Intervention

28

9:43 A.M., WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2008

NEW YORK CITY

By nine-forty-three a.m., James was already in his office clearing his mail and answering e-mail. It amazed him how much of the business of the archdiocese was accomplished by e-mail, and he regularly attributed most of his thirty percent productivity increase to his adaptation to the new technology. What it did magnificently was speed the spread of information and eliminate many otherwise-lengthy telephone calls. For James the latter effect was so crucial.

He’d been up that morning from well before six; he’d already read his Breviary, showered, and shaved while listening to the news. He’d said Mass with his staff and breakfasted with the Times before repairing to his study, where he now sat. At ten he was due in the “consulter’s” room, where he was to meet with the chancellor and the vicar general, where he was debating possibly dropping the first words about the ossuary problem, when the phone rang. Checking the LED screen, he snapped it up immediately because it said ARCHDIOCESE, which James knew would be Luke Hester.

“Good morning, Your Eminence,” Luke said the moment James had said hello. “I believe I have some good news for you.”

James rocked forward in his seat, his pulse quickly speeding up. He happily envisioned Gabriel the Archangel on the line. “Has he changed his mind?” James demanded gleefully. From chatting with Luke on the two previous days, James had essentially given up hope on plan B and worried that a plan C did not seem to be in the offing.

“Not yet, but I’m sure he will.”

“That is heavenly music to my ears.”

“I hope you will always hold me in high esteem for this,” Luke said. “This has not been easy.”

“I never imagined it would be,” James admitted. “Actually, I’m somewhat surprised, considering how made-up his mind was. Yet I always believe, once a faithful Catholic, always a faithful Catholic, and I always believed that about Shawn Daughtry despite his anticlerical bluster. Should I call him to congratulate him?”

“Not until tomorrow or all will be ruined.”

“Then I should gladly wait until the morning. What argument did you finally choose?”

“The solution represents less of an argument and more tactics.”

“I’m impressed. Will you ultimately tell me?”

“You will certainly be privy to the details.”

James smiled. The young man often spoke as if his only contact with the outside world was with the Bible.

“The solution was dependent on more fully comprehending what I was up against.”

“I would say that such an aphorism holds true in many conundrums.”

“What I had to learn was that Satan is involved with both the husband and the wife, and not just the husband.”

“Well, they are working on the same project,” James offered.

“It was my mistake, then,” Luke said. “I thought they were different people, but both are an occasion of sin.”

“Thank you for giving me this update,” James said. “I must confess, I was quite close to despair.”

“I was glad to have been given this opportunity to serve the Church and, most important, the Blessed Virgin.”

Luke disconnected from the archbishop. He was in the kitchen getting himself something simple to eat. Sana had not gotten up early to make him breakfast, nor had he wanted her to do so. He didn’t want to confront her that morning, now that he knew who she really was.

Content with his toast and milk, Luke headed back up to his room. There he went into the suitcase and got out the money he’d been given. It was four hundred dollars, a fortune to him, and much more than he needed. After all, it wasn’t going to be a long shopping trip, as the house was already perfect.

The temperature outside was seasonable, which was good, since he did not own the warmest coat. Back at the monastery, his work did not require him to go outside, and accordingly, during the winter, he rarely did. That morning, Luke’s biggest problem was finding a sizable hardware store where he’d find a good exterior lock. It was his idea to add another to the three that were already on the front door.

It took only a few blocks to reach one of the many commercial areas in the Village, and as soon as he did, he asked for a hardware store. Fifteen minutes later he walked into a good-sized one on Sixth Avenue not too far from Bleecker Street. As far as outdoor locks were concerned, they had many to choose from. As it turned out, Luke’s choice was the one the store attendant said would be the easiest to install.

On the way home, Luke stopped in two other stores to get the last two items on his list. They were easier than the lock, since there was no choice other than the brand, which didn’t matter. With everything he needed, he was back at the Daughtrys’ before noon.

