Seven Wonders (11 page)
In addition to the overwhelming crush of people, to add to the festive, earsplitting mood in the train car, there was a three-piece salsa band set up in the back row of seats, consisting of two steel drums and what appeared to be some sort of battery-powered xylophone. A pair of Danish girls with braided hair and clunky heels was dancing in front of the band, somehow managing to stay on their feet even as the train shifted into a near forty-five-degree angle, fighting through a twist of forest dense enough to block out most of the morning light.
It was hard to believe that the precipitous track had been built for steam engines by Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1884, and electrified over a century ago in 1910. Though in his professional work, Jack had seen feats of architecture and engineering dating back thousands of years that were truly mind-boggling, there was something about the contrast of technology and nature—the audacity of putting an electric train up the side of a goddamn mountain—that gave him pause.
And this was just the precursor to the main event
.
Jack glanced back toward the window, at the verdant swirl of vegetation whipping past as the train chugged upward. He was surprisingly alert, considering how far he and his team had traveled in such a short time. None of them had slept much on the fourteen-hour journey from Boston to Brazil, jammed together in conditions almost as harsh as those they found themselves in now, sharing a middle row in coach that made Jack pine for the relatively posh conditions of some of the most primitive tribes he’d lived with over the years.
Although he had been able to get enough funding from his department to bring his team to Brazil—no questions asked, since most of his work was so outside the box, his superiors had long ago decided to give him a fair amount of slack—they couldn’t afford to travel in style. The hotel they’d checked into upon landing in Rio had a wireless connection, but no air-conditioning, and a bathroom that was shared by an entire floor. Andy had threatened to urinate out the window onto the cobbled alley that separated their building from what appeared to be a neon-lit disco; but Dashia, to her credit, had simply wrinkled her nose, then placed her efficiently packed suitcase on the chipped, redwood dresser, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room beside a pair of double beds.
A sharp turn in the track shifted Jack against the seat, and he watched as Dashia grabbed at her laptop bag, catching it before it slid off her lap. The fact that she had even volunteered to accompany them on the expedition was a testament to how much she had become a true part of Jack’s team. She had listened intently as Jack had given her the rundown over the phone from Boston, on what he’d discovered on Jeremy’s thumb drive—that there was some sort of link between the Seven Wonders of the Modern World; that six of them matched up with the ruins of six of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; and that there was something geographically intriguing about Christ the Redeemer that he needed to investigate. She hadn’t asked any questions, she had simply told him that as long as she was still getting
credit toward her PhD, she could be at the International Terminal at Logan in about four hours.
A part of Jack wondered if he was making a mistake involving his two grad students in something he didn’t yet understand—something that might very well be connected to the violent way his brother had died—but the truth was, both of them had skills that were indispensable. Andy was almost as field ready as Jack himself; Jack knew he would need Andy’s help if what Jeremy had uncovered about Christ the Redeemer was even partially true. And for Dashia’s part, she had reached back into her former life as a computer wizard, and had already scripted a hacking program to look into the 2007 vote that had chosen the Seven Modern Wonders. Although she hadn’t found much—just a few suspicious quirks that led her to believe that, indeed, the data had been massaged by an unknown party—it was enough to give more credence to the idea that someone, for some reason, had manipulated the hundred million votes toward a predetermined outcome.
Jack couldn’t possibly imagine what they were getting themselves into; at the very least, the mystery they were trying to unravel was the last thing his brother had been working on when he was murdered. Jack believed he owed it to his brother to follow the clues he had left behind.
Jack’s thoughts were interrupted as a sudden cheer erupted through the car, followed by the salsa band kicking into high gear, wooden sticks slamming repeatedly against steel drums. But despite the roar, Jack’s attention was entirely captured by the scene on the other side of the window. One minute, everything was thick and green, and then suddenly, they were surrounded by swirling gray mist, churning across a steep vista of jagged stone. Then, just as suddenly, they were above the mist. Jack had a moment of vertigo as the train seemed to be going almost straight up, and then there was a lurch as the train pulled to a sudden stop.
They had reached the top of Corcovado.
There was a brief pause, then the crowd surged toward the open train doors.
“He certainly makes an impression, I’ll give him that.”
