Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

Like Jack’s last and final visit just a few days ago, the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death. Jack had started the tradition as yet another way to try and reach out to his twin; and over the years, there had been a few moments when it had seemed to be working: an emotional moment here and there, at the cemetery, on the drive from the airport, over dinner at one of the local burger joints near the MIT campus. But usually, those moments had quickly evaporated, replaced by pointless bickering.

  Jack couldn’t even remember much of what their last argument was concerning. He’d been excited to tell his brother about his upcoming expedition to Turkey, and then they’d gone off on some tangent about the Seven Wonders of the World—and that was pretty much the end of his visit. They simply couldn’t connect, they were just too damn different.

  And now Jack would never have the chance to change that.

  Jack’s thoughts were interrupted by a whiff of antiseptic air as the glass door to the lab swung inward. Jack recognized the pathologist from his ring of wiry brown hair, now matted with sweat. He was wearing fresh scrubs and had ditched his latex gloves, but otherwise, he looked the same as he had earlier that morning, when Jack had been brought in to ID the body.

  “Ms. Whitehead, if you could give us a moment.”

  The woman gave Jack’s shoulder a carefully trained squeeze, then left the two of them alone in the lab. The pathologist pulled up a stool next to the counter where Jack was sitting and placed a plastic evidence bag on the surface between them.

  “This isn’t exactly protocol, but I’ve already checked with Detectives Murphy and Collins, and they’ve hit such a wall in their investigation, they were willing to give me a little leeway. Considering your area of expertise, I figured maybe you could help me out.”

  Jack glanced down at the plastic bag. Inside, he could make out something tiny—a sliver, or a splinter—of some sort of white material.

  “My area of expertise?”

  “I’ve read a few of your articles in Science and saw the documentary you did for Discovery a couple years back. I didn’t make the connection when we first met, but while I was working on your brother, I realized there can’t be many anthropologists who focus on ancient cultures.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t surprising that the pathologist had recognized his name; doctors subscribed to Science and watched the Discovery Channel, and a few of Jack’s pieces had gotten a fair amount of attention. In particular, the video diary of the research journey he’d taken into Eskimo country in the Canadian Arctic had been one of the most downloaded series of anthropological pieces of the year—especially when on day thirty-seven, he’d nearly gotten himself buried in an ice flow and instead had uncovered evidence of an ancient Viking expedition to the area.

  Andy had gotten great enjoyment out of reading aloud the fan mail that had come in after that excursion—including at least three proposals of marriage. Jack guessed the proposals had more to do with the fact that his shirt had been shredded as he’d climbed free of the ice, rather than the pair of rusted Viking swords and the wooden remains of the ship he had handed off to the nearest Canadian Royal Museum.

  Jack could only imagine the sort of mail he would be getting after he published his work on the Temple of Artemis. If Vikings were sexy enough to get him interviewed on a handful of basic cable morning shows, Amazons would probably land him squarely in prime time.

  “How can I help?” Jack asked.

  “The autopsy confirms that your brother died from injuries sustained via sharp forced trauma; there was no tissue bridging, no signs of alternate lacerations. The wound edges remained well approximated, with very little differentiation between the entrance and exit. The projectile—for lack of a better word for it—entered the right hemithorax below the anterior aspect of the right sixth rib, and exited in the right infrascapular region below the posterior aspect of the sixth rib. These findings, along with the lack of trace evidence—hair, fibers, DNA on the victim’s body—leads me to suspect that the projectile was thrown from a distance of between four and five feet.”

  Jack looked at the man.

  “Thrown?”

  “Yes. Furthermore, from the angle of entry and the form of the damage, I believe we’re looking for a pointed object with a diameter of about three centimeters that is probably between two and four feet long.”

  “My brother was killed with a spear?”

  The pathologist pointed to the plastic evidence bag on the counter between them.

  “That isn’t even the really strange part.”

  Jack looked more closely at the white sliver of material in the bag.

  “This fragment was found lodged in a paraspinous muscle—the muscles surrounding the spine. From our spectrographic and chem analysis, we believe it’s a fragment of pure ivory. Which is why I thought maybe you could help us figure out where it came from.”

  “Why me?”

  “The chem analysis seems to indicate that this ivory is older than anything I’ve ever seen in my lab before. Too old for me to even date with anything available to me here. I’m going to send it out for analysis—but I was hoping you might have some idea where it came from.”

  “You’re saying that my brother was killed by a spear made out of extremely old ivory.”

  The use of ivory dated back to prehistoric times; nearly every ancient culture had utilized the tusks of elephants in art, religious artifacts, and in weaponry. But the idea that some sort of ivory weapon had been used to kill his brother—it was beyond conception.

  Jack shook his head.

  “My brother was a computer scientist. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him—or where this ivory came from.”

  The doctor thanked him for his time and offered his condolences. Jack was barely listening as the man retrieved the evidence bag and headed back across the lab. A mixture of emotions was rising inside of Jack. Sadness at the loss of a brother, guilt that he’d never had the chance to fix their relationship—and most powerful of all, anger that Jeremy had died in such a violent, terrible way.

