Intervention

18

4:21 P.M., FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2008

NEW YORK CITY

The sky was clear and the sun near the western horizon when Jack emerged from the OCME and turned northward on First Avenue. The temperature had dropped to a bracing level, and his cheeks burned as he raced the traffic uptown.

At 81st Street he turned west, and soon had the Metropolitan Museum of Art directly before him.

With its tan, neoclassical façade brightly illuminated against the coal black of Central Park, the huge building momentarily took Jack’s breath away. As night had now fallen, the building looked like a jewel on a square of black velvet.

Jack checked his watch. It was exactly quarter to five. Hurrying forward and up the front steps, he entered the renowned museum, asking himself why he didn’t take advantage of its treasures. Somewhat guiltily, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been there.

The huge multistory lobby was filled with people. Jack had to wait at the large oval information booth in the center of the room to talk to one of the museum’s employees. When he asked for the location of Shawn Daughtry’s office, he was given a map with the route drawn with a marker.

As Jack approached the office, he was pleased to see the door ajar. He walked in and found himself in an outer office with a secretary’s desk. Beyond the desk was a second door, also ajar. Jack continued in and, reaching the threshold, he rapped forcefully on the jamb.

“Aha!” Shawn voiced, leaping to his feet. “Here’s a sight for sore eyes. How the hell are you?”

Shawn moved toward Jack with his hand extended.

“I got your note,” he added, with a smile splashed across his face. “I’m so pleased you stopped by. And look at you, you look as fit as you did the last time we were together. How do you do it?”

“Mostly street basketball,” Jack said, a bit taken aback by Shawn’s exuberance.

“I should follow your example, buddy,” Shawn said. He leaned back and stuck out his already protruding gut, patting himself as if proud of it.

“So, how long’s it been?”

“I don’t remember exactly,” Jack admitted. He glanced around the spacious office whose windows looked out on Fifth Avenue. A number of early Christian artifacts sat on a large rectangular center table. An entire wall of bookshelves was filled with an impressive collection of art books. The far wall was dominated by an enormous dark green leather couch.

“Beautiful office,” Jack remarked, thinking of his own tiny cubicle.

“Before I say anything else,” Shawn began, “I want to thank you for being willing to help in this affair. It truly means a lot to me, for many reasons, but mostly because I think this extraordinary find is going to define my career.”

“I’m happy to do it,” Jack said, wondering what Shawn would think if he knew that Jack was doing it as much for himself as for Shawn. Being involved in Shawn’s project was a hundred times more absorbing than investigating alternative medicine, the results of which people didn’t want to hear.

“What’s the bottom line? Have you had a chance to ask your chief about lab space?”

“I did. There’s no problem. You and your wife will have to sign a comprehensive liability waiver, but that’s it. No one has even spoken of any charges.”

Shawn clapped his hands loud enough to make Jack jump. “All right!” he cried, before placing his palms together, closing his eyes, and tilting his head up at the ceiling in a crude mime of praying. A moment later he leaned forward and assumed a serious expression. “Jack,” he said. “I’m thrilled you got us permission to use OCME lab space, but there is one thing I do want to talk to you about. It’s an important issue, and one that His over-the-top Holiness said he’d already mentioned. I’d just like to emphasize the fact that we want this whole project to stay completely secret, especially as it pertains to the Virgin Mary. Are you okay with that? If what we expect is in the ossuary, we want to be able to break the news only after we’ve totally finished our respective studies. I want to be entirely sure of the facts when we make the announcement.”

“James was very clear about the secrecy issues. In fact, he’s probably more interested in secrecy than you. I don’t know if you are aware of this, to the extent that you should be, but he means to launch a serious campaign to convince you never to publish anything at all about the Virgin Mary’s connection to the bones. I believe he’s already mentioned to you that he’s totally convinced this is an elaborate fake: a first-century fake but a fake nevertheless, which he is certain you will learn eventually, as a consequence of your investigations.”

