“As sure as I’m standing here, rotting in this cell.” He starts pacing again.

She registers the click of the recorder as it runs out of tape and switches itself off.

“Dom, there was another story on CNN—I only caught the last blurb. Something about an earthquake hitting the Yucatan basin. I need to find out what happened. I need to know if the earthquake originated in Chichén Itza, or in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Why the Gulf?”

“You haven’t even read the journal entry concerning the Piri Re’is maps?”

“Sorry. I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Jesus, Dom, if you were my intern, I’d have flunked you by now. Piri Re’is was a famous Turkish admiral who, back in the late fourteenth century, somehow came upon a series of mysterious charts of the world. Using these charts as a reference, the admiral constructed a set of maps that historians now believe were used by Columbus to navigate his way across the Atlantic.”

“Wait, these charts were real?”

“Of course they’re real. And these charts reveal topographical details that could only have been acquired using sophisticated seismic soundings. For instance, Antarctica’s coastline appears as if there’s no ice cap even present.”

“What’s so significant about that?”

“Dom, the map is over five hundred years old. Antarctica wasn’t even discovered until 1818.”

She stares at him, not sure of what to believe.

“If you doubt me, contact the United States Navy. It was their analysis that confirmed the accuracy of the cartography.”

“So what does this map have to do with the Gulf, or the doomsday prophecy?”

“Fifteen years ago, my father and I located a similar map, only this one was an original, thousands of years old, like the one Piri Re’is found. It was sealed in an iridium container, buried in a precise location on the Nazca plateau. I managed to snap off a Polaroid just before the parchment deteriorated. You’ll find the photo in the back of my father’s journal. When you look at it, you’ll see an area circled in red, located in the Gulf of Mexico, just north of the Yucatan Peninsula.”

“What’s the mark represent?”

“I don’t know.”

Wrap this up. “Mick, I don’t doubt anything you’re telling me, but what if … well, what if this deep-space transmission has nothing at all to do with the Mayan prophecy? NASA says the radio signal originated from some distant point more than eighteen hundred light-years away. That should give you some measure of comfort, right? I mean, come on”—she smiles—“it’s a bit unlikely that we’ll be seeing any extraterrestrials arriving from Orion’s belt within the next sixty days.”

Mick’s eyes widen into dark saucers. He steps back, grabbing his temples with both hands.

Oh, shit, he’s losing it. You pushed him too far. “Mick, what is it? Are you okay?”