Seven Wonders Read Free Page A

then a connecting flight from Istanbul to Izmir, then a bus ride to the nearby village of Selçuk, where he’d been met by his two grad students for a middle of the night bike ride into the Greek-era ruins of Ephesus.
    Andy, by far the more talkative of his two charges, had grumbled the whole ride over that they should have waited until daylight and that he felt like some sort of grave robber sneaking into an archaeological dig at two in the morning. Dashia, for her part, had pedaled along in silence, trying tostay right behind Jack as they wound beneath the arched Greek ruins and around the Doric columns.
    Along the way, Jack hadn’t even bothered to try and respond to his lead student’s whines; Andy Chen was a wise-ass, but he was one of the smartest students Jack had ever met. He’d graduated at the top of his class at Princeton at sixteen, completed a Fulbright at Oxford before deciding to letter in anthropology, and since then, he’d become indispensable to Jack’s operation.
    At the moment, Jack was certain Andy’s complaining was more for Dashia’s benefit than for his. Though his second grad student had proved over the past six months that she could hold her own in the brains department—a transplant from Harvard, a triple major in biology, anthropology, and computer science—Dashia Lynwood was surprisingly straight-laced.
    To be sure, Andy knew full well why they couldn’t wait until morning, and it wasn’t just the oppressive heat that would swelter through the swampy field around the Temple of Artemis dig site, now a hundred and fifty feet directly above him. The truth was, Jack and his students were interlopers here. That they’d even managed to get permission from the Turkish Board of Antiquities for a late night survey of the area was a testament to Jack’s persuasiveness and his department’s prestige. This was an archaeological dig site; an anthropology fellow and his two precocious grad students shouldn’t have been let within a hundred yards of the place.
    Of course, if the Antiquities Board or the team from the British Museum who were running the dig had realized what Jack was really up to, he might have been on his way to a stay in a Turkish prison rather than lowering himself into an ancient abyss.
    “Ignition in three, two, one!” Jack said, yanking one of the chemical flares from a compartment in his harness.
    He pulled the cord on the end of the flare, and a burst of bright orange flame cut through the blackness. Jack leaned forward until he was parallel with the empty drop beneath him, the aluminum rope stringing out abovehim like a spider’s web. He let the flare go, and counted quietly to himself as he watched the flame pinwheeling downward, spinning end over end.
    He was still counting more than twenty seconds later, when the speaker croaked in his ears.
    “Dashia wants to know why we call it the splat test.”
    Jack grimaced, certain that Andy would find the most inelegant way to explain it to her. It was mildly unsettling to think they’d been in enough situations like this over the past couple of years to have come up with a term for the test. Basically, if Jack’s harness broke, they now had some idea how long it would take before Andy heard a splat. In this case, as far as Jack could tell, the torch was still spinning through the darkness.
    But Jack wasn’t thinking about the bottom of the pit anymore; in that first few seconds after the flare had gone off, he’d noticed something extremely interesting about thirty yards down from where he was hanging, along one curve of the circular pit walls. It might have been nothing—a trick of shadows, a discoloration in the stone—but Jack thought he’d seen an opening, at least the size of a six-foot-tall anthropologist.
    “Andy, bring me down another three clicks.”
    Jack used his legs and arms to keep himself steady as Andy complied; he was still hanging parallel to the drop, a floating starfish, the flashlight on his