Sana was having fun. The day was progressing as well as the previous two. That morning, earlier than she had expected, she’d finished up with the polymerase chain reaction steps and had moved over to the 3130XL genetic analyzer system. Now, by the middle of the afternoon she was expecting to not only have the full mitochondrial sequence of the ossuary individual’s DNA, but she would also have the sequences of a variety of the test areas, which were used to explore the person’s genealogical roots.

Once the automatic sequencer was doing its job, Sana had left the lab and had traveled up to Columbia to make sure all her experiments were being attended to appropriately. She’d been glad to find that everything was now in order. Every one of her four graduate students were now working responsibly, to make up for being lax when Sana had attended the Egyptian conference.

As Sana climbed from the taxi after returning from her lab at the medical school campus, she briefly thought of Luke. She’d thought of him the moment she’d awakened but had decided not to make any snap decisions about the previous evening’s incident, like telling Shawn about it. She knew that if she did tell him the man-boy would be out on his ear, and Shawn would be on the phone, complaining to the archbishop that he’d made a poor choice for an emissary. Since that would put them back to square one with the archbishop’s threats of closing them down, Sana wanted to let the episode percolate in her mind for a while for three main reasons. The first was because, in retrospect, she blamed herself to an extent. Enjoying his company as much as she did, and recognizing her own needs, she’d admitted she’d been titillated herself to some mild degree. The second reason was that although he had essentially attacked her, to her it was ninety percent a defensive act. The final reason was that she was confident he would apologize after he’d given the episode some thought, even though he’d failed to appear that morning to do so.

With the taxi paid, Sana entered the building, flashed her ID to security, who now knew her, and rode up in the elevator. In the outer part of the lab she found Jack working with Shawn on the translation of the first scroll. The unrolling had been completed that morning, which thrilled Shawn. As the translation progressed Shawn was certain that Simon was about to rehabilitate himself to a degree as a theologian in his own right. Shawn had assured the others that Simon was definitely either the first or among the first Christian Gnostics, combining the story of Jesus of Nazareth with basic Gnostic ideas, such as Jesus’ true role as a teacher of enlightenment more than a redeemer of sin.

“Did you guys come across anything particularly interesting while I’ve been away?” Sana asked as she hung up her outdoor coat in one of the coat lockers.

“We’re about to start on scroll two,” Jack answered. “We’re hoping in that one or the third one to have a mention about the bones.”

“Good luck,” Sana offered. “I’m going to head into the lab and see what I’ve got with the mitochondrial DNA. We might have some information in the next few minutes.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Shawn said, preoccupied with what he was doing.

Sana stepped into the gowning room and quickly changed. Even though the sequencer had now completed the process, she wanted no contamination into the room, as she might be running certain samples again, or even a totally new sample, depending on what she found. When she was gloved, gowned, hooded, and bootied, Sana went into the lab proper and walked directly to the sequencer. Taking the stack of pages from the printout, she sought the pages that really counted to her. It took only a few minutes. It turned out there were three, and when she finally isolated them, she glanced at each and then looked again, like a double take. Then she shook her head and looked yet again. She couldn’t believe it, but there was no way she was going to sit herself down and compare every one of sixteen thousand four hundred and eighty-four base pairs on all three pages. Feeling suddenly light-headed, Sana sat down just the same. She didn’t try to do any comparing herself — that was what computers were good for. Instead, she’d sat down to try to fathom what the results were suggesting, something Sana felt from her experience to be impossible.

The problem was this, and Sana checked again to be certain: The mitochondrial DNA sequence of the pulp of the tooth Sana had pulled from the skull coming from the ossuary matched — base pair for base pair, sixteen thousand four hundred eighty-four — with a contemporary woman, as Sana had ordered the computer to check once it had established the sequence by using the brand-new international mitochondrial library called CODIS 6.0.

