The Messiah Conspiracy - A gripping page-turning Medical Thriller - [Omnibus Edition containing Book 1 & Book 2]

by Irvine, Ian C. P.

  “And thirdly, if I may give a comment of my own, as an atheist, even if there was a man called Jesus Christ, who is to say he was not just an ordinary man, and has nothing to do with God, or any god?”

  “Thank you for your personal observations Dr Sanderson, however, you must realise that that debate is one which is already two thousand years old, and not one that concerns us. History and God will be the judge of that. What concerns me now are the facts!”

  Mike remained silent. The Ambassador was clearly rattled, and Mike knew the best thing to do was stay silent while his commanding officer considered what he had just been told.

  For a few moments the Ambassador continued to look out off the window, seemingly staring far out into space. Then he returned to his desk and faced Mike again.

  “Do you have a recommendation, Mike? You normally do…...” He asked, a little more amiably than before.

  Mike leant forward, placing his tea cup and its china saucer carefully onto the desk top with both his hands, and pausing for a moment before continuing his report.

  “Yes, I do. Over the past few days since I learned of this project I have given it a great deal of thought.” He paused momentarily, to give emphasis to what he had to say next. “I believe that the CIA must immediately approve an operation to snatch the Crown of Thorns from the laboratory in Oxford and must implement its own programme to clone Jesus Christ. It is unacceptable to the future of our country that a member state of the European Union should be allowed to create and grow a clone of Jesus Christ before we do…"

  "…Who can say what the political and religious implications of such a program would be, were it to be successful? What effect would it have upon the balance of power, if Great Britain was able to clone Jesus Christ? I'm not a religious man myself, and I'm not going to suggest that the British would be able to enlist any supernatural powers from a cloned Jesus Christ which would help their nation, but realistically we have to recognise the positive effect his presence would have on the focus they would receive from other countries and corporate investors. I could easily see how it could be extremely detrimental to the American trade…"

  "…No, if we cannot prevent the Oxford group from creating a clone, we at least must take the lead in the clone war and create and grow our own first...and prevent others from doing so in the future. If Jesus Christ is going to come back for a second time, this time round he’s going to be an American!”

  .

  Chapter Eighteen

  I.G.E.G.G.M. laboratory

  Oxford, England

  .

  Jason couldn’t believe how well the project was going so far. Since he had the idea in the Chapel of Sainte Chapelle everything had just happened as if it were meant to be. Resources, funding, equipment, support...it had all just fallen into place. And Mathew, as Professor Wainright now insisted Jason called him, was being just incredible. His support was total, including additional fellowship money from the I.G.E.G.G.M. coffers. The project had become almost full-time now, and he hardly had any time to devote to the Pharaoh project, which had now already advanced into the second phase. All three fertilised eggs had been placed in their surrogate mothers, and the pregnancies were advancing well.

  Professor Wainright had started to spend all the available hours he had with Jason and the others in the lab, working on the Haissem project. As the days passed the team had integrated well together, bound by a growing and profound awareness that the work they had embarked upon could be the most important scientific project ever undertaken by mankind. Or at least, should it become public knowledge what they were doing, it could certainly become one of the most dangerous ever undertaken.

  Each member of the team realised the importance of secrecy and except for Lydia, not a single person outside the project had the faintest idea of the true nature of their work.

  Although Prof. Wainright was the official ‘front man’ for the project, there was an unspoken understanding, that when and if the authenticity of the Crown was proven, Jason would take charge of the future of the project, directing the others as he believed necessary. It was Jason’s project. In the meantime Prof. Wainright was in charge of co-ordinating and directing the first phase, that of proving the Crown’s authenticity, determining the presence of any blood residues, and extracting them correctly.

  .

  ---------------------

  .

  “Jason, have you got the results from the NMR scanning?” the Professor asked at the early Monday morning meeting.

  “Yes…and they’re excellent…they were completed on Saturday afternoon, and I compiled the results on Saturday night, and ran an analysis of them yesterday. And this is what I found...” Jason swivelled round in his chair and pointed the remote control at the large plasma display on the wall opposite. It immediately sprang to life, a wall of colour filling the little room they were gathered in. The others all turned to the screen onto which the compiled image of the Crown’s NMR analysis was being relayed from the computer.

  “..as you can see,” Jason continued, “…I’ve compiled the data from the run over a wide spectrum of frequencies. In the old days, NMR depended upon the resonance set up from water molecules, but modern scanners can scan across the resonances produced by a much wider range of chemical structures. For this run I set the NMR to scan at the frequencies of the amino acids and proteins which build up blood cells. Theoretically, if there was any blood absorbed by the material in the membranes of the Crown I would be able to map the location of it three-dimensionally...”

  “ …At the moment what you can see is just the Crowns image compiled in three dimensions from the scan produced at a number of different frequencies, none of them blood related. As you can see the image we get appears transparent, and we can see through the surface of the thorn’s structure and inside the thorns and out the other side...but if I superimpose the frequencies that interest us, we should be able to see everywhere where blood has been absorbed...Before I do that though, the places you now see marked by the arrows on the screen are where we visually saw discolorations on the thorns when we first examined them and we hoped it could be due to blood absorption...and now…here we can see if the NMR detected any blood samples…”

  There was a small gasp from the room. The image on the screen had been a white ghostly three-dimensional skeleton of the Crown against a grey background. But as Jason pressed another button on the remote control, the computer superimposed the next set of data on the existing images and several blue patches appeared on the white skeletal areas, two of them relating exactly to where the arrows were pointing.

