Eyeing the jar and papyri one last time, Cohen went out into the corridor and waited as Yosi pulled the door shut and locked it with a key.
“Good seeing you, Rabbi. Shalom.”
“Shalom.”
Cohen folded his arms tight across his chest and watched the old man disappear around the corner. Then he studied the door lock.
15
******
Phoenix
“I don’t know what to say . . . ,” Donovan began, shrinking in the Volvo’s leather passenger seat. “I’m so very sorry, Charlotte. If I’d known they’d—” But as he glanced over at her again—the pain that contorted her face, the tears, the trembling hands gripping white-knuckled at the steering wheel—he knew there weren’t words to console her about such a thing.
Silent, with eyes staring emptily at the roadway, Charlotte was lost for words too. The moment she’d safely left the downtown high-rises in her rearview mirror, the fight-or-flight rush had given way to overwhelming shock and grief. It wasn’t just the man she thought she’d loved who had been mercilessly murdered before her eyes, but a visionary genius as well. A man who’d revolutionized genetics. It was a profound loss that would affect so many.
Heading north on Squaw Peak Parkway, she had yet to consider a specific plan or destination. Escape had been the only thing on her mind. But finally, she eased off the accelerator as more tears blurred her vision. “They’re going to follow us, aren’t they?” she finally said, opening the center console to pull out a tissue.
Hearing her speak was comforting. “I’m afraid so.”
She wiped her runny nose, then her moist eyes. “Who are they?” He shook his head. “Not sure. But they’re definitely professionals. How
they could find me so quickly . . .” He sighed and threw up his hands. “They’d need access to all sorts of information.”
“Did Conte send them?” she sniffled. “Is that what this is about?” Ever since the creep had chased her out of Vatican City and she’d landed a firm foot in his crotch, she’d feared his retaliation.
Donovan glanced out the window at the omnipresent freeway signboards for Paradise Valley before answering. “Conte’s dead, Charlotte,” he said with conviction. “It couldn’t have been him.”
This took Charlotte completely by surprise. “What? How?” A pause.
“I killed him.” His brogue grew stronger. “I had to kill him,” he stressed.
“There was no choice.”
“My God,” she gasped in repulsion. “How could you do such a thing?
You’re a priest.” Now she couldn’t dismiss the fear that maybe Donovan
was somehow baiting her.
His wounded stare remained on the approaching desert hills, dotted
with cacti. “Just before he tried to kill me, he told me he would come for
you, Charlotte.” He could still hear the mercenary’s words clearly in his
mind: “Did the cardinal tell you she skipped off with her laptop . . . loaded
up with all the data? . . . I’ve got to fix that too and her blood will be on your
hands ... if a freak accident should happen to befall the lovely geneticist . . . the authorities would be none the wiser... Of course, I’ ll be sure to show her a good time before she goes.” “I couldn’t handle another loss . . . after Dr.
Bersei . . . the Israelis.”
Mute, Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“I had a gun,” he went on. “There was a struggle . . .”
For a moment, Donovan was back at the misty grove atop Monte Scuncole, peering down at the ossuary he and Conte had dropped into the pit
they’d dug. He remembered fixating on the crack that had snapped the
stone lid in two—wide enough to reveal the sacred bones beneath. Conte
intended to drop Donovan’s body in right behind the relic and use C-4 to
finish the job.
“I managed to run from him . . . out onto the roadway. He was right
behind me when the car came.” The images reeled through his mind,
making his pulse drum. He needed to take a breath before continuing.
“By the grace of God, it swerved and took him down—like the Angel of
Death . . . but even with that, he was still breathing.” He shook his head
in disbelief. “Only the devil himself could have kept him alive. But Conte
was breathing. Had he somehow lived, there’s no telling what—” Trembling fingers went to his lips to repress the surge of emotion. The next
words came fast: “So I took the gun and finished him.” He quickly crossed
himself. God, please have mercy and forgive me for these deeds. No matter what the consequences, airing the confession felt good—
cleansing. The Irish way of “stuffing it down” simply wasn’t good for the
soul. However, Donovan still wasn’t prepared to offer up that when he’d
stripped Conte’s body of its personal effects, he’d found a syringe filled with
clear serum, which he’d snuck past the Vatican metal detectors to eliminate what he thought had been the final threat—the Vatican’s secretary of
state. Otherwise Santelli would have stopped at nothing to complete what
he’d set out to do: eliminate any trace of the Vatican’s involvement in the
church’s greatest cover-up.
He allowed a few moments for the air to settle.
