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The visit to his boss in the CIA building the next day was like a trip down memory lane. Nowadays he didn’t make it over to the old building as much as he would have liked, but today he had the perfect excuse. Before he briefed the President he wanted to brief Daniel, his real boss. As he had expected, Daniel gave him full authority to proceed as he thought fit, and later that day Tim sat down in the big leather chair in his office and dialled the President’s private mobile number. It would give Tim the greatest pleasure to call up the President and inform him there was a full blown Code Green operation on. Top Level National Security and all that.
“I’m sorry, I know it means that you’ll have to cut your golf trip short, but I think you will appreciate the reason when I brief you. Tomorrow at two? …That’s fine sir...And you sir...and enjoy the rest of your game!” Tim enjoyed the subtle irony that after the President had ruined his Redemption Day holiday, that he had just cut the President’s holiday short, and summoned him to a Code Green in Washington.
The President stormed into the office the next day, still smarting from having lost the game the day before. President Jamieson hated to lose. At anything. He always did his best not to lose. And sometimes Tim knew that clouded his judgement, which was dangerous.
As he walked across the room towards Tim's desk, he threw his suit jacket onto one of the chairs. His dress sense today was fairly typical of his everyday clothes; dark blue trousers held up by dark red braces; a light blue Oxford shirt with a yellow tie; gold cufflinks and black polished shoes. President Jamieson wasn't very tall, only about five foot seven, but his muscles were overdeveloped from years in the army gym and his large chest strained to burst out of the shirt. His bristly blonde hair, still crew cut in the typical army regulation style, complimented his piercing blue eyes. A two inch scar, the result of a bullet wound in Desert Storm, added to the character of his tanned face. The man was small, but he oozed power and quickly made his presence felt wherever he went.
“So this better be good Tim. Do you realise how good the weather is down there today? It’s perfect! And it’s bloody raining here again. What the hell has happened to the weather these days?”
Tim thought momentarily about pointing out the latest report on Climate Change effects, but realised this wasn’t the time. Anyway, the President didn’t care about anything that would penalise his plans to rebuild their industries. Thanks to the coal burning factories he had authorised all along the Canadian border, Washington now spent most of the year in a semi-tropical climate like the rain forests of Brazil. And everyone knew it was directly attributable to the President’s cheap energy programme.
“As I said, I think you’ll be interested in this one. This could be just what you’ve been looking for to put the country back on the road to greatness.”
“What do you mean? For fuck’s sake Tim, I’ve told you about that before. I will not, I repeat, I WILL NOT hear you talk negatively of this great country of mine. America is still the greatest country in the world, and always has been...”
Out of the corner of his eye President Jamieson suddenly saw the holographic image of the Crown floating above the table in the centre of the room.
“...and WHAT, if I may ask, what the hell is that?” he said pointing at the rotating three-dimensional image.
“That’s what you’re here to see. It’s a three dimensional hologram of the Crown of Thorns. The Crown of Thorns that Jesus Christ was forced to wear on his head when he was crucified.” Tim’s voice was calm and matter of fact.
The President glanced at Tim and then returned his attention to the floating Crown. He crossed back to the big round table and leaned forward over the hologram, supporting his weight on two-balled fists planted firmly on the table top. He put his nose as close to the hologram as possible, and then he lifted one hand off the table and tried to grab the image with his fingers. His hand met thin air and passed through into the space beyond.
“Bloody hell…I’ve never seen anything like that before! How do they do it?”
The President had forgotten his anger and was now behaving like a teenage kid, wafting his hand back and forward through the image hanging in the air above the light-box, which lay flat on the table top beneath.
It took an hour to brief the President on the rest of the details, and by the time he was finished the President was completely mesmerised. Tim had never really seen him like this before, and for a second or two he was frightened by the President's reaction. The President was NEVER lost for words. This had been the first time it had ever happened, or at least, the first time in all the years Tim had known him. Unfortunately the silence didn’t last long, and two minutes later the President was back on his feet pacing round Tim’s office issuing instructions.
“I want you to report to me directly on this every time there’s a development. This project takes precedence over all the others. Funding…whatever it takes...just make sure you keep me informed. I’m putting you in charge of the whole project. I’m looking to you Tim, to bring the Messiah back to America, and then together we will lead the world’s premiere nation back to glory and freedom, and its rightful destiny!”
Tim hadn’t seen that glazed look in the President’s eyes for years and to be quite honest, he didn’t know if he liked it. It made him feel uneasy. But the important thing was, Tim had got the Presidential blessing. The project had been approved.
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Chapter Twenty One
Institute for Genetic Evolution for the Greater Good of Mankind
Oxford, England
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Don had waited patiently while Jason and Louisa spent the past week recovering samples of the blood residues from each of the thorns on the Crown. Exactly how they did it Don didn’t know. All he knew was that during the day they spent most of their time working with the Crown in the biology lab in the University, only bringing the Crown back to the confines and protection of the I.G.E.G.G.M. lab late at night time.
