Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

Spanish writer Javier Sierra is known for seamlessly weaving history and science together in stories that not only entertain, but which attempt to solve some of the great mysteries of the past. His meticulous research has taken him across the globe, and his knowledge of faraway places and forgotten cultures is abundantly clear in “The Fifth World.”

When murder and mysticism meet, Tess Mitchell is left with only a yellow butterfly found at the feet of her slain professor. The Mayan Calendar and its prophecies had always seemed academic to the young woman, but in Javier’s chilling and believable style, they come alive in uncertain, frightening new ways.

THE FIFTH WORLD

“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 the 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 policeman 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 conjure 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?”

“Didn’t 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 p.m. 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 for 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 of 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 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 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.

“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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 e-mails, which included 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 p.m. 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.

“Are you Tess Mitchell?”

An indigenous-looking man nearing forty, with a thin beard and a face weathered by the sun, yanked her out of her thoughts as he stepped out of a red minivan that had just pulled up alongside her car. He wore a brightly colored poncho with geometric motifs that she could barely make out, because his headlights were still on.

“How…?”

“What? How do I know your name?” He smiled. “A good friend of yours told us. Professor Jack Bennewitz.”

As he spoke, two other men stepped out of the minivan and walked over to her. She had a difficult time seeing them because, despite the clarity shed by the first-quarter moon, the hotel lights suddenly went out, and with them all the lights in the neighborhood. Tess jumped with a start.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, miss,” the indigenous man said.

“Anymore? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That time has reached its end and the cosmic clock has done its job. We have just crossed the threshold from the twenty-first to the twenty-second of December.”

Then he added, “Welcome to the Fifth World, Miss Mitchell.”

Tess shook her head.

“Please don’t be afraid. Yesterday we paid a visit to your physics professor to convince him not to publish the information he had regarding the solar storm that the two of you detected. The same information that you are carrying right now in that laptop of yours.”

“You…you were the ones who killed him?” Tess was incredulous. More than reproach, what echoed in her voice was fear.

“Oh, come on! We only sped up his passage, Miss Mitchell,” the man said, without a trace of emotion. “We couldn’t risk allowing Doctor Bennewitz to reveal his findings to the scientific community because, without realizing it, he would have prevented the sky from opening up as it just did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“I’m sure you understand the scientific jargon better than I do, miss. But what just happened, though you and many other people may not realize it, is that the planet Earth has experienced a blast of cosmic energy so powerful that it produced a dimensional leap. Our position in the universe has shifted, and just as was foretold thousands of years ago, a new world has been born.”

“That’s ridiculous!” replied Tess. “Who are you people? Where did you come from?”

“We are the survivors of the Mayan people, miss. Descendants of those few people who remained on this plane of reality when our ancestors transcended dimensions at the end of the Third World. The world that just left us-forever, in fact-was the fourth.”

“Well, I…I haven’t noticed a thing!”

“Oh, really?”

The man’s ironic smile, fixed on his face, made her wary.

“Have you tried to make a phone call? You won’t be able to,” he said, laughing as he watched Tess unsuccessfully dial the emergency number from her cell phone. “Have you heard anything at all on the radio in the past few hours? No. And from now on you won’t, not ever again. Have you tried plugging anything into an outlet? You might as well say goodbye to all that forever. In the Fifth World none of that will work anymore. The sun has altered the electrical balance in the ionosphere and, as such, in the entire planet.”

“Just like that?”

“Look!” One of the other men with them pointed upward. The night sky had transformed into something phantasmagoric, surreal. The silvery sky seemed to have morphed into a spongy substance that flowed as if dragged by the wind. It was a kind of aurora borealis, one that was nothing like anything any human had ever before seen on Earth.

“Now do you believe us?” the man asked. “Everything is mutating. Even you. You don’t realize it, but your entire molecular structure and DNA are changing at this moment.”

“Right…” she said, quivering. “So, what do you want from me?”

“We’ve come to deliver you a message-Professor Jack Bennewitz is waiting for you at the Teotihuacán ruins. He wants to explain everything.”

