He looked up—and that’s when he saw them. At least two dozen, churning up the muddy water near the bottom of the sinkhole, barely three feet away. Jack’s eyes went wide, and he tossed the snake in his hand toward the pack, tucked the clay pot under one arm, and pushed off the ground, ignoring the shards of pain that ricocheted up his leg.
He swam as hard as he could, shooting upward so fast that his ears felt ready to explode. Something touched the bare skin at the bottom of his right foot, and he kicked out, hitting cold, slithering flesh. Then a flash of silver flickered right by his left cheek, and he realized the pack was all around him, diving and darting in concentric circles as he tore upward. Halfway to the surface, the first snake lunged at him, aiming for a flash of bare skin right above his jeans. He brought his knee upward, catching the thing right under its jaw, and it flittered past, harmless. Then a second snake aimed right for his face. Jack unhooked the clay vessel from under his arm and swung it in an upward arc. The pot connected with the snake’s head with a dull crack, and the snake’s entire body went limp, its long tail curling in on itself. A dozen of the other snakes descended on their wounded colleague, tearing into it with their fangs. Jack kicked twice more, and his head burst through the surface of the water.
Coughing and sputtering, he dragged himself the last few feet to the edge, and Sloane helped pull him out of the murk. He twisted onto his back, holding the clay pot against his chest. He could feel the blood trickling from the wound on his ankle, but he didn’t care. All he could think about was how heavy the clay vessel felt now that he was out of the water.
He pushed himself to a sitting position, then held the pot up so Sloane could see. Any adornment or decoration had long since washed away, but
from the craftsmanship and the style, Jack knew that it was old—at least as old as the pyramid behind them.
Without a word, Jack raised the pot over his head and brought it down hard against the stone lip of the sinkhole.
There was a loud crack as the pot fractured into three pieces—and a small, shiny bronze object tumbled to the ground. Sloane knelt, and lifted up the snake segment, shaking it dry.
“No parchment,” she said. “Does that mean there are no more clues?”
Jack shook his head. He was looking past her at the pieces of clay on the ground. The exterior of the pot was unadorned, but the interior, it seemed, had flashes of color, twists of ancient ink.
“Maybe next time you’ll find a better way to get something out of a fifteen-hundred-year-old vase,” Sloane said.
Jack turned over the pieces, one at a time. There it was: the segmented snake, painted in stains of black, and next to the fifth segment another pictogram. This one was familiar: a red-tinged, leafless vine, covered in thorns, twisting through a Roman aqueduct, until it ended over a tiny portrait of an Egyptian queen.
Jack looked at Sloane.
“I think we’re one riddle ahead,” he said. And then he noticed the expression on her face. She wasn’t looking at the clay shard, she was looking down toward his feet.
“It looks worse than it feels,” Jack said. “But don’t worry. I’ve got about twenty more minutes before the venom takes effect. After that, some muscle pain, some spasms in my jaw. Then blurred vision, my lungs will seize, and I’ll start to suffocate.”
Her expression only got worse.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got my antivenom kit in the trunk of the car.”
“Jack,” she said, and he saw that she wasn’t looking at his ankle, but the
ground in front of his bare foot.
A two-foot-long, yellow-bellied water snake was wriggling across the mud toward his heel.
He reached down, grabbed it expertly below its head, and tossed it back over the lip of the cenote, where it landed with a mud-spattering splash.
Be it ever so humble
, Jendari thought to herself as she raised the four-inch stiletto heel of her bright green Manolo Blahnik over the unfortunate, squirming dormouse. In truth, she was more curious than annoyed. The engineer in her wondered how the poor creature could have gotten itself trapped like that: long curl of a tale pinned between two of the wooden slats that ran along the base of her aunt’s cabin’s quaint front porch; while the genetic expert she had become wondered how such a mindless, irrelevant creature had made it into the twenty-first century, let alone onto the isolated grounds of her inherited, upstate New York country escape.
