Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

‘The mathematics was a little complex, as I recall. Nonlinear partial differential equations.’

‘Exactly, and from those you can predict the existence of black holes. My grandfather was not only an archaeologist, he was a passionate physicist, and even back then, these men were thinking about this.’

O’Connor looked out the window. The train had picked up speed. The lines ran beside the Danube now, and the trees on the banks were heavy with snow. ‘It may be coincidence, but the earth’s magnetic field is at its weakest in recorded history,’ he said finally. ‘I spent some time on one of our research bases in Alaska recently. The field is down to less than 0.5 gauss, and the poles are shifting very rapidly – more than thirty kilometres a year. The magnetic North Pole is no longer centred in Canadian territory, where it’s been for the last 400 years. It’s now located north of Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands and moving rapidly across the Arctic Ocean towards Siberia. Since its discovery in 1831, it’s moved 1100 kilometres, and as the magnetic field weakens, that movement is speeding up.’

‘It’s not the first time this has happened,’ Aleta agreed solemnly. ‘And if the magnetic field drops to zero gauss, we’re all in big trouble…’

O’Connor nodded. ‘Yes, not only do we lose all near-earth orbiting satellites, which would throw communications and ship and aircraft navigation into chaos, but if we lose the earth’s protective magnetic envelope, there’s no shield against deadly cosmic rays.’

‘And there’d be altitude sickness at sea level. The only safety would be in underground bunkers,’ Aleta added. ‘I’ve seen some recent research published by respected paleomagnetists who’ve been drilling through ancient volcanoes, and their core samples prove the magnetic poles haven’t always been in the Arctic and Antarctic.’

O’Connor and Aleta both knew that molten lava was rich in minerals, especially iron; minerals that oriented and then cooled along the prevailing magnetic field of the earth, providing an indelible record of the ancient positions of the magnetic poles. They also knew that as scientists mapped the ocean floor, they’d discovered that magnetite, the magnetic mineral in volcanic basalt, had left a similar footprint beneath the sea.

‘The northern lights may not be the only thing Canada loses,’ Aleta concluded. ‘It’s another indicator this planet may be in a lot more trouble than we think.’

‘It’s more your field than mine, but didn’t scientists find tropical coral outbreaks when they drilled in Newfoundland?’

‘The evidence is a lot more extensive than that. Scientists drilling through the ice in Antarctica have found fossilised tropical forests and ferns at depths that coincide with Mayan records of history. In the northern hemisphere they’ve found evidence of swamp cypress near the North Pole, as well as fig trees under northern Greenland, which means there’s not only been magnetic pole shifts in the past but geographic pole shifts, devastating life on the planet.’

‘The rise in sunspot activity is further proof that we’re headed into very rough waters,’ O’Connor agreed, ‘but Monsignor Jennings wasn’t buying the suggestion that the Maya knew about the sun’s magnetic field?’

‘Again, quite strange for someone in his position.’ Aleta turned to another page in her grandfather’s notebook. ‘Levi says here “Stela F provides incontrovertible evidence that the Maya were well versed in the twenty-two-year cycle of the sun’s magnetic field and the accompanying rise and fall in sunspot activity.” ’

‘Does your grandfather give any clues as to how the ancients were able to investigate sunspots without even a basic telescope?’

Aleta shook her head. ‘He just notes that he can’t be sure if the Maya knew anything about the equator of the sun moving more quickly than its poles, or whether that’s the reason the sun’s plasma gets into such a tangle. And he also doubts they were aware of the intense electromagnetic radiation and solar winds. But he does say he suspects the Maya were aware of the effects of sunspots on the planet, and there’s no doubt they were able to predict the cycles.’

‘And the current cycle will reach its peak in 2012. A geographic shift, with the North Pole ending up in New York or the South Pole in Sydney…’ O’Connor left the deadly prospect hanging. If the Maya Codex was predicting a geographic shift, both Aleta and O’Connor knew the human race would need to take extraordinary precautions, and even then much of life as we know it would not survive.

‘E veryone here, Davis?’ Wiley demanded of his chief of staff as he strode into the CIA operations room. A high-resolution computer screen showed a real-time satellite image of a train located some distance from the border between Austria and Germany and heading north-west. Another showed a map of the Danube with a blinking blue crosshair encoded with Sodano’s cell phone number. The crosshair was moving south through Budapest. Yet another provided a map of the streets of Vienna with another crosshair annotated with O’Connor’s cell phone. The track was leading away from Wahringer Strasse and Maria-Theresian Strasse towards the Donaukanal.

‘Ready to go, Sir. The chiefs of station in Vienna and Berlin are on secure video link,’ Larry Davis confirmed. Davis was only slightly taller than Wiley. Overweight, bald and out of condition, Davis wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘We have a situation,’ Wiley barked at the six officers Davis had briefed into the top-secret compartment of Operation Maya. ‘This is priority one. What’ve you got, Vienna?’

The encrypted video screen switched to the chief of station in a small operations room hidden in the bowels of the white four-storey US Embassy building in Boltzmanngasse, a quiet leafy street in Vienna.

‘We have an asset on board the Vienna-Wurzburg intercity express. He has confirmed Tutankhamen is with Nefertiti in Car 3. They’ve crossed the Austrian-German border and they’re now ten kilometres north-west of Nuremberg. The train is scheduled to arrive at Wurzburg Hauptbahnhof in fifty-two minutes.’

‘Then who has Tutankhamen’s cell phone?’

‘Not known, but it’s currently moving slowly east towards the Donaukanal.’ Wiley glanced at the screen tracking O’Connor’s cell phone, showing a location at the intersection of Schottenring and Rossauer Lande.

‘Whoever’s got it, I want them tracked down – now!’

‘We’ve got the area under surveillance.’ The Vienna chief of station, a grey-haired veteran CIA boss in his late fifties, was unperturbed by the DDO’s fiery temper.

‘And Sodano?’

‘He appears to be still on a barge that has crossed the border into Hungary and that’s now tracking south through Budapest.’

‘ Appears? I want to know!’ Wiley glowered at the screen locked onto Sodano’s cell phone. The blue crosshairs were hovering above the western channel of the Danube, abeam Margitsziget Island, just to the south of the Arpad Bridge. ‘Get Budapest to put an asset on that barge,’ Wiley barked at his chief of staff. ‘I want Sodano brought in, and fast!’

Davis nodded towards his deputy, a slim, attractive brunette in her late thirties. Ellen Rodriguez had spent the last three years as Deputy Chief of Station in Lima, and before that she had worked at the White House. In the short time she’d been back, she had already clashed with Howard Wiley twice, and she was beginning to regret accepting the position on Langley’s Latin American desk. Rodriguez logged into a spare computer in the ops room, but her attention was dragged back to the video screen almost immediately. Vienna’s chief of station had been alerted to a live Die Welt online video update.