Under the pretext of working late, Don was always the last person from the group to leave the lab in the evening. As soon as the others left, he found himself drawn to sitting and staring at the Crown for hours on end, thinking and pondering the meaning of life.
Just being in the same room as the Crown filled Don with a host of emotions he couldn’t quite understand.
From the moment he had seen it that first day it had arrived in Oxford he had felt drawn to it. It made him feel strange. There was just something about it. And it wasn’t a bad feeling. Don had decided it was actually quite a good feeling.
In an attempt to understand what it was he felt, he had even been to Blackwell's, the big bookshop in the centre of Oxford, and had bought his first and only ever copy of the Bible. He had taken to reading it at night time in his cluttered and messy bedsit before going to sleep, and on two occasions he'd actually cancelled a darts evening so that he could read and digest as much of the book as possible. It was as if the Crown was trying to tell him something and the Bible held the key.
Late one night when no one else was around he had felt compelled to touching the Crown of Thorns, picking it up and holding it in his gloved hands. He had felt electricity running through his hands, a rush which spread through his body from head to toe, followed by a feeling of great sadness which in turn was replaced by a tremendous sense of peace.
Don had never been a religious man. He was only a child when both his parents had died and he had been brought up by his elder sister. He was a quiet man, had few friends and mostly kept himself to himself. His only real love in life was a good pint and a game of darts, and when people saw him standing at the bar on a Sunday afternoon playing with the local team, no one would ever have realised that he was one of the cleverest people in the country.
About two years ago, he’d had a girlfriend, but that had only lasted six months before she had moved to another part of the country and it had slowly fizzled out.
She had been a member of a rival darts team, and it had been love at first sight when they'd met at a league match. When Don had looked at her for the first time, a little voice in his head had shouted 'one hundred and eighty!' and that was it, he was in love. Making love to her that night after the match had been the closest he had come to having a religious experience.
Until now that is. As he looked at the Crown for the hundredth time through the protective glass surrounding it in its case, Don felt totally at peace with himself, and a knowledge that what they were doing was right. He would even have used the word “blessed”, but since he had never ever been to church he didn’t really know what the word meant.
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It was Don that had worked with the Prof. in developing the latest cloning techniques, and his name was on the original published paper that had announced to the world their first success in creating a cloned human baby.
But Jason’s insight into how to take dried blood residue, treat it and generate genetic material for the cloning process was pure brilliance. He took his hat off to the young man, and he looked forward to working with him over the next stages of the Haissem project.
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When Jason and Louisa came back with the Crown that Sunday evening, they brought with them the hermetically sealed box containing the extracted blood residues. Don and Jason immediately set about analysing them together.
They worked late into the night, and it was two o’clock in the morning before they realised how late it actually was.
“I think we’d better call it a day...we can’t afford to make any stupid mistakes through tiredness. Let’s go home and meet back here in the morning at 10am?” Jason suggested.
“You go ahead, you’ve had a long day already. I’ll just lock up and put everything away.” Don replied. He didn’t feel at all tired, and he didn’t want to go home. When he was sure the others had left the building he returned to his work. He knew exactly what he had to do, and the process was relatively simple from now on. The blood samples had been prepared and samples from each had been put in solution. Before going home that night Don wanted to identify the blood group of the samples.
It was another two hours before the results were clear. He checked his work twice before he had satisfied himself that his conclusions were right. There was no mistake. They had samples of two different types of blood.
In itself, this wasn’t a major problem. It was an annoyance, because now they would have to split the project into two separate streams, working both as if they could each be a sample of blood from Christ, if indeed, either of them was. However what had made him check his results several times, and question whether or not he was really so tired that his judgement was becoming impaired, was the fact that although one of the samples was of Type ‘A’ blood, the other…well, it was of a type he had not been able to identify. He had never seen anything like it before.
It was to all intents and purposes a completely new category of blood type.
Which was impossible.
“Or was it?”, Don said to himself while staring out of the window as the first rays of the morning sun broke over the horizon and filled the room. “What type of blood is God meant to have?”
At six am in the morning, Don wrote up his notes from the evening, summing up in the last line the most momentous discovery of the twenty-first century. “…Today at 4am in the morning I identified a brand new and hitherto unrecorded new classification of blood type. For the purposes of this project I have called it Type G. After “G” for God.”
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“What? A new blood type? Show me!” Prof. Wainright demanded excitedly at the Monday meeting later that morning. Don had gone home, showered, shaved, had breakfast and returned by 8am. He was buzzing, adrenaline still shooting through his veins, the true significance of what he had discovered only now beginning to dawn on him.