Andy was a half step ahead of Jack and Dashia, his neck craned upward as the steel-framed escalator deposited them, still crammed into the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, onto the stone-paved viewing platform. Up close, the huge Art Deco statue loomed indescribably large, rising up out of the mist like something from ancient mythology. Though it had been constructed in France in the 1920s and shipped over to Brazil in pieces—white soapstone wrapped around a concrete and steel frame—the monument would have fit well in any Greek or Roman ruin: ninety-eight feet tall, perched atop a twenty-six-foot-high black granite pedestal, rising out of the peak of the twenty-two-hundred-foot-tall mountain, arms outstretched to embrace what looked like the entire world. Christ the Redeemer, perhaps the largest representation of the religious icon on Earth—and the most modern of the Seven Wonders of the World.
“View’s not half bad, either,” Dashia said, from Jack’s left.
She was peering over the low wall that surrounded the platform as they shuffled forward with the crowd. Though most of the view was obscured by the rolling mist, which had followed them up as they’d made their way via
a trio of elevators and a pair of escalators from the train depot, Jake caught glimpses of the incredible panorama down below. From a half a mile up, the urban sprawl of Rio was nearly postcard perfect, from its pincushion of gleaming skyscrapers, to its clustered apartment complexes, to its snow-white resort hotels, and of course, the legendary white sand beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, bathed in the shadows of Corcovado and its slightly shorter twin, Sugar Loaf.
The crowd of tourists and pilgrims didn’t seem to care that they were gazing down on Rio through breaks in the mist; to the contrary, the wisps of cottony white sweeping across the paved stones, so thick in some places Jack couldn’t see his own feet, made it feel like they were walking on a canopy of clouds.
“I’m a little turned around,” Andy said as they moved along the side of the black granite base. “You want to take the lead, Doc?”
Jack pointed at a woman two steps ahead of Andy, in a flowing white wedding dress, the train folded up beneath the arm of her tuxedo-clad groom.
“Follow her. She knows where we’re going.”
Somewhere between the elevators and the escalators, Jack and his team had found themselves intertwined with the wedding party. Besides the bride and groom, there were at least four bridesmaids in matching cream dresses jockeying through the crowd around them, escorted by groomsmen in dark suits. Jack knew that within the base of the great statue was a wedding chapel; even though the space was small, carved into the granite block whose main purpose was holding up the massive, seven-hundred-ton soapstone monolith, the waiting list to hold weddings on Corcovado was months long. Jack supposed for a true believer, you couldn’t do much better than getting married a few inches below Christ’s toes.
As Jack had suspected, the wedding party was making a beeline toward the chapel, and Jack and his team fell into step right behind them, skirting
the granite base with the help of their pink-frilled escort as most of the surrounding crowd moved outward toward the front of the viewing platform, which jutted out like a pirate’s plank over the sprawling city.
A dozen yards from the entrance to the chapel, the bride and groom exited the crowd and began their stroll down a red carpet that had been laid out along the paved stones, bordered on both sides by a pair of photographers. Jack tapped Andy’s shoulder, pointing him away from the carpet toward a crook in the wall at the edge of the viewing platform. Andy nodded, and the three of them slipped out from between the bridesmaids and regrouped right up next to the wall. Christ the Redeemer had his back toward them now, his vast, soapstone hips disappearing into the soupy gray.
Jack glanced at the handful of tourists who were still nearby; almost all were focused on the wedding party, still making its way down the red carpet and into the chapel. Through the open doors, Jack could make out a handful of red velvet chairs lined up in two parallel rows and a small lectern, manned by a priest in white robes. Then he turned his attention to the wall to his right; it was a little more than waist high, topped by an iron railing. Behind the railing, there was about a ten-foot drop, then a steep slope covered in chunks of rock ending in deep brush, the beginning of a thick twist of the rainforest that ran up and down most of the mountainside. Three feet into the brush, rising up on a black metal frame, was a bank of spotlights aimed at the statue behind him. Jack knew that the lights were part of the massive LED and spot system that had been added to the monument in 2011, giving the Wonder an entirely new dimension; at night, the intelligent lighting system could bathe the Redeemer in full Technicolor, which could be seen from every corner of the city below.