Although finding a match in the contemporary world wasn’t that abnormal because identical twins matched, the problem, however, in this case was that the woman in the ossuary was more than two thousand years old! As exceptional as this match was, the second match was even more fantastic, and frankly inexplicable to Sana. She looked at it and shook her head. “This cannot be,” she said out loud. “This simply cannot be.”

Suddenly, Sana leaped to her feet and, running out of the lab and through the gowning room, emerged into the office mildly out of breath. Both Shawn and Jack had been seriously startled. Sana didn’t care. Instead she gasped, “The impossible has happened!”

Jack, who had forgiven her startling him faster than Shawn, crowded around her and took the printout page she held out to him. He was eager for an explanation.

“That’s the woman in the ossuary’s MT-DNA sequence,” Sana spat out, hitting the page Jack was holding with the back of her hand. “This is the exact same sequence in a contemporary Palestinian woman,” Sana continued, handing the second page to Jack. “And this sequence, which is also the same, is the mitochondrial sequence of Eve!” She gave Jack the final page. She was out of breath from excitement.

Jack looked up quizzically from the pages. “What do you mean the sequence of Eve?”

“It is a sequence that had been determined by a supercomputer running for weeks on end to determine the matrilineal most recent common ancestor, or MRCA,” Sana explained. “In other words, it’s the sequence of the first female ancestor, taking into account every human permutation of the normal sixteen thousand and something base pairs of the human mitochondrial DNA sequence.”

“The statistics of something like that happening would be off the charts,” Jack said.

“Exactly. That’s why this is impossible.”

“What are you two mumbling about?” Shawn asked, coming up behind the others.

Sana gave Shawn the same explanation she’d given Jack. Shawn was equally dismissive.

“Something must have gone wrong with the system,” he suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Sana said. “I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of these MT sequences. Nothing has ever gone wrong before. Why should something go wrong now?”

“Do you have any more of your sample from the PCR?” Jack asked.

“I do,” Sana replied.

“Why don’t you just run another sequencing and analysis?”

“Good idea,” Sana agreed.

“Wait a second,” Shawn said, holding up a hand. “Let me ask you two guys something, and then you tell me I’m crazy and to shut the hell up. Okay?”

“Okay,” both Sana and Jack said, nearly simultaneously.

“Okay,” Shawn said. “Here’s the only way that this statistically impossible situation could have occurred...” Shawn hesitated, looking back and forth from Sana to Jack.

“All right, already. Tell us!” Sana protested. Her pulse was still racing.

“We’re all ears,” Jack agreed. “Shoot!”

“Are you sure you’re ready?” Shawn teased, to good effect.

“I’m going back into the lab to run another sample,” Sana said, pushing away from the counter where she’d been leaning.

“Wait!” Shawn said, catching her arm. “I’ll tell you, promise!”

“I’ll give you five seconds to start or I’m going into the lab,” Sana said. She’d had enough. She wasn’t going to play Shawn’s game any longer. She was too excited.

“For a second forget the Palestinian woman. We have two identical samples: matrilineal Eve and the woman from the ossuary. Other than having the same mitochondrial DNA, what makes them similar?”

Sana glanced at Jack, who returned her stare. “They weren’t contemporaries, if that’s what you are implying,” Sana said. “Matrilineal Eve is projected back many hundreds of thousands of years.”

“No, no,” Shawn said. “Their similarity is not that. Let me put it another way. My belief, thanks to Saturninus’s letter, is that the bones in the ossuary are those of Mary, the Mother of Jesus of Nazareth. Let’s assume for a moment they are, which would make them extraordinarily holy objects to many, many people. Do you follow me so far?”

“Of course,” Sana said impatiently.

“Now, if we had some bones from matrilineal Eve here as well, how would they be similar, besides having the same mitochondrial DNA sequence?”

“Perhaps they’d have the same nuclear DNA sequence as well,” Jack suggested.