The team huddled round the microscope each eager to peer down the eyepiece themselves, even though the image was simultaneously projected onto the large plasma screen on the wall at the end of the lab. As each person in turn took their turn in looking at the G-type blood for the first time, a reflective mood fell on the group.
Each of them knew what it was they were looking at, but it was Don that broke the silence.
“I’ve checked and rechecked and I’ve also done a computer scan of all known blood types. The result is negative. No known animal has this type of blood, and it resembles human blood most of all. The last thing I did last night before I left was to start a DNA scan, and as you can see from the screen now…” Don flicked a button on the computer keyboard, “…the computer has completed the assembly of the first DNA base…and it is human. There’s no doubt now that what we are looking at is a form of human blood. But it’s a type never seen before, or even thought possible.”
“Which in a way is what you would expect if we really are looking at the blood of Jesus Christ!” Jason interrupted.
“ Exactly. What were we expecting? I would say that even though we’ve got two different blood samples, the ‘G’ type is the one most likely to be the blood of Christ...” Don beamed, his eyes alive, and beads of sweat glistening on his forehead.
“Okay, let’s all sit down for a minute and think about this…” The Prof. tried to calm them down, and bring some order back to the meeting.
“Let’s think rationally. We’ve now identified two blood types. One normal one, and one very unusual one. Very unusual I’ll grant you that, but that in itself doesn’t prove that it is the blood of Christ. We can’t be sure of that. And likewise, even though the other sample is normal, we can’t discount it completely. We have to ask ourselves if there is the slightest possibility that the G-type blood is actually a legitimate blood type that has simply died out over the past two thousand years. I can’t say for sure that that isn’t possible. We also have to consider if the situation could actually be reversed, i.e. that the normal ‘A’ type sample is the blood of Christ and the other type could just be the blood of a very special man that medicine has never seen before? Could that not also be so? And of course, there is still the possibility that neither sample belongs to Jesus Christ.”
The group was silent.
“Okay, so we have to proceed with both samples. I think we all know that.” Jason agreed, trying to take control of the meeting. From now on, it was his responsibility to lead the group, and he was desperate to prove himself to the others and gain their respect.
“So what do we do next Jason?” Don asked, giving Jason the opportunity to tell him what to do, even though he already knew.
“Well, I would like you to complete your work on constructing the DNA bases, and I’ll prepare for the next stage. Professor Wainright, can I ask you to work with Louisa on getting the embryo’s we need ready for three weeks on Thursday? Once I get the DNA bases from Don later today, it’ll take me three weeks to create the chromosome set, and then we’ll be ready to rock and roll…”
“No problem, Jason...it’ll be my pleasure.” Prof. Wainright nodded, and Louisa smiled back at him.
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Chapter Twenty Two
Oxford, England
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In spite of the distance between them, the relationship between Jason and Lydia had been getting stronger week by week. Lydia had managed to rig up a satellite connection and now they could speak and view each other almost every night on their Polycom video conferencing app on their iPads. Lydia had been able to come back to Oxford to meet Jason once every three weeks, and in the coming months she was hoping to spend a month or two working in the British Museum, helping to supervise the recording and preservation of some of the items recovered from the tomb which had been allocated to Professor Wainright as part of his share of the treasure. At least that would give them the chance to see a little more of each other.
Lydia’s latest visit coincided with Don�
��s great discovery, and when Jason got back to his flat later that night, Lydia was waiting expectantly for him. While she had been waiting she had whipped up an incredible meal from the contents of the cupboards, and as Jason walked in through the door she handed him a rather large glass of Cabernet Shiraz.
“To the Haissem project!”
“And you!” replied Jason before taking a mouthful of the red wine.
“So...how did it go today? Any progress?” she asked.
“A little. I’ll tell you about it later. Afterwards… ”
“After what?”
“...After this...”
Taking the glass from her hand and placing it on the dining room table, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her through to the bedroom. Like most new couples, they couldn’t get enough of each other, and spent vast amounts of their time together in the bedroom making love. Only afterwards, as they finished the glasses of wine and they lay in bed propped up beside each other on the pillows, did Jason tell Lydia what they had discovered.
“You’re kidding...you’re bloody kidding...no pun intended, but that’s, well, that’s bloody incredible!”
“Please Lydia, I’ve dealt with enough blood today,” said Jason laughing at Lydia’s enthusiasm.
“Sorry. So what happens next?”
“We make two different clones from the blood samples we’ve got, hoping that one of them is the blood from Jesus Christ.”
“But, it’s obvious. It’s the G-type blood. It’s got to be!”
“Okay, Dr Lydia. If you say so.” he said, making a little face at her, to which Lydia responded by jumping on top of the bed and hitting him hard with her pillow.
After dinner they made love again, and as they lay in front of the open gas fire in his living room, the light from the flickering flames casting a golden orange glow across Lydia’s beautiful naked body, she looked up at him with a question in her eyes.
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