Brother Guy gave them both a wry smile.
“Ah yes, sex,” he said as they left the lawns and entered the Castel keep proper. “Nature has long used the pleasure of the senses to sell reproduction to her creatures. The way humans and all higher animals delight in such activity suggests to me that all creatures have always done so, to the degree they are capable—all the way back to single-celled critters that don’t even reproduce sexually.”
As they walked, dimly lit corridors and rough-hewn rock alternated with rebuilt modern interiors—crisp, clean walls and efficient lighting.
“Just imagine a microbe, say,” Brother Guy continued, “undergoing all the contortions of pinching off and splitting into two more or less identical copies of itself. Then afterward both of them are smoking in bed, and one microbe says to the other, ‘Was it good for me, too, baby?’”
Susan blurted a loud, surprised laugh as they walked down a hall lined with magnificent Baroque paintings.
“That’s one of the better sex jokes I’ve heard in a while—and from a celibate priest, yet!”
“Brother, not priest. And I wasn’t always celibate, you know. I came to my vocation rather late.”
“Okay, Guy, you can stop flirting with her now. We need to get down to business—or to more blatant criminal activity, at least. The thefts from the meteorite collection, I mean.”
“Killjoy. I’m very sorry Father Kunkel, our current curator of meteorites, couldn’t be here to meet with you himself. He’s rather busy with the police at present. Never fear, we’re already on our way to the scene of the crime.”
“Brother,” Susan asked as they continued down a long hall, “how did the Vatican end up in the astronomy business anyway? After Galileo and all?”
“Those are probably the two most frequently asked questions we get. Yet, long before Galileo, astronomy was part of the core curriculum taught at the universities the Church itself founded, during the Middle Ages. Arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music were the ‘top four,’ the quadrivium, of the seven medieval liberal arts.”
“What were the bottom three?”
“The trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic. The Church’s involvement with an observatory proper doesn’t go all the way back to the Middle Ages, but it does go back to before the Galileo affair—to 1582, when Pope Gregory the Thirteenth asked Jesuit mathematician Christoph Clavius to improve the scientific data for the reform of the calendar.”
“That the Clavius of moon-crater fame?” Michael asked, turning back from where he’d gotten ahead of Susan and Brother Guy.
“Very good, Michael. It is indeed. Much later, in 1891, Pope Leo the Thirteenth formally reestablished the Vatican Observatory on a hillside near the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. A signal to scientists and the faithful that science and religion had nothing to fear from each other.”
Brother Guy picked up his pace and they strode past more spectacular Baroque depictions of the heavens.
“Light pollution drove us from Rome to Castel Gandolfo, here, in 1933. The same thing happened again as Rome grew, after the war. Since 1981 most of our real skywatching has been done in Arizona, through the Vatican Observatory Research Group, the VORG.”
“‘Resistance is futile—’” Michael began.
“‘—you will be assimilated.’ The VORG is a partner in the Mount Graham International Observatory, which is where you’ll find the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope.”
“And Galileo?” Susan asked.
Brother Guy heaved a sigh.
“Last time I checked, even the Church hierarchy was made of flawed human beings. Sometimes we make mistakes out of ignorance. The early seventeenth century was a very tense time for the Church—the Protestant breakaways gathering momentum for nearly a century, the ongoing madness of the Thirty Years War, all of that. Some very powerful prelates confused what makes us go to heaven with what makes the heavens go, as Galileo put it. The Galileo affair is not characteristic of the Church’s attitude toward science as a whole, thank heavens.”
“No?” Susan asked, not quite keeping the skepticism out of her voice.
“Think about it. The first chemist was a monk—Roger Bacon. The first geologist was a monk—Albertus Magnus. The founder of genetics was a monk—Gregor Mendel. The inventor of spectroscopy was a priest—Pietro Angelo Secchi—as was the first proposer of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaître.”
“But…meteorites?”
