Seven Wonders Read Online Free PDF Page A

answer, but they kept calling.”
    Jack could hear the sudden tremor in her voice.
    “Your brother. He’s—Dr. Grady, you need to come back up here.”
    Jack paused. His brother? He couldn’t imagine that anything involving Jeremy could be more important than what he was looking at, but he’dnever heard Dashia sound so emotional before. He glanced at his watch—four a.m. With any luck, he’d still have a couple of hours before the Brits took over the site and kicked his group out. He could deal with whatever Dashia was so worked up about and still get back down for a second look.
    “Okay, on my way.”
    With enormous effort, he tore himself away from the warriors, the forest, and the gold, segmented snake, and started back up the gravely slope, dragging the aluminum rope behind him.

CHAPTER THREE
    Sloane Costa dug her fingernails into the stone wall as she shuffled her feet a few steps forward along the six-inch ledge. Her calves felt like they were on fire from the effort, the heels of her field boots hanging out over the four-foot-deep ditch. An hour a day on the elliptical back in the gym at Michigan State had not prepared her for whatever the hell this was, but then again, nothing in her precise, organized life could have prepared her for what she had stumbled into over the past three hours.
    She took a deep breath, then glanced down past her heels. It was hard to see clearly in the dim morning light seeping through the spiderweb of cracks in the curved tunnel’s ceiling, but she guessed she still had about five yards to go. The ditch appeared to end just as it had begun; a sudden, eight-yard gash in the cobbled floor of the tunnel, bordered on each side by just the tiniest of ledges.
    When she’d first come upon the ditch, she’d considered climbing down instead of trying to shuffle across. Four feet wasn’t that far; she’d already clambered down a rotted-out stairwell to get into the tunnel in the first place.
    But then she’d looked closer, using the light from her miniature flashlight to illuminate the tangle of vegetation that filled the bottom of the ditch like twisting rolls of barbed wire. It had taken her almost two minutes toidentify the long, ovate leaves and the bell-shaped, dark brown flowers: Letalis belladonna , from the family Solanaceae , a distant cousin to the more well-known Atropa belladonna . Even though she couldn’t see the vine’s miniscule thorns hidden beneath its curled leaves, she knew what would happen if she took one step into that ditch. A single scratch, and her bloodstream would be coursing with the toxins scopolamine and hyoscyamine. A few minutes after that, she’d have the dubious distinction of being the first botanical geneticist to be killed by a plant.
    She put her cheek flush with the stone wall and shuffled another few inches along the ledge. She considered herself in pretty good shape for a twenty-six-year-old scientist; she’d run two half marathons since completing her master’s and tried her best to get to the gym every morning before locking herself in the lab. On the two days a week she was forced to teach undergrads to maintain her assistant professorship at Michigan State, she jogged the entire five miles to campus from her studio apartment at the edge of East Lansing.
    But she was learning that there was a big difference between sweating your way through a training session in a state-of-the-art gym and being out in the field, dragging yourself deep through the bowels of one of the greatest structures in Europe, if not the world.
    She took another careful step, then paused to listen for any Italian voices that might signal that the pair of Polizia who had first escorted her through the locked front entrance to the Colosseum—one of the oldest amphitheaters on Earth, the pride of the city of Rome, and one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World—had noticed she had disappeared. Just a few minutes past five in the morning on a hazy Saturday at the end