Seven Wonders (24 page)

With a burst of strength, he yanked the lid upward. There was a loud hiss, and a cloud of greenish dust floated upward. Jack jerked his head back, holding his breath. When the cloud cleared, he peered down into the coffin.

It took less than a second for him to find the object, dead center, right where Mumtaz’s heart would have been. Just as in the eye of Christ the Redeemer, it was wrapped in parchment.

Jack’s fingers trembled as he lifted the object free and carefully unwrapped the parchment. The snake segment shined in the green glow of the bioluminescent fungi. It was about the same size as the other two they had recovered—the head from Christ the Redeemer, and the section Sloane had found in the Colosseum—this time curving slightly to the right. Jack could see the same strange bronze gears inside, clearly visible from both openings. Then he turned his attention to the parchment, spreading it out against the open sarcophagus lid.

Once again, he was looking at an image of the segmented snake. But this time, there was a pictograph next to the third segment:

Three trapezoidal shapes that could have been windows or stones above another geometrical shape—a stepped cross, symmetrical rectangular arms around a circular center. Jack instantly recognized the Incan Chakana, one of the most holy symbols of the lost Peruvian civilization. He knew from his time spent in the nearby jungles with the Yanomami what the Chakana was supposed to represent: the Tree of Life, similar in form and context to the Tree from the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden. But he’d never seen a version of the Chakana that had looked quite like this. The edges of the stepped cross seemed to be on fire—metallic wisps of flame leaped from every corner. Even without understanding the details, he knew what the pictograph was trying to tell him—and where they needed to go next.

“Machu Picchu,” he said. “The sacred, lost city of the Incans.”

It made chronological sense. Machu Picchu had been built sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, two hundred years before the Taj Mahal, and was the next of the Modern Seven Wonders in terms of age. If this snake segment had been hidden here when the Taj Mahal was built, then it would have been possible—as crazy as it sounded—to reference an architectural wonder that had been built before
it
was. Though from what Jack remembered from his South American history, Machu Picchu had been lost for centuries, only rediscovered by an explorer in 1911. Then again, that
didn’t mean the ruins were lost to
everyone
.

“Jack,” Sloane said—but he was still running through it all in his head.

“One segment beneath Christ the Redeemer, the next at the Taj Mahal. A third somewhere in Machu Picchu. Where is this leading us?”

“Jack. Shut up for a second and listen.”

Jack looked up, surprised by her tone. Then he noticed it, too.

“The echo,” he said. “It’s gone.”

He could only think of one reason why the echo would have disappeared. He looked up toward the ceiling and saw that a panel had suddenly opened in the curved marble, maybe twenty feet above. There was something shifting behind the opening.

“Move!” he shouted, shoving the segment and the parchment into his wetsuit.

He leaped off the base and grabbed Sloane by the wrist.

“What the hell—”

“Go, go, go!” he yelled, tearing across the detailed floor, dragging Sloane behind him.

They had made it halfway to the collapsed brick door when he heard the first crash; despite himself, he glanced back over his shoulder—and saw the open coffin disappear in a crush of white and gray objects falling from the opening in the dome. As he watched, another panel opened in the marble, and more of the objects began raining down into the tomb, plunging straight into the floor and shattering against the hard stone.

“Faster!” he screamed.

They were almost at the pile of bricks when one of the objects sailed right by Jack’s shoulder. He caught a glimpse of what it was out of the corner of his eye—and yanked Sloane even harder, pulling her up the pile and nearly hurling her through the opening. He dove right after her; just as he crossed out of the tomb and into the chamber full of statues, one of the objects glanced off of his extended calf, tearing a three-inch gash in his wetsuit. He
hit the ground next to Sloane, then rolled over, staring down at his leg.

The object was still caught in the rubber of his suit by one of its five razor sharp points. Thankfully, the point hadn’t gone all the way through to his skin, and he didn’t appear to be bleeding.

He kicked the object off of him and watched as it clattered against the floor, landing at the base of the androgynous statue that still wore Unger’s moondial. Sloane’s jaw dropped open, shock evident in her eyes as she stared at the object.

A dismembered, skeletal hand, fingers outstretched, yellowed nails as sharp as daggers. Still aghast, Sloane turned back toward the opening to the tomb. Jack followed her terrified gaze. Beyond the pile of bricks, he could see the fountains of similar skeletal hands still pouring from the ceiling, piling up in the center of the room. The sarcophagus was already buried, the base where he had been kneeling, just moments ago lost beneath a growing sea of razor-sharp skeletal fingers.

Jack wondered how long it would take for twenty thousand pairs of severed hands to fill the entire marble tomb.

He didn’t intend to stick around and find out. He let Sloane help him to his feet, and then the two of them started back past the statues and toward the waiting drainpipe.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It looks like Christmas is coming early this year
, Gordon Unger thought to himself as he tucked his cell phone back into his pants, right up next to the leather holster of his vintage, but fully functional, Luger semiautomatic. The Luger wasn’t the most accurate sidearm Unger owned; in fact, he had a fairly sizable armory tucked into a safe behind one of the glass display cabinets in the storage room not ten feet from the reinforced door that led to the souvenir shop outside. But the Luger was
authentic
, not just functional, and a man in Unger’s line of work knew the value of authenticity. His Luger had once been carried by a Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS; Unger had received the gun as part of a payment for a pair of rare jade Buddhas he’d liberated from a jungle tomb near the Indian-Bangladesh border, and he’d carried it with him ever since. Something about the long thin barrel gave him an extra edge of confidence, because it was a killer’s gun, not for show, not for decoration. It was a gun that had killed before, and would happily kill again.

