Of course. It makes perfect sense
.
Sloane leaned closer as Jack played the light from the torch over the statue, the flames flickering over its hunched lion’s body to its chiseled human head, crowned in the Egyptian pharoanic tradition, rising up over a pair of great, resting paws.
“The Great Sphinx of Giza,” Jack said. “It stands in front of the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.”
Sloane squinted her eyes as she focused on the sculpture’s face.
“But it doesn’t look right. I’ve seen pictures of the Sphinx. In real life, the nose is missing, but more importantly, the Sphinx at Giza is male, isn’t it?”
Jack smiled.
“Actually, no.”
He shifted his feet against the slick floor so that he was right up against the altar, getting the torch as close to the diorama as he could. As he did so, he thought he heard a quiet splash coming from somewhere across the room—but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw nothing but shadows. He assumed the motion of his feet had churned up a little wake and turned back to Sloane.
“Up until just a few years ago, it was assumed that the Pharaoh Khufu built the Sphinx, along with his pyramid, in the year 2500 BC. But recent dating technology tells a different story. Most likely, Khufu
unearthed
the Sphinx when he was surveying the area—the Sphinx was already there, buried in the sand, and had been there for a very long time.”
“How long?”
There was another quiet splash. This time Sloane heard it, too; she glanced back toward the stairs leading up the way they had come, but also saw nothing. She gave it a moment, waiting to see if the splash returned, then turned back to Jack.
“At least ten thousand years,” Jack said. “Furthermore, the Sphinx that Khufu found looked very different than the one we see today. The original Sphinx was indeed a woman. Khufu had it altered to look more like him; he couldn’t have a woman guarding the entrance to his pyramid, no matter how ancient she might be.”
“A woman’s face,” Sloane said, “on a lion’s body. Something an Amazon might carve.”
Jack shrugged, inwardly pleased that Sloane was now breaking far beyond her scientific mold. He shifted his attention to the armed warrior women—and to the tablet they carried. He pointed at the last segment.
“Either way, I think it’s pretty clear where we’re supposed to bring our snake.”
“Shouldn’t we try to put it together here?”
“Sure,” Jack said, “But if the Seven Wonders really are a road map of some sort, I think we can see where that map is supposed to lead. The Sphinx—maybe the oldest standing relic on Earth, perhaps the most significant physical link to the ancient Amazon civilization—”
And then he stopped, because the splashing noise had returned—only now it was much, much closer.
“Jack,” Sloane started, but he was already turning.
Ten feet away, moving quickly across the surface of the water, each raised nostril the size of Jack’s fist, the snout twice as long as his arm, and those eyes, slitted, yellow, with pitch-black pupils, each as big as a saucer, staring right at him—Jack couldn’t see the body of the beast, but he knew it stretched back an ungodly distance, propelled by a tail strong enough to shatter stone.
Sloane screamed. Jack grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her behind him. Then his right hand went into his jacket, while he waved the torch at the creature with his left, trying to scare it back; but the damn thing just kept coming, rippling across the water, moving faster and faster—
And then it lunged, its enormous head coming up out of the murk, jaws opening wide on hinges of muscle, eight-inch teeth tearing through the air toward Jack’s face. Jack flung the torch at its head, where it glanced harmlessly off the plated scales. His other hand tore the grapple out of his jacket. Just as the creature’s jaws were about to close on Jack’s face, he jammed the grapple deep into its mouth, then hit the switch, releasing the metallic, spiderlike claws.
There was a horrible rending sound as two of the claws pierced upward through the top of the creature’s upper jaw. The bottom claws tore downward into the reptile’s tongue, spraying blood in an arc out both sides of the animal’s mouth.
Jack dove backward onto the altar, nearly upending the ivory diorama as the creature whipped its head back and forth, its entire body thrashing across the shallow water. For a brief, agonizing moment, it seemed like the creature was staring right at him, its jaws pinned open by the grapple, its fetid breath splashing against his face.
And then, with a massive swish of its monstrous tail, the thing swung around and rocketed back the way it had come, disappearing beneath the murk, trailing a pool of dark red blood.
Jack heard coughing, and saw Sloane pull herself out of the water. He helped her up onto the altar next to him and noticed that she had the bronze segment gripped tightly in her hand. She’d obviously grabbed it on the way down. Jack was impressed. For a woman who’d spent most of her life in a laboratory, she’d come a long way.
“I think we just met the dragon,” Jack said, wiping crocodile blood from his cheeks. Or more accurately, he thought to himself, perhaps the last remaining relative of
Crocodylus porosus
.
Sloane leaned against him, shaking water from her hair.
“One myth at a time, Jack.”
And then she slid off the edge of the altar and began leading the way back toward the stairs.
The leech was hungry. The scent of blood was everywhere, filling its microscopic pores, setting off neural sparks that overwhelmed the circuits of its primitive cerebellum, enacting muscular commands that instantly overrode all of its other limited senses.
The leech was hungry, and it was going to feed.
Vika clenched her teeth as she watched the bulbous black worm crawl across the flat skin of her naked stomach on an inexorable journey toward the two-inch, mud-covered wound that stretched along her flesh just below her bottom right rib. An involuntary cry erupted from her throat as the creature reached the edge of the opening, its prickly, circular rows of teeth clicking against the white shard of bone that stuck a full centimeter out through the mud. Then the leech clamped down, sucking on the blood that still oozed out through the palliative sludge—a recipe that had been handed down for a dozen generations. Vika closed her eyes, forcing the pain back behind mental walls that had taken a lifetime to build, brick by agonizing brick.
She was lying flat on her back on a woven reed mat, tucked into the corner of the mud and wood hut where she had grown up—a single-story,
windowless shelter bathed in the shadows of the Great House where her team was hurriedly packing up their equipment for the fifteen-hour flight.