  There was nothing Jack could do about the first two emotions—but the anger was something he intended to use.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Clambering two stories down a steel-framed emergency ladder in an elevator shaft on the MIT campus was a hell of a lot easier than rappelling down an aluminum thread in a nearly bottomless pit beneath a dig site in Turkey. For one thing, Jack didn’t have to worry about Andy Chen braying in his ear. Instead of a crash helmet, Jack was fogging up the transparent plastic face shield of a Level B hazmat suit. And Andy was safely camped out in the utility closet in the Infinite Corridor with the floppy-haired sophomore who’d led them to the ventilation access point to the shaft and loaned Jack the biohazard suit.

  Even in the cramped quarters of the elevator shaft, the suit was surprisingly comfortable. The thick white material covered his entire body, sealed at the wrists, neck, and ankles beneath his boots. The oxygen tank on his back, hanging from an oversize black backpack, was only a quarter full, but Jack wasn’t worried about suffocating; he’d opened the valve on the suit’s respirator. It was one thing to stay in character, but there was no need to go overboard.

  The kid with the floppy hair hadn’t had any trouble lifting the suit from the biology lab where he was working on a master’s that had something to do with a modified form of smallpox—though Jack didn’t really want to know anymore, since he was now breathing the guy’s recycled air. Jack didn’t love that they were relying on the help of a nineteen-year-old, no matter how smart he was, or how many proteins he’d named in just his second year at MIT. Like Andy, he was just a kid. But he’d also known about the utility closet that had shared a wall with the elevator shaft, and how to get through the ventilation panel that bypassed the elevator’s security desk, which had been taken over by a pair of officers from the Boston Police Department.

  Jack took the last three rungs on the ladder, then dropped to the cement floor, direc
tly across the shaft from the interior of the doors that led to the basement hallway. Then he glanced up again to make sure the elevator was still fully perched on the top floor. He doubted anyone would be making the trip down to the underground security labs at four in the morning, but getting crushed by an elevator while attempting to commit a felony was not high on Jack’s list of ways he wanted to die.

  When Jack left the pathology lab, he had come to the sudden conclusion that getting into the crime scene was his necessary next step. The police had already given him the impression that they had very little to go on, and Jack didn’t have the kind of personality where he could sit on the sidelines and wait for someone else to do the hard work.

  Once he’d made the decision, it had seemed natural to involve Andy. Jack trusted his prized grad student with his life—had literally done so more times than he could count. But when Andy had first suggested they reach out to some of his contacts in the graduate community, Jack had balked at the idea. He was willing to take the risk, but he didn’t want to involve a bunch of college kids in something that could them all arrested.

  Eventually, Andy had convinced him that it was their best option, and besides, MIT had a tradition of flouting authority; campus pranks were legendary, like the time a group of seniors had taken the Dean of Students’ car apart and rebuilt it on top of the big dome, a hundred feet above the student center. Or the time a group of engineering students had rewired the windows in the physics building to play an enormous game of Tetris that the entire city of Boston could watch.

  Once he’d given the okay, Jack had been amazed at how fast Andy had been able to find what they were looking for. Although Andy had done his undergraduate work in Princeton, he had been a fixture at the Academic Decathlon championships that were held at MIT every fall. You didn’t forget losing to a wiseass genius like Andy Chen every year.

  The floppy-haired sophomore hadn’t been the only undergrad on Andy’s e-mail chain to respond to Andy’s request for help, but he’d been the most creative. He’d known exactly where to go to get past the security at the elevator; and he’d also had access to the hazmat suit. Jack was a little terrified about a kid with such ready answers to the task at hand, but he certainly wasn’t in the position to judge anyone. He’d been a bit creative as an undergrad at Princeton, too; the local police station had a cell unofficially dedicated to him when he’d graduated—only to see him return as a professor.

  Confident that the elevator wasn’t going to come down on him, Jack turned his attention to the double elevator doors. He crossed the shaft in three steps, then placed his gloved hands on the seam between the doors. On the second try, he managed to get the toe of one of his boots into the seam along with his fingers, and with a burst of effort, forced the doors wide enough to slide his body through.

  The hallway was dark, the only light coming from a pair of pale blue emergency signals attached to police call boxes a few feet from the elevator, and Jack waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Then he was moving forward.

  He spotted the uniformed police officer the minute he took the first corner in the hallway; the man couldn’t have looked more bored, leaning back as best he could in a metal folding chair, a school newspaper open on his lap. Directly behind him was a closed lab door, covered in bright yellow police tape.

  Jack didn’t even pause. He took the corner at full pace, then pulled a small Geiger counter out of the backpack that held his oxygen tank, flicked it on, and headed directly toward the officer.

  The man didn’t notice his approach until he was about two feet away. Then the cop looked up, saw the hazmat suit—and his eyes nearly bugged out of his head. He got up from the chair so fast the metal seat folded up into the frame, the entire thing clattering to the hallway floor.

  “What the hell?”

  Jack kept his attention on the Geiger counter, which was now chirping away, louder by the second as his finger shifted against the volume control.

  “Nothing to worry about, officer. Just a little spill in one of the labs upstairs, happens all the time. They got me down here looking for runoff—whoops, that’s odd.”

