by Ben Mezrich
Praise for Ben Mezrich’s fiction:
“Like Crichton, Mezrich knows how to weave … a fast-paced story that’s fun and irresistible.” —People
“On par with Robin Cook.” —Kirkus
“Ben Mezrich is a rising star whose name will become as well-known as Clancy, Koontz, Grisham, and others.” —Tulsa World
“Mezrich knows how to make science suspenseful.” —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Bringing Down The House:
“A book that will surely become a classic of its genre.” —The Sunday Express
“Part Tom Clancy, part Elmore Leonard … Gripping.” —The Express
“The reigning cowboy of creative nonfiction.” —The Oregonian
“What Mezrich has done, beautifully, is craft a riveting story about kids with excess brainpower taking on casinos with excess money. He has penned a gripping true-life adventure that will keep you reading well past your bedtime.” —The Boston Globe
“Mezrich manages to incorporate solid journalism into a narrative that just plain works.” —Publishers Weekly
To my parents, on their fiftieth anniversary.
And to Asher, Arya, and Tonya, my eighth, ninth,
and tenth Wonders of the World.
© 2014 by Ben Mezrich
Front Cover image courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections Flap Image: ©Thinkstock/javarman3, Back Cover Image: ©Thinkstock/pazham Interior Illustrations © 2014 Gina and Matt
Published by RatPac Press in collaboration with Running Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957368
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5383-2
987654321
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Cover Design by Andy Carpenter
Edited by Jennifer Kasius
Typography: Berkely
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I am grateful to Brett Ratner and Beau Flynn for sending me off on this amazing journey; this has truly been the best writing experience of my career. I am also indebted to my wonderful editor, Jennifer Kasius, and all the amazing folks at Perseus, Running Press, and RatPac. Special thanks to Chris Navratil and Allison Devlin, as well as Steve Asbell at 20th Century Fox. Thanks also for the encouragement, humor, and brilliance of John Cheng and Wendy Jacobson. Many thanks to the thorough and creative Dr. Daniel Friedman, my expert on too many things to mention, and to Gregg Selkoe, for some dancing bears. I am also eternally grateful to Eric Simonoff and Matt Snyder, the best agents in the business.
Most important, thank you Tonya, my incredible secret weapon. And to Asher, Arya, Bugsy, and my parents—you make it all worthwhile.
CHAPTER ONE
Three a.m.
It was five days into a fierce New England heat wave, the scattered trees lining Mass Avenue bowed and weeping, desolate sidewalks glistening, tar black asphalt leaking wisps of steam into the thick, humid air.
Fifty feet below, in a reverse-pressure, vacuum-sealed Level Four computer lab—two stairwells and one elevator ride beneath the famed, eight-hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-long Infinite Corridor that bisected the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Jeremy Grady’s world had just turned upside down.
Impossible.
Jeremy staggered back from the flat-screen monitor on the glass desk in front of him, nearly upending his chair. The rubber of his sneakers shrieked against the vinyl floor panels, but he didn’t take his eyes off the screen, didn’t even blink as the brightly colored pixels continued to dagger out across the cave-like lab.
This has to be a mistake.
His fingers trembling, Jeremy yanked off his thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, hoping the blur of his poor vision would somehow change the image in front of him to something that made sense. But no amount of myopia could defang the electronic packets of light emanating from the screen. He considered running the program again, but he had already run it twice, and he knew that the results would be the same.
A bug? A problem with the code?
Jeremy put his glasses back on and then exhaled, letting the sound of his own breath compete with the hiss of the lab’s high-powered ventilation system. Jeremy had written the code himself, had already combed through it a dozen times over the past two days. There was no bug. No mistake. The image on the screen, as impossible as it seemed, was as true and certain as math itself. After all, that’s all the program really was, a complicated mathematical equation. Numbers turned into pixels. And numbers didn’t lie. Numbers were safe and certain and sure.
At twenty-eight, Jeremy had built his entire life around numbers. Not by choice—it was simply the way he was wired. The various psychiatrists his mother had consulted over the years had always tried to couch it in the gentlest terms: a special child, with a special sort of mind. Anxious, socially awkward, and closed off, preternaturally obsessed with mathematical patterns, so wrapped up in his own internal compulsions that even the most normal, easy things in life often seemed like utter torture. A trip to the grocery store, a visit to a crowded park, an invite to a birthday party—from an early age, these were things that could leave Jeremy curled up in a corner of his bedroom, trembling and in tears.