“Maybe, but that’s not what I want to hear,” Shawn said, as impatient as Sana. “Think from a theological perspective!”

Jack shook his head while looking at Sana. She shook her head as well. “You are going to have to tell us what you want to hear.”

“Theologically, they were both made directly by God the Father. Remember the Catholic feast James mentioned to us this past Sunday that he celebrated? It was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which was about the creation of Mary to be the sinless Mother of Christ. Well, Eve was also sinless at first. As the first female, there was no one else around to create her but God himself. Now, how many recipes, so to speak, do you think God might have for humans? My guess would be one, and in terms of mitochondrial DNA sequence, what we have here is the one. He used the same recipe for both Mary and Eve, which makes it interesting they turned out so differently, since they are twins.”

For a few moments no one spoke. Each was lost in his own thoughts until Jack broke the silence: “If what you say is the case, you two have inadvertently yet scientifically corroborated the existence of the divine.”

Both Sana and Shawn laughed gleefully and then hugged despite Sana’s barrier gown, hat, gloves, and booties. “Our journal articles are going to be classics even before their publications,” Shawn blurted. He then broke away from Sana. “I have to get to work! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to wait to finish all three scrolls. I’ve never been more excited in my life about a couple of papers.”

“I’m going to run several more samples, just to be totally sure of the results,” Sana announced.

“And while you guys do that,” Jack said, getting to his feet, “I’m going to head home somewhat early to insist my wife take a break.” Actually, Jack had something more specific in mind. He’d called the pediatric oncologist that morning who was in charge of the neuroblastoma protocol at Memorial to ask, in light of JJ’s several good days, if Jack should bring the boy in for blood work to check his level of mouse antibody.

“Congratulations,” Jack called out as he opened the door to the hall. Both Shawn and Sana waved in response. Sana was at that moment heading back into the gowning room to regown. Shawn was back at the painstaking unrolling work. “What time in the morning?” Jack yelled out.

“Let’s say ten,” Shawn yelled back. “There may be some celebrating tonight.”

“By the way,” Jack yelled, “I’d hold off telling James about the mito DNA until it’s confirmed.”

“That’s probably the merciful thing to do,” Shawn agreed.

Jack was about to leave when he thought of something else. Since yelling from the doorway was potentially disturbing to others in the lab, he returned to the office and approached Shawn. Jack could see Sana in the gowning room in the middle of changing.

“I forgot about the Palestinian woman that also matched,” Jack said. “What on earth does that say?”

“Good question,” Shawn said, rolling back his chair. He quickly stuck his head into the gowning room and asked Sana her opinion.

“She has to be a direct matrilineal relative of the woman in the ossuary,” Sana said. “It’s possible, because the half-life for a single nucleotide mutation or SNP for mitochondrial DNA is two thousand years. That would be my guess,” Sana said, completing her dressing.

“Did you hear that?” Shawn asked Jack, letting the gowning-room door close.

“I did,” Jack said. “It’s curious to think about. I wonder if she has any idea, or if anyone had an idea. It even makes me wonder if she’s a Christian or a Muslim.”

“Maybe one of us should look her up sometime,” Shawn said, “although I can’t help but have the feeling the less she was told, the better.”

“It’s a curious idea,” Jack said. He then took his leave for the second time. As he rode down in the elevator, another associated thought passed through his mind. One aspect of alternative medicine he had not even touched on was faith healing, and the reason was that he gave it even less chance of being efficacious than some of the other methods. A few times, while idly channel surfing on the television in his old life, he’d briefly watched as TV evangelists put their hands on supposed patients’ foreheads, which would cause the people to fall back, limp yet cured. Yet if someone had the same DNA as the Mother of Jesus of Nazareth, Jack couldn’t help but wonder if she could heal others.

The elevator reached the first floor, and Jack got off. Almost immediately, thoughts about faith healing evaporated from his mind, replaced by thoughts concerning the antibody levels in JJ’s body.