“Jack…?” Tess was unable to finish her sentence.

For the umpteenth time, Bill Dafoe checked, but without luck. The conventional communications grid, including the high-resolution microwave signal, was down. The order to search for Tess Mitchell hadn’t made it beyond the four walls of the embassy. Instinctively, he leaned out the window of his office on the sixth floor of the building. To his surprise, all the Christmas lights lining Serrano had gone dark. Not a single bus traveled down this street, one of Madrid’s main arteries, and even the many Santa Clauses that just a few hours earlier had been clogging the sidewalks of this commercial zone, had disappeared into thin air. The city seemed deserted.

“I have to check something,” he said to Eileen, and bounded down the stairs. The elevator, along with all the electricity in the building, had gone dead, as well.

When he arrived at the building’s front gate, the Marine Corps guards and the National Police in charge of watching over the embassy precinct were in a state of distress. Everything had stopped working. Even-and this was the strangest thing of all-the diesel engines of the two assault tanks that the Spanish police used to guard the surrounding streets.

“Bill! Now that’s funny!” shouted the officer responsible for allowing outsiders to gain access to the building. He knew Dafoe from their years as schoolmates back in Lexington, Kentucky. “With this damn blackout I had no way of calling up to let you know. You’ve got a visitor. In the waiting area.”

“A visitor?”

“Yeah…let’s see,” he said, automatically glancing down at the embassy’s entry and exit list. “His name is Francisco Ruiz, and he says that you and your partner have a folder of his that he’d like to pick up.”

“Francisco Ruiz?”

A solemn atmosphere pervaded the ceremonial complex of Teotihuacán. The grayish silhouette of the massive pyramids and the hulking magnificence of Cerro Gordo on the horizon shone dramatically beneath the powerful glow of the moon. Next to the smallest pyramid, in a plaza adorned with reliefs of the Quetzal, a curious cross between bird and insect, Tess just barely made out the familiar image of a man dressed in white. It seemed as though he’d been standing there for a millennium, waiting for her.

“The best place in the world for us to find each other again, Tess!”

Jack Bennewitz’s booming voice reverberated between the empty structures. Tess Mitchell didn’t understand anything, and her face showed it. Right at that moment, she was tempted to think that everything she had been through in the past few hours had been nothing more than a bad practical joke.

“It’s me-Jack!” he said, opening his arms wide. “I don’t know what the boys told you, but this is real! At midnight the planet entered into a totally new vibrational phase. All matter, including dark matter, has begun to resonate at a frequency that was unknown up until now. Do you understand, Tess?”

“But…you’re alive!” she exclaimed.

“Alive, dead…what does it matter? Those are states of being that belong to the old world. We’re in a new dimension now.”

The young woman’s hands stroked the soft white cotton of Jack Bennewitz’s suit. It had to be an illusion.

“Come on, Tess! Okay, maybe I didn’t enter this dimension voluntarily, but the men who killed me knew that they were just speeding up my passage by a few hours. They even left you a sign so that you wouldn’t worry…”

“They didn’t leave me anything!” she protested, stepping away from him.

“Yes they did, Tess. They left you a Quetzal butterfly, like the ones on these reliefs. Don’t you recognize it? For the people that built Teotihuacán, as well as the ancestors that established the Mayan calendar, the butterfly symbolized the passage of time. The shift from one dimension to another. I just stopped being a larva before you did. But now both of us are like them…”

The young woman touched her handbag, feeling around for the little box she had taken from Jack’s office. Jack looked at her, content.

“And the rest of the world, Jack? What’s happening to them? Are they all butterflies now, too?”

“The rest of the world, too, Tess. Little by little they’ll all begin to realize it.”

Jack Bennewitz put his arms around her shoulders before saying anything else. His touch was real. Physical. Just as it had always been.

“You know something?” he said. “It’s funny that your instinct brought you here to this place tonight, a night of such transformation.”

“Funny? What’s so funny about it?”

“Well, Tess. You should know that Teotihuacán means ‘the place where men become gods.’ And now that you and I have died, that’s precisely what we have become. How does it feel to be a god, Tess?”