Seven Wonders (28 page)
She immediately found herself reminded of the dossier she had been reading on the flight from South America to London, the pages prepared by Vika on the woman, Sloane Costa, who had joined Jack Grady in Rio and accompanied him to India and apparently back to South America. The botanist with the shaky professional standing and peculiar scientific curiosity that seemed to have inadvertently driven her into Jack Grady’s sphere. An unimpressive woman, really, in terms of her accomplishments; had she submitted her résumé to Saphra’s HR representatives, she would never have been granted an interview with Dr. Benson and his staff, let alone been
offered any level of employment. Even so, one small undertaking had stood out. During her graduate studies in genetics, the woman had written a paper on the theoretical work behind the concept of Mitochondrial Eve.
Jendari didn’t consider Sloane Costa’s résumé-filler as any great coincidence; there was hardly a geneticist who had trained in the nineties who
hadn’t
spent some time considering the theoretical discovery. It was quite a spectacular notion, focused on what many scientists called the Holy Grail of DNA studies: the idea that somewhere in the past, there was a single woman from which all living humans had evolved. Not a man, because mitochondria were inherited along matrilineal lines, but a woman, a single Eve containing perfect, essential DNA. Eve, mother of all who came after her; and every living soul on Earth could trace their own degraded, mutated DNA back to her.
According to the theory—and literally tens of thousands of historical genetic samples—this female ancestor had lived around two hundred thousand years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps in a jungle, not a garden—but still, the religious, scientific, and cultural implications were staggering.
Mitochondrial Eve—the original woman—with her perfect DNA, her perfect double helix. And since then, a thousand, thousand generations had endowed that double helix with millions upon millions of mutations—defects, leading to nearly every disease that existed all the way to the cellular deterioration commonly known as aging, and through aging, to shortened life spans. Everything that mankind had become—perhaps even the mortality alluded to in the Judeo-Christian Bible, the result of a misuse of the wondrous Tree of Life—was due to transcription errors that had built up, generation to generation, over the ages.
Jendari opened her eyes and once again peered through the glass at the glowing calf in the tank.
Cloning a cow, adding a bit of jellyfish DNA to make it glow—it was a parlor trick compared to what Jendari knew was coming next.
She felt a chill move through her. To Sloane Costa, Mitochondrial Eve was a theoretical concept, a paper to be written in a prestigious journal, maybe something that could help her on her way up the pillars of academia. The poor fool—she had no idea what she and her anthropologist were chasing, no idea what they were nearing with every riddle they solved and every Wonder they conquered.
No idea that before they reached the final secret, Jendari would take it from them, and with it—she shivered again as she wondered,
What if Dr. Benson and his scientists had something much more powerful than a jellyfish to work with?
Such science would change the world.
And whoever controlled that science would wield power beyond comprehension.
One short flight from Lima to Cancun, then a three-hour drive in a cheap rental car, nearly bottoming out against the damn speed bumps that seemed to litter every road in the Yucatán Peninsula, followed by a couple of stops for more equipment, picking among the many contacts Jack had made years ago on numerous expeditions to study the aboriginal tribes that had once dominated much of the area—and here they were, transported backward eight hundred more years into the past from the already ancient ruins of Machu Picchu.
Jack stood next to Sloane behind a waist-high rope, staring up the ninety-one stone steps that led to the top of the Temple of Kukulcan, the grand, ninety-eight-foot-tall centerpiece to the Mayan Wonder of the World known as Chichen Itza—and all Jack could think of was snakes.
“Right there,” he said, nodding his head past Sloane. “Down from the top of the steps to that stone creature at the base. It’s supposed to end up right at his head.”
Sloane peered over the rope at the statue at the bottom of the pyramid: an enormous feathered snake, mouth wide open, almond eyes seeming to squint angrily in their direction.
“He’s a nasty looking fellow, isn’t he?”
“Kukulcan wasn’t known for his kind temperament. Then again, despite popular conceptions, the Mayans themselves weren’t the most gentle of people. The only things they loved more than calendars and astronomy were human sacrifices—and snakes.”
Jack wasn’t surprised he had snakes on his mind; he’d been staring at the pictogram on the parchment he’d retrieved from the burning cross at Machu Picchu for much of the trip to Mexico:
A tiny image of Kukulcan, the Mayan feathered snake deity, which he’d recognized at once, and a second snake rendered in black, curling across the parchment from above Kukulcan’s head to a spot below his flickering tongue.
Like anyone who had ever Googled the Mayan Wonder of the World, Jack was aware of the ancient pyramid’s most interesting feature: how twice
a year, on exactly the spring and autumnal equinoxes, just as the sun began to set, a snakelike shadow appeared on the pyramid’s steps. Riding downward from the northwest corner, the shadow-snake descended ninety-one steps until it hit the head of Kukulcan—then disappeared until the next equinox.
Jack knew that the optical phenomenon was an incredible feat of both astronomy and architecture; nearly fifteen hundred years ago, the Mayans had been advanced enough to chart the sun and the stars with near perfect mathematical precision.
And yet, Jack hadn’t immediately understood how that phenomenon, so obviously referenced by the pictogram, could lead him to the next step.
It wasn’t until Sloane had taken her turn with the pictogram—and then asked a simple question—that it had dawned on Jack. If the Mayans were known for being mathematically precise, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that the pictogram associated with their greatest city might also be referencing that precision? Might precise mathematics be the solution he was looking for?
