Seven Wonders (26 page)

Then again, the way the no more than eighteen-year-old girl had smiled at Jack when he’d apologized for almost crushing her, Jack wasn’t sure she would have truly minded. Her dark brown eyes had flashed at him from beneath razor-sharp bangs, and Andy, who had noticed the exchange from one row up, had rolled his eyes, then whispered something about Jack getting arrested for robbing the Mesoamerican cradle.

“It’s a best guess,” Jack responded, comforted by the bulge of the three snake segments through the material of the pack that he felt with his foot. “The three trapezoids represent the Three Windows. They overlook the Sacred Plaza, a stone perch which is one of the highest areas of the ancient city. The Plaza is surrounded by the ruins of a number of sacred buildings, including the Principle Temple, with its sacrificial altar; it’s also close to the Intihuatana Stone, the hitching post of the sun. You get up there via a staircase that goes up from the terraced Main Plaza.”

He could tell that much of what he’d said were just words to Sloane; she hadn’t had much time with Dashia’s notes, and to her, Machu Picchu was little more than an exotic destination she might have noticed in passing on a travel show, or seen on the back of someone’s postcard. Even the four hundred thousand tourists who made the difficult trek to the high altitude ruins every year knew little beyond the barest details about the site: a six-hundred-year-old, fifteenth-century Incan ruin sitting seven thousand feet above sea level, tucked into the Andean mountain range, consisting of stone buildings, terraced greenery, and elaborate fountains and aqueducts. The fact that it was so remote and little understood was part of Machu Picchu’s charm—and the main reason it existed at all. Most experts believed the city had only survived the Spanish genocide of the Incan culture because it was so damn hard to find—and before planes, trains, and buses, almost impossible to reach.

“These three windows had some sort of religious function?”

“Like most of Machu Picchu,” Dashia said, over her seat back, “nobody’s really sure. There’s certainly a religious aspect to many of the hundred and fifty buildings that make up the site; some experts believe the entire place was some sort of sacred zone, built for worship. But others contend that it was a fort, or a royal palace, or even an astronomical research center. The Incans were obsessed with astronomy, and many of the buildings stand at precise astronomical points, corresponding to different positions of the sun.”

“And the Chakana,” Sloane asked. “Is there one in the Temple of the Three Windows?”

“There are Chakanas everywhere.” Jack shrugged.

“But I assume if there is, it isn’t on fire,” Andy said.

“Probably not. But it’s not an entirely surprising image. The Incas loved fire. Theirs was essentially a heliocentric religion. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the Incan god, Inti. He’s often portrayed as a flaming sphere with a face in the middle.”

“The original emoticon,” Andy said.

“And the Incan story of creation involves both the sun, the Chakana, and fire. Dashia?”

She turned halfway in her seat, showing Sloane her tablet. On the screen was a picture of Inti, and below that, two flame-covered people, a man and a woman. The man was holding what appeared to be a golden staff, wedge-shaped, narrowing where it reached the ground.

“Like most cultures, the Incan civilization started with a flood. The Creator, dissatisfied with the way primitive people were behaving, unleashed the ‘waters of the sun’ to extinguish mankind. When this flood of fire cleared, Inti, feeling bad for the few humans who had survived, sent his favorite son and daughter down from the heavens on a mission. He gave them a golden wedge, which they were to plunge into the ground. If they were able to penetrate all the way to the hilt with a single stroke, that was
supposed to be the spot for mankind to build a new, pure civilization, to last forever. The Incas.”

“Forever,” Andy said. “Or until a bunch of Spaniards inadvertently infected them with smallpox, then went about destroying all evidence of their existence.”

“Okay,” Sloane said, ignoring Andy, “so we’ve got the Three Windows, and the cross, but it probably isn’t burning—”

“Yet,” Jack said, and again he touched his backpack. He’d made a couple of stops in Cusco before they’d left for Aguas Calientes, and he’d put together a plan. Judging from their experience with the moondial and the red brick door, he had a feeling the pictograms were more than geographic clues. They were steps to be followed, a riddle that was meant to be solved.

