The Medici Manuscript

Prologue

To-morrow—oh, that’s sudden!

Spare him, spare him! He’s not prepared to die.

SHAKESPEARE

Puebla, Mexico, December 27, 9:02 a.m., GMT-6

Archaeologist Steven Giambruno—the oldest disciple of the great Lawrence Miller at the University of New Mexico—reacted with a start when he heard the distant blast of a vehicle’s horn, so absorbed was he in his thoughts.

He was an upper–middle-class man, somewhat pompous, though possessed of exquisite manners. The pompous air came, albeit unintentionally, from a flawless tan that he somehow managed to maintain even in the dead of winter.

American by nationality, his father was Italian and his mother French. From his father he had inherited his tan and his taste for refinement. His clothing was impeccable; his hair flawless; his glasses, his watch, his shoes—handmade by a designer—everything was part of a carefully conceived ensemble meant to project cleanliness, elegance, and a certain aristocratic air (though he never mentioned any noble lineage), which he somehow managed to preserve even amid the dust and heat of archaeological excavations.

From his mother he inherited a perfect command of rhetoric, which meant that whenever he debated any subject—whether wine, politics, football, or archaeology—he would deliver a discourse full of facts and opinions, analyzed, dissected, and internally agreed upon, which he could present in English, French, or Italian, languages he spoke flawlessly and with a native accent since childhood.

By the age of ten he spoke the Spanish of his schoolmates—he had grown up in California—and by the time he graduated from the University of New Mexico, he spoke German and Portuguese. His travels around the world taught him Arabic and Hebrew, and now, at fifty, he read a Babylonian tablet, a Mayan inscription, or an Egyptian papyrus as effortlessly as the latest novel by Wilbur Smith.

On December twelfth, when one of his assistants unearthed a tablet from the base of a column in a temple in northern Sudan, he recognized at a glance a text that appeared in all cultures, no matter how distant from one another. If anyone could attest to this, it was he, for he had memorized it the first time he deciphered it in an Olmec– Maya temple in the Americas, and later found it repeated on Cambodian, Egyptian, and Hindu tablets; the Incas of Peru, the natives of Polynesia, the Chinese… verbatim, word for word, they all repeated the warning of an ending and a new beginning, as though something— or someone—had wanted the message to appear everywhere and be unmistakable.

More puzzling still was the warning that appeared in a twelvehundred-year-old manuscript that had been in his family for centuries, and which long ago had led him to study archaeology. A treasure taken from the Vatican three centuries earlier by an ancestor who did not want such a message to remain hidden forever.

After the incidents at the desert temple triggered by the discovery, he left Sudan abruptly. The fact that the stranger—the Syrian—had attempted to steal the tablet on the very day it was unearthed confirmed that someone else wanted the information it contained.

On December fifteenth he decided it was time to pack up and return to Europe. A normal excavation should have continued for many months, but the Syrian’s death and the disappearance of Aura Gualtieri, the group’s anthropologist, provided the perfect pretext to inform the museum that security conditions were no longer adequate.

The most important part of the work was finished, the mission entrusted to him by his mentor and friend Lawrence Miller— champion of the excavation—fulfilled. On December twelfth he relayed the core of his discovery to the old archaeologist, who awaited news anxiously in New Mexico.

After returning from Sudan, and for three full days, he tried unsuccessfully to reach Miller, eager to learn more about the secrets it concealed. Miller had entrusted him with what to look for and where to look for it, but not with what it meant. Giambruno did not ask further questions; he feared that his mentor might in turn question him, and that he might then decide to reveal his own secrets—and speak of his manuscript.

However…

On December nineteenth, he learned from the news of Miller’s murder, days after he had sent him the information about his findings. This troubled him more than he cared to admit, for there was reason to believe the two events were connected.

He spent the following week in France cataloguing and handing over the recovered artifacts (under the agreement with the Sudanese government, the items would be studied at the Louvre, exhibited for seven years, and later returned to the Khartoum Museum), but he made no mention of the stone tablet the Syrian had tried to steal from him.

That tablet had another peculiarity: a similar—if not identical— piece had appeared ten years earlier in Cambodia, in secondary ruins near Angkor Wat.

