The Fifth World Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Javier Sierra

  Also by Javier Sierra

  “The Fifth World”

  About the Author

  About Atria Books

  Ask Atria

  PRAISE FOR JAVIER SIERRA

  Praise for The Secret Supper

  “For fans of religious conspiracy and reinterpretations of religious history.”

  —Washington Post

  “The Secret Supper is a fascinating yarn and very well told.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Sierra emerges as a strong contender in historical fiction with his mostly well-crafted book.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Javier Sierra’s take on Da Vinci is much sharper, more focused and more rewarding.”

  —New York Daily News

  “No mere Da Vinci Code redux, this Spanish bestseller fuses an ecclesiastical whodunit with an A–Z guide to Neoplatonist philosophy and Renaissance symbology. Sierra is a more sophisticated writer than Dan Brown, and he offers fresh perspective on the Renaissance mind.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Offers a new way of interpreting The Last Supper. Sierra’s book, already a bestseller in Europe, is a fresh contribution to the Da Vinci industry.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for The Lost Angel

  “A coiling plot, full of insightful characters, with an intriguing mix of hopes and fears.”

  —Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Jefferson Key

  “Sierra takes us on a riveting quest through 5,000 years of humanity’s rich esoteric history, peeling away those fascinating onionskin layers of our own hidden past.”

  —Katherine Neville, author of The Eight and The Fire

  “Sierra has fashioned a spine-tingling apocalyptic thriller set in real-world locations and based on well-researched mythology and scientific facts, with just the right amount of fiction to make for an excellent read.”

  —Library Journal

  “This plot-driven adventure is a definite page-turner.”

  —Booklist

  “A fascinating and gripping tale.”

  —Heather Terrell, author of Fallen Angel

  “A rocket-paced page turner. Fans of Dan Brown will find everything they’re looking for—and so much more.”

  —Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Darkness, My Old Friend

  Praise for The Lady in Blue

  “Javier Sierra’s The Lady in Blue is an intriguing ‘eye-opener’ intertwining historical and scientific research with his own experience of surprising synchronicities. An exciting read!”

  —Margaret L. Starbird, author of The Woman with the Alabaster Jar and Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile

  “Sierra makes it all entertaining, intermixing history, churchly intrigue, folklore, spycraft, musicology and conspiracy journalism.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[An] intriguing paranormal puzzler.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “At once a paranormal thriller and an exploration of an enduring religious enigma, the novel is intellectually engaging and elegantly written. Fans of Sierra’s previous novel should definitely read this one.”

  —Booklist

  “The Lady in Blue is the haunting and evocative tale of the triumph of modern spirit and science over a 400-year-old conspiracy. Javier Sierra’s groundbreaking historical research opens our eyes to a world we thought we knew, and revisits, in a surprising way, the devastating clash between Catholic Europe and the far more ancient world of the American Southwest.”

  —Katherine Neville, bestselling author of The Eight and The Magic Circle

  “The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra offers an intriguing story that spans centuries, countries and cultures.”

  —Catholic Observer

  ALSO BY JAVIER SIERRA

  The Secret Supper

  The Lost Angel

  The Lady in Blue

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Javier Sierra

  Previously published in the anthology Thriller 2

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Atria Books ebook edition June 2012

  and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Akasha Archer

  ISBN 978-1-4516-8960-0

  ISBN13: 978-1-4424-1433-4 (eBook)

  “YOU’VE GOTTEN YOURSELF INTO A QUITE a mess, young lady.”

  Tess Mitchell’s blue eyes flashed at the precinct commander as he entered the interrogation room where she had been placed in isolation. She had seen his face before on local TV in Tucson.

  “My name is Lincoln Lewis and I’m in charge of this precinct,” he said, with a sneer. His overall manner, however, was entirely professional. “I know you’ve spoken with some of our agents already, but it would be a real help if you could clear up a couple of things from your statement.”

  “Of course.”

  “For one thing, I need you to tell me what, exactly, you were doing at four o’clock this afternoon in Professor Jack Bennewitz’s office.”

  “You mean when I discovered . . . the body?”

  The police nodded. Tess swallowed hard.

  “Well, we had been working together on a project connected to his field of investigation. I was doing research for him and this morning I came across some data that I thought would interest him. Observational data. Technical things.”

  “I see. And what was it that Professor Bennewitz taught?”

  “Theory of the Solar System, sir.”

  “Did you have an appointment with him?”

  A blush suddenly came over Tess’s cheeks and, unable to conceal it, she cast her eyes downward at the steel and wood table.