Then again, at this point, the dormouse had about as much claim to the desolate log cabin and the four hundred acres around it as anyone else. Even Jendari’s late great-aunt, who had little to hide besides her own unresearched and unwavering beliefs, had kept the location off the books and off the grid; out of habit, Jendari had continued the exercise, even going so far as to have the few weather satellites that crisscrossed the inner atmosphere over this section of the continental US rerouted to pass an extra thousand miles out of photographic range. Not even the IRS knew of the cabin’s existence, and aside from Jendari’s annual visit, the place lay as fallow and uninhabited as the defunct copper mine tucked into the foothills eighty
miles to the north.
Many times over the years since Milena Saphra’s death, Jendari had thought about getting rid of the estate. The childhood recollections she carried of the place—from the moment her aunt had first revealed the bronze wheel in the basement to the week after her aunt died, when she’d had the wheel removed and brought to her waiting plane—had grayed and faded, and now, as she stood on the porch, watching the dormouse, she wasn’t even sure why she bothered with the annual visit. Sentimentality? Tradition? Sense of habit?
Shackles of youth
, she thought. She watched the dormouse for another moment, then lowered her heel, purposefully missing the pathetic creature by a shadow of an inch. Such an irrelevant failure of evolution didn’t deserve the time it would take to scrub his blood off of her eight-hundred-dollar shoes.
She crossed the porch and unlocked the front door. No DNA scanner here; just a key and a padlock. She wasn’t afraid of anyone breaking into the cabin, even if there was anyone other than her and maybe the pilot of her plane who could locate the damn thing. She’d long since emptied everything of value from the place.
Jendari entered the cabin and quickly moved through the Spartan living area. The dust on the three-seater leather couch by the empty fireplace was so thick, she could see tiny rodent footsteps crisscrossing the fading pillows. She passed two empty bookshelves, a low credenza containing empty picture frames—and arrived at the door leading down to the basement.
Another lock, another key from a ring she had brought with her from the plane. The steps were wooden and creaky, and she had to be extremely careful because of the shoes; boots might have been a better choice, but she’d always been the type of woman whose exterior matched the level of energy she was feeling inside. Today, her pantsuit was impeccable and bright, an almost electric green to match her shoes. Today, she was alive
inside. Even though the last text she’d received from Vika hadn’t been entirely the news she had been waiting for, her operative did get confirmation that Jack Grady was moving forward at an incredible pace. Two clumsy attempts to take whatever it was he had found without giving themselves away had failed; but both operatives had been able to report that Jack had found something in Machu Picchu, and in Chichen Itza. And Jendari had a very good idea where he was going next.
She reached the bottom step and slowed her pace as she crossed the basement. The rectangular room with low ceilings and poor lighting was the only room in the cabin with a floor that wasn’t made out of wood. Her heels clicked against the smooth cement, which her aunt had once told her was over two feet thick, poured over a frame of solid steel. Milena had put the floor in the week she had inherited the great bronze wheel from her own mother to support the hefty mechanism’s sizable weight.
Halfway across the basement, Jendari stepped into the shadow of the iron frame that had once held the artifact; it rose almost to her height, two triangular legs supporting a thick iron crossbar. As she moved closer, it was like traveling back in time: her fourteen-year-old self had actually trembled when Milena had shown her the thing and filled her head with the heady talk of the Order of Eve. A sermon of sorts, a speech of indoctrination. The shackles of a cult that Milena hadn’t herself fully understood.
Jendari felt her lips twitch as her eyes drifted to the ornate iron and bronze drop box beneath where the wheel had once stood. It was the one true item of her aunt’s that Jendari had left in the cabin—the thing she had returned to year after year like the dutiful cog in the Order of Eve that Milena had hoped she would become.
