The Ambassador was about fifty years old. He had developed expensive tastes since he had arrived in England five years before. He only wore the best suits from Savile Row, today's blue and white pin-stripe being complemented perfectly by the folded white handkerchief in the front chest pocket. Completely bald, the Ambassador's pate shone like a polished bowling ball in the bright lights of his office.
Although he claimed to be a direct descendant of the twentieth century president Lyndon B. Johnson, Mike knew that in reality he came from New Jersey and a very different and more humble background. His sources were seldom wrong. Nevertheless, he was the Ambassador of America in England, and that made him the most senior ranking American in the country.
As a ranking Colonel in the CIA, the Ambassador was Mike’s senior field agent, and Mike reported directly and only to him.
“What brings you here again Mike...it’s been five months since we last met hasn’t it?” the Ambassador launched a very subtle dig at Mikes recent track record, having failed in the past year to get his teeth into anything really interesting. The last time he had met him was when Mike had copied some research papers on the latest plasma engine the physicists at Oxford had been developing. True, that information had been worth a lot to the CIA, and to American industry in general, but for the budget he made available to Mike, he expected a little more.
Mike shifted uneasily in his chair. In the quiet embassy overlooking Grosvenor Square in the heart of London, sitting in the oak panelled and brown walnut-furnitured antique office with a history that went back hundreds of years, what he had to tell the Colonel seemed so unreal. Maybe unbelievable. Yet it was imperative that the Ambassador believed in what he was just about to say.
“Are you a religious man, Ambassador Johnson?” Field agents never addressed each other by their rank, no matter where they were. In the field, that would be tantamount to stupidity.
“Yes, well, I think it would be fair to say I was. Although my wife may disagree at times. Why?”
“Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” Mike enquired.
“Yes, I do as a matter of fact. This is all rather personal. Where is this leading to young man?” the Ambassador stirred his tea with an antique silver teaspoon.
“Would you like to meet Him?”
“Who? You mean ‘Him?’…as in Christ?…” The Colonel pushed back in his chair and looked at Mike directly. “Have you taken leave of your senses, boy. Explain what you mean. Give me a clear, succinct report. Now.”
“I’m sorry Ambassador, it’s just that what I have to say may sound rather far-fetched, but I believe it to be true. It has come to my attention that a group in Oxford, financed by the Institute for Genetic Evolution for the Greater Good of Mankind, and led by a Professor Mathew Wainright, is planning to take genetic samples of the blood of Jesus Christ from a religious artefact known as the Crown of Thorns. Are you familiar Ambassador, with what the Crown of Thorns is meant to be?”
“Yes, I am. Continue. Please.”
“From this material their plan is to create a clone of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, even maybe part of God himself, and call him their Messiah. At the very least, the effect of cloning Jesus Christ is to try bringing the Messiah back to a world that has predicted and awaited his return for two thousand years. In summary, if the Oxford team succeed, we could be looking at the start of the Second Coming of Christ, the return of the Messiah…”
“Enough! You are a CIA agent, not a religious zealot. Stick to the facts, not conjectures.” The Ambassador shook his head, putting his cup of tea down gently into his china saucer and raising himself from his chair and crossing to the window, his hands behind his back. He peered through the curtains into the park in the middle of the Square, waiting for Mike to continue.
“I have a contact within the team proposing to do this. They genuinely believe that they have the capability to do it. There are only two issues to hinder them. Firstly, although they believe they have the genuine Crown of Thorns, they have not yet established if there are any traces of blood on the thorns of the Crown. Secondly, if they do find some blood, they cannot know for certain whether or not it will belong to Jesus Christ...”
“And thirdly, if I may give a comment of my own, as an atheist, even if there was a man called Jesus Christ, who is to say he was not just an ordinary man, and has nothing to do with God, or any god?”
“Thank you for your personal observations Dr Sanderson, however, you must realise that that debate is one which is already two thousand years old, and not one that concerns us. History and God will be the judge of that. What concerns me now are the facts!”
Mike remained silent. The Ambassador was clearly rattled, and Mike knew the best thing to do was stay silent while his commanding officer considered what he had just been told.
For a few moments the Ambassador continued to look out off the window, seemingly staring far out into space. Then he returned to his desk and faced Mike again.
“Do you have a recommendation, Mike? You normally do…...” He asked, a little more amiably than before.
Mike leant forward, placing his tea cup and its china saucer carefully onto the desk top with both his hands, and pausing for a moment before continuing his report.
