miscalculated the distance, run out of fuel, and crashed during a mid-Pacific hop to Howland Island. Another possibility is that she’d turned back for some reason and had crashed on a nearby desolate atoll. The most outlandish theory was that she was a spy working for either the US government or the Germans, and she’d intentionally ditched the plane, then been secretly picked up by a naval ship, given a new identity, and had lived out the rest of her life, hiding in plain view.”
As the 747 leveled out, Jack could see the flight attendants at the end of the aisle unstrapping themselves from their jump seats, getting ready to begin the first of their countless rituals. Soon they’d be pushing carts full of miniature beverages up and down the narrow aisles, checking seat belts, lowering window shades, and generally trying to make an eternity trapped in a flying tin can seem almost bearable. Jack figured he and Sloane had about ten more minutes to get to some sort of understanding of what the hell they were getting themselves into before the distractions became too many.
“Any of those theories have her heading to Brazil, then ditching her plane beneath Christ the Redeemer?” he asked.
He didn’t expect a smile—hell, if Andy couldn’t get her to crack her façade, he’d never had a chance. Still, he at least hoped for some acknowledgment that he was trying.
“According to this flight diary, she didn’t go straight to Brazil,” Sloane said, her voice as steady as ever. “She took off from New Guinea on July 2 at midnight, then headed into the Pacific, toward Howland Island, as she
was supposed to; instead of reaching Howland, she touched down on Gardner Island, a little known spot in the Phoenix Island group nearby. From there, the plane doubled back toward Asia, and on into Europe, ending in an airfield near a village called Cuarzon, in the South of Spain. Two days later, she left Spain and flew back again across the Atlantic, finally heading toward Rio, Brazil.”
Jack looked past Sloane’s finger, toward the lines and numbers that spread out across the pages of the flight diary. He was impressed that she’d been able to interpret the notations so quickly. She was stiff and way too logical for his liking, but she wasn’t going to be completely useless.
“That’s quite a flight plan,” Jack said. “Pretty incredible evidence that we’re diving into something extraordinary.”
“Actually, like I said before, I believe it’s nothing more than an elaborate hoax. I don’t know who set this up, and I don’t know why—I’m just telling you what we’re supposed to believe, based on this diary.”
Jack touched the backpack he’d stored snuggly beneath the seat in front of him.
“These artifacts seem pretty real to me,” he said quietly. He could feel the bulge of the stone tablet beneath the vinyl of the bag, and beneath that, the two snake segments, which he’d wrapped separately in hand towels from the Rio hotel. They’d attempted to place them gently together in the hotel, but the pieces hadn’t fit; they hadn’t wanted to risk damaging them by forcing the matter.
Even worse, Jack had been forced to take both segments out of the bag while going through security at the Rio airport; when the Brazilian equivalent to a TSA agent had tried to poke a gloved finger at the mechanical gears within one of the segments, he’d nearly decked the guy. Luckily, Sloane had stepped in, telling the man that the snake pieces were fragile antique toys she had bought for her cousin. The Brazilian TSA agent had shrugged, obviously more interested in the bottle of shampoo Andy had tried sneaking
through in his duffel bag beneath the infrared dish and the climbing rope—both of which had garnered surprisingly little attention.
Sloane shrugged. There was no way she could explain away the segments or the stone tablet. Especially since she’d seen the exact same picture on the wall in the hypogeum of the Colosseum and after Jack had explained to her that he’d also seen and photographed the same painting in the pit beneath the Temple of Artemis.
For the moment, whatever Sloane believed, they needed to treat what they were diving into as more than a hoax.
“I’ve never heard of Cuarzon,” he said, going back to the narrative she’d just given him. “But Spain in the late thirties was caught up in a pretty intense civil war. Towns and villages were getting bombed and burned into oblivion, and almost six hundred thousand people died.”
“The Spanish Civil War. A devastating time—but what does it have to do with what we’ve found?”
“Maybe the destruction going on during the Spanish Civil War had something to do with the transportation of these artifacts halfway around the world. Christ the Redeemer had just finished construction, and though it wasn’t yet a Wonder of the World, it was as impressive as anything that had ever been built in modern times.”
A war was going on in Spain, towns were burning to the ground all over the country, and according to the flight diary, that’s where the plane he’d found beneath Corcovado had made a stop after the pilot had faked her own disappearance. Jack wondered,
Is it possible that the stone tile and the snake segment were moved to a place that seemed safer than where they had been stored before? Had they been intentionally hidden beneath a Wonder of the World?
The line of thought pricked at Jack’s mind. He’d been studying one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for some time because of what he believed to be a connection to the ancient Amazons. Along the way, he’d
gained a broader knowledge of the other Ancient Wonders, and he knew that six of the seven had been destroyed over the years by natural disasters and wars. Even so, most of them had lasted hundreds, if not thousands of years.
The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, by the very nature of their worldwide designation, would probably last almost as long.
Didn’t that make the Seven Wonders the perfect hiding places for something that was supposed to stay hidden for hundreds, if not thousands of years?
“Supposing any of this is true,” Sloane said. “What could be so important about the tablet, and the segments, that you’d need to hide them at all? And the time frame we’re talking about—it’s hard to even fathom.”
Jack had to agree with her. The object he’d recovered from the statue in Brazil had presumably been there as long as the ditched airplane—more than eighty years. The segment Sloane had recovered at the Colosseum had been sealed into an aqueduct perhaps as many as two thousand years ago. It was almost incomprehensible that the two objects could be related over such a long period of time, but there they were, wrapped in cheap, dirty hand towels in the backpack beneath his feet.