It was not the first time objects found thousands of kilometers apart shared similarities, but this case was different. The symbols on both were Mayan. Mayan! He knew it after spending years in Mexico and Guatemala. Their content echoed the famous two-thousandtwelve prophecy—the one that never came to pass—and added a phrase he had known his entire life, with an ominous warning: The pyramid will speak of the waters that will come; of the fires that will come; and the craters will speak as well!

His perfect understanding of the ancient language allowed him to decipher that the event to which they referred would occur in four places on Earth—exactly what the family manuscript claimed.

Shortly after nine that twenty-seventh of December, after traveling thousands of kilometers, Steven Giambruno gazed—entranced, astonished, and terrified—at the same symbols on the tunnel walls.

He traversed the vast archaeological site for half an hour until he found the exact spot where his memory told him he had seen them before. Now, after analyzing each inscription, he reached a terrifying conclusion. Not only was this one of the places named in the prophecies: it was the precise place where the end would begin.

And a few minutes later, at nine oh eight in the morning, it began.

The ground shook violently, and the tunnel walls trembled as if seized by a furious convulsion. Though over his many travels archaeologist Giambruno had grown accustomed to the movements of an evolving planet, this tremor was different. The oscillation, the shockwave, something in the way the masses of stone vibrated as if they were about to explode, screamed at him that what he feared most was beginning to happen.

The Purification.

For three centuries his family had believed without reservation in what was depicted by the Medici manuscript, a treasure they proudly possessed and protected. Not he—the most skeptical of them all. That bundle of folios he had received as an inheritance from his father for his first birthday of the new millennium told a story of giants, pyramids, spheres, and the imminent end of a cycle—and of civilization itself.

It was supposed that destiny had reserved for him the task of revealing its contents to the world before that moment, so that perhaps the worst might be avoided.

Steven, however, did not want to be regarded as some New Age guru, struggling to impose a religion of any kind—much less one he did not believe in—filled with predetermined futures, magical places, and inexplicable forces.

The very idea that anyone might learn how much time and energy his family had spent obsessing over the madness of a gamble, a mystification, embarrassed him.

He safeguarded the folios to appease his father (who had died young, at forty-eight, far before his time), but he did so with disdain, hiding them even from his late mentor and friend, Lawrence Miller, the only person with whom he had ever considered sharing them.

He earned bachelor’s degrees in History and Philosophy and devoted himself to the study of Archaeology, intending to roam the world proving the falsity of what the folios claimed.

In the last two years, however, life had been leading him to prove the opposite, as though the pieces of the puzzle were materializing one by one before him to demonstrate their truth.

One hour before the bowels of the Earth announced what was to come, he confirmed something in the tunnel that made it not only real, but urgent: the symbols on the mural were identical to those on the Sudan tablet.

Not similar—the same.

The implications were chilling.

“Beneath this place…” he read in the symbols.

“That’s what this damned line of the mural says, and then it repeats the phrase from the tablet,” he told himself.

Stress settled into his neck and shoulders, for something within compelled him to share that knowledge.

The problem was—with whom?

Miller was dead, half his friends would not understand a word of it, he had no family, and his colleagues in New Mexico… If he told them what he believed he had proven, they would mock him and outcast him. His life depended on a university, and his research required funding; and it was clear that no one financed madmen, nor those who strayed from established canons.

But if what the manuscript said—confirmed by the symbols—was true, none of that would matter.

He sat down, leaning against the tunnel wall, the mural before him, and composed an explicit email, though without revealing too much, to which he attached a video of the symbols on the mural and photographs from Sudan that would serve to support his claims.

It took him quite some time, as he typed with a single thumb.

He addressed it to a colleague on sabbatical whom he had never called a friend, and with whom the only thing he shared was a close relationship with Miller: his mentor respected him, and that had to mean something. Stefano Della Croce, the colleague who had been trying to contact him for days—messages he had ignored, unwilling to speak to anyone.

Perhaps Stefano could help him find an answer, and if not, at least he would unburden himself of the need to share the information.

Message sent.

That appeared on his phone screen at the very instant the Earth began to move, as if reacting with fury against something—or someone. They were eternal, terrifying seconds in the darkness, knowing himself to be completely alone.

“Is this it? Is this how it ends?” he thought, as his body was violently shaken along with everything else.

Then something struck his head, and everything went dark.

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