Seven Wonders (33 page)
Andy nodded toward the top platform of the catwalks.
“I think that’s where we’re supposed to go.”
Jack saw it too; at the very end of the top platform stood another urn on top of a small, circular pedestal.
Without wasting any more time, he swung his legs over the ledge where they were standing and dropped the ten feet to the sand. He sunk into the sand almost to his calves, then started forward, using the flare to search the ground in front of him for any signs of traps or triggers.
Or snakes, or spiders
.
Jack pushed the thought away; when you couldn’t see your feet, it was never good to imagine things with fangs.
He could hear Andy and Sloane plodding along behind him, but he didn’t turn until he reached the grooves leading up to the first platform. By then, his flare had just started to die down, so he tossed it to the sand and lit a second one. The orange flame flashed against the closest cylindrical support columns, and he reached out with two fingers to touch the sheer white material.
Ivory
. His mouth went dry as he remembered the sliver that the pathologist had removed from his brother’s rib cage. The ivory columns brought him right back to that lab, yards away from Jeremy’s autopsy table. He knew that ivory was a material used extensively by ancient cultures; no doubt the Amazons had a fascination for the hard, yet pliable material as well. He wondered,
If these columns are more evidence of an Amazon connection, does that extend to the ivory in my brother’s chest?
He thought back to the two robbery attempts. Both of his assailants had been women.
What if they were Amazons?
It was a preposterous thought. Even if the snake segments had been left by Amazons, the idea that remnants of a culture had survived in secret for so many millennia was unthinkable.
Jack took his hand off the column and moved to the first set of grooves leading upward. Then he began to climb.
By the time they reached the top catwalk, all three of them were breathing hard. Although Jack’s first step off the grooves caused the entire catwalk to rock a few inches in either direction, the stone felt stable enough to hold their weight. Still, they moved forward carefully, keeping close together, all three holding onto the rope, which was grappled to a jut in the wall near the roof of the cavern, ten feet above.
“It’s smaller than the one outside,” Andy said. “Moses must have dropped some of his gold on the way up.”
Jack approached the urn slowly, holding the flare out in front of him.
The urn was about half the size of the one on top of the Treasury, and its surface was devoid of any pockmarks or carvings. It still appeared to be made out of stone, but even from a few feet away, Jack could see flickers from his flare glancing inside the lip of the vessel; it seemed to be hollow. He also saw that a few feet above the urn, a pair of grooves led to another oval opening in the wall similar to the one they had come through from outside. Perhaps another way out, or maybe a dead end—it was hard to tell. Jack turned his attention back to the urn.
“Looks like it’s hollow,” Jack said.
He was about to reach for the urn with his free hand—when he noticed something about the circular base that the urn was sitting upon. It wasn’t a single stone; it was a number of circular stones, each a few inches thick, piled one on top of another.
Jack felt a shiver move through him, and he quickly held up his free hand, stopping Sloane and Andy. Then he lowered himself to one knee, peering closer. At the very back edge of the stone circles, he saw it: a long sliver of ivory, almost thin enough to be invisible, leading from the bottom of the base to the top of one of the ivory support columns.
“An ενεργοποιούν,” he said, using the ancient Greek. Andy exhaled—his Greek wasn’t as good as Dashia’s, but he obviously understood. Sloane touched Jack’s arm.
“What is it? A trap?”
“A pressure scale. These stones are held down by the weight of the urn. The original design is ancient Greek, but there’s evidence that the origins are much older. It’s pretty sophisticated, actually—”
“What happens if you remove the urn?” Sloane interrupted.
Jack waved with the flare.
“Not sure, exactly.” He bent forward again to take another look at the strip of ivory—and just then, something whizzed by his right ear and exploded against the rock wall to his right.
Flecks of sandstone rained down onto the catwalk, and Jack grabbed Sloane by her robes, pulling her down next to him. Andy was already flat on his stomach, peering over the edge.