“Oh yes, the Church has been in the vanguard even in meteoritics, the humble science of fallen stars! One of the great eighteenth-century scientific investigators of meteorites was a Jesuit priest, Father Domenico Troili.”
“After whom the ubiquitous meteoritic mineral troilite is named,” Michael said.
“Ah, can’t fool you,” Brother Guy said playfully. They followed him as he turned down a side corridor of the Vatican Observatory Museum.
“This place we’re walking through, the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo, was originally built in 1590 for Maffeo Barberini. Barberini later became Pope Urban the Eighth, the pope who was behind Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition. Since 1933 the same villa built for the persecutor of Galileo has been topped with observatory domes and has served as the home of the Vatican Observatory. I’m sure you both can appreciate the irony in that.”
They stopped before a pair of policemen standing in front of a section of a modern, clean-walled, and efficiently lit hallway—blocked by crime-scene tape. Brother Guy spoke to the officers, who agreed to let them enter, but only if they gloved up, which they did.
Once past the tape, they stood before a wood-and-glass cabinet. Nearby were rank upon rank of drawers. Several of the drawers had been pulled out and left roughly stacked on the floor of the hall, and the doors of the cabinet were ajar. The floor was littered with plastic bags and the occasional glass vial.
“Looks like somebody was in a hurry,” Susan said. “They certainly didn’t bother to clean up after themselves.”
“Yes, it would seem so. The collection, as you can see, is considerable. It contains fifteen hundred specimens from nearly five hundred different falls. It would have taken whoever did this quite a while to clean up—if they had ever intended to leave things orderly. Which I doubt.”
“How did you get so many of them?” she asked, carefully picking up a meteoritic fragment in her gloved hand.
“The core of the collection was donated by the distinguished French agronomist Adrien-Charles, Marquis de Mauroy, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. The de Mauroy collection itself is some two hundred years old. We have continued to add items to it here for over eighty years.”
“When was the last time it was cataloged?” Michael asked.
“Before this recent unintended reorganization, the collection was cataloged twice—in 1983, prior to which it was in general disarray, and in 2008, when numerous additions to the collection’s holdings necessitated a new inventory.”
“Any pattern to what was taken?”
“After as much examination as the authorities will allow,” Brother Guy said, nodding in the direction of the officers, “Father Kunkel has highlighted what we believe is missing—here, on this list.”
Brother Guy handed him a printout of nearly forty pages of alphabetically arranged entries in what Michael quickly recognized as British Museum Catalog style. The entry for each specimen included the locality and date of the meteorite fall or find, its classification, weight, and a brief description. The catalog listed stones from around the world.
The first highlighted name Michael encountered was a famous one any meteoriticist would already know:
“ALLENDE, Chihuahua, Mexico—Fall, Feb. 8, 1969—Carbonaceous Chondrite CV3—Specimens: Fragments, 5 gm, 5 gm.” He paged through several more sheets listing mesosiderites, pallasites, octahedrites, hexahedrites, anomalous ataxites, and several other types of chondrites before he came to the next highlighted item: “GROSNAJA, Mekensk, Terek, Caucasus—Fall, June 28, 1861—Carbonaceous
Chondrite CV3—Specimen: Piece of thick slab in glass vial, 11 gm.”
By the time he reached “ORGUEIL, Montauban, Tarn-et-Garone, France—Fall, May 14, 1864—Carbonaceous Chondrite CI—Specimens: Large fragment and many small pieces, 60 gm, Fragments 14 gm, 6.2 gm, 5.0 gm, 1 gm (Note: all specimens are in glass vials with cork stoppers),” Michael clearly saw the pattern to the highlighted entries. He stopped reading.
“All carbonaceous chondrites,” he said. “Very important stones, but strange nonetheless.”
Brother Guy nodded.
“Why’s that?” Susan asked.
“If I were an ordinary thief,” Michael said, “I would have grabbed the pallasites, since they’re most readily convertible into gemstones.”
