“You want a mask? Go ahead, whatever you’d like.”
She crossed to the cabinet. Then she pulled her right sleeve over her hand—and smashed her fist, heel first, into the glass. The glass shattered, shards clattering to the floor. She reached into the shelves and retrieved a mask from behind a pair of elephant faces. Then she turned and held it in front of Unger.
He saw that it was metal, oversize, almost big enough to be a helmet, with a snout like a jaguar. He assumed it was one of the lesser Hindu deities; shit, who could remember them all? Then the woman turned the mask around and showed him that there was a small panel on the back of the mask, held shut by a single screw. She reached up with her other hand and slowly undid the screw, and the panel swung open.
“Mr. Unger, it looks like you’ve filed this one away in the wrong cabinet.”
Unger coughed, tasting blood. His wrists were burning where the plastic cuffs were beginning to cut into his skin.
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the cabinet off to her left—the one full of antique torture devices.
“This isn’t a ceremonial mask. Although it is quite antique, and I’m sure immensely valuable. It’s from the mid-sixteenth century, a Mughal design. Quite effective, I’m sure. It was used primarily on traitors and thieves. I believe the proper term for it was Chuha Pinjare. Am I saying that right? Hindi was never my best subject.”
Unger felt his eyes widening.
Chuha Pinjare
. He made the translation in his head.
The Rat Cage
. She couldn’t be serious. Jesus Christ, she couldn’t be.
And then he saw her draw the rat out of her satchel. She’d somehow gotten a makeshift muzzle over Henry’s snout, and there were plastic cuffs around both sets of claws, but otherwise he looked as energetic as ever, twisting his rangy body back and forth as she held the rat in the air between them.
Then she was moving forward.
“Hold on,” he said. “I already said you can take whatever you want.”
She placed a leather boot-heel on one of his knees, holding him in place, and with a sudden motion, jammed the mask over his head. The metal felt cold and hard against his skin.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screamed, his own voice strange from within the confines of the heavy mask.
Her boot was still hard against his knee. He couldn’t see the rat, but he could suddenly hear it hissing and spitting, because now she had obviously removed the muzzle.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, Mr. Unger. About a pair of visitors you had recently. I want to know why they were here and what, exactly, they were looking for.”
“Please,” Unger hissed as he heard the rat’s hiss getting closer “I’ll tell you anything.”
“No,” the woman said. “You’re going to tell me
everything
.”
Suddenly, her boot was off his knee and she had crossed around behind him. He felt a brush of cold air as she opened the little panel on the back of the metal mask.
“You crazy bitch!” he screamed, trying to lurch out of the chair, but her free hand was like a vise on his shoulder.
“Mr. Unger,” she said, leaning close to his left ear. “You have no idea.”
And then he felt something claw at the back of his skull as she pushed the screeching rat into the mask.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, Vika leaned against the edge of the round table in the backroom of the souvenir shop as she typed her report into the keyboard of
her cell phone. In the background, she could still hear the rat clawing around within the mask, but the grave robber had long since stopped twitching. His body was slumped against the metal chair in her peripheral vision, but he barely rated notice anymore. Gordon Unger wasn’t simply dead, he was no longer relevant.
In the end, the grave robber had told her everything he could, and she had shown him some level of mercy. The mottled blue spots that covered his throat, where she had pressed her fingers for the four minutes necessary to fully end all brain function, would only add to the unique circumstances of his death; but the wonderful thing about the developing world—and specifically, these particularly rough and tumble slums of Old Delhi—was that you didn’t need to worry so much about the details. Another dead black-marketeer in this part of the world wasn’t going to raise any alarms.
Vika finished with her text, then hit the Send button and waited for her new orders. The interrogation had gone well; in her line of work, it was often the improvisational performances that rendered the best results. But Unger’s knowledge was far from complete. She was quite sure he had told her everything he knew. But he hadn’t known much.
