And maybe in the beginning, Dr. Berman’s diagnosis would have been correct. A normal person would not have turned what was essentially a stupid argument between brothers into a time-consuming diversion, employing enough computing power to launch a medium-size war. A disagreement so petty and bizarre, it wouldn’t even make sense beyond the confines of the twins’ dysfunctional relationship. Why his brother Jack even felt it necessary to return to Boston once a year, to mark the anniversary of their mother’s death, was unfathomable to Jeremy. The two of them had so little in common, without an argument, they’d have nothing to say to each other at all.
This one had been as pointless as ever. Jack had barely stepped off the plane when he’d started going on about his latest excursion, some sort of field research study at an archaeological dig site in Turkey. An anthropology fellow at Princeton who spent more time getting his passport stamped than in any classroom, Jack was always prattling on about his latest adventures.
This time, he was particularly excited because the dig site was at one of the Ancient Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Jeremy hadn’t even realized there were two sets of Seven Wonders—Ancient and Modern—and when he’d casually mentioned that the Ancient Wonders couldn’t have been all that impressive, since he doubted anyone could name three, let alone all seven, that was all Jack had needed to set him off on a lecture about the relative merits of the two lists that lasted until his flight back to Turkey.
Of course, that should have been the end of it. But the minute Jeremy had returned to campus, his mind started to spin. Subconsciously, he’d already begun trying to devise some sort of metric to compare modern and ancient architectural accomplishments. And just to get some sort of idea as to what he was even trying to compare, he’d pulled up maps of the various Wonders on his laptop. He wasn’t sure what had made him start toying with the latitudes and longitudes, or what he’d been looking for when he’d started superimposing the various maps on top of one another, charting out geographical centers, functioning out elevations and topography—but certainly nothing could have prepared him for what he had found.
A pattern
.
Mathematical, precise, and impossible.
At first, he’d refused to believe what he was seeing. The human mind searched for patterns, begged for patterns, often invented patterns when they couldn’t be found in nature. He’d forced himself to approach it logically, treat what he was seeing as a mathematical anomaly he needed to disprove. When he’d realized his own facilities weren’t enough, he’d gained access to everything he needed—holing up in the underground lab. All he’d brought with him were a change of clothes and his laptop, which was sitting next to the lab’s supercomputer. Attached to his laptop was a small thumb drive hanging from a fairly unique keychain. He’d fashioned the keychain out of a souvenir his brother had given him years earlier. Maybe Jack had
been going for something sentimental with the gift; Jeremy’s Egyptology was rusty, so he wasn’t sure what sort of message a gold-plated scarab was supposed to send. Hollowed out with a lathe from the mechanical engineering department, however, it made the perfect place to store a thumb drive.
There was no doubt now that Jeremy had uncovered something worth putting on that drive. Because based on the image on the screen, not only had he confirmed that the pattern wasn’t a figment of his special mind, he’d now used satellite data to correct for the curvature of the Earth and immensely powerful data processors to rule out any other possibilities.
At its core, it was the same simple mind experiment he’d performed two days ago—superimposing maps of the Modern Seven Wonders of the World against maps of the Ancient Wonders of the World. First, he’d created a map of the Ancients: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pyramids, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He’d had to look most of them up, and was surprised to learn that all were now little more than ruins, except for the Pyramids. One, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, was even less than that; nobody was even certain where it might have once stood, or even if it was more than just a myth. After precisely mapping the rest, he’d connected the geographic center of each Wonder, correcting for topography and the Earth’s curve. Then he’d created a similar map of the New Wonders of the World: Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, the Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, Petra, and the Great Wall of China. Together, they spanned a much larger distance, encompassing the entire globe rather than just the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. After functioning out the differences in scale, he’d over-laid the Modern Wonders over the Ancient Wonders, parsed the data into a visual image—and nearly knocked himself right out of his chair.
Most of the two images appeared to be enantiomers of each other—three-dimensional mirror images, matching up in the way someone’s left
and right hand might match up. But they weren’t just near mirror images. They were
perfect
enantiomers. Six of the Ancient Seven Wonders matched six of the Modern Wonders, creating a swooping pattern that, if anything, resembled two interlocking snakes—a double helix, in mathematical terms—with one tail ending at the Great Wall of China, the other at the ancient Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
Jeremy knew that what he was seeing was impossible. According to Jack’s lecture, the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World had been chosen by ancient Greek historians. But the new Seven Wonders of the World had been chosen by a popular vote. The only way for the new Seven Wonders of the World to have ended up in a pattern geographically linked to the ancient seven would have been if that vote had been manipulated; for some reason, someone had wanted those specific monuments chosen—monuments that had been built on the exact mirror image geographic locations as the Wonders from the ancient world.
Jeremy noticed, as his mind continued to whir forward, that his right hand was in the air, his finger tracing the pattern on the screen in the empty space in front of him. Objectively, the double helix was such a beautiful shape; the fact that it was also the easily recognizable form of DNA—the chemical building block of all life—added even more weight to its palpable splendor. As he traced the shape again, moving across the brightly colored pinpoints that marked the geographic center of each Wonder, Modern and Ancient, he found himself focusing on what wasn’t there: the two Wonders that didn’t match up. On the Ancient map, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which made sense, since the Gardens might very well have been myth. But the missing Modern Wonder—Christ the Redeemer, the magnificent Art Deco statue in Rio, and the most recently built of all the Wonders—why didn’t it fit the pattern?