It was obvious from Sloane’s expression that she didn’t share his optimism as she re-rolled the parchment and handed it back to Jack. Maybe his methods weren’t scientific, but even so he was amazed that she could remain skeptical, with all that they’d discovered so far. Whatever mystery they had gotten themselves into, this was far outside the laboratory and the rules of science.

He leaned forward, unzipping the top pocket of his backpack, and carefully placed the parchment back inside. Just as he was rezipping the pocket, the bus went into another turn, and the pack slid a few inches into the aisle. Jack reached for it, and nearly bumped heads with the pretty brunette teenager from across the aisle, who had also leaned down, probably to help him out.

“Thanks,” he said as her hand reached out toward the strap. “Appreciate the help, but I’ve got it—”

And then something flashed by the corner of his vision, followed by the hiss of steel against vinyl. Suddenly, the strap in his hand split down the middle—and the backpack was yanked out of his grip and across the aisle.

Jack looked at the girl. She was half out of her seat, his backpack in her
left hand. In her right hand was a knife. The eight-inch blade was shiny, serrated, and steel.

“Hey,” Jack started, shocked—but the girl was moving quickly up the aisle, toward the front of the bus.

Jack didn’t have time to think. He leaped after her, ignoring Sloane’s surprised yell from behind. The bus was still halfway into its turn, and Jack nearly lost his footing, but then he was moving forward, his hand outstretched toward the girl.

She spun around, catching him with the hilt of the serrated blade in the dead center of his forehead. He felt a sharp pain explode through his temples, and he fell back, hitting the floor of the aisle spine first.

He could hear Andy shouting something through the ringing in his ears, but the words were quickly drowned out by a rush of adrenaline and anger. He pushed himself back to his feet. The girl was now ten feet ahead, halfway to the front of the bus. The few other passengers were staring at her, but nobody was moving to help, which was unsurprising, considering the knife.

Jack started after her, his anger continuing to rise.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he shouted.

The girl paused, then turned to face him. His backpack was hanging from her left hand, the eight-inch serrated knife from the right.

Jack slowly drew his two-foot-long iták out from behind his back. The girl looked at his machete and smiled.

Suddenly, she lunged, the knife moving almost too fast to see. Jack barely parried her first blow, but in an instant her hand lunged the other way, and she caught the back of his grip with the hilt of her blade. The iták whirled out of his hand, spiraled through the air, and landed with a thud, point first, in the center of a nearby empty seat.

The girl lunged again, the blade heading straight for Jack’s chest. At that very moment, the bus came out of the turn, and Jack used the momentum
to sidestep her blow by mere centimeters. As she went by, he stuck out a foot, and she stumbled forward, losing her footing. She tumbled into the aisle, but even before she hit the floor, her legs were underneath her, readying for a catlike spring back toward him—

And just then, Andy brought Dashia’s tablet down against the back of the girl’s head. Her body went limp, and she collapsed to the floor of the aisle.

There was a screech of brakes; Jack nearly tumbled over himself as the bus came to a sudden stop. He whirled around, looked out through the front windshield, and saw canvas tents, stone steps leading up to a wooden gate, and a smattering of tourists heading into a group of metal turnstiles. They’d arrived at Machu Picchu.

Jack looked back at the girl. She’d just started to move against the floor, and he came to a quick decision.

“Move!” he shouted toward Andy and the rest of his team.

He grabbed his iták and yanked it out of the vinyl seat, then quickly retrieved his backpack. He let Andy, Dashia, and Sloane pass by, then followed them toward the front of the bus, keeping one eye on the girl, who had made it to a knee. Then he was out the door and racing after his team, all of them running as fast as they could toward the turnstiles.

“Who the hell was that?” Sloane gasped as they pushed their way to the front of the handful of tourists.

