by Ben Mezrich
Of all the stupid things he’d ever done, he felt for certain that this topped them all.
He grinned in the darkness and leaned back to enjoy the ride.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jendari blinked back tears as the enormous spotlight flashed alive, turning night into day, bathing the enormous, underground cavern in an almost apocalyptic glare. Instinctively, she took a step closer to the rushing underground river, staring down toward the curve a hundred yards away where the water disappeared around a near hairpin turn. Then she shifted back on her boot heels toward the base of the ramp they had just come down, to where Vika knelt next to the portable spotlight, her hands still holding the long extension cable that ran up to the surface, where they’d installed the generator, right up against the base of the Great, and in Jendari’s mind, hideously ugly, Sphinx.
“How far ahead do you think they are?” Jendari asked as Vika let the cord fall to the sand and slowly raised herself to her feet.
For a moment, a flash of visible agony flashed behind the assassin’s normally stoic features, but then she regained control, shifting her eyes toward the pair of sarcophagi that still stood against the nearby cavern wall.
“By the depth of the tracks leading to the water’s edge,” she said, her voice more clipped than normal, “and the erosion of the tracks up on the surface, I’d estimate they went into the water at least thirty minutes ago.”
Jendari nodded, her gaze playing over the closest of the two sarcophagi. Ballsy of Jack, putting his trust in a coffin that’s been standing there for thousands of years. But then again, she’d learned not to be surprised by anything the anthropologist seemed willing to do. The fact that the untrained man had bested Vika’s operatives twice, and nearly killed Vika herself, was evidence that he was more than he seemed. Determined, certainly, but also a little crazy—or stupid enough to make decisions that were impossible to predict.
Still, no matter how he’d done it, Jack Grady had found his way through all Seven Wonders of the World—and led Jendari to what she now believed was the final resting place of the secret that the Order of Eve had spent ten thousand years protecting. The river behind her was evidence enough; nearly every culture and religion that spoke of a Garden or a Tree of Life also spoke of the river that led there. In many of the stories, it was that same river that humankind was supposed to use to get back to the floral paradise—either through death, as in Islamic, Hindu, Sumerian, and Jewish ancient lore, or at the end of a preordained length of time, as in Mayan, Incan, Chinese, and countless other religious traditions.
To Jendari, it was still just a river. And if Vika was right, unless he’d drowned or floundered somewhere along the way, Jack had already been riding the current for thirty minutes or more, which meant Jendari had no more time to waste. She opened her mouth to give the command, but Vika had already taken out her cell phone and was speaking in Portuguese.
Jendari understood most of the words; Vika had told her operatives stationed aboveground by the generator to retrieve the inflatable skiff from the jeep. She’d ordered one of her operatives—a woman named Villia, her eldest cousin—to bring the skiff down the ramp. And then she had told the rest to fan out and take defensive positions around the statue above.
When Vika had hung up the phone, Jendari caught her attention.
“Why only one skiff?” she asked. “And why only one additional operative? We should bring the entire team with us. We can’t risk him getting away again.”
“There are only two of them, and we have the element of surprise. And you were very clear—we don’t want to endanger the artifact.”
Jendari watched as Vika moved toward her, noticing the assassin’s slight limp, and the way the woman seemed to be dragging the entire right side of her body. Still, she didn’t seem any less deadly than usual. And Jendari knew that the other operative, Villia, was one of her best people.
Besides, she realized, the fewer operatives who accompanied them down the river, the fewer loose ends Jendari would eventually have to deal with.
Vika was the ultimate tool—but she wasn’t going to be necessary for much longer.
“Okay,” Jendari said. “And no firearms. As you say, we don’t want to risk the collateral damage.”
Jendari still couldn’t be certain what they were going to find at the end of the river, but she had a pretty good idea. It bothered her that Jack Grady was going to get there first. Still, the anthropologist’s mode of transportation was more than fitting.
She was going to make damn sure he returned the same way he went in—in a coffin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Thirty minutes of near silence, apart from the rushing of the water and the creak of the sarcophagus beneath their bodies. Thirty minutes lost in the maddening thoughts swirling through Jack’s mind—of Seven Wonders built to hide a road map, of an underground river beneath the oldest sculpture on Earth, of a civilization that wasn’t really supposed to have ever existed, leaving evidence behind in cultures all over the globe—and then, suddenly, they took another hairpin turn, buffeted nearly sidewise by the fierce current, and Jack’s entire world became engulfed in a paradise of verdant green.
It was the mural come to life, stretching for a hundred yards across an island in the middle of the widening river, an incredibly thick assemblage of plant life, from low brushes to twisting, serpentine vines to towering trees, reaching higher and higher, so incredibly high. That’s when Jack realized that the roof of the cavern had risen hundreds of feet above them, and that his flashlight had suddenly become useless—because from above, a strange, yet natural glow filled the air, wisps of colored light reflecting through the very stone roof of the indescribably massive chamber.
“We must have been traveling downward the entire time,” Jack whispered. “Deeper beneath the desert. The light—it’s like rays reflected through quartz.”