Jeremy approached the desk again, this time turning to his laptop. Hitting keys with both hands, he quickly pulled up his satellite data on Christ
the Redeemer, looking again through the topographical imagery, running through the equations that he’d used to calculate the Wonder’s geographic center. As the numbers blinked across his laptop’s screen, he paused, his fingers hanging above his keyboard.
He wasn’t surprised he had missed it before; it was so small, barely a rounding error in the scheme of things. But certainly, given the image on the bigger computer screen, it now seemed very intriguing.
There was something off about that Wonder of the World—an anomaly in its topography. Something that wouldn’t have been visible at all, without the sophisticated satellite equipment. The sort of thing that his brother, Jack, would want to check out in person; another adventure he could dive headlong into, halfway around the world. Jeremy would have to be content to study it via the safety of electronic packets of information, from a basement laboratory five thousand miles away.
He quickly transferred the information onto the thumb drive attached to the laptop. Then his eyes returned to the larger screen—to the vivid pair of snakes cavorting in the perfect shape of the double helix.
And what would Jack make of this?
he wondered. He grinned, thinking about his brother digging through the dirt in Turkey, probably looking for a couple of scuffed coins or rotting bones—while Jeremy, locked up in a basement lab, had just made the discovery of a lifetime.
Hell, maybe the discovery of a thousand lifetimes
.
He yanked the thumb drive out of the laptop—the gold-plated scarab keychain attached to the drive clinking with the motion—and snapped it into a USB port on the side of the enormous flat-screen. Three swipes of a mouse against the glass desk, and the packets of data were on their way from the security lab’s computer system onto the drive. As Jeremy waited for the transfer, he turned back to the glowing double helix, swooping up and down through the filtered air. He was so enrapt by the brightly colored pixels, he didn’t notice the figure closing in behind him—until a shadow flickered across the screen.
Jeremy turned just in time to see a flash of motion, and then something jagged and long was knifing through the air in front of him. There was a sickening sound, like a butcher’s blade going through a block of raw meat, and Jeremy looked down. His eyes went wide.
Something long and almost impossibly white was sticking out of the center of his chest.
Jeremy crashed back against the glass desk, sending his laptop clattering to the floor. The figure in front of him was moving forward now, closing the distance between them. Jeremy felt himself sliding to the floor. As his knees touched the vinyl panels, he realized there was something in the palm of his hand. The thumb drive, hanging from the scarab key ring. He must have yanked it from the flat-screen on his way down. He had no idea if the data transfer was complete, but it hardly seemed to matter, because now the pain was starting to work through the shock in searing, gut-wrenching waves, emanating from the thing embedded in his chest. And then he realized that the pain wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he could no longer breathe.
As his body crumpled forward, he used his last burst of strength to shove the thumb drive deep into the hollow scarab, hiding it inside the keychain. A second later, his cheek touched vinyl, his eyes rolled up, and all that remained was the afterglow on his dying retinas of a pair of glowing snakes, intertwining in a sea of black.
Okay, Jack. It’s not like this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done… .
Jack Grady slid one gloved hand over the high-tensile aluminum rope, rechecking the iron clasps where it connected to his suspension harness. His other hand was straight out in front of him, his wrist working back and forth to steady his body in midair.
But hell, it’s got to be in the top five… .
He tried not to look straight down, where his work boots were dangling above a blackness that was both thick and palpable. Likewise, he did his best not to dwell on the fact that the only thing between him and a plunge that would end in certain death was that taut, seemingly floss-thin aluminum rope.
“Everything okay down there, Doc?”
The speaker in Jack’s fiberglass crash helmet was the size of a doll’s eye, and still the voice was like a gunshot in his ears, amplified by the sheer rock walls of the pit. Jack fought to keep his body still, but even the slightest tremble was enough to put him into a gentle spin, the yellow cone of light from the flashlight attached to his open visor dancing across the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle of stone that surrounded him.
“Like a piece of bait on a hook, kid,” he responded.
There was a laugh on the other end of the speaker. Then the aluminum rope gave a slight jerk, and Jack was inching downward again, into the soupy black.
He kept his breathing normal as he went, noting that the air had turned markedly cooler since he’d passed the hundred-foot depth marker they’d clipped to the rope. He also noticed that there was a new, musty scent, perhaps some sort of microscopic vegetation or bacteria living in the crags and seams of the nearly sheer rock walls. It didn’t seem likely that anything substantial could live down there, although the pit itself appeared to be naturally occurring—Jack’s best guess, the result of a meteor strike that, according to the local oral tradition and held up by the geological dating, had struck the area around thirteen thousand years ago.
About time someone came down here to kick the tires and check the oil… .
Jack gave it another ten minutes, inching downward, his body still revolving in a nearly silent spin, before he reached up and tapped the side of his helmet.
“Okay, hold up. I’m going to do a splat check.”
The rope jerked to a stop. He was a good hundred and fifty feet down now, and still the pit appeared exactly the same as it had when they first broke through the limestone mantle beneath the dig site and peered down into the black drop from above.
Just getting to that moment had been heroic enough. First the plane from Boston, then a connecting flight from Istanbul to Izmir, then a bus ride to the nearby village of Selçuk, where he’d been met by his two grad students for a middle of the night bike ride into the Greek-era ruins of Ephesus.
Andy, by far the more talkative of his two charges, had grumbled the whole ride over that they should have waited until daylight and that he felt like some sort of grave robber sneaking into an archaeological dig at two in the morning. Dashia, for her part, had pedaled along in silence, trying to
stay right behind Jack as they wound beneath the arched Greek ruins and around the Doric columns.