by Peter James
108
Friday, 17 March
Just after 5 p.m. Ross Hunter crouched down uncomfortably beside Zack Boxx on the manky beige carpet. The cat was prowling around at the far end of the room, looking unsettled. Ross had never seen Boxx so animated.
On the screen in front of them were rows of numbers and letters, totally meaningless to him. Boxx pointed at some of them, excitedly, running his finger along a row. ‘See that DNA match?’
‘Not really,’ Ross replied.
Boxx refreshed the screen and a new set of figures, equally meaningless to Ross, appeared. ‘How about this?’
‘Nope.’
He again refreshed the screen. ‘Any of these?’
‘Nope.’
Boxx pushed his mop of hair back and looked at Ross as if he was a simpleton. ‘OK, let’s go back to the first image.’
He tapped the keypad, and within seconds the screen filled with rows of figures. ‘You’re lucky, Ross. I think we’ve got really, really lucky! With the standard DNA, the mitochondrial and the Y-STR.’
‘In what way?’
‘In every way! OK, the first is through the mitochondrial DNA database held by the Los Angeles Police Department. I’ve got a match with the mitochondrial you gave me. The seven mutations are present in both profiles.’
‘You have – with whom?’
‘A lady called Arlene Katzenberg.’
‘Arlene Katzenberg?’
‘Yes. Does her name mean anything to you?’
‘Not immediately. What did she do to have her DNA on file with the LAPD?’
‘All will become clear.’
Ross stared at the screen in silence. Mitochondrial. DNA that went down through the female line, unaltered. If the DNA from the chalice and from the tooth were really from Jesus Christ, this meant that Arlene Katzenberg, whoever she might be, was directly descended from the bloodline of Jesus.
‘Brilliant work, Zack.’
‘OK, now take a look at this. You gave me Y-STR – the Y-chromosome short tandem repeat DNA – which descends unaltered, like the mitochondrial, but from the male bloodline. I’ve got a profile match here too, again with the seven mutations, to a doctor called Myron Mizrahi, born in La Hoya, California. Also on file with the LAPD.’
‘What’s the reason they have his on file?’
‘All will become clear.’ Boxx gave him a smug look. ‘You’re going to see that I’ve earned my money.’
‘I think you have.’
Ross’s brain was racing. Dr Myron Mizrahi. Direct descendant, through the male bloodline, of Jesus Christ. So many possibilities were occurring to him.
‘What’s your view on religion, Zack? Do you have any beliefs?’
‘Quantum physics is kind of my religion.’
‘Not an area I can get my head around.’
Boxx rocked his head backwards and forwards, excitedly. ‘You should try. Study it. It’s like – probably the key to everything.’
‘If anyone could understand it!’
‘There’s all kinds of stuff going on in quantum physics no one can understand, yep? Connections across the world that no one can explain. Stuff that is beyond coincidence, beyond chance. Supernatural? Could it be the work of an Intelligent Designer?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘You know the multiverse theory?’
‘I’ve heard the term but I don’t know what it means.’
‘For life to exist on our planet it requires an unbelievably intricate number of elements all combining. The simplest example is this: if we were only a small distance closer to the sun we’d be fried – life on this planet could not exist. A bit further away and it would be too cold to support life. And there’s endless more. The mathematical, physical and chemical calculations required for life as we know it to exist are just – mind-boggling. So, the multiverse theory is that when the Big Bang happened it created hundreds, maybe millions, maybe billions of universes just like ours. The theory holds that in just one of them it’s possible that all the elements combined, by sheer chance, to enable life as we know it to exist. Our planet, earth.’
‘You subscribe to that?’
‘Nope, I think it’s bollocks. There’s a category mistake here. The much more interesting stuff for me, in quantum physics, is the effect of the observer. That if you look at something, the fact that you are looking at it changes it.’
‘God watching us? Changes us?’
‘Who knows? Either that or human life is the result of a pretty big coincidence.’
‘What did you mean by a category mistake?’
‘Yep, OK. So, it’s kind of a Paley’s Watch kind of a thing –’
‘Paley’s Watch? You’re losing me again.’
‘OK, take a Ford motor car dropped into a remote part of the world where a man who has never seen a car, and knows nothing about modern engineering, looks at it. He might imagine there is a god – Mr Ford – inside the engine making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly, it was because Mr Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it wouldn’t start it was because Mr Ford didn’t like him and was angry about something, OK?’
Ross frowned, wondering where this was going.
‘So, if he subsequently took engineering classes and dismantled the engine, he’d find there was no Mr Ford inside,’ Zack continued. ‘He’d also learn the real reason it worked was through internal combustion. But taking it a stage further, if he then decided that because he now knew how the engine worked, he had no reason to believe in the existence of Mr Ford, he’d be making a category mistake. Because if Mr Ford had never existed to design the mechanisms, none would exist.’
Ross let it sink in. Then he asked, ‘What do you really believe yourself, Zack?’
‘I haven’t figured it out yet. Coincidence is kind of interesting, that draws me. Einstein named coincidences God’s calling cards. I’m about to give you a coincidence that’s about as close to God’s calling card as you are ever likely to get. You ready for this?’
