The Maya Codex (31 page)

‘Fuck!’ Wiley slammed his fist on his desk. What the hell was Sodano doing in Bratislava and why was he headed for Budapest? Wiley had been in no position to haggle over the €100 000 Sodano had demanded up front, but if the little shit had done a runner, it would be his last. For now, there were too many unanswered questions. Wiley angrily punched in a response:

For chief of station Vienna: ‘Endeavouring’ not good enough. Surveillance to be re-established at all costs, including airport, train stations and border crossing. O’Connor and Weizman assigned code names Tutankhamen and Nefertiti, respectively. Berlin station on full alert and able to assist. Advise re-establishment of contact SOONEST.

Wiley had chosen the codenames deliberately. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti had both met early deaths, and neither death had ever been explained. Wiley had every intention that history would repeat itself. He buzzed Larry Davis, his chief of staff.

‘We have a situation. I want the ops room brought up to speed,’ he ordered, ‘and include the background to this Maya Codex. I’ll be down there in three minutes.’

36

WESTBAHNHOF, VIENNA

C
urtis O’Connor scanned the lower floor of Vienna’s cavernous international railway terminal. The station was busy and the announcements in German and English echoed off the marble walls. Seeing nothing untoward, he and Aleta joined the queue in front of one of the ticket windows.

‘Zwei Karten zu Bad Arolsen, Business-Class, bitte.’

‘
Single oder zurück
?’

‘
Single, bitte
.’

‘
Das wird €480 bitte
.’

‘
Danke schön
.’

‘There’s a coffee shop upstairs,’ O’Connor said after he’d paid cash for the tickets.

‘The train goes in twenty minutes. Is there time?’

O’Connor smiled. ‘Always assume you’re being tailed. The train leaves from Platform 6, but we’ll get on at the last minute. That way it’s harder for someone to organise a ticket – although the Austrians are so efficient you can buy them on board these days,’ he added, his smile fading. ‘And stick this in your bag,’ he said, handing Aleta a new cell phone. ‘From now on, I want you to assume everything you say on your cell phone is being monitored, and that includes texts.’

‘Won’t they be tracking yours?’

‘They will. But as we speak, it’s bound in bubble wrap and making its way out of the Imperial’s toilets into Vienna’s main sewer. Hopefully it will confuse them and buy us a little more time.’

They rode the escalator to the departure floor. Below them, the tall, thin man in the black overcoat entered the lower floor of the station.

The train sped quietly and smoothly westwards towards Linz, the capital of Oberösterreich, the city where Hitler attended high school with the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; a city from which the Mauthausen concentration camp was less than twenty-five kilometres away. The fields and distant forests were blanketed in a fresh covering of snow and the sun struggled to penetrate the low clouds scudding across the border from Italy.

‘‘You don’t slum it, do you?’ Aleta sank back into one of just four leather seats in their business-class compartment. They had the compartment to themselves.

‘Not if the CIA’s paying. In about three hours we’ll cross the German border near Passau. From there it’s another three hours to Würzburg, where we’ll change trains for Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe. Once there, we’ll change again for Bad Arolsen.’

Aleta shivered at the thought of what she might find.

‘How well do you know Monsignor Jennings?’ O’Connor asked, picking up on her distress and changing the subject.

‘Well enough, unfortunately, although I’ve never worked with him. It’s always been a mystery to me why he’s held in such high esteem in archaeological circles.’

‘Overrated?’

‘A self-opinionated, arrogant twit. He’s very close to the Vatican, and they seem to have an unhealthy influence on him.’

O’Connor grinned. ‘He speaks very highly of you, too.’

Aleta made a face. ‘He’s also rumoured to be fond of little boys.’

O’Connor’s grin evaporated.

‘‘That’s the problem with the Vatican – most of them are hypocrites,’ Aleta continued. ‘Pius XII didn’t lift a finger to help my grandfather or any of the millions of other Jews slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis, and nothing’s changed. Now Benedict’s given his blessing to a bishop who’s denied the gas chambers even existed! What was his name —’

‘Williamson,’ O’Connor said simply.