“Yes, I do. Over the past few days since I learned of this project I have given it a great deal of thought.” He paused momentarily, to give emphasis to what he had to say next. “I believe that the CIA must immediately approve an operation to snatch the Crown of Thorns from the laboratory in Oxford and must implement its own programme to clone Jesus Christ. It is unacceptable to the future of our country that a member state of the European Union should be allowed to create and grow a clone of Jesus Christ before we do…"
"…Who can say what the political and religious implications of such a program would be, were it to be successful? What effect would it have upon the balance of power, if Great Britain was able to clone Jesus Christ? I'm not a religious man myself, and I'm not going to suggest that the British would be able to enlist any supernatural powers from a cloned Jesus Christ which would help their nation, but realistically we have to recognise the positive effect his presence would have on the focus they would receive from other countries and corporate investors. I could easily see how it could be extremely detrimental to the American trade…"
"…No, if we cannot prevent the Oxford group from creating a clone, we at least must take the lead in the clone war and create and grow our own first...and prevent others from doing so in the future. If Jesus Christ is going to come back for a second time, this time round he’s going to be an American!”
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Chapter Eighteen
I.G.E.G.G.M. laboratory
Oxford, England
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Jason couldn’t believe how well the project was going so far. Since he had the idea in the Chapel of Sainte Chapelle everything had just happened as if it were meant to be. Resources, funding, equipment, support...it had all just fallen into place. And Mathew, as Professor Wainright now insisted Jason called him, was being just incredible. His support was total, including additional fellowship money from the I.G.E.G.G.M. coffers. The project had become almost full-time now, and he hardly had any time to devote to the Pharaoh project, which had now already advanced into the second phase. All three fertilised eggs had been placed in their surrogate mothers, and the pregnancies were advancing well.
Professor Wainright had started to spend all the available hours he had with Jason and the others in the lab, working on the Haissem project. As the days passed the team had integrated well together, bound by a growing and profound awareness that the work they had embarked upon could be the most important scientific project ever undertaken by mankind. Or at least, should it become public knowledge what they were doing, it could certainly become one of the most dangerous ever undertaken.
Each member of the team realised the importance of secrecy and except for Lydia, not a single person out
side the project had the faintest idea of the true nature of their work.
Although Prof. Wainright was the official ‘front man’ for the project, there was an unspoken understanding, that when and if the authenticity of the Crown was proven, Jason would take charge of the future of the project, directing the others as he believed necessary. It was Jason’s project. In the meantime Prof. Wainright was in charge of co-ordinating and directing the first phase, that of proving the Crown’s authenticity, determining the presence of any blood residues, and extracting them correctly.
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“Jason, have you got the results from the NMR scanning?” the Professor asked at the early Monday morning meeting.
“Yes…and they’re excellent…they were completed on Saturday afternoon, and I compiled the results on Saturday night, and ran an analysis of them yesterday. And this is what I found...” Jason swivelled round in his chair and pointed the remote control at the large plasma display on the wall opposite. It immediately sprang to life, a wall of colour filling the little room they were gathered in. The others all turned to the screen onto which the compiled image of the Crown’s NMR analysis was being relayed from the computer.
“..as you can see,” Jason continued, “…I’ve compiled the data from the run over a wide spectrum of frequencies. In the old days, NMR depended upon the resonance set up from water molecules, but modern scanners can scan across the resonances produced by a much wider range of chemical structures. For this run I set the NMR to scan at the frequencies of the amino acids and proteins which build up blood cells. Theoretically, if there was any blood absorbed by the material in the membranes of the Crown I would be able to map the location of it three-dimensionally...”
“ …At the moment what you can see is just the Crowns image compiled in three dimensions from the scan produced at a number of different frequencies, none of them blood related. As you can see the image we get appears transparent, and we can see through the surface of the thorn’s structure and inside the thorns and out the other side...but if I superimpose the frequencies that interest us, we should be able to see everywhere where blood has been absorbed...Before I do that though, the places you now see marked by the arrows on the screen are where we visually saw discolorations on the thorns when we first examined them and we hoped it could be due to blood absorption...and now…here we can see if the NMR detected any blood samples…”
There was a small gasp from the room. The image on the screen had been a white ghostly three-dimensional skeleton of the Crown against a grey background. But as Jason pressed another button on the remote control, the computer superimposed the next set of data on the existing images and several blue patches appeared on the white skeletal areas, two of them relating exactly to where the arrows were pointing.
“What you can see here is confirmation that on the two thorns we were highlighting, two of the discoloured areas are caused by blood absorption. But also, there are four other areas underneath the skin of the thorns where blood has been absorbed into the plant material itself. Two of these patches are found on another thorn. In total, we see that blood samples can be found on three separate thorns."
There was silence in the room. The news was more than they could have hoped for.
“…If I may continue…” Jason said smiling. “I have also done the analysis on the holographic images Louisa obtained. If you will look at the screen on the desk in front, you can see the standard hologram of the Crown at normal light frequencies.” Jason leant forward and pressed a button, and the screen came alive.
Although it was a flat screen, projected out from it was a three-dimensional image of the Crown. It was identical to the real crown, the same size, colour…everything. A person just walking into the room at that point would have seen the Crown of Thorns floating in mid-air and thought that is was the real thing somehow floating in space. The hologram was amazing. Don couldn’t help but reach forward and try to touch the image, and as his fingers wafted through empty space in front of the screen he whistled aloud.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s sooo real!”
