Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

Rodriguez returned to the tomb to find Aleta, O’Connor and Jose huddled over the codex.

‘Can you decipher it?’ Jose asked. He had left even the task of deciphering the warning to the one whom the ancients had intended to issue it.

Aleta nodded. ‘It will take time to unravel it in detail, but the warning is clearly there. Although…’ Aleta paused, a puzzled tone to her voice, ‘it appears to be in two parts. There’s a short path that finishes before December 2012, and a longer path, though both of them lead to the destruction of the human race.’

‘What’s the short path?’ O’Connor asked.

‘It deals with the earth and its axis,’ Aleta said, reading the hieroglyphs by torchlight. ‘My God!’ she gasped. ‘There’s a tilting, and a geographic pole shift, followed by an annihilation of cities near the coast. And there’s a shooting star… no, wait… it’s coming from the earth, not to it – it’s some kind of rocket.’

It was Rodriguez’ turn to gasp in amazement. She grabbed O’Connor by the arm and explained the calls she’d had from Tyler Jackson.

‘Tyler’s one of the best scientists I’ve ever worked with, Ellen, and if he’s concerned, the White House should be too.’

‘The Chandler wobble?’

‘The Chandler wobble’s very real, and we saw the effect of the Chile earthquake. That involved a shard of the earth’s crust sliding under the South American plate, which redistributed a whole chunk of the earth’s mass. Three billion watts of radiated power might push the planet past the point of balance. But the President can’t assess that risk if he’s not been briefed on it.’

Rodriguez speed-dialled Andrew Reed’s number.

‘For Christ’s sake, Ellen, we had this fucking conversation at three o’clock this morning. The answer’s no – what part of that don’t you understand?’

‘Then we’ll announce what you’re doing to the media.’

‘And you’ll not only be fired, you’ll finish up behind bars.’

‘You guys have got no idea what the CIA is up to down here, so shut the fuck up and listen.’ Rodriguez briefed her old boss, taking a risk over the open line. When she’d finished, there was silence on the other end. ‘Did you get that, Andrew?’

‘There’s a cabinet meeting shortly, but I’ll delay it. Is this Jackson available?’

‘Waiting for someone to call him in Gakona.’

I t was the world’s greatest archaeological announcement since the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The hotel conference room, even though it seated over a hundred people, was way too small. The media conference had, perforce, been moved to the Great Plaza of Tikal, flanked by the massive Pyramid I and II: the Temple of the Great Jaguar and the Temple of the Mask.

Jose performed an ancient Mayan blessing and introduced Aleta as one of the finest archaeologists of the age. She stepped confidently to the microphone, which had been positioned on the steps of the North Terrace on the northern side of the plaza. Cameras flashed incessantly and television cameramen and women vied for the best shots. The broadcast beamed live to over 150 countries. Aleta had wanted to begin by thanking O’Connor, but he’d firmly dissuaded her. The game in Washington wasn’t over yet, he’d warned – not by a long shot. Just before Aleta took the microphone, Rodriguez handed her a note. It read: ‘Test-firing of Minuteman cancelled’.

‘The warnings are stark,’ Aleta emphasised, after she’d given the assembled media a short introduction to the Maya and the codex. ‘And the major warnings for our civilisation concern religion and the environment,’ she said, avoiding any reference to the shorter warning on the rocket launch. ‘The Maya built one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen; but the last recorded inscription on any stelae in Tikal is dated 13 August 869 AD, and by then the city was in deep trouble. By 950 AD, the entire Mayan civilisation had collapsed. The magnificent city-states, with their countless pyramids and temples, lay totally deserted. There has been much debate in academic circles as to the reasons, and until now the real cause has not been determined.’

Aleta’s flawless command of English, with its delightful Spanish lilt, echoed authoritatively from the steps of the great pyramids. Three hundred kilometres away, Monsignor Jennings watched the proceedings on his black-and-white television. He threw the empty bottle of scotch clanging into the metal wastepaper basket. ‘Fucking bitch,’ he muttered, reaching for another bottle.

‘It is now clear,’ Aleta continued, ‘that despite a series of warnings to the great Mayan kings – kings like Jaguar Claw, Zero Moon Bird Hasaw and his wife, Lady Twelve Macaw, Yax Ain II – the city-states of Tikal, Calakmul and Naranjo, the latter controlled by the powerful warrior queen, Lady Six Sky, were engaged in vicious continual conflict. Conflict that ultimately destroyed both their environment and their ability to feed themselves, and ultimately, their civilisation The Maya Codex makes plain that we will suffer the same fate unless we change course.’ Aleta paused to let the warning hang above the ancient plaza. ‘As a civilisation, we, like the Mayan city-states, are fearful of difference. We fight our wars in the name of religion, be it in Northern Ireland or in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, and we seem unable to tolerate, let alone accept, different cultures. Pakistan, for example, is close to being a failed state, and her nuclear weapons may fall into the hands of extremists. Those extremists would think nothing of engaging in suicide bombings on a nuclear scale, all in the name of their god, Allah.’ The print-media journalists scribbled furiously.

‘In the United States a powerful block of forty million evangelicals subscribes to the view that Christ cannot return until all of the occupied Palestinian territories – Gaza, the West Bank – until every last square centimetre of the so-called Promised Land is returned to Israel.’

Ten thousand kilometres away, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Salvatore Felici, sat glued to the television in his opulent office in the Palazzo della Sacra Inquisizione.

‘The Vatican has yet to release the real third warning of Fatima,’ Aleta charged, ‘but a single page of notes, handwritten by Sister Lucia, has been hidden away in the Vatican’s secret archives. When the Virgin Mary appeared to Lucia in 1917, she issued a similar warning to that contained in the Maya Codex. The Virgin’s warning was preceded by Saint Malachy’s claim of a vision from God given to him on the Janiculum Hill above Rome in 1140, a vision that has proved to be an extraordinarily accurate forecast of who was to take the Keys of Peter, and there is every indication that the last papacy will end in December 2012.’ Some of the media reached for their phones. ‘Nor are the ideas of Christ unique,’ Aleta declared. ‘The codex makes plain that the message of how we should do the right thing by our neighbour is common to a great many religions – Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam – and if you were brought up as a child in Baghdad, it is not Christ’s resurrection you would be taught to believe in, but rather the resurrection of the great Prophet Muhammad on his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back again. No one can claim they have the only path. There are many paths to the Omega, as the codex makes clear, because religion is an accident of birth. If we do not learn to get along and respect our different cultures, religion will be one of the forces that destroys us.’

Cardinal Felici snapped a pencil.

‘But the most strident warning in the codex concerns our treatment of the environment, because it was this, in the end, that destroyed the mighty Mayan civilisation and forced them to abandon their cities. The conference in Copenhagen, like every environmental conference before it, was an abject failure, yet the evidence of dramatic changes in weather patterns is there for everyone to see. The Maya Codex is clear: if we don’t change course, the sceptics who advocate protection of jobs will find there are no jobs left to protect. Finally,’ Aleta said, ‘the Maya Codex is quite clear about the coming confluence of our solar system with a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.’ There was a look of expectation on the face of every journalist in the plaza. ‘NASA has confirmed the ancient astronomers were right, down to the last second. Added to that, the scientific evidence is clear that the earth’s magnetic field is now at its lowest strength in recorded history, and the poles are moving across the wastes of the Arctic and Antarctic at over thirty kilometres a year. Sunspot power is rising dramatically, and will peak in 2012, but I would caution against extreme action.’