‘Richard Williamson! How could I forget? And Benedict, who in his time as Cardinal Inquisitor amassed detailed dossiers on everyone from Hans Küng to Teilhard de Chardin, now claims it was all a simple misunderstanding? That he should have consulted the internet? Give me a break!’ Still angry at the injustice of being targeted by powerful institutions and finding herself on the run, Aleta was not about to cut O’Connor any slack. ‘As for you Americans, you’re the most powerful country in the world, and you throw your weight around so everyone knows it. You say you stand for freedom, yet when it suits your purpose, you think nothing of shipping people off to secret torture prisons around the world – prisons that you bastards in the CIA run – and most of these people just disappear. And as for that last idiot you elected to the White House, I doubt he’s ever even read the Geneva Conventions. He picks a White House legal counsel who thinks water-boarding and leaving people out in the open to freeze in temperatures below zero are just fine. What did he say? “Terrorism renders obsolete the Geneva Conventions’ strict limitations on the questioning of prisoners” … That’s the sort of thing the Nazis did to my grandfather, and you bastards are no better. You
trained
the death squads who killed my father!’

‘In other words, torture is okay,’ O’Connor interpolated quietly. ‘You’re absolutely right: the Vatican and Washington have both lost the plot, and I’m not going to defend the indefensible. I can understand your anger at American foreign policy, too. Half the world hates us at the moment.’

‘You flatter yourself if you think only
half
the world hates you. Where I come from it would be hard to find someone with a good word for an American, and don’t kid yourself it’s much better over here. I don’t think you’ve got any idea how much damage your government’s policies have done, Mr O’Connor.’ Aleta reverted to formality. ‘Or should that be Agent O’Connor?’

‘That’s the Hollywood version. It’s actually “Officer”, although when you’re ready, Curtis will do just fine.’

‘What I can’t understand, given your views,’ Aleta said, speaking more softly now, ‘is why you’re still working for the CIA?’

‘Well, once they tumble to what happened back in your apartment, I’ll be off the payroll. But despite what you think, with a few notable exceptions, the CIA is made up of basically decent human beings trying to serve their country.’ O’Connor paused, trying to order his own emotions. ‘I joined the CIA because I thought I could make a difference. Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out that way. Although who knows? If we can recover the codex, that might redress the balance a little. Do your grandfather’s notes throw any light on things?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to go through them in detail, although when Levi was in Tikal in the 1930s, he unearthed a stone carving.’ Aleta opened the notebook at the page on which Levi Weizman had attached a photograph of a stela he had named ‘Stela D’. ‘The alligator represents the Milky Way,’ she said, pointing to her grandfather’s notations on his drawing of the intricate carving, ‘and in Mayan hieroglyphics, the alligator’s mouth is the Milky Way’s dark rift or
Xibalba be
. The hieroglyphics surrounding the alligator all depict the December solstice sun of 2012.’

‘Yet Jennings plays it down. Would he be aware of this?’

‘He should be, because that stela is still in Tikal. It’s similar to the Izapa stelae, which were excavated near the Guatemalan–Mexican border in the 1960s by archaeologists from Brigham State University and decoded by the noted Mayanist scholar, John Major Jenkins.’ Aleta turned the page in Levi Weizman’s notebook, now yellowed with age. ‘I am convinced,’ she said, reading from her grandfather’s notes, ‘that the hieroglyphics on Stela Delta indicate that this rare alignment of our planet and solar system with the centre of the Milky Way galaxy will be accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the earth’s magnetic field and an equally dramatic increase in sunspot activity.’

The train slowed as the plough on the forward engine sliced through an unusually heavy autumn build-up of snow on the tracks. Both O’Connor and Aleta were totally absorbed in Levi Weizman’s notes, and neither noticed the tall, thin man make his way along the corridor outside. He glanced into their compartment as he passed.

Aleta continued to read from the old notebook: ‘I have discussed this with Albert, and he is of the view we should take this seriously.’

‘I gather your grandfather was a friend of Einstein’s.’

Aleta nodded. ‘Both of them detested the Nazis with a passion. You’re probably aware that by the time my grandfather had unearthed Stela D at Tikal, Einstein had already published his paper on the theory of relativity.’

‘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.’