  “To be honest I didn’t need one,” she explained. “He let me come and see him whenever I had to, and since I knew that he had office hours for his students around then, I just decided to go by. That’s all.”

  “And what did you find when you got there, Miss Mitchell?”

  “I already told your colleagues: the first thing I noticed was how silent it was in Building B. Jack always spoke in such a loud voice. Whenever he yelled—which was often—you could practically hear him at the other end of campus. He was a very intense kind of person, you know? But I noticed something else, too—there was a very odd smell in the waiting room. It even drifted out into part of the hallway, a very strong, acidic odor, really awful.” Tess made a face at the thought of it before continuing. “So I went in without knocking.”

  “And what did you find?”

  Tess Mitchell closed her eyes, trying to conjur
e up the scene in her head. The image of her friend Jack Bennewitz lying back in his leather armchair, his face contorted and his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point between the plaster ceiling and the case filled with his chess trophies, flashed through her mind for a brief moment. Despite the fact that his jacket was fully buttoned, there was no way to miss the chocolate-colored stain that had soaked through the shirt underneath. There was no sign of a struggle. Books and papers were meticulously organized, and even the coffee that he must have poured himself shortly before ending up in that gruesome state remained in a mug on his desk, cold and untouched.

  “Did you touch Professor Bennewitz’s body? Did you make any attempt to revive him?” Officer Lewis insisted.

  “Good God no!” the young woman exclaimed. “Of course not! Jack was dead, dead! Don’t you get it?”

  “Did you notice anything at all out of the ordinary? Something that might have been missing from the office?”

  Tess Mitchell pondered these questions a few seconds before shaking her head no. There was no way, she thought, that the wooden box containing a butterfly with giant yellow wings that she had found at Jack’s feet could be of any use to the investigation. She had put it in her bag almost instinctively; she had no idea why a prominent theoretical physicist like Bennewitz would have been an insect collector, even though she herself was a real aficionado.

  “May I tell you something, miss?” Officer Lewis said, in a conspiratorial tone of voice. “Jack Bennewitz’s death is one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. And since you were the person who phoned it in, I’ll have to ask you to remain in the precinct a while longer. You’re our only witness.”

  “Is it absolutely necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so, Miss Mitchell. You may not know this, but the majority of all crimes are solved using information gathered in the first few hours of the investigation.”

  NO ONE WOULD EVER RECOMMEND THE area around the Museo de América in Madrid as a place for a midnight stroll. Francisco Ruiz glanced at the dark pathway that stretched out from the Moncloa tower and checked his watch. Realizing that it was already past 11:00 PM he stepped up his pace, so that he could get across that part of the walkway as fast as possible. Neither the empty echo of the Christmas carols nor the distant Christmas lights that framed the entrance to the city could dispel the pervading sense of total solitude that surrounded him. Temperatures had dropped considerably and almost instinctively he pulled up his coat collar and began walking even faster.

  “Where are you going in such a rush, professor?”

  Ruiz recognized the voice right away. Of the many places to be caught by surprise in Madrid, this was by far the most forbidding. The man speaking to him had the same Central American accent as that of the individual who had been making threatening phone calls to his house for the past two weeks.

  “You . . . !” he said, in a distressed whisper. Despite his arrogant facade, Ruiz was a coward. “Are you going to tell me once and for all what it is that you want from me?”

  “Don’t play tough with me, man. Not with me.”

  The shadow that had intercepted him took a few steps forward, and was now standing directly beneath the only streetlamp that shed any light at all on the area, and Ruiz was perplexed by the image that now stood before him. The man was far shorter than he had imagined, and his face was graced by the most perfect Mayan features: aquiline nose, sharp cheekbones, tanned skin, and a braid of hair so black that it blended right into the wretched night. A row of exceedingly white teeth glinted in the middle of his dark eagle’s face. He went on:

  “I saw that you didn’t listen to me, professor. The article you were working on came out in the paper . . .”

  “And why would you care about that?”

  “Oh, I care a lot, professor. More than you imagine. In fact, you know what? The reason I’m here now is to make sure that you don’t publish the second part of that article you mentioned. You made the same mistake before, about nine years ago. You know, I’m amazed. In all this time you haven’t learned anything, have you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Francisco Ruiz clung tightly to the folder in his hands, which contained the documents he needed to finish the groundbreaking article he was writing on the SOHO Project. In the past few days he had met with several experts in pre-Hispanic history in an effort to lend his piece, which was purely scientific in nature, a more startling angle. That was why he had gone all the way to the Museo de América . . . But now that he thought about it, the harassment had begun at the same time that he’d started meeting with these historians. This little Mayan man with the fierce gaze, barely five feet tall, had really managed to make him nervous. By now he was within inches of Ruiz’s face, so close that if Ruiz took two steps forward he would bang right into him. His hands, buried deep in the pockets of his polar fleece jacket, seemed only to confirm Ruiz’s hunch that he was up to no good.