As she’d just informed her employer, Jack Grady had indeed retrieved at least one significant item from Christ the Redeemer: an ancient parchment, imprinted with a picture of a segmented golden snake. Next to one of the segments, there had been a pictogram that had led them to the Taj Mahal. Supposedly, they had managed to get inside an underground chamber in the Taj and had retrieved another item—perhaps another parchment and another pictogram—but beyond that, Unger couldn’t say.
Vika had to admit, as she patiently watched the blank screen of her phone, that the anthropologist and his female companion were showing great resourcefulness; her surveillance team outside the Taj hadn’t seen him enter or leave the complex, so if Unger was correct, and Jack truly had retrieved something from inside via a water entry, he had evaded some of
her best operatives.
Still, she wasn’t concerned. She knew that given the order, she could take Jack out with as much ease as she’d handled Unger. Unger, at least, had been armed. And of course he’d had his pet rat.
Vika listened to what sounded like claws against bone as her phone finally blinked back to life. She read the text twice, then returned the phone to her pocket.
The order was clear: They were still primarily in surveillance mode, but if an opportunity presented itself to get a hold of whatever Jack Grady was carrying, her people had been given the go-ahead to make their move.
Vika rose off the table and casually headed for the locked, reinforced door. She didn’t need to rush—and she didn’t need a parchment to follow the anthropologist and the botanist, wherever they were headed next. She had operatives stationed at every nearby airport, bus depot, and train station who would quickly pick up his tail. And besides, her people were already scouting all of the remaining Wonders, as they had been for nearly a decade.
No matter where he went, he was going to be within her reach. And even if she wasn’t there to deal with him personally, she trusted her operatives like they were family—because, indeed, every one of them carried the same blood in her veins.
The blood of the warrior.
The blood of the Icamiaba.
“Are you sure there’s somebody up there driving this thing? Because I’m pretty certain we’re about to die.”
Andy was leaning over the vinyl seat in front of Jack, holding on for dear life as the bus sped into another hairpin turn, jerking so far to the left, it felt like the damn thing was actually up on two wheels. There was a screech of rubber against pavement, a roar of diesel engines, and then they were through the turn and continuing up the steep, narrow road, tree branches scratching at the open windows on either side.
Jack pointed to the seat next to Andy, where Dashia was quietly reading her tablet computer, oblivious to the winding ascent up the four-thousand-foot mountain. If the nauseating turns, four-hundred-foot cliffs on either side of the snake-thin road, or shallow oxygen were bothering her, she wasn’t showing it. She’d had her head in the tablet since they’d left Cusco, by way of the mountain train ride down to the valley city of Aguas Calientes, the last stop before the ascent to the base of Machu Picchu. Jack knew that before the twenty-two hour flight from Delhi to Lima, Dashia had downloaded enough data on the Peruvian Wonder of the World to write her own guidebook; but somewhere between the flight and the harrowing bus ride up to the site,
she’d switched gears and was now sifting through the various symbols of Incan mythology.
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?” Jack asked. “See how she stays in her seat and doesn’t bother the other passengers?”
“She doesn’t know any better. She’s never seen a bus topple over the edge of a mountain cliff. And there’s only about six other people stupid enough to take this death ride at five thirty in the morning—and five of them look like they’ve got one foot in the grave already.”
Andy waved toward the front of the bus, where a group of elderly ladies were chatting away in the front two rows. One of the women was actually knitting as the bus corkscrewed up the mountain road, her shiny metal needles flashing whenever the rising sun peeked in through breaks in the trees and cliffs around them.
Aside from the gray-haired women, who had been right ahead of them in line when they’d boarded the bus at the station in Aguas Calientes, there were only a smattering of tourists and Peruvian locals taking the journey at this hour, just as Jack had hoped. He knew that by midday, the Wonder would be crowded with tourists—camera phones flashing, video cameras churning—which would only make their task that much more difficult.