Shawn slapped the surface of the desk with open palms, put his head back, and let out a guffaw. When he’d regained control of himself, he shook his head in disbelief. “Isn’t that typical of James? I spent four years arguing with him about the abuses of organized religion, including papal infallibility, and now that I’m closing in on evidence to refute it, he wants to deny my use of it. What a joke.”

“He’s worried it might have a tremendously negative effect on the Church, undermining clerical authority and the reputation of the Virgin,” Jack said. “He’s also worried that he’ll be considered an accomplice because of how you tricked him into signing for the ossuary as well as his being responsible for your access to Saint Peter’s tomb. I think he believes his career could be over.”

“As far as his being responsible for access, he’s correct. But no one is going to blame him for that. This is five years after the fact, and I did produce the definitive work on Saint Peter’s tomb, which was the reason the access was granted originally. It’s the Vatican’s fault that the access has remained on the books. As far as signing for the crate, he did that entirely on his own accord. I didn’t trick him. Personally, I suspect he believed he was getting a gift, a decision made entirely on his own. I never said anything about the crate containing a gift.”

“Well, I’m not going to get between you two guys,” Jack said, not wishing to take sides. “You’re going to have to work it out yourselves. I just wanted you to know his mind-set.”

“Thanks for warning me,” Shawn said with a grumble.

“I have a question for you,” Jack said, wishing to go on to another issue.

“Ask away.”

“When do you want to start?”

“As soon as possible.”

“How about tomorrow around eight? I have to meet you to usher you through some details.”

“Fine with me, but let me give Sana a quick call, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“Not at all,” Jack said, and meant it. As usual, he was reluctant to go home for fear of what he’d find. Of course, he didn’t like the feeling and didn’t like himself for feeling it.

Shawn reached Sana at the medical school. She’d gone in that day to try to salvage some of the ongoing studies her graduate-school assistants were trying to keep afloat. It sounded as if things had not gone well in her absence. Even Jack could hear the stridency of her voice as Shawn held the receiver away from his ear. Shawn finally got a word in and told Sana the plan.

He listened intently and soon held up his thumb for Jack’s benefit.

“All right!” Shawn said, hanging up. “Eight it is. Where will we meet you?”

“In the lobby of the DNA building,” Jack said. “What about the ossuary?”

“Sana and I will stop at the residence and pick it up on the way.”

“I have to admit,” Jack said, “I’m wildly curious to see what is in the ossuary. You really think there are bones and documents in there?”

“Very confident,” Shawn said. “And if you think you are curious, you cannot imagine how curious I feel. My wife had to literally talk me out of opening it the moment we got it back to the hotel in Rome.”

“What about the letter? Do you have it here?”

“Absolutely. Would you like to see it?”

“I would,” Jack said.

Shawn retrieved a large volume from the bookcase and placed it on the central library table.

“I used this photography book of Egyptian monuments to get the letter out of Egypt. I’ll have the letter’s pages conserved, but for now it’s keeping them flat.”

Shawn exposed the first page of the letter.

“It looks like Greek,” Jack said, bending over the text.

“It looks like Greek because it is Greek,” Shawn said with a condescending chuckle.

“I thought it was going to be in Aramaic or Latin,” Jack said.

“This is not what we call Attic, or classical, Greek but Koine Greek, which was the language of the western Mediterranean during imperial Roman times.”

“Can you read it?”

“Of course I can read it,” Shawn said, taking mild offense. “But it’s rather poorly written, which makes translating it difficult. It’s easy to tell that Greek was not Saturninus’s first language.”

Jack straightened up. “Amazing! It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“I thought the same thing,” Shawn said, “which is one of the reasons I went into archaeology in the first place. It seemed to me the field was one big treasure hunt. Unfortunately, that’s more romantic than realistic, but finding this letter and then the ossuary has returned me to that romantic notion. Ironically enough, I feel truly blessed.”

“I thought you were agnostic?”

“I still am, for the most part,” Shawn said. “And you?”