There wasn’t any one particular moment in Jeremy’s past that he could point to when he’d realized that his faulty wiring was as much a boon as it was a disability. He’d hardly noticed when his middle school math teachers had stopped assigning him homework, because he was so far ahead of the class, they didn’t have anything left to teach him. He hadn’t felt left out when his twin brother Jack—his polar opposite, a thrill-seeking extrovert, a star in every sport he played�
�had headed off to the senior prom, because Jeremy was too busy putting the finishing touches on a handheld computer he’d built in their basement from scratch.
But somewhere along the way, things had changed. Now that he was seven years into a PhD in applied math/computer science at MIT, his proclivities seemed little more than a nuisance. Besides, he wasn’t the only doctoral candidate at the prestigious math-science mecca who chose to eat his meals in his studio apartment, meticulously stacking his silverware when he was done.
Nor, he assumed, was he the only programming guru to lock himself into his computer lab for two days crafting algorithms and running subroutines because of something he’d stumbled into that didn’t seem quite right.
Though to be accurate, the Level Four security lab wasn’t actually Jeremy’s; even though he’d effectively moved in over the past forty-eight hours. He didn’t actually have the proper clearance to be using such expensive and sensitive equipment. Especially on a project that had nothing to do with his PhD. But it had become evident that he didn’t have access to enough processing power at his own workstation in a shared cubicle halfway across campus. On top of that, Jeremy had needed the satellite data; and everyone at MIT knew where you went when you needed satellite data.
The warren of underground labs tucked beneath the Infinite Corridor were one of the university’s worst kept secrets—especially since some of the money the US Defense Department had set aside to fund the high-tech bunkers was earmarked to hire undergrads as lab techs and engineers. It was one of those undergrads who had loaned Jeremy his security ID to get past the guard manning the elevators that led down from the corridor. One geek with glasses looked much like the next, not that anyone treated this place like Area 51. MIT’s relationship with the defense department went all the way back to before World War II, when radar had been developed in secret campus labs much like this one. At MIT, working on the next generation of missile defense systems was like playing in the marching band, an extracurricular to fatten up your résumé.
The last thing Jeremy was afraid of, staring at the image on the giant screen, was getting caught in the lab without the proper clearance. It was the nature of a university full of introverts that nobody knew what anyone else was doing.
To be fair, bathed in the glare of the impossible image on the screen, Jeremy was no longer sure he could even explain it to himself. Dr. Berman, the psychiatrist he’d most relied on through high school and college, might have insisted that Jeremy was having another one of his episodes—plunging deeper and deeper down the rabbit’s hole of his mind, chasing patterns that only he could see. Even a perfectly normal human brain was built around a passion for patterns; it was part of the evolutionary process, a biological survival mechanism that had driven humanity to the top of the food chain. In Jeremy’s case, the slightest hint of a numerical association could lead to near mental paralysis, as his obsessive mind searched for connections that may or may not actually exist.
And maybe in the beginning, Dr. Berman’s diagnosis would have been correct. A normal person would not have turned what was essentially a stupid argument between brothers into a time-consuming diversion, employing enough computing power to launch a medium-size war. A disagreement so petty and bizarre, it wouldn’t even make sense beyond the confines of the twins’ dysfunctional relationship. Why his brother Jack even felt it necessary to return to Boston once a year, to mark the anniversary of their mother’s death, was unfathomable to Jeremy. The two of them had so little in common, without an argument, they’d have nothing to say to each other at all.
This one had been as pointless as ever. Jack had barely stepped off the plane when he’d started going on about his latest excursion, some sort of field research study at an archaeological dig site in Turkey. An anthropology fellow at Princeton who spent more time getting his passport stamped than in any classroom, Jack was always prattling on about his latest adventures. This time, he was particularly excited because the dig site was at one of the Ancient Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Jeremy hadn’t even realized there were two sets of Seven Wonders—Ancient and Modern—and when he’d casually mentioned that the Ancient Wonders couldn’t have been all that impressive, since he doubted anyone could name three, let alone all seven, that was all Jack had needed to set him off on a lecture about the relative merits of the two lists that lasted until his flight back to Turkey.
Of course, that should have been the end of it. But the minute Jeremy had returned to campus, his mind started to spin. Subconsciously, he’d already begun trying to devise some sort of metric to compare modern and ancient architectural accomplishments. And just to get some sort of idea as to what he was even trying to compare, he’d pulled up maps of the various Wonders on his laptop. He wasn’t sure what had made him start toying with the latitudes and longitudes, or what he’d been looking for when he’d started superimposing the various maps on top of one another, charting out geographical centers, functioning out elevations and topography—but certainly nothing could have prepared him for what he had found.
