Seven Wonders (6 page)

Sloane used one hand to reach into her backpack and retrieve a small
scalpel and one of her plastic specimen containers. Carefully, she leaned forward and scraped a tiny portion of the painting into the plastic well. She wasn’t certain, but bright paint like that, from an ancient origin, was most likely botanical in origin.

It wasn’t until she had sealed the container with the paint chip and placed it into her backpack that she noticed what the tribe of female warriors was carrying on their way out of the garden.

A flat stone tile—and chiseled directly into the stone, a single, segmented gold snake.

When Sloane touched the object with her fingers, she realized that one of the segments was raised a few centimeters above the rest. As she pressed at the seams, the segment clicked out of the stone and into her gloved palm.

She stepped back, holding the snake segment in her open hand. It was heavy, like a paperweight, and when she turned it on one end, she could see that it was filled with what appeared to be mechanical gears. She also noticed that the gold coloring was just plate; the snake segment seemed to be made out of bronze.

Sloane stood there for what seemed like a very long time, trying to make sense of what she had found. Something mechanical and bronze, hidden behind vines that predated the Roman Colosseum by centuries. An object placed behind a dedication to the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra, one of the most powerful women in human history. An artifact found by solving a puzzle involving a double helix, the shape of the building block of life.

None of it made any sense—but there was no question that Sloane had stumbled into something much bigger than a strange little seed.

She placed the bronze snake segment in her backpack, next to the sealed flake of ancient paint. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and took a half dozen photos of the painting on the stone. Then she turned and started back through the labyrinthine tunnels of the hypogeum, toward the waiting Polizia.

CHAPTER FOUR

There is nothing more final than an autopsy table.

Jack tried his best to keep his attention focused on the stack of forms on the low counter ahead of him, but his gaze kept wandering across the harshly lit pathology lab to the pair of empty tables by the far wall. The corrugated aluminum frames, the eggshell-blue operating slabs, the shiny, stainless steel blood gutters that ran along each edge. Jack was thankful that both tables were empty, but he knew that at that very moment, in one of the half dozen other labs down the narrow hallway from where they’d sequestered him, his brother was on a table just like those.

Jack noticed that his fingers were trembling as he moved his pen across one of the forms. The woman with the bouffant of gunmetal gray hair standing next to him at the counter must have noticed too, because she put a hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t have to do this right now. The paperwork can wait.”

Jack hadn’t realized there would be so many forms to fill out when your brother was murdered. Medical histories, insurance documents, autopsy permissions—and all this was in addition to what he’d gone through at the police station when he’d first arrived back in Boston. Three hours in a room
with two detectives who had many more questions than answers.

“Is there anyone else we can call?” the woman asked, echoing the refrain from the police inquiry, after they’d realized that Jack knew very little about his brothers’ day-to-day life.

In fact, in many ways, his twin brother was a stranger to Jack, going back deep into childhood. The only who who’d truly known his brother was their mother, and she had died almost a decade ago. Jack had already left a dozen messages for their father on the most recent voice-mail number he had stored in his phone, but he didn’t expect to see the man stroll into the pathology wing of Mass General anytime soon. It had been over a year since Kyle Grady’s last contact—a brief e-mail from a double blind server somewhere deep in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the elder Grady was about to embark on his latest adventure. Something about a lost tribe and a mythical Maasai warlord; Jack had long ago given up trying to keep track of their father’s whereabouts. The last time the man had gone off on an exploration, he had been out of touch for more than four years. Then he’d shown up out of the blue, right in the middle of an Introduction to Anthropology seminar Jack had been giving to a group of incoming freshman at Princeton; just wandered right to the front of Jack’s classroom, plopping his worn leather saddlebag down on Jack’s desk, launching into a meandering tale about some epic jaunt up the tallest peak in the Andes, where he’d gone to live with a family of Sherpas for some book he was writing. Jack didn’t even know if the voice-mail number was current—not that it mattered. By now, Kyle Grady was probably so deep in the bush, garbed in a grass skirt and covered in Maasai war paint, Jack wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d walked through the door.

Which was just as well, because his brother, Jeremy, had always hated their father. Even before their parents had gotten divorced, Kyle Grady had no idea how to interact with a kid as introverted and troubled as Jeremy, and he’d pretty much ignored Jack’s twin when he wasn’t off in some foreign
land, living with pygmies or shepherds or tribesmen. After the divorce, their mother had raised Jeremy exclusively. Jack had gone back and forth between both parents; at seventeen, for the last year before he shipped off to Princeton, he’d even moved in with his father full-time. It had been a learning experience. A dozen times over the year, his father had simply disappeared for weeks on end. No warning, no food left in the refrigerator, no money or car keys or even a checkbook to pay for electricity or heat.

“There’s no one else,” Jack said, steadying the pen against the top form.

“No friends? Colleagues?”

Jack knew that the woman was trying to be helpful. The hospital had assigned her to wait with him while the autopsy was taking place down the hall. She probably had a psychology degree, and spent most of her time gently patting the shoulders of people who’d just lost family members.

“I’m sure he has colleagues. I doubt he had any friends.”

It was a terrible thought, but Jack knew it was true. Jeremy was different, or as their mother liked to put it, special. The smartest person Jack had ever met, a whiz with numbers and computers who couldn’t carry on the most basic conversation with a stranger to save his life. As far as Jack knew, Jeremy had never gone to a party, gone on a date, or even had dinner with anyone who wasn’t a blood relation. He was probably somewhere on the Autism-Asperger continuum, though their mother would never have allowed anyone to label him. She was the reason he’d been able to go so far; halfway through his PhD at MIT, a brilliant programmer who would have probably ended up in a backroom at Google or Facebook, making millions.

Except now, he was lying on an autopsy table, filling those stainless-steel gutters as a pathologist gathered evidence for the detectives who were still sifting their way through the crime scene.

Even twenty-four hours after a janitor had found the body and called the police, the detectives still had almost nothing to go on. According to the officers who had questioned Jack when he’d arrived off the plane, the high
security laboratory where they’d found Jeremy’s body had been scoured clean; no fingerprints, no shoeprints, no hair follicles, no DNA, and no murder weapon. No sign of forced entry; although from what Jack could gather, the underground lab wasn’t exactly Fort Knox. Jeremy hadn’t had clearance, but he’d had no trouble fooling his way in. The detectives were still trying to reconstruct Jeremy’s last few days; nobody knew him well enough to have any idea what he was working on that would lead him to that particular lab. The head of his department, a Professor Earl Johnson, had described Jeremy as an “autonomous coding machine,” meaning nobody really kept tabs on him. At MIT, that was par for the course: The merely smart had to follow the rules, but true genius roamed free.

“We weren’t very close,” Jack added.

The tinge of guilt that moved through him at the words was palpable. The distance between Jack and Jeremy was something that had bothered him since their teenage years. Many times, he’d tried to address it—a late night phone call, a long, emotional letter, an impromptu visit. None of his efforts had ever led anywhere. A phone call with Jeremy was like speaking into a tape recorder. Maybe you got a noise here and there when it was time to turn over the tape, but otherwise you were talking to yourself. Letters went unanswered, and visits invariably ended in an argument.

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.”