But at the moment, Jack wasn’t interested in the technology or artistry of the lighting panel; he was more concerned about its tensile strength. He had spent many hours during the trip to Brazil studying the information Jeremy had put on the thumb drive, coordinating it with geographic maps
and architectural blueprints Dashia had pulled off the Internet from local government servers. He had committed all of the data to memory, and as he scanned past the bank of lights, he counted another three yards of thick bush before the mountaintop gave way to what appeared to be a sheer twenty-foot drop into even thicker rainforest.
He put one hand on the railing, then nodded to Andy.
“This is where I go over.”
Andy dropped the heavy duffel to the paved stone and went after the zipper, while Dashia unloaded her laptop bag. Jack kept an eye on a pair of nearby tourists who had their cell phones out, peering straight up through the screens, trying to catch a glimpse of Christ’s outstretched arms above the clouds. Jack wasn’t really concerned about anyone seeing what they were up to. Although he’d counted a handful of security guards at the train depot and another half a dozen scattered around the viewing platform, most seemed more concerned about making sure visitors had paid the twenty-five-dollar fee to visit the site; if anything, they were worried about people sneaking over the wall
into
the Wonder of the World, not out. Then again, looking up at a small break in the mist, up the steep, white curve of Christ’s spine to the base of his vast, slightly bent head—Jack couldn’t have asked for a better distraction.
Even so, Andy looked nervous as he retrieved a heavy coil of climbing rope from the duffel, placing it next to Jack’s feet. When he carefully lifted a second object—a miniature dish wrapped in aluminum, similar in shape and size to the sort of dish one might install on a roof to get satellite television—out of the bag, he looked guilty enough to need a visit to the nearby chapel.
“Relax, kid,” Jack said as he took the dish from Andy and attached it by a Velcro strap to a hook on the side of his tan safari jacket. Then he grabbed the coil of rope and shifted it over his right shoulder. If anything, in faded jeans and a safari jacket, with the dish hanging from the strap and the rope
coiled around his deltoid, he looked like a high-tech repairman. Certainly not an anthropologist. Although as usual, he did have a couple tools of his trade hidden under his clothes.
“I’ll hit you up when I’m in position. If anyone gives you any trouble, we’ll meet at the base of the mountain. Should be about a two-hour hike down, if I move fast.”
Andy was peering over the railing at the cliff behind the bank of spotlights.
“More like an eight-minute fall,” he said. “I sure hope we brought enough rope, Doc.”
“When have we ever brought enough rope?” Jack grinned.
And then he put both hands on the railing, gave one last look behind him to make sure none of the tourists were watching, and hoisted himself over the wall.
• • •
The brush was thick, but no worse than he’d experienced in Venezuela with the Yanomami, or, for that matter, with the Penan tribe in Borneo during his first year of graduate study, or in the Visayan Islands where he’d spent a month with his dad when he was just nineteen, living with a group of Aboriginal Pinoy while still a college sophomore. It was on that early trip that his father had given him the first of his indispensable tools of the trade, which he now unsheathed from the concealed holster strapped down the small of his back.
The muscles in his forearm tightened as his palm felt the familiar grip, made of perfectly carved guava wood. It took almost no effort to swing the two-foot blade in a wide arc, cutting into the brush with each expert stroke. The
iták
—or bolo, as it was more widely known—had been designed
specifically for work like this; the metal blade curved slightly outward and widened at the tip, putting most of the momentum at the end of each arc. Jack barely broke a sweat as he worked his way closer to the high iron frame of the platform of spotlights. In some places, he could crawl beneath the gnarled tree limbs or hanging vine, but where it became impassable, a few strokes of the iták gave him enough room to angle through. In a pinch, he also knew from experience that the weighted blade also made a hell of a weapon; a longer version, known as a
Pinuti
, was a standard armament of the natives of the Visayan Islands. Of course, when the tribal natives went to war, they usually tipped the end of the blade in snake or spider venom. Which was one of the many reasons that Jack’s father had taught him to always keep a packet of antivenom vials in another pocket in his safari jacket, next to the chemical flares he brought with him everywhere as well, which he restocked before every trip.