Jendari heard her own laughter echo off of the cement floor, disappearing into the low wooden rafters. Milena had died without ever really understanding the Order she had dedicated her life, and her wealth, to following. She had just been a simple, unthinking cog. Like dozens, perhaps hundreds
of other powerful women around the world that had been recruited over the centuries—women like the ones in Jendari’s precious black-and-white photographs, some of them powerful and famous and even historical, others forever unnamed and unknown—indoctrinated into a loose network of operatives held together by nothing more powerful than belief, performing the occasional task without ever asking why, or for whom.
Such was the power of faith. Milena had known nothing about Euphrates, the shell company that was actually sending her those parchments—a company that had built a mercenary training camp out of an Amazonian rain-forest village, and had, in 2007, hacked an international charity to massage a vote that had led to the modern list of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Milena had died knowing nothing about the secret that the Order she so fully believed in was keeping.
Smiling, Jendari bent to one knee over the decorated drop box.
Ritual, tradition, sentimentality, habit
. Once a year, she had knelt in exactly this spot, thinking of her foolish, dead aunt. And every year, she had opened that drop-box lid—and found nothing. More than a decade, year after year, and nothing.
Jendari had used the unknowing middlemen to take over Euphrates’s jungle training camp and had co-opted Vika and her team for herself. She had collected an entire vault filled with ancient Amazonian artifacts, including her aunt’s great bronze wheel.
And still, every time she’d opened the drop box—nothing. If the Order of Eve really did still exist—beyond her own empire, her own deeds—then it was either toothless or blind. Or, perhaps, they truly had recognized her as the natural new leader—their modern-day Cleopatra.
With supreme confidence, she opened the lid of the drop box, and stuck her hand inside.
Almost immediately, her fingers touched parchment. She froze, her smile
instantly evaporating. Then she lifted the parchment out of the box, and still on one knee, unrolled it in front of her eyes.
The message written across the parchment took up only a single line, and the script was a form of ancient Greek that Jendari’s aunt had forced her to learn as a child. Once she’d made the translation, the words drove right into the pit of her soul.
“Διακοπή. Είσαι υπηρεσίες που δεν χρειάζονται πλέον.”
Stop. Your services are no longer needed
.
Jendari felt a searing heat rising behind her eyes.
Your services are no longer needed
. Such disdain, like she was nothing, no more significant or important than the dormouse struggling its life away on the front porch.
Jendari’s hand closed around the parchment, and she rose to her feet. The fury inside her was like a storm, tearing at her internal organs. She could barely feel her feet as she crossed the basement to a small shelf right below the stairs. On the center of the shelf was a stone incense jar, long since empty. Beneath the jar was a package of self-lighting matches, more than a decade old.
Jendari took one of the matches and scraped it against the side of the stone jar. A teardrop of flame flashed near her perfectly manicured fingertips. She touched the flame to the parchment and watched as it crawled across the aged paper. By the time the fire reached the Greek words, she could feel the heat splashing against her frozen cheeks.
She took the flaming parchment and held it high above her head, letting the fire lick at the dry, aging wooden rafters of the basement’s low ceiling. It took less than a second for the rafters to light, raining sparks and flickers of flame like a halo around her frosted hair.
She turned and tossed the burning parchment into the open drop box. Then she headed for the stairs, seemingly oblivious to the fire that was now engulfing the ceiling above her. As she reached the steps, she removed her cell phone from her pocket and began typing a text message.
It was time to set the endgame in motion. If she was correct, Jack Grady would be heading to the final two Wonders. Which meant he was rapidly moving toward his own obsolescence. If he could have make it this far—through five Wonders, including the Colosseum, which it appeared the botanist had cracked—then Jendari and Grange could figure out the rest.
The time for surveillance had ended. Now she needed to take whatever it was Jack Grady had found, and eliminate him.
Jendari had sent the text by the time she’d reached the last step. Behind her, she could feel the flames leaping across every inch of wood, extending outward across the basement and beginning to eat through the rafters to the cabin above. Again, she smiled.