A pattern.
Mathematical, precise, and impossible.
At first, he’d refused to believe what he was seeing. The human mind searched for patterns, begged for patterns, often invented patterns when they couldn’t be found in nature. He’d forced himself to approach it logically, treat what he was seeing as a mathematical anomaly he needed to disprove. When he’d realized his own facilities weren’t enough, he’d gained access to everything he needed—holing up in the underground lab. All he’d brought with him were a change of clothes and his laptop, which was sitting next to the lab’s supercomputer. Attached to his laptop was a small thumb drive hanging from a fairly unique keychain. He’d fashioned the keychain out of a souvenir his brother had given him years earlier. Maybe Jack had been going for something sentimental with the gift; Jeremy’s Egyptology was rusty, so he wasn’t sure what sort of message a gold-plated scarab was supposed to send. Hollowed out with a lathe from the mechanical engineering department, however, it made the perfect place to store a thumb drive.
There was no doubt now that Jeremy had uncovered something worth putting on that drive. Because based on the image on the screen, not only had he confirmed that the pattern wasn’t a figment of his special mind, he’d now used satellite data to correct for the curvature of the Earth and immensely powerful data processors to rule out any other possibilities.
At its core, it was the same simple mind experiment he’d performed two days ago—superimposing maps of the Modern Seven Wonders of the World against maps of the Ancient Wonders of the World. First, he’d created a map of the Ancients: the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pyramids, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He’d had to look most of them up, and was surprised to learn that all were now little more than ruins, except for the Pyramids. One, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, was even less than that; nobody was even certain where it might have once stood, or even if it was more than just a myth. After precisely mapping the rest, he’d connected the geographic center of each Wonder, correcting for topography and the Earth’s curve. Then he’d created a similar map of the New Wonders of the World: Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, the Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, Petra, and the Great Wall of China. Together, they spanned a much larger distance, encompassing the entire globe rather than just the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. After functioning out the differences in scale, he’d over-laid the Modern Wonders over the Ancient Wonders, parsed the data into a visual image—and nearly knocked himself right out of his chair.
Most of the two images appeared to be enantiomers of each other—three-dimensional mirror images, matching up in the way someone’s left and right hand might match up. But they weren’t just near mirror images. They were perfect enantiomers. Six of the Ancient Seven Wonders matched six of the Modern Wonders, cre
ating a swooping pattern that, if anything, resembled two interlocking snakes—a double helix, in mathematical terms—with one tail ending at the Great Wall of China, the other at the ancient Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
Jeremy knew that what he was seeing was impossible. According to Jack’s lecture, the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World had been chosen by ancient Greek historians. But the new Seven Wonders of the World had been chosen by a popular vote. The only way for the new Seven Wonders of the World to have ended up in a pattern geographically linked to the ancient seven would have been if that vote had been manipulated; for some reason, someone had wanted those specific monuments chosen—monuments that had been built on the exact mirror image geographic locations as the Wonders from the ancient world.
Jeremy noticed, as his mind continued to whir forward, that his right hand was in the air, his finger tracing the pattern on the screen in the empty space in front of him. Objectively, the double helix was such a beautiful shape; the fact that it was also the easily recognizable form of DNA—the chemical building block of all life—added even more weight to its palpable splendor. As he traced the shape again, moving across the brightly colored pinpoints that marked the geographic center of each Wonder, Modern and Ancient, he found himself focusing on what wasn’t there: the two Wonders that didn’t match up. On the Ancient map, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which made sense, since the Gardens might very well have been myth. But the missing Modern Wonder—Christ the Redeemer, the magnificent Art Deco statue in Rio, and the most recently built of all the Wonders—why didn’t it fit the pattern?
Jeremy approached the desk again, this time turning to his laptop. Hitting keys with both hands, he quickly pulled up his satellite data on Christ the Redeemer, looking again through the topographical imagery, running through the equations that he’d used to calculate the Wonder’s geographic center. As the numbers blinked across his laptop’s screen, he paused, his fingers hanging above his keyboard.
He wasn’t surprised he had missed it before; it was so small, barely a rounding error in the scheme of things. But certainly, given the image on the bigger computer screen, it now seemed very intriguing.