Still, truth be told, she was much more impressed by the high-tech shooting range on the other side of the armory, where the other dozen or so of Vika’s current batch of trainees were currently going through their rotations; every now and then, Jendari could hear the rapid patter of light ballistics echoing through the village, the signature cough of automatic M-16s and Israeli-built NG-7s. In previous visits, she had toured the armory and the range and had been impressed by the array of weapons her money had bought: from the machine guns to much larger, shoulder-held missile launchers, to grenade throwers and light mortars. There was even a fair collection of experimental nonlethals, such as handheld sound cannons and
time-release blast grenades. Since Saphra Industries had purchased the village and the surrounding area from the Brazilian government, Jendari had spared no expense in upgrading the village’s main indigenous industry—and despite what the Brazilian officials might have believed, it had nothing to do with curative frog sweat.
Jendari turned away from the window and crossed to the long table, retrieving her briefcase from the bench opposite where Vika was sitting. She could still remember the first time she’d met with Vika in this main house, nearly ten years ago—shortly after her surveillance team had traced the Euphrates Conglomerate’s holdings to this remote part of Brazil. According to her team, Euphrates had owned and protected this jungle paradise for decades, if not centuries; once Jendari herself had investigated the area, she had understood why.
The Main House and armory were just two of sixteen unmarked wooden buildings that made up the bulk of the village grounds; from the air, there was nothing remarkable about the architecture or the placement of the buildings—a concentric circle of living spaces, animal confines, and multiuse sheds that was consistent with other tribal towns that speckled the vast rainforest.
But like the nearby rock quarry that hid the entrance to the vast underground river network that had given the village its name, Fluindo Aldeia, the ordinary appearance of the place was a carefully crafted lie.
Jendari opened her briefcase and carefully removed the two photographs from her vault, placing them gently on the table between herself and the stone-faced operative. If Vika was surprised by anything in the images, she didn’t show it. Jendari wondered what it would take to rattle a woman such as her—a woman who had been born in a place like this.
When Jendari had first discovered what Euphrates had been up to in this isolated corner of Brazil, she had immediately dispatched Grange and a team of handpicked experts to compile a history of Fluindo Aldeia,
because the idea that such a place could exist seemed almost unthinkable. An entire community, hidden deep in the Amazonian rainforest, that had essentially been transformed into a sophisticated mercenary training camp. Even more confounding, nearly eighty percent of the town’s population had been female.
After weeks of digging, Grange’s report only added to the mysteries. According to his findings, Vika’s village was over two hundred years old, settled by an offshoot of a much larger tribal community that had traveled down one of the Amazon River’s tributaries, ending up at the mouth of the underground river that had given the village its name. These tribal settlers were more than simple nomads; they were a legendary group who a hundred years earlier, had given the entire rainforest, and the river that ran through it, its name.
As the story went, midway through the sixteenth century, the Spanish explorers who made the first journey down the rushing, exotic waters of the great river were attacked by a tribe of female warriors—the
Icamiabas
, roughly translated as “women without husbands.” Franciscode Orellana, the lead Spanish explorer, named the river after these women, whom he likened to the mythical Amazons. To this day, nobody knew for sure where the Icamiabas had come from, or what had happened to them after the Spanish exploration and eventual invasion.
Based on writings found in caves near the underground river, Grange and his experts were convinced that Vika’s forest home was the only known remnant of the legendary tribe.
Euphrates’s interest in the village had been more than historical; when Jendari visited the village for the first time, she had found more than a piece of Mesoamerican history. She had found an incredible group of female warriors who had been trained since birth to fight and kill. Euphrates had taken what these women did naturally and turned it into a business.
Jendari had used her own money and connections to make contact with
the middlemen who assigned the various missions to the mercenary group, and eventually hired them to work for her. She’d effectively closed out the Euphrates control of the mercenaries—whom she’d redubbed the Vipers—and for more than a decade now, Vika and her team had worked exclusively for Saphra Industries.
For the first few years after Jendari had made her move, she’d expected Euphrates to respond. Yet all she had gotten from the mysterious, faceless corporation was silence. Either Euphrates was as toothless as she had begun to suspect, and the Order that her great-aunt had worshipped so completely was nothing beyond some shadow bureaucracy, a cult long since faded into obsolescence, or they’d already accepted Jendari as the true heir to their organization.
Their modern Cleopatra, leader of the new Order of Eve
.
“So tell me,” Jendari said, after Vika raised her eyes from the pair of photographs. “Did he find the crate?”
The clatter of a half-dozen submachine guns going off in concert on the far side of the village echoed through the open window as Vika considered the question. Finally, she shrugged her taut shoulders.
“We were unable to get close enough to know for sure,” she said, her words tinged with an accent that was very difficult to place. A hint of Portuguese, a hint of Spanish, but also something else that Jendari had never heard anywhere else. “We couldn’t risk exposure. However, we believe he found something hidden in the canopy beneath the statue, which led him to a second item—hidden in Christ the Redeemer’s face.”
Jendari raised her eyebrows. It wasn’t at all what she had expected to hear—but the fact that at least one of the two items he had found had been hidden
inside
the Wonder of the World set her heart racing. Real, solid evidence had eluded her for so long: The very nature of the Wonders made them impossible to excavate, even for a woman as rich and powerful as she. The best she could do was station Vika’s people at safe distances at each Wonder, keeping an eye out for anything unusual.
Such as an anthropologist scaling the chest and shoulders of a one-hundred-foot-tall statue of Christ, half a mile above the city of Rio
.
“Unfortunately,” Vika continued, “we were unable to survey the cave after he left, because it was destroyed. We can’t be sure what he found was contained within a crate. After retrieving both items, he returned to his hotel and immediately booked a flight to India.”