  “You must be the worst journalism professor in the entire university,” said the Mayan man. His accent was getting stronger and stronger, his voice becoming increasingly vehement. “Or have you already forgotten about Y2K, Don Francisco?”

  A lightbulb suddenly went off in his head. So that was what this was all about? A reader who had been disappointed by an article of his? Ruiz had been one of Europe’s fiercest proponents of the hypothesis that after midnight on December 31, 1999, computer systems the world over would simultaneously collapse because their internal calendars would be unable to make the leap from 1999 to 2000. Since the very earliest computers used two-digit date formats (1997 was 97, 1998 was 98, and so on), some people became convinced that at the dawn of the year 2000 operating systems would identify “00” as the year 1900 instead of 2000, which would, in turn, cause everything to go haywire. In his columns, Francisco Ruiz had envisioned a kind of cyber-apocalypse: airports and hospitals in total meltdown, bank accounts and transactions on the blink, pensions unpaid, power stations, nuclear plants, and gas and oil lines completely cut off by the dysfunctional computer system, to say nothing of world financial systems, satellites, nuclear weapons, and streetlights, which would all become deprogrammed at the very same instant. Caught in the throes of his millennium fever, he had actually advised his readers to stockpile extra cash and provisions before New Year’s Eve . . . just in case.

  But of course, January 1, 2000, had come and gone, and none of the predicted calamities ever came to pass. Francisco had moved on to other topics in his columns, and quite soon the world forgot about the crisis that never was.

  “SOHO is different,” he found himself saying. “It’s quite a bit more serious.”

  “Yes, I know it’s serious!” retorted the Mayan. “Everything that has to do with the sun is serious. That’s why I’m here.”

  SOHO, shorthand for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, was one of the technological playthings that had recently given NASA and the European Space Agency some of its most promising moments. From the day it was launched in 1995, SOHO had sent the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland literally billions of data regarding the sun, its magnetic storms, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections. SOHO had even found the time to identify no less than 1,500 comets that were not visible from Earth. The sinister-looking Mayan, however, did not seem the least bit interested in these achievements.

  Before Francisco Ruiz could change direction and escape, his inconvenient interlocutor suddenly pounced upon him like a bulldog. The impact, which caught Ruiz totally by surprise, sent the two men rolling downhill. The Mayan’s determination to immobilize him, along with his quickened breathing, now had Ruiz scared for his life. The next thing he felt was a hot sensation in his chest followed by a dreadful noise, like a drain gulping down the last mouthfuls of filth spilling out from a broken pipe. It took a few moments for Francisco to realize that the noise was, in fact, emanating from him. From his solar plexus. Then everything felt cold, as if someone had taken off his coat. A sharp pain followed. Cloudy vision
. Darkness.

  Then, everything went black.

  THE PRECINCT COMMANDER AT THE STONE Avenue station in Tucson, Arizona, served himself another cup of coffee from the vending machine in the corridor without taking his eyes off Tess Mitchell. The young woman with the blond braids and frightened eyes couldn’t stop fidgeting in the uncomfortable metal chair.

  “You sure you wouldn’t like something to drink, young lady?”

  She shook her head. Lincoln Lewis had just informed her that federal agents were going to take over the case of Jack Bennewitz’s death. Apparently, on his computer, they had found some interesting links between her physics mentor and various university professors in Central America, the Middle East, and Europe. One of them, Juan Martorell, from the University of Mexico, had been murdered not twenty-four hours earlier in Mexico City, his body thrown from the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Reforma. In the best interests of his investigation, the police chief withheld this last bit of information.

  “You and Jack were close?” he asked.

  Tess nodded. They had known each other for four years. Together they had visited the most important telescopes in the United States, and had even made a few trips out of the country as well, to Arecibo, in Puerto Rico, and Mexico City, just a month earlier. Together they had gone to the pyramids at Teotihuacán, “the oldest astronomical observatory in the Americas,” as Bennewitz had admiringly called it.

  “Did they tell you how Jack died?”

  At this point, Tess had been in the police station for five hours, answering the same questions over and over again to a parade of different agents. It was clear that they had no leads. Just her. And she also knew, as the policeman she had seen on TV seemed to suggest, that they were prepared to put her through hell for as long as they could.

  The young woman shook her head in response.

  “A gunshot fired at him point-blank?” she guessed aloud.