Unger grinned his wolfish grin as he reached the reinforced door and made short work of the lock. As he pulled the door open, he imagined the look on Little Jacky’s face when the poor sod saw the gun again—this time,
Unger would make sure he was out of Jack’s reach when he fired. Maybe the first bullet wouldn’t kill the boy, but it would certainly slow him down. Since the anthropologist and his lady friend had left Unger’s shop, he’d gotten a little nostalgic for the boy’s pop, his former friend; if Little Jacky handed over whatever he’d gotten from the Taj, maybe Unger would even let him go with that single bullet as a souvenir. Then again, the boy’s pretty friend might kick up a fuss, and then he’d have no choice but to do away with them both. Business was business, after all.

He’d gone two steps into the front section of his store, passing the shelves cluttered with cheap souvenirs, still thinking about Jack’s sidekick, when he noticed something strange. Normally, the minute he opened the reinforced door, he could hear Henry the Ravenous Rat hissing and scratching at the sidewalk outside—but for some reason, there was nothing but the normal cacophony of passersby, the errant honk of a triwheeled cycle, and the creak of a wooden rickshaw. He began to wonder if Henry had finally succumbed to his perpetual state of near starvation—and then he saw the woman, standing in the open doorway, her hand on the cracked glass. She was tall and lithe, with sharp, angled features and jet-black hair pulled back tightly behind her head in a thick ponytail.

“Sorry, love,” he said. “We’re closed. You’ll have to come back later.”

The woman ignored him, stepping fully into the store, carefully shutting the glass door behind her. He opened his mouth to say something else, then paused, confused. She wasn’t Indian, and she didn’t look like a tourist. Despite the heat, she was wearing black leather pants and a dark top made out of some sort of stretchy material; it might have been a bodysuit with a zipper that ran all the way up to her tan, toned throat. She had a matching satchel over her left shoulder, hanging down next to her thin, tight waist.

Whoever she was, she was beautiful, from her brown eyes to her long, muscled legs.

“Christmas and New Years,” he said, “All rolled into one.”

And then her eyes narrowed, and the skin of her face seemed to tighten, her chin and cheekbones suddenly sharp enough to cut glass. Despite himself, his eyes instinctively roamed downward—he couldn’t help noting that she was particularly flat-chested—but the way she was carrying herself, it didn’t seem natural. For some reason, he realized, she had tied her breasts down against her rib cage, beneath her bodysuit.

Unger could only think of one reason a woman would want to do that.

He drew the Luger out from its leather holster and held it out in front of him.

“I think you better turn right around, pretty lady. Or this isn’t going to end well.”

She looked at the gun, then back into his eyes.

“You’re right about that,” she said, in a strange, heavy accent.

And suddenly she was moving forward. Jack Grady had been fast, but this woman moved like lighting. He aimed the Luger and tried to depress his finger—but before he could finish the act, her hand had whipped forward and her own finger had caught just beneath his, keeping him from getting the shot off. In the same instant, her other hand shot out, fingers extended, and she jabbed him hard in the throat, right below his jaw.

He staggered backward, gasping, as she wrested the gun from his hand and tossed it to the floor. Then her right foot came up, and her steel-toed leather boot caught him directly in his abdomen. He crashed backward through the open reinforced door, landing on his back on the floor, still clutching his throat as shards of pain erupted in his stomach.

She moved with him, still fast as a snake, slamming the reinforced door behind her. While he tried to push himself to his knees, still desperately fighting to catch his breath, she expertly engaged the door’s lock and reset the alarm.

He spat out a glob of bright red blood, then finally found his voice.

“Who the fuck are you?”

She stepped forward and grabbed him by his hair, then half dragged, half carried him over to one of the metal folding chairs. He tried his best to resist—until she brought a solid knee up into his groin. For a moment, all he could see were bright flashes of light. By the time he’d regained his senses, he was slumped against the metal chair, his arms wrenched back behind him. She was tying his wrists together with tight plastic cuffs.

Three seconds later, she was standing in front of him, and her face had relaxed, an almost indifferent look in her dark eyes.

Unger pulled at the plastic cuffs, and only felt them get tighter against his skin. In a moment, they’d be cutting off his circulation. He tried to kick at her with his right foot, but she simply stepped back, watching him, that damn indifference spreading to her full red lips. He even thought he saw a hint of a smile at the edges.

Who the fuck is this woman?
Unger had been robbed before, numerous times; once, he’d even gotten shot in the process, taking a bullet in his left thigh, which had led to an infection that had nearly killed him. But this woman—Christ, she was something different. Something terrifying.

“What do you want?” he said, his eyes wild. He jerked his head toward the glass shelves and cabinets that surrounded them, toward the jeweled statues, antique weapons, and ceremonial masks. “Take whatever you’d like. I won’t be calling the police.”

She turned, looking over the shelves. Then she paused, focusing on one of the closer cabinets: the one containing row after row of ceremonial Indian masks. Unger knew that many of the masks were nearly priceless; one that he had acquired from a tomb in the Northern mountains had eleven matching rubies inlaid above the eyes. He had guessed he might sell it for twenty thousand in the markets across the border in Pakistan. Still, at the moment he’d have considered it a bargain if that mask would get this woman out of his store. Once she was gone, he’d try to find out who the hell she was—and then goddamn it, he would go after her.