Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online

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 roomwith 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