“Or, if I were a collector gone bad,” said Brother Guy, “I would have grabbed some of the lunar or Martian meteorites. We’ve got achondrite shergottite from the Shergotty fall in India, achondrite nakhlite from the Nakhla fall in Egypt, achondrite chassignite from the Chassigny fall in France—all benchmark Martian meteorites. Father Kunkel just traded several irons to Victor Fremdkunst for a lunar meteorite, too. All very valuable. All untouched, as near as we can tell.”
“I read about that swap with Fremdkunst,” Michael said, shaking his head. “Sounded like a pact with the devil to me.”
“Perhaps, but Father Kunkel thinks it was the devil who got burned on the deal. We worked out a bargain that was strongly to our advantage.”
“Did Fremdkunst himself come here?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Michael. The answer is no. It was all handled through intermediaries. And not even his intermediaries came to see the stones here.”
“These carbonaceous chondrites,” Susan said. “They’re primarily of scientific interest?”
“That’s right. Some would argue they’re of invaluable scientific interest. Thank God what was stolen were only fragments. The rest of the stones are distributed in many institutions throughout the world—predominantly universities and museums of natural history.”
“What about your security?”
“Medium level. More than a jewelry store, less than a nuclear reactor. Door control, alarm monitoring, closed-circuit TV in a few spots. Motion detection lasers and pressure sensors, though the latter have been switched off for years, after endless false alarms. Locks and keys for the cabinets and drawers themselves. A not-inconsiderable contingent of Swissers when the pope is in residence, which he isn’t right now. Whoever took our specimens defeated all the safeguards.”
“Maybe it was an inside job?” Michael suggested. “Even folks who’ve taken Holy Orders could have been following other orders.”
“Not impossible. The police, however, have already found the ingress and egress paths of the thieves.
They came from off the hill and returned in the same direction. The thieves also went to the trouble of either fooling or disabling all the security systems, real time. If they’d had somebody on the inside, I don’t think they’d have had to go to that much trouble.”
“Sounds like a very expensive professional burglary,” Susan said, putting down a sealed plastic bag with a reddish-black stony-iron inside.
“Indeed it does,” Brother Guy said, noncommittally but watching them carefully nonetheless. “Although what was taken were not pieces of the True Cross or splinters of the spear that pierced Christ’s side, these cabinets were scientific reliquaries, as it were, and they’ve been violated.”
“Somebody would have had to put a good chunk of money into planning and executing something like this,” Michael agreed.
“But why do that,” Susan asked, turning to the cleric, “if the stones were mainly of scientific interest?”
“We were hoping you and Michael might be able to tell us.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Brother Guy. But why us?”
“Precisely because of your high profile, Michael. We’ve largely managed to keep this crime out of the media, thus far. We’re not sure we’ll be able to do that for much longer, however. You’re fairly well known, Doctor Meteor. If this blows up in the press, the fact that we’ve put you on the case will show that we’re taking the matter seriously.”
“Ah, I see. You’re covering your ass, politically, despite your claim that politics isn’t important to the science here.”
Brother Guy gave Michael a wry look.
“I prefer to think of it in less colorful terms. Carefully considered public relations, as I see it. Actually, I wasn’t the one who suggested hiring you. It came through some of our colleagues in Arizona, not long after they learned of the matter. The man at whose suggestion we recruited you is here on the grounds, though. Probably still with Father Kunkel and the police, looking at the escape route the thieves used. If you’ll follow me…”
Brother Guy led them out of the violated meteorite display and the interior twilight of the Castel, into the bright sunlight of a Mediterranean afternoon. There they found a priest and police officer talking and gesticulating toward the steep hillside below them. Off to one side of them stood a man with a cane. He also wore a goatee and mustache trimmed in a style Michael thought looked somehow familiar, though he couldn’t place it.
“That’s the gentleman to whom you owe this assignment,” Brother Guy said, sotto voce.
As they approached the brow of the hill, the man with the cane stepped toward them.
“Doctors Miskulin and Yamada, hello. Daniel Amaral, special liaison from the Department of State to the National Security Agency. The NSA director is an old friend of mine, and he has an interest in this case.