Jendari nodded, her excitement growing. Whether or not Jack Grady had retrieved the crate the workers were carrying in Jendari’s photographs, he had obviously found something that had led him to the top of Christ the Redeemer. Whatever the second item was that he had found, it had led him to India—and assuredly, the next Wonder of the World.
“One more thing,” Vika said, no inflexion beyond the accent. “He was joined at his hotel by a woman named Sloane Costa, a scientist. We’re in the midst of compiling her dossier, so far mostly unremarkable—except for one notable exception. She recently conducted research at the Colosseum, in Rome.”
“Is she connected to the twins?”
“I don’t believe so. But she joined Jack and his two graduate students on the flight to India.”
So the woman was involved, now. Which meant she’d found something at the Colosseum that had led her to Jack Grady.
There was no doubt in Jendari’s mind: She had been right to let this anthropologist run with whatever his brother had found. It appeared that Jack Grady was succeeding in days at what she and her operatives had been working on for a decade.
The question was, how much farther should she let him go? Certainly, Vika could take him out now and retrieve whatever it was he had found at Christ the Redeemer.
With Jeremy Grady, there had been no doubt. He had simply been a threat that needed to be removed. But Jack was different: He was useful. She
had seen it the minute Vika had given her his dossier; he was an explorer, an adventurer, a problem solver. Exactly what she needed.
Whatever he’d found in Brazil was leading him to India; no doubt he was interpreting clues, finding his way through to the Order’s hidden secret. If Jendari took what he had and eliminated him, would she be able to continue what he had started? There was no way to know for sure.
Which meant that Jack Grady was still useful—for the moment.
“Continue your surveillance,” she said, still listening to the staccato report of the submachine guns from across the village. “Find out what he’s got, and where it’s leading him. But keep whatever distance you can.”
As usual, Vika remained still and unresponsive. Even so, Jendari knew she would obey, perfectly and precisely. For the time being, Jendari would let Jack continue doing the hard work for them.
As legend had it, the Amazons had always employed men to do the dirty work that they found beneath them; in fact, the legend went, Amazon warriors would maim the men whom they captured—as it was thought that invalids made better workers, and more loyal lovers.
In a way, Jendari had already maimed Jack by killing his twin, his other half. Now he would find the secret of the Order of Eve for her, and then she would have Vika finish the job.
If Christine could see me now …
Sloane almost cracked a smile, imagining the expression on her older sister’s face—if only Christine could have somehow magically materialized next to her on the floor of the bobbing wooden skiff. Just seeing Sloane crouching there, so low that her face was almost touching the damp, rancid floorboards of the barely river-worthy craft, hands furiously working the zipper of her rented rubber wetsuit, which had caught halfway up her cleavage, would have left her sister speechless. Seeing Jack Grady crouched next to her—his rugged features halfway covered in a silk Indian scarf, his muscled body perfectly filling out his matching wetsuit beneath a loose, gray smock he’d bought off the fisherman who’d rented them the boat, his deep blue eyes barely visible, scanning the Yamuna River as he piloted the skiff against the current—would have knocked Christine right overboard in shock.
“I think we’re clear,” Jack whispered, his voice barely carrying over the sound of the skiff’s motor and the lapping of the murky water. “Another ten yards, and we should be at the right spot.”
Sloane shivered, still fighting with the zipper. She was amazed at how calm Jack sounded, considering what they were about to attempt. A
moment ago, they’d passed right by a security cutter heading the other direction along the river, carrying three uniformed Indian officers, and Sloane had nearly hyperventilated. If the officers had decided to check out their skiff—and had seen Sloane in her wetsuit—God only knew what would have happened. But Jack had simply nodded at the men, grinning amiably beneath his scarf, and they’d gone right on by.
So much confidence, so much bravado, so much eagerness to dive right into things, no matter how risky or insane—Jack certainly wasn’t like any scientist she’d ever met before. He was so damn sure of himself. He was just the sort of man she’d always done her best to avoid; a self-styled adventurer, a rogue who’d somehow gotten himself a PhD. Still, he wasn’t stupid; there was a natural intelligence in him that she couldn’t deny. The works she’d read by him on the mythical Amazons, though completely fanciful, were well written, and he was obviously respected in his profession. Field anthropology, sure, and a strain of the discipline that seemed to involve safari jackets, grappling hooks, and one mean-looking Filipino sword—but still, he wasn’t
all
show.
Even so, he had to be feeling a tiny fraction of what she was going through—if not the fear, at least the sheer disbelief that a tiny clue found at the top of Christ the Redeemer could somehow have led them
here
. The truth was, when she had first tracked Jack down in Brazil through his work on the Amazons, she hadn’t expected more than an expert opinion on the red vine and the painting she had photographed beneath the Colosseum. She couldn’t have guessed that he’d have found a second snake segment—or that the two of them had somehow independently stumbled into a mystery that connected at least two of the Modern Wonders.
She didn’t really believe that it could possibly go any farther than that; Jack’s insistence that the pictogram on his parchment was a clear link to the Taj Mahal didn’t exactly seem scientific to her. It was based on a fantastical—and thus unscientific—premise: that his murdered brother had uncovered
an overarching link between the Ancient and Modern Wonders. But even so, she found herself unable to walk away. It wasn’t just the paper she hoped to write about the seed and the vine or the fact that she was trying to save her job at Michigan, it was the need to find a scientific answer to all of this, because without one she was going to end up just like Jack Grady, chasing fantasies.
“How can you be sure we’re there?” she asked, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice. For some reason, she didn’t want him to know how scared she actually was.
“I’m counting the windows,” he said.