Робин Кук - Intervention

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.