Her body felt shattered, her muscles and bones throbbing as if even gravity itself had become palpable. The broken rib was only her most visible injury. She was certain there was much worse damage inside, in her battered organs and connective tissue—places that mud patches and leeches couldn’t reach. She should have been in a hospital, on an operating table, or in a grave. But somehow, she was alive, and she was here. The journey from the rubble-strewn inner chamber of the Treasury to her village in the rainforest a hundred miles south of Rio was a blur of helicopters, private jets, and a multitude of intravenous painkillers, most of which were now wearing off as she turned instead to the ritual medications of her people. Life, or death—it no longer mattered to her as much as the reason she had returned to her ancestral home.
Suddenly, she opened her eyes. The pain was still there, a dagger lodged between her rib and her diaphragm; but the pain didn’t matter. Her life didn’t matter. What mattered was that she could still function, and as long as she could still function, she had a job to do.
She reached down, grabbed the leech between two fingers, and gave it a good yank. The creature hung on as long as it could, pulling her skin up over the piece of visible bone before its teeth tore free. She clutched the leech in her palm and squeezed until the thing burst, her own blood pouring down her wrist, pooling in the crook of her arm.
Then she rose to a sitting position, ignoring the new shards of pain that exploded down the right side of her body. She took a length of gauze out off of the low table by her makeshift bed and tucked it around the mud patch, hooking the Velcro tabs behind her back. Then she reached for her long, white underwrap—still stained with her blood and pierced through in numerous places—and began to wind it around her chest, flattening her bruised breasts.
She had been wearing the underwrap for as long as she could remember; like most things in her brutal life, it had two functions, one ceremonial, the other practical. Underwrapping was a ritual handed down since the dawn of her people—a recognition that although there were differences between men and women, these differences were only as relevant as the individual chose to make them. And from a practical standpoint, the underwrap made it easier to throw a javelin—or fire an automatic rifle.
Once the underwrap was in place, she pulled on her camouflage shirt, making sure to tuck it in tight to her pants so that the bulge of the mud-wrap barely showed. She knew from experience that an enemy could take advantage of any signs of weakness, physical or mental. Though she did not believe this particular enemy had the battle experience to use her wound against her, she never took chances. Even the most experienced foes got lucky. And Jack Grady, damn him, had been smart enough to use his luck like a weapon, again and again.
Vika rose from the mat and slowly crossed the stark interior of her hut. Each step sent more pain up her rib cage. As she moved, she also noticed that she still had a limp. When she had regained consciousness after the catwalk had collapsed beneath her, she had found herself lying facedown on a pile of stone; the first thing she’d noticed, even before the broken rib, was the two-inch piece of ivory sticking out of her ankle. She’d removed the ivory on the spot, fully aware of the irony of the moment. She’d killed Jack’s brother with a length of ivory not much longer than the piece that had ruined her ankle. He had nearly killed her with the same ancient material via a booby trap even older than the javelins she carried on her back.
The fact that Vika was still alive was a minor miracle, though it had helped that she had been on the top level of the catwalks, facing Jack head-on, when he’d lifted the urn off the pressure trap. Vika’s four operatives, who had all been working their way up the lower levels, had not been as fortunate. All four had been crushed beyond recognition by the falling
stone. It had taken three hours for Vika to remove their corpses from the chamber and carry them back to her waiting helicopter. Unfortunately, she would not be at their burial ceremony; as soon as she’d landed in Brazil, she’d received the call from the surveillance team in Beijing.
Jack Grady had found what ought to have been the final clue beneath the last Wonder of the World—and once again, he had taken flight, on his way to what appeared to be a new, surprise destination. Vika’s team hadn’t been able to get inside the Old Dragon’s Head until after Jack and the botanist were gone; it appeared the anthropologist had secured himself a private flight to his next stop, provided by the billionaire brother of one of Jack’s father’s many past lovers. Even so, an hour behind the explorer and his companion, Vika’s team had found enough information in the underground chamber beneath the Wall to tell Vika exactly where Jack was heading.
He had a head start, but Vika was certain she would be able to catch him before he finished whatever it was his late brother had started. Already one of Jendari Saphra’s planes was waiting for her on the jungle runway. And Jendari herself was already on her way to Egypt. She wanted to be there in person. Obviously Vika’s employer believed that Jack was on the final leg of his journey, hours away from uncovering the secret she had been seeking for decades.
Vika should already have been on her way as well, but there was one more thing she needed to do before she boarded that plane. One more duty to perform, one more ritual that had to take place.
She reached the far corner of her hut, and with difficulty, dropped to one knee. Then she brushed her hand along the dirt floor, revealing the hooked metal handle of her buried drop box.
Vika felt a tremble move through her that had nothing to do with the opiates in her veins or the injuries to her body. The ritual had always affected her this way, even when she was just a child. Since the age of twelve, when her ailing mother had passed the duties over to her, she had
made the annual pilgrimage back to her home, back to this hut, no matter where she was or what she was doing.
Over the years, the parchments had been scarce; for many years at a time, she’d found nothing inside the box. In 2004, she’d been asked to eliminate a minor politician in a small European country that she’d never even heard of before. In 2007, the parchment had asked her to retrieve and destroy a series of computer codes that had been used in the hacking of a Swiss Internet contest. In 2009, she had been asked to set up a surveillance team with access to Jendari Saphra’s private plane—it had contained a vault that had been quite tricky to access—until Vika had given a sample of Jendari’s hair to the scientists at Euphrates, who had then provided her with a special, and quite unique, skin-colored glove.
Since then, there hadn’t been a single parchment. And yet still, Vika had returned every year. Now, because of the events of the past week, for the first time in her life, she was two days late to the box—but she was here, and she was going to do her duty.