Free Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich

power to follow the leads Jeremy had left them. No matter how long it took, or how far they had to go.
    For the moment, he only knew one thing for sure.
    The first step was a thousand miles away—two thousand feet up the peak of a mountain, in Rio.
    • • •
    Fifty yards away, the figure on the bench watched as Jack Grady and his graduate student closed the laptop and headed slowly through the center of Killian Court. The figure knew exactly where they were going; Jack Grady’s rental car, parked sixteen feet down an alley off of Memorial Drive, almost in the shadow of the Mass Avenue bridge. The figure waited until the twomen reached the edge of the grassy court, their backs to her, before retrieving her cell phone from a pocket in her faded leather pants.
    She sent a text, then sat back against the bench, waiting for the response. Her entire body was pulsing, her muscles taut, controlled, and eager. Like a coiled spring, waiting for release.
    For most of the past day, since she had gotten her orders, she had been following and analyzing the two targets: Jack Grady, since he’d left the police station after his interrogation, and Andy Chen, the graduate student, since he’d checked into a nearby Marriott hotel. Phone records, bank accounts, credit cards—all of the usual information, which was now filed away for future use—but most importantly, their physical attributes and capabilities.
    Unlike his twin brother, Jack was tall and lean, well muscled, a natural athlete. His arm span was slightly above average, and his hands had some weight to them, with boxer’s knuckles. The other one was shorter, perhaps five-foot-six—no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. But of course, height and weight could be deceiving. She could not count the number of times she herself had been underestimated because of her angled form, because of her narrow hips. Because she was woman.
    She liked it when they underestimated her.
    She shifted her legs, feeling the blood heating within her coiled muscles.
    As soon as she received the text, she would be across the glade in less than eighty seconds. Four seconds after that, she would snap the neck of the graduate student with her bare hands. Six seconds after that, with a single blow three inches above the sternum, she would puncture Jack Grady’s aorta with his own shattered rib. Then she would retrieve the laptop computer, and whatever they had found in Jeremy Grady’s lab.
    She was still visualizing the mission in her head when the cell phone buzzed against her hand. As she read the words, her muscles uncoiled, the blood cooling in her veins.
    Jack Grady and his graduate student would not die tonight. The orderwas still the same; follow, analyze, and report.
    She closed the phone and slid it back into her pants. Her heart rate was now back to normal, and she reached behind her head, undid her tight ponytail, and let her jet-black hair cascade over her shoulders. Then she rose from the bench and began to stroll in the general direction of Memorial Drive and Jack Grady’s rental car.
    She was not disappointed. She knew that eventually, she would be given the order. And she would do exactly what she had been trained, from birth, to do. Like the seven ivory javelins in the quiver hanging down the center of her back, right up against her caramel-colored skin, she would strike with simplicity and speed—the living weapon that she was.
    Silent, precise, and absolutely deadly .

CHAPTER SIX
    “And they say diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
    Jendari Saphra feigned a smile as she slid her cell phone back into her Swarovski studded clutch, then took the last three steps that led from the mezzanine to the bottom floor of the grand, two-story hall. The ambient sound was near deafening here, just a few yards from the main clot of partygoers—four hundred of New York’s most elegantly coiffed financiers, fashionistas, and favored families, gossiping and dancing beneath the