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“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 Be
“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 U.S., and had even made a few trips out of the country, 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 Be
“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.
“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 sunk 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 Be
“We know it wasn’t you,” the police chief assured her. “You wouldn’t have the strength for something like that. Plus, Jack Be
“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 kind of 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.
“We-well,” she stuttered. “I don’t know if this means anything, but Jack Be
“Go on, please.”
“Well, Professor Be
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 two 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 boreales in nonpolar zones. Sixteen years later, in January 2005, another X-class flare showered Earth with a proton storm—high-frequency transmissions in the U.S. 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.