“Then Conte did kill Bersei?” She’d suspected that all along. Donovan nodded. “Many others too.” Though he felt he’d already said
too much, Charlotte would need to know the whole story. “There’s more,”
he said. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose now,” he said, and sighed. He went on to tell her how just weeks before she’d been summoned to
Vatican City, he’d been given a book by an anonymous contact (“The book
I showed you during our meeting with Cardinal Santelli,” he reminded her), how it had actually included a map showing the ossuary’s hidden burial vault beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. How when he realized the implications of what would happen if the ossuary was discovered by Israelis, he’d convinced Santelli to take action. Though he’d advocated a peaceful solution, the pragmatic cardinal immediately sent for Salvatore Conte. Upon assessing the job Conte had used untraceable Vatican funds to employ a team of men to forcefully extract the ossuary—an elaborate plan involving guns, explosives, even a stolen helicopter. Many Israelis had been killed during an ensuing firefight at the Temple Mount, Donovan
explained.
She recalled hearing these things in the news. Even given Conte’s ruthlessness, which she’d witnessed firsthand, his involvement in such a huge
heist came as a complete surprise. Wrapped in thought, Charlotte caught
herself tailgating a semi that was chugging up the steep grade. She checked
the mirrors, flipped on the turn signal, and maneuvered around it. “Then he brought the ossuary to the Vatican,” Donovan said. “And,
well . . . you know the rest.”
Trying to process the unbelievable story, Charlotte was silent for a solid
minute. “I guess I should be thanking you,” she finally managed. He raised a hand to dismiss any idea of it. There was no glory in what
he’d done. Especially since he still wasn’t certain if Conte’s murder had
incited what had happened today.
“At first I thought these men might have known that Conte was working for the Vatican,” Donovan explained. “Perhaps he hadn’t paid them
for their services in Jerusalem. But they spoke about Conte as if he were
a stranger. And no mention of money . . . or the ossuary, or the nails, or
the book. Just the bones,” he grimly replied. “The bones,” he repeated in
disbelief. “I can’t imagine why. Even if I were to give bones to them, how
woul
d they know they came from inside that ossuary? I suppose I could
give them any skeleton . . . ,” he said, hands cast up.
But Charlotte knew that was not the case. Those bones hid a one-ofa-kind imprint. And if these men knew what made them so special . . . A
cold chill ran over Charlotte’s body.
There was a more direct answer she was hoping for. So she just needed
to go for it. “That skeleton I studied ...It belonged to Jesus, didn’t it?”
She’d thought it impossible. But Dr. Bersei had been the first to suggest
this, finally convinced after deciphering the strange relief carved into the
ossuary’s side—a dolphin wrapped around a trident.
Charlotte’s hands clamped harder on the wheel as she awaited Dono
van’s slow reply.
A trembling hand went loosely over his mouth while he tried to formulate a response. “You saw the bones and the relics with your own eyes.
If archaeologists had found them first, the evidence would have left little
doubt—”
“Was it him?” she firmly insisted.
Exasperated, Donovan swallowed hard. “Yes.”
16
******
“And you have no doubts about that?” Charlotte said. After seeing the incredible genes hidden in the bones, their healing powers . . . Could there be any doubt that it had been Jesus’s remains she’d studied in secret at the Vatica n Museums ?
“There’s always room for error, but . . .” Donovan shook his head.
“You . . . a priest . . . ,” she said, stalling. “You’re basically telling me that there was no resurrection or ascension?”
“Not in a physical sense.”
“Then what about the Gospels?” Charlotte bitterly replied. “Is it all just made up?”
“The biblical accounts of events immediately following Christ’s burial are highly suspect, dare I say . . . falsified.”
“How so?”
The proof was fairly complicated, but he started at the easiest point. He explained that the oldest Gospel—Mark—originally ended with the empty tomb and that verses 16:9 through 16:20, where Jesus makes His appearances to Mary and the disciples, then ascends into heaven, were an addendum, written by a completely different hand. The Vatican’s oldest manuscripts from the fourth century, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, didn’t include the long ending, but by the fifth century Mark had four different endings that spoke about resurrection and ascension.
Charlotte could tell that Donovan was calm about all this but also felt somewhat cheated. To her, it seemed too big a conspiracy to have been kept under wraps for so long. “And nobody figured this out?” she asked, incredulous.
“Oh, it’s no secret,” Donovan insisted. “Any good Bible will reference this omission in its footnotes. Not to mention that even if you read these added verses verbatim, Jesus’s post-burial appearances are still referenced in metaphysical terms.”