“A pair of snake segments,” he said, mostly to himself. “Connected to a picture of women warriors carrying a tablet out of a forest—”
“A garden,” Sloane corrected.
“What do you mean?”
Sloane’s voice sped up a notch as Jack saw that the flight attendants had one of the beverage carts unlocked and moving already—still a good fifteen rows away, but making its way toward them, one miniature bottle of booze at a time.
“It’s not a forest in the picture, it’s a garden. The variety of plants and vines, and the way they are planted—grouped by species, carefully intertwined so that the more aggressive genuses don’t overwhelm the more placid—implies that they were cultivated and controlled. It’s not haphazard
or random growth. Hence, it’s a garden—not a forest.”
Jack’s mind started to churn. His first thought went right to his wheel-house.
“Like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”
Sloane shook her head.
“I thought so too, at first. But then I looked up the Ancient Wonder and saw that every image of the Hanging Gardens, and every description—from Herodotus on up—describes a terraced palace, with sophisticated vertical irrigation. The garden on our tablet isn’t terraced. And it doesn’t appear to be mechanically irrigated.”
Jack had another thought. The cart was eight rows away now.
“The Garden of Eden? I didn’t spend much time in Sunday School, but if I remember my Genesis correctly, it was a natural garden, wasn’t it?”
“It makes sense that you’d go there,” Sloane said. “Considering where you just were. But garden imagery is common to almost every culture, and nearly every religion on Earth, past and present, begins with flora: a garden, a vine, a Tree of Life. Pick any god you’d like, the first thing he does is make a plant. Only then, he starts thinking about people.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. That had almost qualified as a joke.
“You know a lot about religion?”
“I know a lot about gardens. Being a botanical geneticist.”
She was definitely warming up—but then she shrugged again and closed the leather flight diary against her lap.
“But I still can’t see how any of this is really relevant. The facts we’re dealing with don’t have anything to do with religious gardens or any other sort of superstition. What we know—and all that we know—is that someone hid the tablet next to a ditched airplane beneath Christ the Redeemer and hid a snake segment at the statue’s peak. They hid another segment beneath the Colosseum. Whether either of these events happened a hundred years ago, a couple thousand years ago, or last week, the fact remains
that these items were hidden in two of the most famous architectural achievements in the world. Which leads me to believe they were hidden, but also meant to one day be found.”
Cold, scientific logic. Jack wasn’t certain that such an approach meant anything, in the face of what they had found—but he was willing to go along.
“Meant to be found by whom?”
“Presumably not us,” Sloane said.
And presumably not my brother
, Jack thought to himself.
The flight attendants were so close now, he could hear them chatting to the nearby passengers about the breakfast options. He looked around, at the people in the seats in the rows in front of him, at the strangers—men, women, a few children—that filled almost every other seat on the partially booked flight.
If his brother had truly been murdered because of what he’d found, Jack and Sloane were potentially in danger as well. Jack didn’t care so much about his own safety; hell, he could handle himself, and he’d faced some pretty hairy situations over the years. But when he thought about Andy and Dashia, near the back of the plane, probably going over the same set of mysteries, he became extremely uncomfortable. Then he glanced back at Sloane, who had traded the flight diary for one of her scientific journals. The title of the article she was reading had something to do with dandelions and allergens. Not the sort of thing Jack would choose to begin twenty-two hours of traveling from Brazil to India by way of Frankfurt, but then again, he’d just learned the difference between a forest and garden.
He reminded himself: Sloane Costa was there on her own accord. Not because of his brother, not even because she truly believed there was a connection between the Seven Wonders of the World. Sloane was there because she was desperate, and trying to keep her job.
Even so, watching her sitting there, with her perfect posture, her hair
combed so tightly against her head that he could see every strand, Jack knew that if what they were diving into was truly dangerous, if people were willing to kill to keep whatever it was a secret …
It would be up to him to keep Sloane, and the rest of his team, safe. Which meant somehow, he needed to figure out what the hell that were getting themselves into—as fast as he could.
The rat was huge.
At least eighteen inches tail to snout, but it seemed almost twice as big, lunging through the air at almost supernatural speed, front claws outstretched, oversized jaws wide open, fangs bared and dripping fetid teardrops of saliva toward the steaming sidewalk.
The thing was moving so damn fast, Jack didn’t have time to think; his reflexes took over, and suddenly he was diving forward, catching Sloane around the waist with one arm and lifting her a full foot off the ground. Sloane screamed in shock, grabbing at him with her hands, but he ignored her, spinning on his heels away from the rabid creature.
He was halfway around when he realized he had miscalculated Sloane’s weight; her body was a good deal tighter and toned beneath the thin material of her pantsuit than he had expected, and the added momentum sent them teetering across the crowded sidewalk, right over the low stone curb. Only a last-second adjustment—a dip in his knees, a twist of his waist, putting her halfway over his right shoulder—kept them from toppling beneath the motorcycle rickshaw that was blasting past them, going the wrong way through the surging, traffic-laden street.
And then Jack heard the laughter, which seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Still holding Sloane over one shoulder, he whirled back toward the rat—and that’s when he noticed the collar, studded with what appeared to be rhinestones, tight around the hissing creature’s throat. A metal linked chain ran from the collar to a steel post set in front of a narrow glass storefront. Above the rat, a web of cracks spread across most of the glass, but in between the jagged shards, Jack could see shelves lining three walls of a space barely larger than an airplane lavatory. The shelves were cluttered with cheap-looking souvenirs: wood-carved Buddhas, brassy statuettes of various Hindu gods, ornate, painted festival masks with wide eyes, beards, and toothy grins beneath headdresses made of peacock feathers and dried flowers.