“Three of them!” Andy said. “They just came through the tunnel from outside. Shit, Doc, I think they’re armed—”
Another bullet cracked against the wall, inches above Sloane’s head. Jack’s jaw clenched. He grabbed Sloane’s hand and pointed to the opening above the urn. She nodded as another bullet whizzed by.
Jack knew he had to move fast. He could already hear footsteps moving across the lowest of the three catwalks. He gripped the flare tight in his hand, then rolled to the edge and flung the flaming stick as far into the air as he could.
Gunfire erupted, and the flare jerked and twisted as it spiraled toward the sandy floor of the cavern. The catwalk around Jack descended into darkness, and Jack pulled Sloane over him, shoving her toward the urn.
“Jump!” he hissed.
She didn’t even pause, hurling herself over the urn toward the grooves that led up to the opening. She hit the wall hard, gasping, but her hands found the grooves and she was moving upward. As she pulled herself into the opening, Jack grabbed Andy by the arm and yanked him forward.
“Your turn!” he yelled, pushing Andy as hard as he could.
Andy let out a yell as he leaped, just missing the top of the urn. For a brief moment it seemed like he was going to slide right down the wall, but then Sloane was reaching down, grabbing him by the collar of his robes and yanking him upward. He clawed at the grooves, and then it was just his legs dangling out of the opening as Sloane pulled him the rest of the way.
Jack was about to leap after them when he heard a noise directly behind him on the top catwalk. He turned as a yellow flare burst to life.
The woman stood still as a statue at the far edge of the catwalk, one hand nonchalantly holding a military-grade flare, the other caressing the
grip of a semiautomatic handgun. She was dressed in desert camouflage-her long, lithe body hidden beneath flashes of gray and brown. Her long, dark hair was pulled back behind her head in a severe ponytail, and her face was the shape of a diamond, her eyes vaguely almond, narrowed to near slits.
“Dr. Grady,” she said, in a thick, unplaceable accent. “You’re much taller than your brother.”
She said the words as if she were simply stating a fact, but Jack was suddenly hit with a burst of white-hot rage. His eyes drifted from the gun in her hand to his rope, which was now on the floor of the catwalk by his feet, still attached to the grapple that was hooked into the wall. While the woman watched, he slid the toe of his boot under the rope, then returned his attention to the woman’s chiseled features.
She cocked an eyebrow, amused.
“You’re very resourceful. But what do you think you’re going to do with that? Climb out of here like a spider on a web?”
Jack could hear more footsteps below them on the second catwalk. Andy had counted three assailants, but there was no way to know how many more were on their way into the cavern.
“We’ve already done spiders,” Jack said.
And then he smiled, slowly extending his right hand behind his back, his fingers reaching for the lip of the hollow urn, just a few feet away.
The woman followed his motion with her eyes, her gaze moving past his fingers to the urn, then down to the rounded stones—and then her expression froze.
Just as the gun shifted up, Jack lunged backward, grabbing the urn and lifting it off of the stone base. There was a sudden crack, and then the catwalk lurched inward as the ivory columns twisted free. The woman’s gun went off, the bullet glancing across Jack’s left shoulder, tearing through his robes and slicing an inch out of his skin—but then the woman was tumbling
downward, toward the center of the lurching catwalk.
In the same moment, Jack’s boot flipped upward, sending the rope flying into the air. He caught it with his free hand just as the entire catwalk disappeared beneath him, taking the woman, her flare, and her gun with her, hurtling toward the floor fifty feet below. He caught one last glimpse of her as she pirouetted through the air, her hands clawing at one of the falling ivory columns as she desperately tried to break her fall—and then she was gone, and Jack was swinging hard into the wall. Thankfully, the grapple held. The stone knocked Jack’s breath away, but somehow he managed to hold on to the urn. He could feel that there was something inside, but he didn’t have time to look.
