12.21.12: The Vessel (The Altunai Annals)

The only way to save the future is to decode the past. The only way to decode the past is to save the future.

Archaeologist Sheppard Smyth has staked his career and the honorable memory of his wife and partner on proving his widely panned theory: Cleopatra, the last sovereign pharaoh of Egypt, was not a victim of suicide as history suggests, but of a well-concealed murder. When a statue of the doomed Queen is unearthed in a pre-Columbian excavation site in Mexico, Shep rushes to investigate and, hopefully, find the proof that has evaded him for so long. The find, however, is only the first clue suggesting a mysterious connection between Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, and possibly - beyond. Suddenly thrust into the heated rivalry between sexy and enigmatic antiquities thief Victoria Kent and the infamous Russian mafioso Dmitri Kronastia, Shep finds himself a common pawn played by forces working to see out a quest older than the pyramids and cloaked in the Mayan Doomsday prophecy of 12.21.12.