by Ben Mezrich
“A moondial. A fourteenth century design, similar to a sundial, but designed to be accurate only during the full moon.”
He handed the stone moondial to Jack. It looked very much like a miniature sundial, with a raised lever that would cast a shadow toward a series of etched lines and circles that circumnavigated the rim of the device. It was pretty obvious how the dial would work; held beneath a full moon, the shadow would aim like an arrow toward one of the etchings.
Jack didn’t know why the god in the pictogram was wearing a moondial around its neck, but he assumed it was significant.
“We can’t pay much,” Jack started, but Unger waved him off.
“It’s my gift to an old family friend. Perhaps you’ll find a way to return the favor, whenever you find whatever it is you’re looking for—beneath the Taj.”
Jack didn’t respond as Unger watched him place the moondial in one of his many pockets. Then Jack held out a hand for the parchment. Unger was much slower to hand it back than the dial, but eventually he gave it over, still grinning.
“That’s it, right? You’re going inside the Taj, hoping to find your androgynous god?”
Again, Jack didn’t answer. But Sloane didn’t seem to notice the growing tension in the room.
“If we did want to find this antechamber—this red door,” she said, beckoning toward the blueprint, “how would you suggest we proceed? Do we just walk right up and ring a doorbell?”
Unger was still watching Jack while he folded the parchment and put it back in his jacket.
“Not exactly.”
Then he cocked his head toward Sloane.
“How well can you swim?”
• • •
Unger stayed glued to the metal folding chair, his feet bouncing up and down beneath the circular table, his hands hovering over the unrolled blueprint, his body alive, electric, on fire—until he heard the buzzer signal that Jack and the girl, that goddamn pretty, pretty, girl, had passed through the souvenir shop and out toward the front entrance. He gave it another two minutes, listening for the glass door to shut behind them, followed by the hiss of Henry the Ravenous Rat, his official mascot, watch rodent, and early warning system. Eight years, he’d gone without a single proper bust, and for the past two of them, he had that rat to thank. The closest he’d come to getting nicked was a good eight months ago, when a pair of local constables had made it as far as the cash register before he’d seen them on the CCTV screen hidden behind one of the fat elephant gods. He’d had plenty of time to seal the iron-plated door and make a hasty exit up through the escape hatch he’d built above the backroom’s ceiling panels.
But at the moment, he was damn thankful that his ravenous rat hadn’t discouraged his latest pair of interlopers. When he’d recognized Little Jacky, Crazy Kyle’s spawn right in his own shop, spitting image of the wild bastard, and judging from the way he’d disarmed Unger without breaking a sweat, just as fast with his hands, he’d never expected the kid would leave him so excited. Kyle Grady was a rogue and a bastard, but he was also a goddamn moral prince who still considered himself an anthropologist, a scientist, no matter how deep into the shit he let himself go. He’d never accepted that Unger was simply a businessman with a very specific set of business skills. It was the main reason they had grown apart and eventually gone their separate ways. Kyle had thought of him as no better than a grave robber—and yet, here was his prized son, chip off the old cock, wandering into Unger’s shop with a plan to rob the greatest grave of all.
Hell, Unger himself had thought about putting together an excursion into the Taj many times over the years, ever since he’d bought the stack of photographs from a notorious antiquities thief, right before the poor fucker had been sent to jail for two decades for an unrelated heist. Unger had no idea if the photos were real or not; but just looking at them always got his saliva flowing. Still, based on photos alone, such an expedition seemed much too risky. You didn’t break into the Taj to steal some fucking stone statues. And anyway, whatever you found there would be too hot to fence. No museum, no matter how shady or third-world, and no collector, no matter how rich and unencumbered by morality, was going to shell out top dollar for something stolen from the most famous tomb on earth.
But then there came Jack Grady, his pretty, pretty sidekick—and that incredible parchment.
Unger shivered, the excitement rising inside of him.