He pulled himself up along the rope, then found a ledge large enough to support his weight. Then he detached the grapple and flung it toward the opening where Andy and Sloane had just disappeared. The grapple caught, and Jack was clambering after them, the urn tucked tightly under his arm. As he pulled himself into the opening, he cast one last look down toward the floor of the cavern.
The three stories of catwalks were nothing but a pile of stone and ivory, dark, jagged shapes rising up from the sand. He thought he heard a groan in the darkness, but he didn’t see any movement. He felt his teeth touch the air.
That was for Jeremy
.
Then he yanked himself the last few feet into the opening, leaving a small trail of blood from his shoulder along the stone wall.
Sixteen hours later, the choppy waters of Bohai Bay flashed by beneath the bulbous Plexiglas windows of a Chinese-built private helicopter. Jack’s shoulder throbbed along with the rhythmic beating of the helicopter’s blades, his wound still fresh beneath a thick wrapping of gauze and medical tape. Jack had changed the bandages himself in the airplane lavatory minutes before they’d begun their descent into Beijing; no doubt, if he’d had the time to stop at an emergency room after his team had worked their way out of Petra, and—with Bedouin help—toward the international airport in Amman, the flesh wound would have earned him a handful of stitches. Instead, he’d had to get by on desert medicine, which had consisted of a foul-smelling salve mixed up by one of Magda’s wives and a half a tube of Neosporin from Andy’s first aid kit. After what they’d just been through—as close as they’d come to death at the hands of that terrifying woman—Jack counted himself lucky.
Jack tried to ignore the pain as he clung to his seat belt harness with both hands, forcing himself to concentrate on the woman’s voice that was now echoing through the heavy headphones pressed against his ears. The roar of the chopper and the way the damn craft kept banking hard to the left to avoid sudden outcroppings from the clifflike shoreline made the task
difficult—and the woman’s thick Chinese accent certainly wasn’t helping. Even though she was just a few feet away, seated directly across from him and Sloane in the passenger cabin of the aging machine—furnished in faded leather, from the harness digging into his chest and waist to the oversize seats, built-in minibar, and interior walls—they may as well have been miles apart, and not just because of the quality of the radio transmitters of their headsets or the language barrier. No matter how important Jack knew the information she was giving them was to their journey to the final Wonder of the World, Jack simply couldn’t do the one thing that would have made the distance between them disappear. He couldn’t look her in the eyes.
Jack could tell by the way Sloane was watching him that she sensed his discomfort. On the trip from the Beijing Capital International Airport to the airfield on the southeastern edge of the vast city, Jack had given Sloane only the barest details about Hinh Hu Li: that she was the lead curator of the People’s Museum of Beijing and an expert in Chinese antiquities, specifically, anything having to do with the Ming dynasty that had ruled most of the country from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century. When they had reached the fenced-in airfield and were led through a pair of security gates by uniformed Chinese soldiers to the waiting helicopter—fiberglass and steel frame glistening in the morning sun, rotors already beginning to spin—Sloane had begun to pepper him with questions. But when she’d seen the woman for the first time, standing on the bottom step leading up to the passenger cabin, the questions had frozen in the air between them, and Sloane had been content to stare in silence. Late thirties, dressed in a stiff gray pantsuit open at the collar, five-foot-ten in high leather boots—Hinh Hu Li had that effect.
Twenty minutes later, enclosed in the throbbing belly of the racing chopper, the woman’s aura was no less palpable. Unlike Jack, Sloane could only briefly take her gaze off the high-ranking academic’s dark, perfect features: lips like crimson clouds, eyes the shape of teardrops, pupils painted in
pitch-black oil, cropped hair combed above brows drawn with the severity of cut glass. She was a beautiful woman—and that only made Jack even more uncomfortable, because it reminded him of how much he’d always hated her.
“You’re definitely on the right track,” she was saying as Jack watched the helicopter’s shadow dancing over frosted waves through the thick glass to his right. “And I can understand why you thought of me. This pictogram seems to be referencing a particular section of the Great Wall with which I have an intimate familiarity. But I believe you’ve gotten two things wrong.”