The Fifth World Read online

“I’m afraid not, Tess. They tore his heart out, in one fell swoop. They did it with some kind of very sharp object, a blade or a prod that they sank into him in a single motion, slicing directly through his arteries.”

  The young woman’s eyes widened with fright. Now she understood that dark stain on Professor Bennewitz’s shirt.

  “We know it wasn’t you,” the police chief assured her. “You wouldn’t have the strength for something like that. Plus, Jack Bennewitz died at least two hours before you got to him. In all likelihood the murder did not even occur in that office. We found no traces of blood whatsoever there, except for the stains on his clothing. They must have brought him there after they did it, sat him down, and left him for someone else to find him.”

  “Really?”

  The police chief nodded.

  “Tell me, where were you at two o’clock this afternoon?”

  Tess didn’t hesitate:

  “I had just left the Kitt Peak observatory,” she said, swallowing air as if muffling a sob. “I was there all morning, gathering information from the main telescope. When I found what I was looking for I went to Jack’s office to show him. From the observatory it takes about ninety minutes to get to Tucson, so I would have been on the road at around that time . . .”

  “Right. Now, since you weren’t on campus when the crime occurred, I wonder if you could tell me if you or any of your friends saw anything unusual on campus today, either this morning or later this afternoon. Anything at all that struck you as unusual?”

  Tess said nothing. She bowed her head, as if trying to extract a memory, any recollection at all that might offer the police some kind of clue to aid their investigation. The matter of the butterfly seemed irrelevant and anyway, she was too embarrassed to admit that she had taken something from a crime scene, so she just put it out of her mind. In a matter of seconds she replayed her arrival at the university, the ham and cheese sandwich she’d eaten in the Building B cafeteria, her thoughts about the university lecture they would be attending that afternoon . . . “Of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “The university lecture, that’s it!” Suppressing an incipient smile, she searched the police officer’s eyes.

  “W-well,” she stuttered. “I don’t know if this means anything, but Jack Bennewitz was going to give a very important lecture this afternoon in the auditorium of the main building. His students were all very excited about it. He was going to announce a major discovery.”

  “Go on, please.”

  “Well, Professor Bennewitz was going to announce the results of his latest work: a theoretical model capable of predicting high-intensity solar storms and eruptions. X-class eruptions, and even higher-level ones. It was rumored that the scale might have to be raised to Z class. He was especially concerned about a storm that could reach Z class. He called it the Big One.”

  Lincoln Lewis’s eyes opened wide. He had heard the techies in his department mention precisely those words, Big One, just minutes earlier. Several folders on the victim’s computer were filled with references to it.

  THE BIG ONE.

  On the sixth floor of the United States Embassy in Madrid, Eileen Garrett and Bill Dafoe of the intelligence unit were having a heated discussion about those three words. The Spanish national police had just been asking them about it, after a journalism professor at the Complutense University had been found dead in the neighborhood of Moncloa with a briefcase full of Internet printouts about the Big One, as well as original documents that bore the letterhead of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The professor’s folder was now sitting open on a conference room table at the embassy. Apparently, what the local police had found so unusual was the way the body had been mutilated: the aggressors had removed the man’s heart and, while he was still alive, thrown his body down onto the entrance to the La Coruña road from the overpass between the Moncloa tower and the university rector’s office.

  “So, do you have any idea what the hell this Big One is, Bill?”

  Eileen’s eyes bore into the back of her colleague, who could scarcely tear his eyes away from the most recent science supplement of the Spanish newspaper El País.

  “Well . . . It turns out that just yesterday this Ruiz character published an article explaining it,” he said, smacking the paper with his index finger.

  “Are you serious? Really?”