It wasn’t the pictogram of the half man–half woman god that had set his veins on fire. It was the image next to the pictogram, the image that Jack had first tried to cover up with his hand when he’d placed the parchment on the table.
It wasn’t the first time Unger had seen the snake figure. The serpent was usually part of a double helix, and carved into something stone or ivory, something very, very old.
Hell, there was nothing uncommon about a snake. Snakes were one of the most overused images of the ancient world. It was a snake who had coaxed Eve and Adam out of the goddamn Garden of Eden. Snakes crawled around the base of the Mayan Tree of Life. Snakes were everywhere.
But it was that particular snake, in that particular curved shape—segmented or whole—that mattered to Unger. For the past decade, he’d seen objects imprinted with similar snakes floating through all his regular stomping grounds, the various, shady underground trade outposts that defined the black market for antiquities.
Rumor was, there was a billionaire collector driving the sudden influx, a billionaire with incredibly deep pockets who would pay top dollar for ancient items imprinted with that snake.
Unger wondered, What would a billionaire pay for a parchment like the one Jack was holding? And how much more would a billionaire pay for whatever Jack was seeking beneath the Taj Mahal?
Unger bounced his feet against the floor, unconsciously running the fingers of his bruised hand against the bulge of the Luger semiautomatic strapped to his outer thigh.
Next time, he wasn’t going to let his old, moral prince of a friend’s spawn get the jump on him.
Little Jacky was fast—but he wasn’t faster than a goddamn bullet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The great silver bird plunged out of the low cloud cover, wings spread wide, banking steeply toward the blanket of green rainforest that ran down the valley, descending toward the scar of brown dirt at the valley’s base. The bird’s silver beak glimmered even in the tropical haze of a mostly overcast morning, while its sharp tale cut a swath through the humid air, trailing swirls of condensation and melting wisps of ice, which it had carried down from altitudes even higher than the tree-covered mountain peaks that bordered the valley on all four sides.
For the briefest of seconds, it seemed as though the enormous bird might dive right into the rainforest; at the last moment, the vast wings shuddered, and bladelike flaps shifted upward to catch the air just right. The bird leveled off, skimming the tops of the trees. Then it made its final approach in near silence, lowering foot by foot toward the bottom of the valley.
Vika watched as the clouds of dust and dirt plumed upward, the rubber tires of the Boeing 767 skidding across the barely paved jungle runway. Although Vika was a good thirty feet away, sitting behind the wheel of her camouflage-green military Jeep which was parked at the edge of a rocky path leading back up through the rainforest, she could smell the sharp odor of jet fuel mixed with burning rubber. Even more overwhelming, she could feel the way the forest around her seemed to contract and go dead silent as the roar of the engines finally hit, so brutally alien, so intrinsically wrong. Only after the plane had pulled to a stop, the dust settling back around its landing gear, did the rhythm of the forest return. Once again, she was engulfed in the near-deafening caw of macaws and parrots, the caterwauling of the tiny rhesus monkeys and the red-furred uakari, the incessant creaking of a dozen types of miniature frogs and a thousand different species of insect.
Even behind the bulletproof windshield of the Jeep, her long, lithe body garbed in an off-white, near-skin-tight special op
s uniform, she felt herself relax, soothed by the cacophony of the rainforest. This wasn’t simply her home, the place of her family, the world where she had grown up; she was a part of this forest, and it lived in her blood. Generation after generation, her family had sworn to protect it, and anything that threatened her forest, threatened her personally. She had been born, bred, and trained to respond to such a threat.
If she had not recognized the call letters on the private 767 as it had broken from the clouds, she would not have remained behind the windshield of the Jeep. She would have retrieved the shoulder-ready stinger missile launcher from the trunk of the vehicle and positioned herself on the Jeep’s front hood. She would have quickly let the launcher’s guidance system lock onto the 767’s superheated twin engines. She would have taken the great silver bird out of the sky before it had gotten within fifty yards of the runway.
