by Ben Mezrich
As Jack moved closer, he saw that the three panels were covered in Chinese calligraphic carvings, running down from about eye level to just above his knees. Jack only recognized a few of the characters, but one name stood out.
“It’s the story of Wang Zhaojun,” he said, running his gaze across the calligraphy as Sloane moved next to him. “Dates back to the Han dynasty, which ruled China from around 200 BC to the first few years of the new millennium. As the legend went, Wang Zhaojun was one of the four greatest beauties in all of Chinese history. Originally of low birth, she had been chosen to serve as one of the Han emperor’s numerous concubines. But when the royal portrait artist came to paint her, she refused to bribe him, so he painted her portrait with a huge mole, distorting her ephemeral beauty. Because of this, the emperor never chose her for his bed. When a rival king asked for one of the concubines to solidify a treaty, the emperor offered up Wang Zhaojun. It was only at the rival’s wedding banquet that the emperor finally saw Wang in person and realized the mistake he’d made. But by then it was too late.”
Sloane ran her palm over the carvings, the elegant swishes of ancient black ink sunk into the even older stone.
“A little superficial, for a love story.”
“I’m not sure it’s supposed to be a love story. More of a political tale. The Emperor’s rival is so taken with Wang’s beauty, he pledges to make peace with his former enemy—”
Jack paused, his gaze frozen halfway through the writing on the third stone panel. He took a step closer, lowering the torch, and then Sloane saw it, too. Five lines of calligraphy from the bottom of the stone.
The serpentlike dragon, wrapped around a spherical peach, was carved directly between the two characters that symbolized Wang Zhaojun’s name.
Sloane dropped to one knee, inspecting the image.
“Anything in the story about dragons and peach trees? Or is it all just beautiful concubines and sexually frustrated Emperors?”
Jack shook his head, still staring at the panel. There was something about the image that bothered him, but he couldn’t quite place his finger on it.
“Any idea what we’re supposed to do now that we’ve found it?” Sloane asked.
She touched the image with a finger, tracing the coils of the dragon’s serpentine body.
“It’s carved right into the stone, like the other characters—”
“Hold on,” Jack said suddenly. “Do you notice anything wrong about the picture?”
Sloane lifted her finger, looked at it again, then shook her head.
Jack shifted his backpack off of his shoulder and reached into the front pocket, retrieving the shard from the stone urn. He held it next to the image on the wall.
“It’s backward.”
On the wall, the dragon’s equine head was facing to the left—not the right, as it was on the shard from the urn. The creature’s tail curved off in the opposite direction, tilting slightly toward the ground.
“It’s a mirror image,” Jack said. “An enantiomer to the pictogram.”
“A mirror image,” Sloane repeated. Then she looked at Jack. “Which came first?”
“What do you mean?”
“The pictogram, or this carving on the wall? Which is the mirror image?”
Jack wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“We found the pictogram at Petra, which was built at least a few hundred years after this section of the Great Wall.”
“And we were led to Petra by a pictogram we found at the Colosseum, which was built fifty to a hundred years later. We were led to the Colosseum by the image we found at Chichen Itza, built six hundred years after that—”
“And Machu Picchu led us to Chichen Itza. The Taj led us to Machu Picchu. We’ve already established that we’re moving back in time—”
“But don’t you see, Jack—these pictograms, these clues, this road map leading us from Wonder to Wonder: It was all planned out ahead of time. Your brother, Jeremy, the link he found between the Modern Wonders and the Ancient Wonders, his mirror image—that’s the only way it makes sense.”
Sloane stood back from the stone panel, shaking her head.
“These segments that we keep finding, they weren’t just placed in random monuments, which somehow became the Seven Wonders of the World. This was all planned from the beginning.”
Jack realized what she was saying, because it had been in the back of his mind since he’d first seen Jeremy’s program, the glowing double helix that had gotten his brother killed. He nodded.
“An architectural roadmap of human evolution.”
“From the Great Wall to Petra to the Colosseum to Chichen Itza to Machu Picchu,” Sloane said. “And on and on. All doubling as markers built to house, hide, and protect our seven bronze segments.”
“You don’t sound so skeptical anymore.”
“I reserve the right to go right back to being skeptical until we find the last segment and see where it leads us. Because there has to be a pretty incredible reason that the greatest landmarks of human evolution were chosen to lead us here.”
Instead of responding, Jack handed his torch to Sloane, then turned and crossed the alcove to one of the shiny breastplates hanging from the wall. Using both hands, he removed the piece of armor and carried it back to where she was standing.
