by Robert Ovies
Kieran realized that he was listening more intently this time than he had the first few times the doctor had played it out to him, before Crawl arrived.
“Among the many traces of other things still on the shroud,” the doctor continued, “twenty-eight flowers have been positively identified, through still-intact physical tracings, as having been laid on the shroud with the body. Several of them grow only in one small area near Jerusalem. All twenty-eight bloom only in the spring, only in the Passover season. ‘Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come.’ ”
When Crawl finally spoke, he didn’t do it quietly. Kieran thought it might have been the bit about the flowers that did it, but Crawl asked abruptly, “What are you going to do with it once we get you in to it?”
Again, the doctor didn’t seem to notice. “Fifty-eight pollens still exist in trace amounts on the shroud. Pollen can survive for thousands of years. Nearly half of the original pollens don’t even grow in Europe, which means the shroud could not be a later European artifact.”
Crawl said it louder. “What are you going to do with it once we get you in to it?”
“But every pollen found on the shroud grows in Israel. All fifty-eight.”
Crawl moved into the doctor’s line of vision and positioned his face just inches from the doctor’s. He said, speaking calmly but looking agitated, “Don’t tell us anything else about flowers and pollen, okay? Because we don’t really want to know about flowers and pollen. What we came all this way to find out is, what are you planning on doing to it once we get you in there with it? ‘Cause that’s what we’re here to do, is that right?”
The doctor stared at him, seemingly trying to focus.
Antonio eased closer.
Kieran moved in front of the Italian.
“It’s really time for you to just tell us what the job is,” Crawl said. “Because to tell you the truth—and I’m sure I’m speaking for my friend, Kieran, too—we’re not sure that we like some of the possibilities that come to mind. So it’s time to cut to the chase. What we want to know is: What are you going to do with the real thing once we get in there with it? And if we don’t hear that little part of it mentioned soon, I gotta tell you, we’re out of here.”
The doctor’s eyes widened. “You can’t go,” he said. “Why would you want to?”
“We can and we will,” Crawl said. He looked proud to have actually gotten the man’s attention. “And we’ll do it in about one minute from now. So put it on the table for us. And don’t even talk about seeing our heads in a box, or whatever it was you said that was supposed to be scary for us, because we have friends all over the world too. Even in the U.S. Even near Jerron-Nash and your house in the Pecos Wilderness.”
Kieran came to attention. He glanced at Antonio, then looked quickly at the man from a place called the Pecos Wilderness who had just gone as stiff as one of Kieran’s fences.
Crawl added, “They can even get near your sister and your niece, doctor, if you don’t play totally straight with us.”
Kieran’s heart pounded. He hadn’t known that. The guy was a doctor, with a sister and a niece, and a man who didn’t like it at all that Crawl knew who he was and where he lived.
He looked again at Antonio. The Italian looked like a cat caught in traffic—on edge and uneasy, but looking more surprised and uncertain than mad or dangerous.
The doctor had straightened to his full height. He said, sounding calm, “You made an agreement with me. That agreement stands. I told you that. Why are you talking about leaving?”
“Why are you looking afraid that we’ll do it?” Kieran said. “You can always get somebody else.”
He was ready for a “Because you already know too much”, but he didn’t get it.
“Time is important to me,” the doctor said. His eyes were dark and alert. “I told you that when we met in Belfast. Time is important to me. Why are you even speaking about this?”
Crawl said, “Because I’m asking you, what are we going to with the shroud once we get you in, and you keep on not telling us. And now’s the time. We know we’re going after the shroud. What the hell else would you have all this up here for? But nothing stolen, you said. Nothing stolen. So what are you going to do with it once we get you in to it?”
The doctor paused, thinking hard behind hard, wide eyes. He said, “I just want to touch it. That’s all I’ll do. I swear it. What comes to a mind like yours? What did you think I would do, after I told you nothing would be stolen?”
Kieran had moved backward, positioned now to watch Antonio nonstop; close by him, ready to move.
“Well,” Crawl said, flashing more impatience of his own, “let’s move on to something like the game you played in Belfast. That’s how you put it, right? ‘Let’s play a children’s game’? Only now I’ll be the one that counts to three. And if you haven’t told us what you’re going to do with the shroud once we get to it by the time I say three—if you haven’t told us more than, ‘Oh, I only want to touch it’—then we’re taking your little rent-a-car and the money you’ve already given us and you’ll never see us again.”
He paused for a full five seconds. Then he said, “One. And remember, our friends know where you live. We don’t call them at the right time, they go after your sister and your niece.”
The doctor wet his lips but didn’t answer.
Kieran swallowed and watched the doctor’s eyes. He saw no surrender.
“Two.”
Silence. With Kieran thinking, “Holy God, what’s going on?”
“Three!”
Crawl turned to Kieran and nodded. “We’re out of here,” he said sharply. “Let’s go find Milan.”
The doctor blurted out in a low whisper that was as tight as a rope, “I need the blood. I just need a sample. A trace, on a piece of tape.”
Crawl stopped and turned. He tilted his head. “You know about me and my family,” the doctor said, speaking quickly, “so you know about Marie.”