Instead, she sat patiently in the Jeep, watching the silver bird taxi down the runway. When it finally came to a stop, she watched until the oval door near the front of the main cabin unsealed itself and fell forward, revealing a carpeted stairway. Only when the figure of a well-dressed woman with frosted hair piled atop her head appeared in the doorway holding a small briefcase in one hand did Vika reach for the ignition.
As the Jeep sputtered to life, Vika kept her gaze pinned to the woman, who was surveying the jungle around her like it was her own, private domain. And in truth, much of it was; her company, Saphra Industries, had purchased the entire valley from the Brazilian government—the trees, the mountains, the dirt runway, even the small village where Vika had grown up, tucked in front of the mouth of an underground river, one of the many tributaries of the legendary Amazon, the life giver. Supposedly the company was to research curative chemicals harvested from the skin of the local amphibian population.
But even so, no matter how much money had changed hands, no matter what sort of documents had been signed or official stamps tendered, the woman would never be anything but a stranger here. As brutally alien and inherently wrong as her great silver bird.
As Vika watched, the woman searched the forest around the runway, an irritated look spreading across her face. It took her a full three minutes to spot Vika’s Jeep, and then the woman waved her free hand in a sharp gesture—a command.
Vika dutifully put the Jeep into drive, and began to carefully navigate the vehicle over the rocks and thick mud toward the runway and the plane.
In the end, it didn’t matter to Vika who the woman was, or how alien and wrong she might be. Just as Vika had been born, bred, and trained to protect the forest around her, she had been born, bred, and trained to follow orders. That was her own internal rhythm.
It wasn’t a matter of thought, or choice; it was a matter of nature.
• • •
The javelins were little more than flashes of white tearing through the air in parallel arcs toward the row of canvas targets. The hurtling weapons made almost no sound—just the slightest hiss of razor-sharp ivory moving at speeds in excess of eighty miles per hour—until they found their marks, exactly fifty yards across the mud-paved central square. All twelve struck the direct centers of the torso-shaped canvas bags filled with thick straw; two were thrown with such force that they went right through, emerging out the other side and traveling another ten yards to the wooden wall of the nearby armory and imbedding, point first, into the thick Brazilian wood.
“Impressive,” Jendari mused, watching through the open window in the Main House overlooking the central square. “It’s certainly an elegant weapon—if perhaps a little conspicuous, don’t you think?”
As usual, Vika remained stone-faced and still, coiled like a snake against the hard stone bench on the other side of the long “family” table that dominated the center of the Main House. For as long as Jendari had known the woman, she had been this way: silent, statuesque, unemotional. It was incredibly unnerving, and yet Jendari accepted it, because Vika was an invaluable asset. If some of her choices seemed a bit, well, eccentric—such as the javelins, or the matching white uniforms the dozen trainees wore as they continued their exercise—who was Jendari to criticize? In terms of a silent ballistic weapon, perhaps a javelin wasn’t the worst of choices; Jendari had access to plenty of ancient ivory, and it was very hard to trace a weapon that hadn’t been used for thousands of years.
Still, truth be told, she was much more impressed by the high-tech shooting range on the other side of the armory, where the other dozen or so of Vika’s current batch of trainees were currently going through their rotations; every now and then, Jendari could hear the rapid patter of light ballistics echoing through the village, the signature cough of automatic M-16s and Israeli-built NG-7s. In previous visits, she had toured the armory and the range and had been impressed by the array of weapons her money had bought: from the machine guns to much larger, shoulder-held missile launchers, to grenade throwers and light mortars. There was even a fair collection of experimental nonlethals, such as handheld sound cannons and time-release blast grenades. Since Saphra Industries had purchased the village and the surrounding area from the Brazilian government, Jendari had spared no expense in upgrading the village’s main indigenous industry—and despite what the Brazilian officials might have believed, it had nothing to do with curative frog sweat.