Giovanni Bersei had told her this too. But she was interested in the priest’s perspective. So she asked for examples.
Donovan went on to give a sampling from all four Gospels, noting that each read like many of the omitted apocryphal texts the Catholic Church had considered heretical. He told her that immediately following the resurrection accounts in John 20 and Mark 16, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and was unrecognizable to her; she’d actually mistaken Him for a gardener. And in Luke 24, two of the disciples not only doubted His identity when he appeared to them, but then Christ literally disappeared from their sight—vanished!
In Donovan’s opinion, however, John 20 was the most telling of a metaphysical resurrection. He said, “John stated that the disciples were hiding in a sealed chamber and Jesus suddenly appeared in the room among them . . . from out of thin air,” he pointed out. “So you see, all four Gospels contain specific language suggesting that the Jesus who appeared after the resurrection was not that same Jesus who was buried in the tomb. So I ask the scientist in you, Charlotte: does that sound like a physical body to you?”
“No.” There were too many things it sounded like, she thought. But disappearing from sight? Appearing out of thin air into a locked room? How else could that be explained? Another wave of mixed emotions crested over her as she came to terms with the notion that the DNA inside her could actually have been taken from Christ. She sighed. “I suppose I’d rather be an apparition in the next life too,” she said.
To a scientist, this actually made more sense anyway, she thought. After all, the body’s “spirit” was really an electrical charge running through the nervous system. And Einstein’s most basic principle maintained that in a closed system, energy could never be lost or gained—merely transferred. If one viewed a dead body as a battery that had lost its charge, then logically, the body’s energy would be given back to the system. What system,
however, was anyone’s guess.
“The real question is, should this knowledge impact one’s faith or discredit Christ’s teachings . . . His mission?” Donovan added. “A physical
body doesn’t negate the teachings found in the Gospels. Nor does it downplay that God’s kingdom does promise eternal peace for the righteous. But
after all these centuries, the Vatican has emphasized an archaic interpretation of Christ’s physical death. So you can imagine the threat a body would
pose.”
He tried his best to explain how the Vatican had for centuries speculated about a physical body and feared one might turn up. Occasionally,
charlatans had attempted to blackmail the Vatican with anonymous relics
lacking any provenance whatsoever. But with today’s scientific methods,
Donovan pointed out, had a genuine relic been excavated, in its context
from beneath the Temple Mount, the threat would then be very, very real.
He stayed silent for a few seconds, then said, “Now we just need to figure
out why these two men want the bones so badly.”
Charlotte shifted uneasily in her seat. One thought kept repeating itself—Evan Aldrich had used those bones to save her life. Now those same
bones had made him a casualty. And though Donovan was fishing for an
explanation in the theological realm, there was only one thing that could
logically be their true motivation.
“I think I might know what these men are after.”
17
******
The Volvo idled at a scenic overlook along Camelback Mountain. The two passengers inside had just reversed roles; now Donovan was hearing Charlotte’s confession. And what she had to say—had to release—was something far more astounding than anything weighing on his soul.
Far across the valley below, beyond the unnatural green swaths of golf courses set amidst suburban sprawl, Donovan’s empty eyes were locked on BMS’s gleaming edifice, which rose high above the buildings clustered around it—an ungodly Tower of Babel forged of glass and steel, where humans challenged God on an entirely new level.
“There’s something else you need to know about what we discovered,” she said. “I’d been very sick back in June . . .”
“I gathered that,” Donovan weakly replied. “I was told you’d left behind things in your room. The drugs were for cancer, weren’t they?”
She nodded. “Multiple myeloma.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of this aggressive disease, and he couldn’t hold back the grim expression that immediately came over him. How ironic that it attacked the bones, he thought.
Picking up on his distress, she quickly added, “But I don’t have cancer anymore.”
Amazed, he looked up at her. “Praise God,” he said, beaming. “That’s incredible! A miracle.”
“Yes . . . and no,” she said. “You see, that same gene I just told you about—” Her voice choked off.
“Go on,” he encouraged her. The same words he’d used cou
ntless times in the confessional.
Glancing over at him, she could tell he didn’t fully comprehend. “The DNA . . . Jesus’s DNA? It has special qualities.” The genetic synthesis was fairly complicated—something she still couldn’t completely decipher—so she needed to keep it simple. “It’s like a virus, but a good one. And when introduced into someone who’s sick . . .” She tried to envision 23 intelligently replicating system-wide at super speed to destroy the malicious cancer cells.
Donovan slumped in his seat.
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