“Or sand,” Sloane said. “Jack, this garden—the diversity—I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Birches, a dozen different palms. Iriartea deltoidea, Chamaecypari thyoides, Fagus diospyros, Ilex opaca, Fagus grandifolia, and that’s just right by the shore. Some of these other plants—they’ve been extinct for thousands of years. And most of them are growing bigger and healthier than they would in their natural environments.”
Jack could still hear her voice, but her words were just sound against his ears, because his attention had suddenly focused on one particular tree, rising up near the center of the florid island. An oak, at least forty feet tall, and halfway up its trunk, suspended between two immense branches, he saw a glistening white platform. Ivory, he thought, his heart racing. Matching white steps led up from the ground, rising over what appeared to be a deep moat that had been dug around the tree’s vast base. And up on top of the platform between the branches, twenty feet in the air, another sarcophagus not of wood, but of brightly polished bronze.
Sloane finally saw the oak as well, because she went silent. Jack finally shifted his gaze back to the river. He looked past the island, and to his surprise, saw a sheer stone wall. It appeared that the river went underground again; out of the corner of his eyes, he noticed a slight break in the sheer stone. It was the opening of some sort of tunnel—perhaps a natural channel, perhaps something that had been purposefully dug. Might be another way out, he thought to himself.
He leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus and began paddling against the current, trying to steer them toward the shoreline of the island. Sloane saw what he was doing and joined him in the effort.
It took a good ten minutes, but eventually, they’d managed to get close enough for Jack to reach out and grasp a section of tree root that was visible along the surface of the water. He hooked one arm around the rough wood and pulled until their vessel slid onto the sandy shore.
Sloane didn’t wait for him to give her the signal; before he’d even finished beaching their sarcophagus, she was up and over the ledge. She took a few steps along the shore, then stopped as she rea
ched the beginning of the low brush.
“Do you see the way these Acalypha deamii are spaced? And these Olearia? These aren’t random growth patterns. These were planned. Cultivated.”
Jack climbed out of the sarcophagus and joined her at the edge of the bushes. His eyes moved over the low brush and settled on a familiar red vine, strung along the tops of the greenery. He followed the vine backward and saw that it led to the base of the giant oak and up the backside of the trunk. He reached forward, gingerly avoiding the enormous thorns, and plucked one of the bright red leaves.
He showed it to Sloane.
“A lot bigger, and probably a lot older, than the leaves you photographed at the Colosseum,” he said.
Then he started forward, letting the vine guide him through the thick brush, deeper into the garden.
By the time he and Sloane had reached the stone steps leading up to the platform in the oak, they were both breathing hard. Working their way through the flora had been difficult; though the plants had been spaced carefully, there were plenty of exposed roots and dozens of species of vines ready to trip them up at every step. Even so, Jack felt his adrenaline rise as he moved toward the bottom step. But before his foot left the ground, Sloane grabbed his shoulder.
She pointed at the moat that that had been dug around the base of the tree not ten feet in front of them, part of it lost in the shadow cast by the rising stairs.
Jack squinted down into the darkness—and saw that the ground at the bottom of the moat appeared to be moving. As his eyes adjusted to the change in light, he made out individual twists of motion, and that’s when he saw the scales and the flickering tongues.
“Snakes,” Sloane said. “A whole lot of snakes.”
“Asps,” Jack said. “Extremely poisonous. I’m counting at least a dozen different species. There isn’t an antivenom in the world that could cure you if you fell in there. Once they sink their fangs into you, you’ve got about five minutes—and then you’re on your way to becoming a corpse.”
Jack involuntarily inched back from the bottom step, surveying the walk up to the platform that hung between the branches and the waiting sarcophagus. He felt something brush his back and saw that he was standing beneath a variety of birch maybe a dozen feet taller than the top of his head.
“Then I guess you’d better be careful,” Sloane said.
“You’re not going up there with me?”
“I think this time I’ll stay behind. Whatever’s up there, in that coffin … I think I’d rather you saw it first.”
Jack understood. They were so close to the end now that it was almost difficult to breathe. But snakes or no, Jack had no intention of stopping. They had come too far.
He started forward, his boot lifting toward the first ivory step, when something blindingly white flashed by his peripheral vision, catching his right sleeve and spinning him around on his heels. He slammed backward into the birch tree, his arm suddenly pinned to the wood. He looked down and saw it—a two-foot-long ivory javelin sticking out from the birch trunk, piercing right through his sleeve, inches from his wrist.
He looked up to see two dark-haired women rushing toward him through the garden. Behind them was a third woman, moving much more deliberately through the underbrush. An older woman with frosted hair and a vaguely recognizable face.
Jack turned to Sloane.
“Go!” he screamed. “Into the bush! Find someplace to hide!”
“Jack—” she gasped.
“Now!”
And then she dove between the plants to his right, cutting a path deeper into the greenery. Jack turned back toward the two dark-haired women, who were now only a few yards away. He immediately recognized the woman in front from the catwalk in Petra; those dark, soulless eyes, those chiseled, tan features. As he watched, the woman pulled another javelin out from a sheath strapped to her back and took aim.
The javelin whizzed past his head, disappearing into the garden the way Sloane had just run. For a nauseating second his heart stopped in his chest—but then he heard the thwack of ivory hitting wood.