Jack glanced at Sloane, who was seated next to him on the two-seater, right up against the open window. She’d spent the first ten minutes of the ride gaping at the view: the rising mountain peaks that flashed between the gaps in the trees, and the four-hundred-foot sheer drops toward the valleys below that appeared at random intervals along the serpentine road. There were metal guard rails set up around the most jagged of the turns, but for the most part, they were relying on the reflexes of the driver, a middle-aged Peruvian with a Yankees cap pulled down low over his eyes and a cigarillo hanging from his pursed, chapped lips.
About midway into the ride, Sloane had obviously had enough of the stomach churning panorama and had asked for the parchment again, which
Jack dutifully retrieved from the zippered pocket of his backpack, now propped against the floor beneath his feet. Since leaving the Taj Mahal, they had both taken turns going over the pictogram; Jack was pretty sure he had at least the basics of the riddle figured out, but he was still waiting for Sloane’s input. They had spoken very little since leaving India, and he was beginning to think that she might be suffering from a bit of shock. After all, it wasn’t every day that you’re almost buried beneath twenty thousand severed hands.
When Unger failed to meet them at the rendezvous point, they had been picked up by Andy and Dashia and had headed directly to the Delhi airport. Jack didn’t think anyone had seen them enter or exit the Taj, but they’d just infiltrated the most celebrated building in the world and had caused a fairly seismic change in the deepest subfloor of India’s most famous national treasure. Then again, Jack was pretty certain that the snake segment and the parchment had been beneath the Taj long before Shah Jahan had constructed the upper levels of his marble love story.
“Trust me,” Jack said, still watching Sloane with the parchment. “The ride up is way better than the ride down.”
“You’ve been here before?” Sloane asked.
“Once. I was fourteen, so I don’t remember much. I kind of ran through the site.”
“You were with your father?”
Jack nodded, though that wasn’t completely accurate. He had traveled to Peru with his father, and they had checked into a hotel in Cusco together, but that was the last he’d seen of the man for the entire eight-day trip. Jack had been entirely on his own—no money, no credit cards—selling off items from both of their suitcases to buy food from the local markets. He’d taken a few day trips on his own to the famous hot springs in Aguas Calientes and up to Machu Picchu, but he’d spent most of his time at the hotel, sitting by the oversize bathtub they called a pool, waiting for his father to return.
Twice, he had called home to check in with his mother, but she’d been too busy dealing with Jeremy’s issues—shuttling him home from school early because he’d locked himself in a janitor’s closet to get out of gym, disassembling a moped engine he’d connected to the vacuum cleaner to see how fast he could get it to move across the living room—to understand his predicament.
Eventually, Kyle Grady had returned carrying an Incan Chakana, the stepped cross of the Incas, made entirely of gold, with stories of a tribe of Peruvian jungle dwellers who had incorporated a stash of Incan antiquities buried beneath their main house into their own animistic religion. He hadn’t even understood why Jack was furious with him. By fourteen, Kyle Grady had been living with Pygmies in Borneo, while his own parents—Jack’s grandparents—went on monthlong safaris across the Horn of Africa.
“You’re lucky,” Sloane said. “My parents never took us anywhere. Well, we did go to Disney once, but the trip got cut short when my oldest sister tried to run off with the monorail driver. Christine was very advanced for fifteen.”
Jack and Andy both stared at her.
“Was that a joke?” Andy said.
Sloane shrugged, the expression on her face as cool as ever. Then she pointed to the parchment.
“So you’ve been to this Temple of Three Windows? And you’re sure that’s what this pictogram is guiding us toward?”
Jack noticed that her voice had gone down an octave as she switched conversational gears, and out of reflex he touched the heavy backpack on the floor in front of him with one of his feet; he had one strap around his ankle, just to keep it from sliding out into the aisle every time the bus took a particularly winding curve. He’d made that adjustment five minutes into their ride up the side of the mountain, when the bus had made its first hairpin turn—sliding so close to the metal guard rail that separated them from a two-hundred-foot
drop that he thought he saw sparks—and both he and the backpack had nearly toppled across the aisle and into the lap of the poor young woman who was sitting across from him.