Ross smiled. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘OK. Arlene Katzenberg and Myron Mizrahi met!’
‘What?’
‘They met.’ He smiled.
‘When? How do you know?’
‘In 1946. Arlene Katzenberg and Myron Mizrahi got married.’
Ross looked at him, totally and utterly stunned. ‘Married?’
He nodded. ‘Yep. And they had a son, born in 1947.’
109
Friday, 17 March
Ross stood up, feeling elated. A woman, with a DNA match to Jesus Christ, married to a man who was also a DNA match to Jesus?
And had a son?
‘Zack,’ he asked, with urgency in his voice. ‘The son – do you have any idea if he is still alive?’
‘He was, certainly, as recently as three years ago.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘All in good time!’
What were the chances of these two meeting, Ross wondered? Both descended from an ancestor born and living thousands of miles away, over two thousand years ago. What were the odds?
Billions to one? Trillions to one?
They were utterly incalculable.
‘How did you get this information, Zack?’
‘Anything you’d care to share with me, Ross?’ He gave him a knowing look.
‘Tell me about the parents, are they still alive?’
Boxx shook his head. ‘That’s how I was able to get this information from the police records – they were murdered soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1957, and it was never solved. A kind of ritual killing – at least that’s how it looked, apparently. Luckily for us – well, for you – the LAPD reopened the case recently, as part of their examination of historical unsolved murders – cold cases – and obtained fresh DNA from their preserved blood samples.’
‘Ritual killing? What happened – how did they die?’
‘It looked like there were religious overton
es, right? They were naked, each nailed to the floor of their home face up, side by side, arms outstretched, a nail through each hand and one through both feet. Like they were crucified.’
Ross looked back at Boxx, horrified. Silent for some moments. ‘Was this in the files you hacked?’
‘All there.’
‘So – what happened to the son – what’s his name?’
‘Michael. The police records show his birth parents were killed when he was ten. He was taken into care, but there is nothing more on him after then.’
‘But you say he’s still alive – or was in 2014?’
Zack Boxx was grinning and nodding his head. ‘Here’s the bit I think you are really going to like – and where I really earn my money!’
Ross looked at him, expectantly.
‘In March 2014, in West Hollywood, a sixty-seven-year-old man, Michael Henry Delaney, was arrested for the suspected misdemeanour of Driving Under Influence. A blood sample was taken by the police, and DNA was obtained from that.’ Boxx looked up at Ross, almost gleeful. ‘Michael Delaney’s DNA, with the seven unique mutations on the mitochondrial and on the Y chromosome, is a one hundred per cent match to the profiles you gave me.’
Ross stared back at him. ‘The missing son?’
He fell silent, thinking of the implications of this. His heart was pounding.
‘So, is there?’
‘Is there what, Zack?’
‘Something you want to share with me on this?’
‘Maybe one day, Zack. But not now. You’re safer not knowing.’
110
Friday, 17 March
Ross drove away from Boxx’s flat in a daze. The geek hadn’t wanted to let it go, so he’d fobbed off more of his questions about why he was so interested in all this DNA. He’d told him he was researching historical genetic links relating to the Jewish diaspora and emigration to the United States.
His mind was spinning.
Michael Delaney.
Michael Henry Delaney.
If what he had in his possession was authentic, the chalice and the tooth, that would mean Michael Delaney had the identical mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA to Jesus Christ – like a unique genetic fingerprint. Everyone knew Jesus hadn’t married, but his Y chromosome would be the same as his brothers, who had wives.
His phone pinged with a text, but he ignored it, not wanting to disrupt his thoughts. Delaney’s parents, direct descendants of Jesus Christ, down the female and the male lines. Meeting. Having a child.
He tried to think through the implications.
Arlene Katzenberg and Myron Mizrahi.
Total strangers to each other. Both Jewish names.
Meeting and marrying.
Murdered a decade later in a symbolic, ritual killing.
Did that mean someone back then knew? But if so, why had they killed the parents and not the son?
Had someone who knew the boy’s provenance taken him away and hidden him? People called Delaney? Changing his last name from a Jewish one to an Irish one? He remembered in the Bible about King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents. Slaughtering every male child under the age of two, in an attempt to kill the baby Jesus.
He wished he knew his Bible better.
He was drawn back to the coincidence. Two people meeting. OK, so they both lived in the same county of Southern California. But carrying that DNA, those genes? And then producing a son with an exact match to the DNA he’d had identified by the ATGC laboratory? How could that be? Every parent carried male and female bloodline genes. They would be randomly mixed in the nuclear DNA of a fertilized egg. Yet this Michael Delaney was carrying identical mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA to Jesus Christ – the unique genetic fingerprint. How could that have happened? Destiny?
If Delaney was still alive now he would be in his early seventies.
The Second Coming?
But if so, why had no one heard about it?
Or had they?
Delaney’s parents murdered in a ritual killing mimicking the crucifixion. The boy possibly taken into hiding, terrified. Was he still terrified today – assuming he was still alive? Keeping low, under the radar, carrying a secret he was too scared to reveal.
Or, Ross suddenly thought, what if he didn’t know?