  Jack hit the volume again, causing the counter to chirp loud enough to send a piercing echo up and down the hall. Then he looked up toward the ceiling and held the Geiger in the air, just a few inches from the policeman’s face.

  “Getting a little reading here. You might want to move your chair to the other side of the hallway while I check this out.”

  The police officer was staring at the Geiger counter with eyes as wide as saucers. Then he looked at Jack’s fogged up face mask. Jack could see the terror in the poor man’s features.

  “What kind of spill?”

  Jack was running the Geiger counter along the wall, just to the left of the police tape, completely ignoring the officer.

  “These damned hard elements, they get out of your controlled system, no telling where they’re going to end up. Seep right on through the floor tiles, into the piping, get into the airflow—and then I’m up all night mopping up. Some freaking grad student overturns a beaker, we’ve got a radioactive incident on our hands, am I right?”

  The officer nearly choked on his tongue. He took a step back.

  “Radioactive?”

  Jack glanced at him through the faceplate.

  “Like I said, you probably want to move your chair over to the other side of the hallway. I’m going to have to get some scrubbers down here and deal with this.”

  The officer shook his head, backing away down the hallway, toward the elevators.

  “Fuck that. I’ll be upstairs by the security desk.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “Suit yourself.” Then he glanced down at the school newspaper, on the floor by the collapsed folding chair. “Probably going to have to burn the newspaper. Maybe the chair, too.”

  The man was almost jogging now. As he disappeared around the corner, Jack could hear the officer’s radio coughing to life. Jack knew he would call it in to his superiors—but at four in the morning, Jack figured it would take some time for them to sort out what to do. This was a scientific institution, with plenty of labs and storage rooms filled with dangerous materials. And hazmat suits were like the modern-day version of medieval plague masks; you showed up in a hazmat suit, nobody stuck around very long to ask questions.

  When he was sure the officer was far enough away, he exchanged the Geiger counter for a small pocketknife and turned to the lab door covered in police tape.

  He made short work of the tape, then turned his attention to the door’s magnetic lock, attached shoulder-high to the doorframe. It was a simple keycard system; Jack knew that Dashia and Andy would have been able to come up with a sophisticated hack to get through the lock, but Jack had never been one for subtleties. He jammed the sharp edge of the knife into the crease where the magnetic lock attached to the door, then pulled as hard as he could. There was a spray of sparks, and then the magnetic lock tore free. He stepped back and put his boot to the door, four inches from the doorknob.

  The door crashed inward, the doorknob and part of the frame clattering to the floor. If the place was alarmed, Jack knew his “me” time was about to get much shorter. He quickly found the light switch, and two oversized fluorescent panels flickered across the low ceiling, illuminating a sophisticated, if somewhat sparse, computer lab. Corrugated steel shelves, counters filled with servers, routers, spaghetti curls of fiber-optic wires. Even some beakers and testtubes, though Jack had no idea what programmers needed with glassware.

  Then his attention was drawn to the glass desk on the far side of the room—and the overturned leather chair beneath it, resting on the paneled floor beside a white chalk outline.

  Jack’s mouth went dry as he crossed toward the outline. He tried to control the thoughts jamming through his head. It was just chalk, a picture, nothing real, not flesh and blood and bones. Except as he got closer, he could see the dark stain emanating from the chest area of the outlin
e, spreading out under the desk, lapping at the leather of the overturned chair. Jeremy’s blood. Jeremy’s life.

  That outline was Jeremy, his last, brutal moment, as he collapsed onto the floor, some sort of ivory spear jutting from his chest. Jack could see from the drawing that he’d landed forward, angled slightly to the side, one arm outstretched, the other clutching at the thing between his ribs.

  Jack dropped to one knee, just inches from the chalk. His face was cold, and he fought to stay in control. He only had a few minutes, and he needed all of his senses. The crime scene specialists had already gone through this lab a dozen times. He could see, glancing around the room, pieces of colored tape attached to various objects, some already tagged and wrapped in plastic evidence bags, logged and ready for transport to the CSI labs. Other pieces of tape near spots on the floor and the nearby wall marked areas of blood splatter. Jack couldn’t be sure, but he guessed from the placement of the tags that the crime scene specialists had been working in a spiral pattern, starting at the door, ending at the chalk outline in front of him.

  If the specialists had missed anything, it wasn’t going to be something simple or obvious. Jack looked up toward the glass desk, just a few feet away. The desk was empty; the oversize computer flat-screen and the shattered remains of his brother’s laptop had already been bagged, cataloged, and brought to the CSI labs. The detectives who’d questioned Jack had told him that both computers had been professionally erased before they’d gotten to them. A thorough job; both hard drives had been magnetically wiped, and then a virus had been implanted to make any sort of data recovery impossible.

  Which begged the question: Was it possible that Jeremy had been working on something using the computers that had gotten him killed? Or did the computers somehow contain evidence that would lead to the killer—something as simple as an appointment calendar or a contacts list? The police had already gone through Jeremy’s cell phone, and the only number that had come up over the past six months was Jack’s. Four calls in total, all of them incoming.