Jendari turned away from the window and crossed to the long table, retrieving her briefcase from the bench opposite where Vika was sitting. She could still remember the first time she’d met with Vika in this main house, nearly ten years ago—shortly after her surveillance team had traced the Euphrates Conglomerate’s holdings to this remote part of Brazil. According to her team, Euphrates had owned and protected this jungle paradise for decades, if not centuries; once Jendari herself had investigated the area, she had understood why.
The Main House and armory were just two of sixteen unmarked wooden buildings that made up the bulk of the village grounds; from the air, there was nothing remarkable about the architecture or the placement of the buildings—a concentric circle of living spaces, animal confines, and multiuse sheds that was consistent with other tribal towns that speckled the vast rainforest.
But like the nearby rock quarry that hid the entrance to the vast underground river network that had given the village its name, Fluindo Aldeia, the ordinary appearance of the place was a carefully crafted lie.
Jendari opened her briefcase and carefully removed the two photographs from her vault, placing them gently on the table between herself and the stone-faced operative. If Vika was surprised by anything in the images, she didn’t show it. Jendari wondered what it would take to rattle a woman such as her—a woman who had been born in a place like this.
When Jendari had first discovered what Euphrates had been up to in this isolated corner of Brazil, she had immediately dispatched Grange and a team of handpicked experts to compile a history of Fluindo Aldeia, because the idea that such a place could exist seemed almost unthinkable. An entire community, hidden deep in the Amazonian rainforest, that had essentially been transformed into a sophisticated mercenary training camp. Even more confounding, nearly eighty percent of the town’s population had been female.
After weeks of digging, Grange’s report only added to the mysteries. According to his findings, Vika’s village was over two hundred years old, settled by an offshoot of a much larger tribal community that had traveled down one of the Amazon River’s tributaries, ending up at the mouth of the underground river that had given the village its name. These tribal settlers were more than simple nomads; they were a legendary group who a hundred years earlier, had given the entire rainforest, and the river that ran through it, its name.
As the story went, midway through the sixteenth century, the Spanish explorers who made the first journey down the rushing, exotic waters of the great river were attacked by a tribe of female warriors—the Icamiabas, roughly translated as “women without husbands.” Franciscode Orellana, the lead Spanish explorer, named the river after these wome
n, whom he likened to the mythical Amazons. To this day, nobody knew for sure where the Icamiabas had come from, or what had happened to them after the Spanish exploration and eventual invasion.
Based on writings found in caves near the underground river, Grange and his experts were convinced that Vika’s forest home was the only known remnant of the legendary tribe.
Euphrates’s interest in the village had been more than historical; when Jendari visited the village for the first time, she had found more than a piece of Mesoamerican history. She had found an incredible group of female warriors who had been trained since birth to fight and kill. Euphrates had taken what these women did naturally and turned it into a business.
Jendari had used her own money and connections to make contact with the middlemen who assigned the various missions to the mercenary group, and eventually hired them to work for her. She’d effectively closed out the Euphrates control of the mercenaries—whom she’d redubbed the Vipers—and for more than a decade now, Vika and her team had worked exclusively for Saphra Industries.
For the first few years after Jendari had made her move, she’d expected Euphrates to respond. Yet all she had gotten from the mysterious, faceless corporation was silence. Either Euphrates was as toothless as she had begun to suspect, and the Order that her great-aunt had worshipped so completely was nothing beyond some shadow bureaucracy, a cult long since faded into obsolescence, or they’d already accepted Jendari as the true heir to their organization. Their modern Cleopatra, leader of the new Order of Eve.
“So tell me,” Jendari said, after Vika raised her eyes from the pair of photographs. “Did he find the crate?”
The clatter of a half-dozen submachine guns going off in concert on the far side of the village echoed through the open window as Vika considered the question. Finally, she shrugged her taut shoulders.