The Fifth World Read Free Page B

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.”
    A S 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:
    â€œNBA signs Roger Williams, Basketball’s new Big One.” She dismissed that one.
    â€œMadrid journalism professor murdered while researching article on solar storms.”
    â€œThe Legacy of Juan Martorell: A life dedicated to theMaya.”
    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 tobelieve 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.
    â€œDecember 21, 2012,” repeated Tess in a whisper.
    Exactly nineteen hours away.
    T HE FACADE OF THE INSTITUTE OF Anatomical Forensics on the campus of Madrid’s Complutense University flashed and twinkled beneath the glow of its