“That’s right,” Crawl said, lying.
“What you may not know yet is, my niece has terminal cancer.” The doctor turned slowly to lay both hands on the altar platform to his left. He stared at the marks left by the face on the shroud. “She doesn’t know it,” he said softly. “She just knows she’s felt very sick. But it’s too late to save her through any medical means.”
“How long’s she got?” Crawl asked.
“Maybe thirty days. Maybe a few months. It’s very hard to tell.” Kieran said, “And you think the blood will do something to save her?”
The doctor turned to Kieran. His eyes appealed for understanding. “If I can take even a trace of it and touch her with it, I know she’ll be healed. I know it! It really is the blood of Jesus! It must be!”
Crawl wondered what it was that just went off the tracks. Something was wrong with the last three minutes, but he wasn’t sure what.
“You’re a scientist, right?” he asked. “Why do you believe that?”
“I’m a man of faith who happens to be skilled in a medical science. I believe it because I know that miracles happen. I know that. As a scientist.”
Crawl said, “So you’re looking for a miracle, is all?”
The doctor stood at his full height, looking at Crawl. “You say ‘is all’. But God in heaven, man, that would be everything!”
“So you’re not planning on taking the whole shroud?” Kieran said.
“God help us! Not at all! I’ll press a little tape to it and draw off a trace of the blood so infinitesimal no one will even know anything’s missing!”
“We’re going to have to break into it, though,” Crawl said. “That’s what all these cases are for, right? These are here so we can practice getting into them. Are these cases duplicates of the real thing?”
“Perfect replicas,” the doctor said, looking slowly around the room. “Once I have a trace of the blood, that’s all I’ll need. Or I should say, that’s all my niece will need. It’s the bloo
d of Jesus, I’m certain of it. One touch, that’s all I need time for. I don’t expect you to understand, and I certainly don’t ask that you agree with me, but I believe that with absolute conviction. And I’m willing to pay you a hundred thousand pounds to help me get it.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Virtually no risk,” the doctor said, shifting his eyes to Kieran. “No weapons will be necessary. No one will be hurt. Nothing, at least nothing anyone will ever know about, will leave that chapel.”
“And then you’d never see us again,” Crawl said. “And we’d never see you again. That’s a part of it, too, isn’t it? Little local boys from all the way over in Ireland; and you vanish, and we just scratch our heads and go home. Which is a long way from the Pecos Wilderness.”
“You asked me what the job is, and I told you. I just need a trace of the blood. I don’t understand what you’re talking about now.”
“Okay,” Crawl said. He pursed his lips, nodded, and said it again. “Okay. All you need is a trace of the blood.”
He caught Kieran staring at him. He nodded again, this time at Kieran. He said a firm “Okay” one more time, clapped his hands together once, loudly, and turned to look again at the cases around the room. “So let’s move on,” he said.
With that, he walked to the nearest of the horizontal replicas and reached up to rap on its transparent cover. “If it’s protected as much as they want it protected, this stuff isn’t easy to get through, is it?”
Kieran spoke up. “The cover,” he said, “was designed by an Italian aerospace company. He told me about it. That’s an inch of polycarbonate, with some kind of gas pumped into the real thing to preserve the cloth. It will have an aluminum cover over it too, when we get there. A duplicate of the cover is in the other room. The cover’s easy, but the polycarbonate is so strong that fire and gunshots and even most bombs won’t hurt it. But he’s got two lasers from North Korea that will.”
“From South Korea,” the doctor said quietly.
Kieran said, “The lasers are special forces design.” His hands began to gesture, drawing small squares in the air. “They’re no bigger, each one, than maybe four fists put together, but they cut through this stuff like butter. I worked one a half hour ago. He wouldn’t show me what we were going to do once we cut our way in, but he showed me the lasers are rigged to run along the top and side edges of the case. They cut at an angle so we can take the whole cover off in about. . .” He looked at the doctor. “How quick again, to have the cover off?”
“Two minutes, fifteen seconds. With both units cutting.”
“How about the aluminum cover-thing?” Crawl asked.
“Less than half a minute,” the doctor said. “It’s secured with latches. They just hold the cover on, they don’t protect it from anything serious.”
“So less than three minutes total to take it all off and get it all out of the way,” Kieran said.
Crawl was biting his lower lip, the right side. He said, “Why do you need four of us?”
Again, Kieran answered. “There’s a window of just a few minutes, is all, before the alarms click in again. Two or three of us might not be quick enough.”
“But four will?”
“Four will nail it,” Kieran said. “It’s worked out good, Crawl. The lasers are so new the Korean military isn’t even using them yet. At least not that they admit. Cost him a fortune.”
“Good for him,” Crawl said, as if unimpressed.
He turned to the doctor. “So answer this. Why take off the whole cover, if all you want is to touch the shroud and take a sample of the blood?” His right arm swept across the nearest replica. “You wouldn’t do the whole thing for that. You’d cut a little square, is all you’d need. You’re wasting two or three minutes, at least, and maybe more. That’s a lot of time with alarms about to go off.”
The doctor shook his head. “You can’t cut a hole with a laser over the shroud itself,” he said curtly. “It would burn a hole in it.”