“I suppose,” Jack said, thinking of all his personal trials and the damage done to any religiosity he did have. To change the subject, he pointed to the letter and asked Shawn how he’d found it.

“Do you have time for the story?” Shawn asked.

“Absolutely,” Jack said.

Shawn described the whole thing, beginning with an explanation of a codex and continuing on to his visit to Antica Abdul.

“It was pure luck that I stopped in the shop when I did,” Shawn admitted. “Rahul was about to sell it. He has the e-mail addresses of the curators of the world’s famous museums. He’s in regular contact with the who’s who of the field of ancient Near Eastern antiquities.”

“And it’s just a modest hole-in-the-wall antiquities shop in the middle of the Cairo souk?”

“That’s right,” Shawn agreed, “with ninety-nine percent of its inventory being modern fakes. It’s more of a souvenir shop than a true antiquities shop, but it obviously does have some real relics, as I’ve proved on two occasions.”

“So, you’d been there before?”

“I had,” Shawn admitted. He told Jack about his first visit ten years earlier, when he stumbled on the piece of pottery in the window. “You can imagine my shock,” Shawn continued, “when one of my Egyptian department colleagues convinced me it was not a fake. In fact, it is on display downstairs in a prominent location in the Egyptian collection.”

“Did you see the codex in the window like the pot and recognize what it was, or did he just bring it out?”

“It wasn’t in the window,” Shawn said with a smile, “and he didn’t just bring it out. We’d talked awhile, and I guess he decided I was an okay risk. It is seriously illegal to sell such a relic in Egypt.”

“Did you know it was authentic right away?”

“Absolutely.”

“Was it expensive?”

“I certainly overpaid, but I was dying to get the codex back to the hotel room to see what texts it contained.”

“Was the letter part of a text or just inserted into the codex?”

“Neither. It was sandwiched in between the leather covers to stiffen it, along with other scraps of paper. At first I was disappointed, because all I found in the codex were copies of texts that had been in previous codices. Then I remembered to check inside the cover. Bingo, I found the Saturninus letter.”

“So the letter not only explains that the ossuary contains Mary’s bones but also exactly where to locate it.”

“It does indeed. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but my last professional publication was called Saint Peter’s Burial Complex and Environs. Did you happen to read it?”

“I didn’t get a chance to read it,” Jack commented. “I thought I’d wait for the movie.”

“Okay, wise guy!” Shawn laughed. “It wasn’t meant to be a bestseller, but it was meant to be the definitive work on a very complicated structure that had been under almost continual renovation for two millennia. Currently I’m probably the most knowledgeable person on the complexities of Saint Peter’s tomb. From Saturninus’s letter, I had a good idea of where the ossuary would be in relation to one of the tunnels dug during the tomb’s last excavations.

“So, the tunnel was reasonably accessible?”

“Very much so. I knew the tunnel had not been filled in from my work at the site. My only mistake was that the ossuary was in the wall and not in the ceiling.”

“It’s an amazing story,” Jack said. “Is it your intention to open the ossuary tomorrow?”

“You bet your life! Thanks to your arranging access to a modern lab facility.”

“Would you mind if I stuck around to watch after I get you and your wife settled in the lab?”

“Not at all. We’d love to have you. In fact, if we find what we hope to find, we’ll have to have a celebration tomorrow night at our house in the West Village, and you’ll be invited. We’ll even pressure His Holiness into joining us. It will be the Three Musketeers all over again.”

“If you find what you want to find, I’m not sure James will be in the mood to celebrate,” Jack said, shaking Shawn’s hand in preparation of leaving.

“I think we’ll be able to twist his arm,” Shawn said, walking Jack to the office door. “See you tomorrow for what should turn out to be a remarkable unveiling.”

“Looking forward to it,” Jack said. Remembering a question he’d been meaning to ask, he added, “If there are bones in the ossuary, would you want the OCME anthropologist to look at them? He’s an expert on old bones, and can probably tell you some interesting things about them.”

“Why not, provided there’s no mention of whose bones they are. ‘The more information we can get, the better’ has always been my motto.”