97 seconds

20 July 1969: The Apollo XI had accomplished its mission.

Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the desolate surface of the moon, watched in astonishment by millions of viewers following the exploit on television.

Suddenly, Mission Control warns Armstrong that a signal featuring an intelligent pattern had been picked up from a spot near the moon-landing site.

Television communications were suspended. Armstrong walks towards a little crater, and finds half-buried there a chest with the United States seal stamped on the top.

Today. The famous investigative journalist Ned Horton wakes up in his Los Angeles hotel to find a dead woman in his bed.

He has fallen into a trap set for him. And the key to it all lies in the tapes containing the 97-second recording that was never sent back from the moon.

He has discovered that the chest Armstrong found contained a desperate message from the future, intended for a scientist doing research into time travel and on the point of carrying out an experiment that will create a black hole capable of destroying planet Earth.

Horton has to rush into frantic action, which takes him to the world’s largest physics laboratory: the CERN, in Switzerland.

There he will find the scientist for whom the message was intended, and thus ward off the annihilation of the human race.