Kieran said, “We cut the whole cover off at the sides, he told me, so the laser just scorches the case along the edges. Smoke but no fire. Then we lift the whole cover off and we’re in. Cut it any other way and the shroud gets burned too.”
“So nothing hurts the shroud?” Crawl asked. “That’s a big deal to you?”
“Nothing and no one,” the doctor said. “Absolutely not. That would be unthinkable.”
Crawl thought about it for a few more seconds, then turned to Antonio. “So what do you think about this, Italy? You think the man doesn’t want to hurt the shroud?” He didn’t give Antonio time to answer before he said, “I know. You’ll shrug. What do you know, right?”
He looked at Kieran. “All the man does is shrug. You notice that?” Kieran shrugged himself.
Crawl threw up his hands. “You see that? You do it, too. Must be the air around here. Everybody shrugs.”
He nodded several more times and said, “Well, little brother, do you buy this, what he’s telling us here? You’ve been with him for a while now.”
“He did say that to me,” Kieran answered. “About the one thing we have to be sure of is not to touch the shroud with the lasers.”
Crawl turned to the doctor, paused for another few seconds, then nodded again and said, “We’ll need two things. One, show us the plans you have for getting us in and out. No more talk about how secret things have to be, not to us. Because we may have ways to make them even better. Second, we search all three cars and whatever gear you’re carrying just before we leave for the job.”
“Why would you do that?”
“We’ll want to make sure: no extra backpacks with a few loads of explosives, no secret South Korean special forces flamethrowers, no big surprises. How’s that for honesty between friends?”
The doctor’s lightning scar quivered as he forced a grim smile. “Do you seriously think that I, of all the people in the world, would want to destroy the burial shroud of Jesus?”
He let them think about it, then he added, “I’ll let you have everything you’ve asked for, but I’ll add one condition myself. I am the only one who touches the shroud. You don’t touch it. You don’t even breathe on it. You don’t poke it with your finger or with anything you’re carrying. You don’t touch it in any way, shape or form. When the cover is off, you both stand back. Your work is done.”
“Well,” Crawl said, nodding agreement, “unworthy as we may be to breathe on your shroud, we do deserve to eat when we’re hungry, so why don’t you ask Antonio here to break us out something to eat and drink, ‘cause I’m standing here starving. Then let’s look at a schematic of the cathedral, which you must have, being a smart man with almost a Nobel Prize. And then tell us whatever Plan A is to get us in and out with no risk and no one getting hurt.”
Kieran nodded his agreement. He even managed a half smile. He was finally ready to believe it: they were going to do a job for fifty thousand pounds each, with no weapons and nothing stolen and no one hurt and hardly any risk at all.
Crawl turned to him. “Of course,” he said, sounding deadly serious, “if that really is the burial shroud of Christ, we just might burst into flames.”
Kieran’s smile faded, then spread again as Crawl winked at him and laughed out loud.
They shared a quick meal of couscous and stir-fried vegetables that neither Crawl nor Kieran enjoyed, then spent the next seven hours, until nearly 1:00 A.M., studying the schematic of Turin’s Saint John the Baptist Cathedral and reviewing the plans and materials at their disposal.
The materials included multiple duplicates of the polycarbonate and aluminum casing that protected the shroud, the two handheld South Korean military lasers that would open the casings to the doctor, and the cigarette-pack-sized digital video camera that Antonio had planted in the cathedral to record the night schedule and the checkpoints of the security guards.
The plans were so well thought out and so expensive that Crawl found himself thinking that he coul
d never care enough about anybody to go through all the doctor was willing to go through for his niece. He thought of all the work and the time and the planning and the mountains of money, plus all the could-end-your-life risks, and he thought: no way. No way he’d ever care enough to do that much, not for anybody in the world.
He even wondered, just for a few seconds, if that was something he should feel bad about.
At 1:15 A.M., satisfied that the operation was not only possible, well planned and well equipped, but that it did, in fact, seem relatively risk free, they ended their day with an agreement that on their next day together, the equipment would be much more than items on display. The next day, and much of the day after that, would be dedicated to rehearsals.
The doctor ended their session by giving each of them three sets of manila folders to review and discuss together as necessary. They were labeled: Entry Rehearsal, Shroud Rehearsal, Exit Rehearsal.
As they headed toward their bedrooms at the end of a long first-story hallway, Crawl jabbed Kieran’s arm and said, “Let’s talk. Outside.”
The night air was filled with muted clicks and chatters of more insects than they would hear in a whole summer in Belfast. A waning moon was suspended over the Alps, which was good, Crawl thought. In a few more nights there would be nothing but a sliver of moon to illuminate Turin.
He and Kieran were quiet as they backtracked along the way they had come. The house slipped slowly behind the hill. They walked a hundred yards more when Kieran stopped abruptly and asked in a hushed, rapid-fire sequence, “So what do you think, Crawl? This blows my mind. What did Michael tell you? Doesn’t this blow your mind?”
Crawl stared at him, sucked in his lower lip, bit it for a moment and said, “The kid’s dyin’ with cancer, my ass. That’s what I think.”