The woman cursed, then turned to the second woman, who Jack also recognized from the brownish streaks in her dark hair. It was the woman from the Temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza. The first woman said something in stilted, accented Portuguese, and the second woman ran past Jack, diving into the brush after Sloane.
“Hold on,” Jack said. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”
The dark-haired woman stopped a few feet in front of him and waited for the older woman with the frosted hair to finally work her way the last few feet through the garden.
“Dr. Grady,” the older woman said, after she’d caught her breath. “I have to thank you. You’ve done excellent work.”
Something about her face pricked at Jack’s memory.
“Do I know you?”
“I certainly know you,” the woman responded. “You and your brother saved me years, perhaps decades. Certainly millions of dollars.”
And then Jack realized where he had seen the woman before: on television. A biotech billionaire, Jendari Saphra. What could she possibly have to do with any of this? Jack was about to ask, when Jendari suddenly looked past him toward the giant oak, and the stairway leading upward.
“The Tree of Life,” she whispered.
Jack followed her eyes and realized she wasn’t actually looking at the oak, she was looking at the bronze sarcophagus.
“What is it?” he said. “You had my brother killed—for what?”
The woman ignored him, heading for the bottom step. As her foot touched ivory, she glanced back at the dark-haired woman, still standing a few feet in front of where Jack was pinned to the tree.
“Vika,” she said as if it were merely an afterthought. “He’s of no use to us anymore.”
Then she started up the steps. Jack turned his eyes forward, just in time to watch Vika pull a third ivory javelin out from behind her back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sloane’s lungs burned as she dove through the underbrush, fronds and thorny vines whipping at her arms and shoulders, pollen clinging to her hair. She could still see the first javelin tearing through Jack’s sleeve, and the second javelin, which had missed her by mere inches, plunging into the trunk of a mature cyprus.
Even with a head start, she could hear her pursuer closing in. No matter how many hours she’d spent on StairMasters and ellipticals, there was no way she was going to be able to outrun a trained killer. She began to frantically search the plants around her for something she could use as a weapon. Maybe an oversize thorn? A broken tree limb? But she knew she was just being foolish; she wasn’t going to beat the woman in a fight, and she wasn’t going to get away. Which meant unless she came up with something brilliant, and something fast—she was going to die.
Sloane leaped over a high fir root. No, damn it. She wasn’t going to let it end like this. Not here, of all places. She had dedicated her life to the study of plants. Hell, she was in this garden because of her obsession with the simple essence of the beautiful, perfect floral structures around her. Maybe she had initially been motivated by the need to secure her job, but now it was much more than that. Her love of plants had led her to the end of a mystery that spanned millennia and the entire globe. Her love of plants had led her to Jack—who was still just as irritating and headstrong and wild-eyed as when she’d first met him, but still—no, damn it, she wasn’t going to die here, in this garden.
Because this was her turf.
And then suddenly, she skidded to a stop, her feet digging into a section of soft, falanius moss. But it wasn’t the moss that had frozen her in her tracks. It was the pair of towering plants behind the moss, rising up from behind a fallen deciduous limb.
The two stems were much too long, reaching almost a foot above her head, curving outward from each other, jutting out over a small clearing between the moss and the edge of more underbrush. And the quintet of leaves at the end of each stem we
re incredibly large—each as big as a manhole cover, flat and heart-shaped. But the deep pink color and the colony of frond-like hairs around the interior of the lobes were unmistakable.
Sloane’s breathing became steady as she realized what she was looking at. She quickly crossed the moss and crept beneath the two overhanging stems, standing with her back to the green stalks. Then she waited.
It was only a few seconds before she saw the woman sliding between the various trees and brush with the agility of a forest cat. The woman saw her at almost the same moment—and a smile broke across her narrow face.
She slowed her pace, her eyes scanning the area around Sloane for any nearby weapons. Satisfied, she stepped onto the carpet of moss, rising to her full height, a good inch taller than Sloane’s five-foot-seven.
“That was a pretty good kick back at the pyramid in Mexico,” she said in heavily accented English as she advanced carefully across the moss. “I almost broke my neck on the way down.”
“That was you?” Sloane said, remembering the moment at the top of Chichen Itza. “I thought you looked familiar. You look much better on your feet, not tumbling down two-thousand-year-old stairs.”
The woman grinned, taking another step forward. She was just a few feet away now. Her right hand moved to her belt and she withdrew the cruel-looking, serrated knife.
“You won’t catch me by surprise again, bitch.”
Suddenly she lunged. Sloane leaped backward, barely avoiding the blade, and smacked one of the stalks with the palm of her hand. Then she dropped flat to the ground.
The woman stood over her, a confused look on her face.
“Now why would you—” she started, but that was as far as she got.
The giant, heart-shaped leaf of the plant plunged downward, opening like a pair of bright pink jaws. It closed over the woman’s head with a sudden snap, then sprung back upward, carrying her up into the air, her feet dangling four feet over the ground.
Sloane rolled away from beneath the woman’s kicking legs, then rose slowly, brushing moss from her pants.