“…If you think that’s good…watch this...” And slowly the image of the Crown began to rotate in free space. “ …and now… for my piece-de-resistance, feast your eyes on this...” And Jason pressed another button on the keyboard of the computer. Some red patches immediately appeared on the surface of the Crown in the hologram in front of them.
“I’ve colour coded it for effect…but when I compile the hologram at the expected resonance frequency of blood residue, I get a hologram only of where blood is to be found, and by superimposing that image on the hologram obtained at normal visible frequencies, we can see where the blood residue would be...
He paused for a moment to let the impact of what they were seeing sink in, then continued.
“Okay, if you compare the images you can see now on the screen with the ones from the NMR on the plasma screen, you can see they’re almost identical...they match!”
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This was exactly the news they had been hoping for. They had found blood samples, and knew exactly where to retrieve them from.
The only question to be answered now, was whether the Crown of Thorns was authentic or not. Was it real? If it wasn’t real, the blood samples would be meaningless.
“Truly excellent, Jason. Fantastic work. But what time frame in history does the Crown originate from and where does it come from geographically? These are two equally important questions that we need to answer…Don, what are your conclusions from the carbon and chemical dating?”
Don swivelled in his chair. It was his turn to give his report. He hoped he wouldn’t disappoint them. He had worked long and hard with the physics, chemistry and biology departments of the university to ensure that no mistakes had been made. They had run extensive carbon dating analysis, and had analysed and dated several of the chemicals that were found in the make-up of the thorns. The chemical analysis used a new dating technique that had been pioneered in Oxford only three years before, so as such, his report was state-of-the-art, based upon the latest techniques available. Don leant forward and slipped a micro-disk into the computer and instantly a series of charts appeared on the overhead plasma screen.
“First of all we did some carbon dating. As you can see from the graph, all the points came back indicating a time frame of about 27-35 AD, during which time the thorns would have died and stopped absorbing any fresh carbon. Next, we did tests on three chemicals found in the constituent make up of the thorns, focussing on the decay of several radioactive isotopes found in one of the proteins in the thorns…a new technique developed here in Oxford…and these all point to a time frame of 28-34AD for the death of the plant. These results are all shown on the next chart.”
The screen went dark for a second, and then was instantly refreshed with a fresh set of data from the other research.
“I sent you electronic copies of all this information earlier this morning, so you can draw your own conclusions later if you wish. But from the work I did with the other departments, I would conclude that the Crown of Thorns comes exactly from the period in which we would require it to, were we to postulate that it could in fact be the Crown of Thorns which sat upon Jesus Christ’s head at his crucifixion!”
“Don. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. Of course I expected nothing less from you, but it's nice to know you’re still as good as ever...”, Mathew Wainright praised the second member of the team.
Everything was coming together. The data looked too good to be true, but it was all there. The only thing that remained was to try and establish where in the world the Crown of Thorns came from.
“Louisa. It’s over to you. Have you got any good news for us?”
“Thanks Professor. It turns out that I do,” Louisa beamed. She was the last one to report, but her information was just as important as anyone else’s.
<
br /> “I took the Crown to the biology department and we examined it under the microscope and cross-matched it against all known types of thorns. Both past and present. It turns out that the thorns we have in the Crown are fairly unique and come from a single variety of the thorn plant that historically was only to be found growing in the land now known as Israel. We took some pollen samples from where one of the thorns was broken, where pollen had blown into and become embedded in the split in the thorn, and we cross-matched and dated the pollen samples to historical records of other samples of pollen found in clothes taken from tombs throughout the regions of Egypt, Syria and Israel, dating back to the middle of the first century before Christ’s birth. In the samples taken from the Crown we observed two distinct types of pollen. One quite prolific at that time throughout Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel…”
“…The second, however, was of a type fairly unique to the area around Jerusalem. The fact that we could observe this type of pollen indicates that the plant from which the thorns were taken, either grew or was present at some stage in or around Jerusalem. Basically, there is little doubt that the object tested, i.e. the Crown of Thorns… once spent part of its history in or around Jerusalem, between 30AD and 70AD. We couldn’t get more accurate than that, I’m sorry. I haven’t put together my final report yet, but I’ll send it to you as soon as possible. All I can say now in summary, is that...well, we have proven it comes from the same area that Christ would have been in when he was crucified. And we have also shown that it was there about the time Christ was crucified!” Louisa beamed. She hadn’t been expected to tie down any dates, just the geographical origin. That last part had been an extra.
The Professor smiled at her. He was very proud of her. He had selected the best for this project and he had got the best.
“So, team...what we have shown in the space of the past month…with the help of all our colleagues here in Oxford, is that the object we have is made of a type of thorn that originates from the area around Jerusalem, and that it comes from the time when Christ was crucified. Whether or not it is the Crown of Thorns that sat upon Christ’s head we may never know. However, in addition to determining its age and origin we have also found several samples of blood on the Crown.” The Professor paused, looking around the faces of his team.
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