  “Listen: ‘In 1989 a solar eruption sparked one of the most significant plasma expulsions documented by astrophysicists to date. They classified it as an X-class flare and discovered that it had sent a proton cloud into space that took several hours to reach Earth. When it finally did, a magnetic storm shifted the planet’s field by eight degrees, short-circuited telephone and power lines in Canada, and caused aurorae borealis in nonpolar zones. Sixteen years later, in January 2005, another X-class flare showered Earth with a proton storm: high-frequency transmissions in the US and Canada collapsed, and this time the aurorae were visible in Arizona. Fortunately, none of these sudden flare-ups directly impacted the Earth; they only struck us laterally. The day we receive a frontal impact, the consequences of the Big One will be devastating.’ ”

  “Wow! It sounds like an ad for a horror movie.”

  “Well, Ruiz took all of this very seriously. And get this: at the end of the article it says that tomorrow’s paper will include part two of the article in which the author promises to give readers a probable date for the Big One. The news desk at the paper confirmed for me that they were expecting the article this afternoon.”

  “Excellent. Do you think this has something to do with his death?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think, Eileen. Washington’s already asked us to follow up. Until a few days ago, only a handful of people in the entire world had ever even heard of the Big One. And now, it looks like there’s someone out there who wants to eliminate them, one by one.”

  AS SOON AS TESS GOT BACK to her tiny apartment on Lester Street, she opened her laptop. She had received instructions not to leave the city without alerting Chief Lewis, but they hadn’t said anything about suspending her professional activities. Nervously, she opened a search engine, typed in the words “Big One,” and waited the fraction of a second it took for the first results to appear. She took a deep breath. Interestingly, the search engine produced only three news items related to the term. For the moment, it seemed, nobody knew about what she had discovered at Kitt Peak.

  Not even the police had bothered to ask her about her work. The minute they sensed the hint of a technical explanation, they seemed to lose interest.

  The articles Google produced were as follows:

  “NBA signs Roger Williams, Basketball’s new Big One.” She dismissed that one.

  “Madrid journalism professor murdered while researching article on solar storms.”

  “The Legacy of Juan Martorell: A life dedicated to the Maya.”

  Tess clicked on the second item and read through the article without blinking. It was a chronicle of events that briefly described the death of a Spanish professor whose heart had been ripped out and his body thrown from the top of an overpass. The police had no leads but were speculating that it was some kind of ritual murder. They said that the victim had achieved some notoriety in the hours before his death because of an article he had written in which he speculated that the imminent arrival of a magnetic storm from the sun might plunge civilization into a pre-digital era and cause severe damage to the cellular composition of a number of animal species. He had named this storm “the Big One.”

  When she read the professor’s name, she suddenly became agitated. She had heard Jack talk about this Francisco Ruiz on several different occasions. In fact, Jack had been supplying Ruiz with information about the SOHO satellite and its discoveries for several months before his death.

  Distressed, Tess clicked on the third article. Although the Mayans were not a subject of particular interest to her, she wanted to make sure the article didn’t contain any more surprises.

  As it turned out,
the details of this piece were even more astonishing than the last. Another professor—a historian this time—had also been murdered, after giving a seminar on the Mayan Calendar and the decline of the Mayan civilization. According to Martorell, the Mayan culture disappeared after a series of sudden natural disasters—droughts, hurricanes—swept through Mexico in the tenth century. According to the professor, the Mayan people foretold the advent of their own apocalypse through meticulous observation of the sun. They came to believe that every 52 years the sun experienced a rebirth, and that this mutation necessarily affected them, as well. According to their belief system, every 52 cycles of 52 years (in other words, every 2,704 years), the world disappeared completely and gave way to an entirely new one. In fact, said the professor, this was the only possible explanation for the mysterious and abrupt manner in which the Mayan people abandoned their pyramids and cities, as documented by archeologists. According to this odd logic the final cycle, which would herald the arrival of the Fifth World, would come to an end at midnight on December 21, 2012.

  “December 21, 2012,” repeated Tess in a whisper.

  Exactly nineteen hours away.

