Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online Page A

off in some foreignland, living with pygmies or shepherds or tribesmen. After the divorce, their mother had raised Jeremy exclusively. Jack had gone back and forth between both parents; at seventeen, for the last year before he shipped off to Princeton, he’d even moved in with his father full-time. It had been a learning experience. A dozen times over the year, his father had simply disappeared for weeks on end. No warning, no food left in the refrigerator, no money or car keys or even a checkbook to pay for electricity or heat.
    “There’s no one else,” Jack said, steadying the pen against the top form.
    “No friends? Colleagues?”
    Jack knew that the woman was trying to be helpful. The hospital had assigned her to wait with him while the autopsy was taking place down the hall. She probably had a psychology degree, and spent most of her time gently patting the shoulders of people who’d just lost family members.
    “I’m sure he has colleagues. I doubt he had any friends.”
    It was a terrible thought, but Jack knew it was true. Jeremy was different, or as their mother liked to put it, special. The smartest person Jack had ever met, a whiz with numbers and computers who couldn’t carry on the most basic conversation with a stranger to save his life. As far as Jack knew, Jeremy had never gone to a party, gone on a date, or even had dinner with anyone who wasn’t a blood relation. He was probably somewhere on the Autism-Asperger continuum, though their mother would never have allowed anyone to label him. She was the reason he’d been able to go so far; halfway through his PhD at MIT, a brilliant programmer who would have probably ended up in a backroom at Google or Facebook, making millions.
    Except now, he was lying on an autopsy table, filling those stainless-steel gutters as a pathologist gathered evidence for the detectives who were still sifting their way through the crime scene.
    Even twenty-four hours after a janitor had found the body and called the police, the detectives still had almost nothing to go on. According to the officers who had questioned Jack when he’d arrived off the plane, the highsecurity laboratory where they’d found Jeremy’s body had been scoured clean; no fingerprints, no shoeprints, no hair follicles, no DNA, and no murder weapon. No sign of forced entry; although from what Jack could gather, the underground lab wasn’t exactly Fort Knox. Jeremy hadn’t had clearance, but he’d had no trouble fooling his way in. The detectives were still trying to reconstruct Jeremy’s last few days; nobody knew him well enough to have any idea what he was working on that would lead him to that particular lab. The head of his department, a Professor Earl Johnson, had described Jeremy as an “autonomous coding machine,” meaning nobody really kept tabs on him. At MIT, that was par for the course: The merely smart had to follow the rules, but true genius roamed free.
    “We weren’t very close,” Jack added.
    The tinge of guilt that moved through him at the words was palpable. The distance between Jack and Jeremy was something that had bothered him since their teenage years. Many times, he’d tried to address it—a late night phone call, a long, emotional letter, an impromptu visit. None of his efforts had ever led anywhere. A phone call with Jeremy was like speaking into a tape recorder. Maybe you got a noise here and there when it was time to turn over the tape, but otherwise you were talking to yourself. Letters went unanswered, and visits invariably ended in an argument.
    Like Jack’s last and final visit just a few days ago, the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death. Jack had started the tradition as yet another way to try and reach out to his twin; and over the years, there had been a few moments when it had seemed to be working: an emotional moment here and there, at the cemetery, on the drive from the airport, over dinner at one of the local burger joints near the MIT campus.