He’d like to speak with you, once you’ve finished up here and have returned to the States.”
CAUTIONS AND PRECAUTIONS
“It’s beautiful here,” Darla Pittman said as they drove down Fourth Street, through the small town of Hamilton, Montana. The Bitterroot Mountains formed a spectacular backdrop to the neighborhood of older but well-kept residential homes through which they were passing.
“Certainly is,” said her driver, Biological Safety Officer Reg Singh. “I’ve become quite the fly-fisherman since I moved here. I understand you’re a technical rock climber? There’s great climbing in both the Bitterroots and the Sapphires.”
Ahead of them she spotted a cluster of buildings, blandly functional in appearance. Given their location in a residential neighborhood, the structures might have passed for the campus of a high school or community college, with accompanying physical plant, were it not for the security-fenced perimeter, tall lights, and surveillance cameras.
“This is rather an incongruous place to put a BSL-4 biocontainment lab,” Darla said.
“A product of history,” Singh said with a shrug. “RML, the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, started out in an old schoolhouse over a century ago. Rocky Mountain spotted fever was the scientific problem back then. The etiology of Lyme’s disease was discovered here, too, in 1982. Of course, we’ve been investigating a lot more than ticks and fleas for a long time.”
“I gathered as much,” Pittman said as they pulled to a stop beside a guarded gate. The guard required that they both sign and date the logbook—actually a notepad computer—before entry.
“Under NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, we’ve prospered and grown,” Singh said as he signed in and handed the stylus and notepad computer to her. “Especially since the Bioterrorism Response Act of 2002 paved the way for more top-level containment labs. RML’s Integrated Research Facility here was only the fifth biosafety level-four facility in the country. RML-IRF is a major player in the fight against bioterrorism—despite the bucolic setting.”
Handing back the log-in device with her signature, Darla Pittman nodded but said nothing. Reg drove them slowly into the secured facility.
Darla recalled with a twinge that, when she initially mentioned the bioweapon angle to Barry Levitch, she intended it as something of a canard. Upon relaying her preliminary findings to General Ret
ticker, however, he had quickly gone to Defense Condition 1, at least in terms of containment. Ever since, she’d been threading her way through a vast bureaucratic maze.
It turned out that the national security community and its members had established and now sat on numerous advisory boards overseeing clinicians and researchers involved in viral diseases, bacteriological pathogens, biotech, immunology, and basic molecular biology. It was through Retticker’s board-sitting friends that Darla had been allowed to pass through the acronymic labyrinth of government regulatory agencies—FBI, CDC, USDA, NIH, FDA, NRC, DHHS.
She’d had to learn more about biotech and bioterrorism than she’d ever wanted to. About “experiments of concern” and “designer diseases.” About “restricted persons” who may not possess “select” and “novel” agents. About exotic pathogens and BSL-4 containment, in which nothing created or emerging within a laboratory should have any possibility of escape or direct contact with lab workers.
At CU, one of her colleagues in the biology department had been dragooned into giving her a crash course in microbiological laboratory practice, to brush up her skills. She’d been forcefed what she thought of as the Protocols of Bumble—BMBL, Biosafety in Microbiology and Biomedical Laboratories.
She knew all about the “dual-use dilemma,” and about what was permitted and what was prohibited under the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC).
Worse, before she even left Boulder, she had to suffer many a hypodermic needle injecting various substances into her body as part of an immunization regime for work at RML-IRF. She endured almost as many more needles pulling things out of her—all sorts of baseline serum sampling—as part of the lab’s serological surveillance program.
The pain and aggravation, however, seemed to be paying off at last.
“Here we are,” Reg Singh said as they pulled up to the IRF proper. Flashing her a sly grin, he extended his hand for her to shake. “Congratulations on being named a principal investigator. As your biological safety officer, or BSO, I’ll be keeping close tabs on you—same as I do with all the PIs on my watch.”
Spears of God Page 13