“In ancient times, mirrors were more than simple objects we used to see how pretty we looked when we woke up in the morning. They were considered gateways to secret worlds, sometimes to the heavens, or the clouds where the gods resided.”
He bent forward and shifted the shiny breastplate so it was directly in front of the image carved into the stone panel. Then he adjusted the angle, using the light from the torch in Sloane’s hands until the image was reflected across the shiny bronze surface—a perfect mirror image, exactly the same as the original pictogram.
Almost immediately, there was a loud churning sound, like heavy water against a hidden stone wheel. Jack felt a cold, damp breeze against his cheeks, and then the third stone panel tumbled backward—revealing another stone stairway that led directly downward.
Jack tossed the armor to the floor. Then Sloane held the torch forward, trying to see past the first few steps.
“I kind of wish the stairs led up instead of down. What did she say, a phoenix in the branches?”
Jack took the torch from her and started down the steps.
“And a dragon down below.”
• • •
“Look out, the last step is a doozy.”
Jack held out his hand, stopping Sloane on the stairwell. He lowered the torch, letting the flames play across the surface of the murky water that stretched out across the long, rectangular basement, lapping at the walls and disappearing into the shadowy corners. The room was part cave, part chamber; in some places, the walls were made of the same stone panels they had just come through, in others, it was just mud and rock, chunks jutting out like knuckles over the fetid, liquid floor. The ceiling was too far above to see clearly, but Jack’s attention had already shifted across the long room to a raised stone platform up against the far wall. In the center of the platform stood some sort of altar, about waist-high, in front of what appeared to be a sculpted diorama. Even from a distance, Jack could tell that the craftwork didn’t appear to be from the Han era, or even Chinese. If anything, it looked Greek—but Jack had a feeling it wasn’t the ancient Greeks who had led him to this place.
Jack turned back to the water below his feet, then shifted his gaze to the nearest wall, searching for the sturdiest looking outcropping of rock. He moved his free hand into his jacket, reaching for his grapple.
“We should be able to make our way along the far wall, for at least the first ten yards. Then we’ll cross back to the other side—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Sloane strolled past him and stepped boot first into the fetid water. There was a splash, and then she was standing in front of him, the water reaching to just above her upper thigh.
“Really, Jack, enough with the theatrics. It’s not that goddamn deep.”
Jack’s eyes widened.
“How did you know?”
She pointed to the surface of the water, a few feet to her right. Jack saw a clump of thin, green strands, each about the width of a strand of hair, floating on the top of the murk.
“Filamentous algae. It only grows in shallow water. Are you coming?”
Jack placed his grapple back in his jacket and stepped off the last step. The water felt cold through the material of his jeans, but his boots easily found the floor—slick and flat, more packed mud than stone. He moved next to Sloane, and together they started forward across the rectangular room.
Each step took effort, and twice Jack almost lost his footing, but Sloane caught him both times, gripping his jacket tight enough to send jabs of pain into the flesh wound on his shoulder. When he grimaced, she apologized, but he waved her off with the torch; the pain was keeping him alert, reminding him that one wrong step, one inch to the left when he should be going right, and there was a good chance the blood was going to flow. Though they were solving riddles, this wasn’t a game; they were in a chamber over twenty-two hundred years old beneath the last and oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, searching for the final piece to a mystery that had already gotten his brother killed. A mystery millennia in the making—
“There it is. The last segment.”
Sloane’s voice was a whisper, nearly lost in the lapping of the murky water against the walls. Jack followed her gaze to the raised stone platform, now only a few feet in front of them. There on the waist-high stone altar sat the final bronze segment, the snake’s tail curved and shiny in the torchlight.
“No parchment,” Sloane said. “No protective vessel. It’s just sitting there.”
But Jack’s gaze had already moved from the segment to the diorama behind it, which he suddenly realized wasn’t made of stone like the walls and the rest of the section of Wall above them. The diorama was glistening white, with smooth lines and curved edges.
“Ivory,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
It was the same image from the mural he had seen over and over again—beginning in the pit beneath the Temple of Artemis, again on the stone tablet he’d found in the crate beneath Christ the Redeemer, and again in Sloane’s photos from the hypogeum of the Colosseum. Except instead of paint against stone, this time the mural was carved in pure ivory, from the dense spectacle of the ancient garden to the group of armed women carrying the tablet of the segmented snake. And in this version of the mural, there was one marked difference. The women weren’t simply leaving the garden. They were heading toward something. Something huge, intricately carved—and instantly recognizable.
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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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.