“If the snake shadow is supposed to connect with the snake god,” Sloane had asked, “then why does it seem to be passing right over his head?”
Finding a protractor somewhere between Peru and Cancun hadn’t been easy; but once Andy had located one in a drugstore inside the Mexican airport terminal, Jack had been able to look more closely at the pictogram from a mathematical perspective.
The shadow-serpent on the parchment didn’t just miss Kukulcan; it missed the feathered snake god by exactly twenty-three degrees. Once Jack had done the measurement, he’d suddenly understood where the pictogram was leading him—and he’d begun to come up with a plan.
Leaving Andy and Dashia at a well-populated resort in Cancun had been the first step of that plan. Neither of them had complained about getting a day to lounge around a pool shaped like a kidney bean; Jack only wished
that he could have convinced Sloane to remain with them, though her company had made the three-hour drive through the jungle moderately bearable. Either she was starting to warm to him, or he was starting to see through her walled-in façade. They’d even had a chance to talk a bit about his brother—the reason Jack was so determined to see this mystery through.
Talking about Jeremy didn’t come easy for Jack, and not simply because of the guilt he felt for not working harder to be a part of his twin brother’s adult life. The wound left by Jeremy’s passing went back much farther than that.
Jack’s earliest memories of his brother barely resembled the strange, brilliant, and obsessive introvert his twin had grown into; on the playgrounds and backyards of their early childhood, they were just two little kids with personalities that complemented each other. In fact, Jack’s father had often joked that in the right light, you could see how close together those two perfect zygotes had been. Even as a child—five, six years old—Jack had been the headstrong one, a wild kid, climbing trees that were too tall for him, diving into lakes that were too deep, picking fights with bullies that were twice his size. And it was Jeremy who had been there to pick Jack up off the ground, drag him out of the water when it got too rough, and call for the teacher when the bullies got the better of him.
Even when things began to change—somewhere between the ages of nine and ten, when Jeremy’s trouble with social situations became a full-blown disability and he started to recede into the lonely world of his neurosis—there were still moments that stood out in Jack’s mind, flashes of a bond that seemed deeper than mere brotherhood. He’d tried to describe one of those moments to Sloane as the jungle flashed by on either side of the winding road from Cancun.
“There was this tree house our dad had built in our backyard,” he’d started, keeping his gaze focused on the strip of road ahead of him. “Well, it wasn’t really much of a house. More like a wooden board hanging
between two branches that could just barely support our weight. But we’d sneak out there once in a while, after our mom would fall asleep. I’d bring an empty mayonnaise jar to try and catch fireflies; Jeremy would just lie on his back and count the stars. And I mean he’d really count them, sectoring up the sky using astronomical charts he’d memorized, making sure he didn’t miss a single one. And I remember, I’d ask him: ‘Why, Jeremy, what does it matter how many there are?’ And he’d just look at me, sitting there next to him with my little jar filled with bugs. And then he’d go right on counting, all the way until morning. I didn’t understand until years later. For Jeremy, it wasn’t the number of stars that mattered, it was the counting. It was this ten-year-old kid in a world that was rapidly turning more and more terrifying, taking control of something so vast and incredible as the entire night sky.”
Sloane hadn’t said a word, but Jack could tell that she’d understood. From the outside, Jeremy might have seemed damaged and bizarre; but to Jack, he had always been that little kid in a tree house counting stars—all the way to the end. And Jack—the wild, adventurous half of that zygote out in the wilderness with his empty mayonnaise jar, chasing bugs—couldn’t shake the feeling that he had failed his brother.
He didn’t intend to fail Jeremy again.
He put a hand on the rope in front of them, then gave one more glance over his shoulder, making sure they were alone.
“Good to know American dollars still have value in some places,” he said as he lifted the rope so Sloane could go under. “Although we’ll be sharing a room from now on.”
Altogether, it had cost two hundred dollars to get them alone at the edge of the pyramid. The first hundred had gotten them through the front entrance gate, even though it was an hour after the official closing time; Jack had read online that the site offered special “sundown” viewing for those willing to make the guards out front an offer, and once inside, Jack had been
lucky enough to find a second guard who was happy to make sure they got some time by themselves at the pyramid itself. The man hadn’t questioned why a couple would want to be alone at sundown at one of the great Wonders of the World. It wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal—not with the Cenotes, the ceremonial sinkholes where the Mayans used to toss their human sacrifices, within a stone’s throw—but it had its charms.
When they’d first entered the site, they’d played the part of privileged American tourists, walking hand in hand in a clockwise circle around the central section of the site, hoping as they went that none of the guards would notice the oversized duffel bag Jack had brought with him from the rental car. From the visitors’ entrance, they’d crossed by the Great Ball Court, a rectangular playing field with stone rings attached like sidewise basketball hoops on either end. Jack could only imagine the viciousness of the games that had been played there—especially considering that the entire losing team would usually be killed, their bodies tossed into one of the sinkholes. From the Ball Court, they passed by the Temple of the Jaguars, a smaller pyramid than the Temple of Kukulcan, as befitted a smaller form of deity, and skirted the Sacred Cenote, the largest of the great sinkholes, which was essentially an ancient well, thirty-eight feet deep, that acted as a natural source of irrigation to much of the old city. Then the Platform of Venus, the Temple of the Warriors, the Astronomical Observatory—and at last, the main event: the Temple of Kukulcan, where they’d arrived just minutes ago.