Jack had no idea; but he didn’t intend to stick around to find out. Andy’s quick move had saved him from the girl and bought them some time. But Jack was pretty sure a computer tablet wasn’t going to keep someone like that down for very long—no matter how much data it contained.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Jack took the last set of stone steps two at a time, half pushing Sloane ahead of him. The terraced grass of the Main Plaza had receded into the mist coming off of the mountains behind them, and Jack could no longer see Andy and Dashia, who they’d left camped out below by the entrances to the Royal Tomb and the Temple of the Sun. The tomb and the temple were two of the most popular locations in the ruins, which meant there would be plenty of people around, and maybe even a security guard or two. Andy had pretended to put up a fight when Jack had insisted that his grad students stay behind as he and Sloane continued to the peak of the mountain by themselves, but Jack could tell that the incident with the tablet had shaken the kid pretty good.

As Jack followed Sloane out into the open stone glade of the Sacred Plaza, his mind was still trying to deconstruct what had happened. Obviously, Sloane was doing the same, because as soon as they slowed their pace, both of them gasping from the high altitude exertion, she grabbed him by the wrist.

“Shouldn’t we tell someone? Call the police?”

Jack didn’t shake her loose, but he continued moving forward, picking his way past the few clusters of tourists who were milling about, using their
phones to take photos of the various buildings that ringed the stone clearing.

“Jack, do you hear me?” Sloane said, her fingers tightening. “We need to call the police. That woman tried to rob us.”

Jack pushed through a group of German tourists gathered around a Peruvian guide who was using broken English and hand gestures in a futile attempt to give them details about the highest, most sacred level of the Incan ruin. In front of him, he finally spotted the entrance to the Temple of the Three Windows—basically a path that wound around a loose pile of stones. As he led Sloane toward the path, he lowered his voice.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”

As much as he’d have liked to have believed that the incident on the bus had been a robbery attempt, there were too many things that bothered him about what had happened—starting with that damn serrated blade. He’d been robbed before, twice in the Philippines, once in Eastern Europe, and he’d also been threatened by assailants wielding knives on at least three occasions. But the blade that girl had been carrying wasn’t the sort of thing you picked up in a Peruvian pawn shop; it was a survival knife, military grade.

Even more troubling, the woman—girl, really—had moved fast. Exceedingly fast. She had disarmed him of the iták with such ease, hell, he had been little more than a nuisance to her. Jack was certain that if the bus hadn’t come out of that turn at just the right moment, the situation would have ended differently. The way she moved, the precision in her actions—that girl had had combat training.

Jack had learned to fight in the bush, and before that, he’d trained with his father at a makeshift gym his dad had built in the basement of his home in California. But even with fairly adequate skills, he’d barely gotten the better of her—with Andy’s help, and more than a little luck. If that girl had been a bandit, well, she was the most dangerous bandit Jack had ever encountered.

“So you think she was after us,” Sloane said as they reached the entrance to the Temple of the Three Windows.

“I don’t know. But I think we need to start taking better precautions.”

If someone had tracked them all the way to Peru, then whoever they were up against had impressive resources. If it was the same person or people who had murdered his brother—well, it was a terrifying thought. Calling the police wasn’t really an option; the evidence they had would confuse the situation more than edify it, and besides, what police force would they even try to explain it to? The Boston cops investigating Jeremy’s death would have no jurisdiction in Peru. And once they started down that road, they’d have to explain their expedition into the Taj Mahal, the climb up Christ the Redeemer, and why they were now charging up to the top of Machu Picchu. Jack couldn’t foresee such a conversation going well for any of them.

He only hoped Andy and Dashia had enough sense to stay out in the open, surrounded by people. It would be just like Andy to go snooping on his own, especially into the Royal Tomb. The tomb was fascinating for a number of reasons—but especially significant considering his and Andy’s most recent research. According to the latest studies, more than eighty percent of the mummified remains buried there happened to be female.