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.’
‘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.
37
‘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