Another, perhaps simpler explanation, was that the cup and the tooth he had were just not the real deal.
Or was Jesus Christ simply not the Saviour that some religions believed? Just a man who was a conjuror and illusionist, who was written about erratically by various people, including some of the Apostles, who believed they could found a religion by creating a myth around him?
If that was the case, he had to hand it to them. Their press releases had been pretty good to have lasted over two millennia.
But if Michael Delaney was the true Messiah, what were the implications – for the world?
He thought about the potential story he could write if he could find him.
The greatest newspaper scoop of all time?
111
Friday, 17 March
At a few minutes to 6 p.m., Ross entered his house, crouched down and stroked Monty. ‘We’ll go for a walk later, OK? Promise!’
He hurried upstairs, sat in front of his computer and logged on. The moment the screen came alive, he did a Google search on the name ‘Michael Delaney’.
Hundreds of matches appeared.
He narrowed the search by changing it to ‘Michael Henry Delaney Wiki’.
The Wikipedia entry appeared and his hopes rose as he got a hit.
Michael Henry Delaney (born 18 April 1947) is an American close magician. Under the stage name Mickey Magic, he had his own prime-time show on ABC Television from 1994 to 1997. Formerly represented by Creative Artists Agency. As a child, he was put in the care of foster parents, adopting their last name, following the (unsolved) murder of his parents, Myron and Arlene (née Katzenberg) Mizrahi.
He then clicked on Images. But only one series of photographs appeared. They were of a flamboyant man in his late forties, with flowing brown hair. He was wearing a fancy white suit in each photo. Some of the images showed him performing magic, his head surrounded by rays of light, creating a halo effect.
There were no other photographs of Michael Delaney, and no indication he had died.
So where was he now? And by having these details up on Wikipedia, did it mean Delaney was no longer afraid?
Was he really a direct descendant of Jesus Christ? Alive somewhere in Los Angeles, the coordinates seemed to indicate, and unaware of who he really was?
And hadn’t Jesus, in his own way, been a magician, too, back when the world had been a lot less sceptical?
Ross dealt with a few emails that needed quick responses. On his iPhone was a text from Imogen, suggesting they meet tomorrow for lunch if he was free – and not ‘editing’ – and there was one on his burner from Sally Hughes, asking how his day had been.
He did not reply to either. Instead he went downstairs, tugged Monty’s lead off the back of the kitchen door and headed off with him into the darkness.
Thinking. A plan forming.
An hour later, when he returned, he went up to his den and typed an email to his editor.
Hi Natalie, I have total dynamite on my story. You’re going to have to trust me on this. I need expenses. Got to fly to LA asap. Have a flight on hold at a good price. Can you call me when you get this?
To his surprise, she rang back five minutes later on the burner phone number he had given her.
‘Hang on one sec,’ he told her, and hurriedly went outside to talk. ‘OK!’ he said.
‘Ross, you are in the last-chance saloon. You’re turning down every story I suggest – I’m getting nothing back from you. I’d really like you to write a follow-up piece on Wesley Wenceslas’s murder. Could you do that for this weekend?’
‘I can’t, I need to go to LA.’
‘This had better be good. What can you tell me?’
‘Well, I’m not sure you would believe me if I did.’
‘Try me.’
Ross tried her.
112
Friday, 17 March
Big Tony lounged back in the curved window seat of his twelfth-floor apartment in Monaco. He was drinking his preferred single-grain Scotch, whilst listening through his headset to Ross Hunter, who was talking on his phone in his bugged home in Brighton, Sussex.
The colours in here were bright and sunny; the drapes and the cushions yellow, the carpet and furniture white. After his years in the darkness of his supermax cell, he liked brightness. He liked the sun shining in. For over two decades he’d not seen the sun.
Outside, a blue and white Héli Air Monaco shuttle was lifting off for its seven-minute flight to Nice Airport. He watched its winking lights as it climbed away into the darkening sky above the Med, then puffed on his Cohiba Robusto.
He liked Cohibas, the only cigar that controversial character Fidel Castro used to smoke. The Cuban dictator had been paranoid in his early days about being poisoned, so he had employed personally selected cigar rollers to work exclusively for him.
Big Tony figured the dictator of the world’s premier cigar-manufacturing nation would have had the pick of the crops. If they were good enough for Castro, they were good enough for him. He liked to know stuff. He knew everything about this whisky, too. The Haig distillery was founded in 1824 and was the first distillery to produce grain whisky using the column still method. It was important to know everything you could about who you were connected to, he believed. And he had learned a lot through his headset in the past few days.
The conversation was interesting. Ross Hunter was talking to a lady – maybe his editor, from the way it sounded – asking for funding for a trip to Los Angeles. Seemed like he wanted to go pretty urgently. But his voice was very faint, as if he had stepped outside and Tony was only picking up part of the conversation. It was enough for him to know what he needed to do next.
It was strange the way things worked out, he reflected. Banged up for twenty-five years in his mid twenties, life in that supermax had been hell. But since then it had been sweet. And now he was on a roll, and when the dice were rolling right, stuff worked out for you in ways so good it felt almost like there was a helping hand up there, somewhere.