  THE FACADE OF THE INSTITUTE OF Anatomical Forensics on the campus of Madrid’s Complutense University flashed and twinkled beneath the glow of its Christmas lights. It was an odd sight to behold: a gray, somber-looking edifice so gaily illuminated at eight o’clock in the morning. But despite the early hour, the activity contained within its walls was at full pitch.

  Eileen Garrett had found her way to the building in a sleepy haze, unaware of why she had been summoned with such urgency. Dr. Aguirre was waiting for her at the entrance to the building, a folder in his hands.

  “I’m sorry for waking you in the middle of the night, miss,” he said. He seemed like a circumspect sort of man. “Last night the police asked us to phone the embassy as soon as we completed the autopsy on Ruiz.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well . . .” The doctor’s pause banished the last traces of slumber in Garrett’s head. “To tell the truth, we don’t know quite what to say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The method used to remove the heart of this poor man. We believe it was done with an obsidian knife. Under the microscope we identified a few particles of the volcanic rock. What’s so odd is that this is the kind of weapon used by primitive cultures, like the Mayans or the Aztecs. The skill with which it was used requires a tremendous degree of strength.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, doctor, that this man was stabbed with an Aztec sacrificial knife?”

  “I know it sounds bizarre, Miss, but there’s no doubt in my mind. And it was done by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.”

  FOUR PEOPLE IN THE WORLD KNEW all the details of the Big One. All four were connected to Jack Bennewitz—including Juan Martorell, according to the article Tess had found on the Internet—and three of them had been found dead, victims of some sort of ritual murder, in the last few hours. The only one left alive was Tess Mitchell, who spent a fitful, sleepless night thinking that before midnight on this new day of December 21, her name would be added to that macabre list. She had to do something to stop it from happening. Anything. Something that would keep her hidden from a bunch of murderers who, just like the ancient Aztec sun-worshippers, believed that the end of the day would mark the end of the world.

  Could this really be happening? Or was she just going mad?

  It was barely four in the morning when Tess quickly packed her laptop and notes in her car, along with the images she had obtained from the Kitt Peak observatory, and headed for Nogales. For a moment she thought that if she could cross the Mexican border within an hour or so and then get herself to Mexico City, it would be very hard for anyone to locate her in a city of 19 million. She did not warn the police, nor did she realize that what was behind the deaths of Jack, Juan, and Francisco was about to crash onto her with all the weight of the laws of physics.

  What Tess did know, however, was that at twelve noon on December 20, 2012, a massive solar eruption, or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), had been recorded on Sunspot 1108 at approximately 60 degrees west longitude, perfectly aligned with Earth. The resulting proton storm, picked up by the monitors of the National Astronomical Observatory, was heading toward Earth at that very moment, and would crash into the planet’s surface in a short period of time. This was—what else could it be?—the first sign of the Big One that Professor Bennewitz had been talking about for years: an indeterminate sequence of solar eruptions with a subsequent magnetic emission that was heading straight for planet Earth. Tess had little trouble seeing that the sheer force of the event would be enough to plunge half the planet into total darkness, paralyze radioelectronic emissions in the hemisphere where it landed, and destroy no less than eighty or ninety basic communications satellites in its path. But it was also possible that this occurrence might be the sign of something far worse: it still remained to be seen what, exactly, the relationship was between those proton storms and certain climate and chromosomal alterations. That was why she had gone to Jack’s office that morning. That was why his death had left her so perplexed.

  As she drove her gray Ford Mustang onto Interstate 19 and headed south for Mexico, she had no idea that she was being followed. The vehicle tailing her was a modern red Nissan Quest minivan with a Yucatán license plate. Tess drove for the remainder of the night, as did the red minivan. When the young physics student finally stopped to sit down to a hearty breakfast at a roadside restaurant near Ciudad Obregón in Sonora state, the men following kept an eye on her from afar. There was no way she could have known it, but the apathy with which she gazed at the cybercafé across the way from the restaurant saved her life. She was far more transfixed watching CNN on the television set there.

