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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 predigital 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 fifty-two years the sun experienced a rebirth, and that this mutation necessarily affected them, as well. According to their belief system, every fifty-two cycles of fifty-two 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 ma
“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. Doctor Aguirre was waiting for her at the entrance to the building with 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 co
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 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 nineteen 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 noon on December 20, 2012, a massive solar eruption or Coronal Mass Ejection-CME-had been recorded on Sunspot 1108 at approximately 60° 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 Be
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,” a