"Really," Annja said. "I didn't know."

"And since we speak of knowing, I know for a fact that the Maya did not regard 2012 as the end of the world, or near to it. Or in any event, not all Maya did."

"Why not?"

"First, in Palenque in the state of Chiapas, we find record of projections to October 13, 4772. For those Maya, history did not run out a handful of years from now. Also, a monument at Coba in Quintana Roo projects the end of creation at many powers-of-thirteen of the cycle of b'ak'tun.According to it we've barely begun the cycle."

"So the world," Annja said, "will not cease to exist on December 21, 2012? Or thereabouts."

"According to the Maya, I'd say there's no more likelihood than that it will end on any other given day, including this one." His smile frosted over. "There are times when I suspect that 2012 is a most optimistic date for how long we have left."

Annja sighed. "I hear you, Doctor. Thank you very much."

She had a bus ticket to Fresnillos in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, north of the Federal District, for the following morning. Her modest but comfortable little three-star hotel was in Coyoacán, near the university. Instead of heading back there after parting company with the helpful young Dr. Márquez she decided to spend the afternoon cruising the bright, chattering street markets of the immense city square known formally as the Plaza de la Constitución and universally as the Zócalo.

She took a quick pass through the museum showing artifacts from the Aztec Templo Mayor unearthed during the construction of the underground station. Quickly, because she had done a lot of museums recently, and suspected more lay in her near future. She loved archaeology. She loved glazed doughnuts, too. Continuing to savor life's loves, she had learned, was done best by metering their doses.

She emerged blinking into the heat and spear-sharp sunlight – and eye-watering pollution – of the plaza. Leaving the climate-conditioned subterranean realm of the station was like getting hit in the face with a wet blanket. A none-too-clean one, at that.

Like Los Angeles and Denver, and, on a smaller scale Albuquerque, Mexico City was built in a big bowl in the desert, with mountains for walls, ideal for trapping both heat and pollution. It was also naturally humid despite high altitude and relatively low annual rainfall, being built in a lake, into which it was gradually sinking. Moreover, the world's third-largest square, after Tiananmen and Red, was well fenced by big buildings, from the cathedral to the Palacio Nacional. They served the same function for its microenvironment as the surrounding mountains did for the Valley of Mexico. The Zócalo, in short, was a heat sink wrapped in a heat trap.

Annja wandered past some rather tawdry and dispirited Aztec dancers and in among the brightly colored kiosks, and the crowds of tourists, notably less colorful. In fact the latter were mostly pale but well-larded North Americans, Northern and Eastern Europeans. The season had grown cool in New England and Europe. The sunbirds had begun early migration to warmth.

One place that caught her eye was a wooden booth offering pre-Columbian artifacts, mostly figurines of weird Aztec and Mayan gods. She made a beeline to it, a frown starting to furrow her brow.

Still a few feet away, it became apparent that these were all reproductions, not necessarily of museum grade, and not plundered archaeological treasures. Though when she picked up an effigy of Tezcatlipoca to find a yellow Made In China sticker on its base she thought that was a bit over the top.

Feeling somewhat chagrined, she moved on. She looked distractedly at white dresses with bright trim, hung next to sticks of cinnamon in clay vases and, improbably, brass Buddhas. I don't know why I bother, she thought. It's not as if I have any room for more stuff. Between artifacts – all legally held – and stacks of books, magazines and manuscripts, her Brooklyn loft apartment was well packed.

I've never been a shopping goddess, anyway. She took pains about her appearance, not a universal constant among archaeologists. But that was mostly confined to making sure her clothes were clean and color coordinated. Sturdy and serviceable were big items with her. As was cost. The closest she came to being a fashionista was her expertise at thrift stores. But that wasn't shabby chic; that was spending almost her whole life poor.

As for labels, it seldom occurred to her to look. People like her female associates from the C hasing History's Monstersstaff sometimes caught her and forced her to spend a little money on nice clothes and accessorizing.

But her acquaintances had learned to their exasperation that unless they arrived at her loft and stood guard over her as she dressed, Annja was still just as likely to show up for one of the rare girls' nights out they could coax her to in khaki cargo pants, a secondhand man's shirt and comfortable boots. Exactly what she wore at the moment, except for substituting a lightweight saffron cotton blouse.

She was content, though, to let herself drift. Listening to the tourists natter in German and French and nasal English as they bargained with the cheerful shopkeepers, she knew that however strange, or even crass or tacky the goods on offer, she was participating in a ritual at least as old as civilization. More than likely Nahua vendors with plugs in their lower lips had dickered on this very spot, half a millennium ago, with copper-haired Tlaxcaltecans and cynical, pipe-smoking Mayan missionary-traders.

She found herself under an awning at a booth offering plates and pots and mugs of heavy, lovingly hand-painted pottery. She picked several up and examined them. No two were alike, and there was nary a Made In China sticker to be found.

A cat with a swirled brown-and-gray back and a white belly and nose lay in repose in a bin on top of a stack of serving platters, apparently enjoying the cool. As its pale green eyes caught hers it rolled over on its back with a loud, hinting purr.

She scratched its proffered belly. It writhed and purred louder in appreciation.

Maybe this is why I came here,she thought. It was as good an answer as any.

Chapter 9

Annja put her hands to the heavily tinted glass of the taxicab window. "Wait," she said in English. "Where are we going?"

" No intiendo," the driver said, a stout, sweating, droopily mustached man who had both understood and for that matter spoken English perfectly well when he had picked her up outside the hotel.

She repeated her question in Spanish, which was the first foreign language she'd learned in the orphanage in New Orleans – a city where the Spanish influence was almost as strong as French, though much less publicized. It attracted both the affluent and the penniless from all across the old Spanish Main and much of Latin America. Not to mention from right across the Gulf of Mexico.

The cabbie only shook his balding head and waved a handful of rings that had turned the fingers blue-green around them.

She was on her way, or so she thought, to the airport. Yet somehow the taxi had turned decisively off any kind of main drag. Initially the driver had muttered something – again in heavily accented but quite clear English – about avoiding traffic jams. And traffic jams there were aplenty, with upward of twelve million people poured together in the big, high bowl of the Valley of Mexico. At first Annja accepted he was dodging apparent gridlock because she could see he did so. The street ahead had been solid with cars immobile as some modernistic ribbon statue of sun-gleaming metal.