  “. . . To date, power outages have been reported in seven European countries, to greater and lesser degrees, for reasons that are still unknown,” announced the voice of morning newscaster Terry White, jolting her out of her ruminations. “And in addition to what appears to be the most significant simultaneous blackout in the history of Europe, we are now receiving reports of problems with telecommunications, trains, and air traffic. We are now advising anyone with plans to travel to the Mediterranean coast area . . .”

  “Holy Mary mother of God!” exclaimed an old, indigenous-looking woman, who crossed herself as she looked away from the television. Despite the early hour, she was already nursing a tall glass of tequila. “Did you see that, young lady? That’s just the beginning!”

  “The beginning?” Tess swallowed hard. She spoke very little Spanish, just enough to maintain a short conversation. “The beginning of what, ma’am?”

  “Come on, honey! Are you the only person in the world who doesn’t know about what’s going to happen tonight?”

  “What is supposed to happen?”

  “The end of the world, honey! That’s what the Mayan prophecies predict. And from the look of things,” she said, pointing to the television, “it’s already started in Europe. The land of our executioners.”

  Two sharp beeps emanating from her cell phone forced Tess to turn her attention to the liquid crystal display of its tiny screen. It was an RSS message from the Kitt Peak Observatory.

  “Sunspot 1108 has entered into eruption again. Colossal. The CME are increasing in number now.”

  The cell phone went dead.

  “I’VE FOUND SOMETHING, EILEEN. LUCKILY BEFORE this damn blackout cut off our access to the internal network.”

  Bill Dafoe’s face was radiant. Despite the fact that electricity lines in Spain—and, along with them, those of Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Holland—were completely down, the embassy’s emergency generators had given him a window of time to finish what he had been working on. He went on to explain to Eileen that he had been nosing around the archives of Madrid’s Complutense University in search of information on Francisco Ruiz, when he hit upon the professor’s emails, which incl
uded a number of messages to a certain Professor Bennewitz, who had been murdered in Tucson at almost the exact same time as Ruiz, and in the very same manner.

  “So?”

  “Bennewitz was working with a talented student by the name of Tess Mitchell. I’ve been trying to locate her but last night she disappeared from her apartment and her neighbors haven’t seen her since. The Tucson police interrogated her a few hours earlier, but found no reasons to name her as a suspect in the murder. They’re searching for her now, though.”

  “Do you think she left town?”

  “Well . . .” Bill still had another piece of information in his possession. “According to border control in Nogales, a vehicle with her license plate left the U.S. and entered Mexico at around five thirty this morning.”

  Eileen’s face suddenly lit up.

  “We have to find her, Bill. That girl knows something. I’ll put out a search order for her right away.”

  THE DRIVE TO MEXICO CITY DRAGGED on until well after 11:00 PM. The vehicle’s radio, oddly enough, was unable to tune in to a single radio station, just a lot of empty static. Tess’s cell phone had lost reception as of Ciudad Obregón and none of the electronic signs on the road to Mexico City were working. Though these were clearly the symptoms of the fallout from the first proton storm, the physics student decided not to overestimate their importance.

  As she approached the highway into the Mexican capital, Tess Mitchell decided that it would be more practical for her to find a hotel somewhere near the Teotihuacán archeological complex. There, at least, she could be sure of finding a room, and she knew the area relatively well. She had spent an entire week there, visiting the ruins with a research team from the university, and Jack Bennewitz had shown her some of the best and cheapest places to stay in the vicinity. As she turned off the ignition in front of the Albergue San Juan she was overcome by a torrent of mixed emotions: her evening strolls with Jack along the Avenida de los Muertos in the heart of the pyramid complex, gazing up at the Milky Way; his explanations of the relationship between each of those monuments and the planets known in pre-Hispanic times; even his remarks about how the people who built Teotihuacán believed that they were feeding the sun with every heart they pulled from someone’s body. All these memories passed through her mind, more vivid than ever. How ironic that Jack would surrender his life to the sun, in the very same way that people did all the way back then, she thought.