  “What you can see here is confirmation that on the two thorns we were highlighting, two of the discoloured areas are caused by blood absorption. But also, there are four other areas underneath the skin of the thorns where blood has been absorbed into the plant material itself. Two of these patches are found on another thorn. In total, we see that blood samples can be found on three separate thorns."

  There was silence in the room. The news was more than they could have hoped for.

  “…If I may continue…” Jason said smiling. “I have also done the analysis on the holographic images Louisa obtained. If you will look at the screen on the desk in front, you can see the standard hologram of the Crown at normal light frequencies.” Jason leant forward and pressed a button, and the screen came alive.

  Although it was a flat screen, projected out from it was a three-dimensional image of the Crown. It was identical to the real crown, the same size, colour…everything. A person just walking into the room at that point would have seen the Crown of Thorns floating in mid-air and thought that is was the real thing somehow floating in space. The hologram was amazing. Don couldn’t help but reach forward and try to touch the image, and as his fingers wafted through empty space in front of the screen he whistled aloud.

  “It’s unbelievable. It’s sooo real!”

  “…If you think that’s good…watch this...” And slowly the im
age of the Crown began to rotate in free space. “ …and now… for my piece-de-resistance, feast your eyes on this...” And Jason pressed another button on the keyboard of the computer. Some red patches immediately appeared on the surface of the Crown in the hologram in front of them.

  “I’ve colour coded it for effect…but when I compile the hologram at the expected resonance frequency of blood residue, I get a hologram only of where blood is to be found, and by superimposing that image on the hologram obtained at normal visible frequencies, we can see where the blood residue would be...

  He paused for a moment to let the impact of what they were seeing sink in, then continued.

  “Okay, if you compare the images you can see now on the screen with the ones from the NMR on the plasma screen, you can see they’re almost identical...they match!”

  .

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  .

  This was exactly the news they had been hoping for. They had found blood samples, and knew exactly where to retrieve them from.

  The only question to be answered now, was whether the Crown of Thorns was authentic or not. Was it real? If it wasn’t real, the blood samples would be meaningless.

  “Truly excellent, Jason. Fantastic work. But what time frame in history does the Crown originate from and where does it come from geographically? These are two equally important questions that we need to answer…Don, what are your conclusions from the carbon and chemical dating?”

  Don swivelled in his chair. It was his turn to give his report. He hoped he wouldn’t disappoint them. He had worked long and hard with the physics, chemistry and biology departments of the university to ensure that no mistakes had been made. They had run extensive carbon dating analysis, and had analysed and dated several of the chemicals that were found in the make-up of the thorns. The chemical analysis used a new dating technique that had been pioneered in Oxford only three years before, so as such, his report was state-of-the-art, based upon the latest techniques available. Don leant forward and slipped a micro-disk into the computer and instantly a series of charts appeared on the overhead plasma screen.

  “First of all we did some carbon dating. As you can see from the graph, all the points came back indicating a time frame of about 27-35 AD, during which time the thorns would have died and stopped absorbing any fresh carbon. Next, we did tests on three chemicals found in the constituent make up of the thorns, focussing on the decay of several radioactive isotopes found in one of the proteins in the thorns…a new technique developed here in Oxford…and these all point to a time frame of 28-34AD for the death of the plant. These results are all shown on the next chart.”

  The screen went dark for a second, and then was instantly refreshed with a fresh set of data from the other research.

  “I sent you electronic copies of all this information earlier this morning, so you can draw your own conclusions later if you wish. But from the work I did with the other departments, I would conclude that the Crown of Thorns comes exactly from the period in which we would require it to, were we to postulate that it could in fact be the Crown of Thorns which sat upon Jesus Christ’s head at his crucifixion!”

  “Don. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. Of course I expected nothing less from you, but it's nice to know you’re still as good as ever...”, Mathew Wainright praised the second member of the team.

  Everything was coming together. The data looked too good to be true, but it was all there. The only thing that remained was to try and establish where in the world the Crown of Thorns came from.

  “Louisa. It’s over to you. Have you got any good news for us?”

  “Thanks Professor. It turns out that I do,” Louisa beamed. She was the last one to report, but her information was just as important as anyone else’s.

  “I took the Crown to the biology department and we examined it under the microscope and cross-matched it against all known types of thorns. Both past and present. It turns out that the thorns we have in the Crown are fairly unique and come from a single variety of the thorn plant that historically was only to be found growing in the land now known as Israel. We took some pollen samples from where one of the thorns was broken, where pollen had blown into and become embedded in the split in the thorn, and we cross-matched and dated the pollen samples to historical records of other samples of pollen found in clothes taken from tombs throughout the regions of Egypt, Syria and Israel, dating back to the middle of the first century before Christ’s birth. In the samples taken from the Crown we observed two distinct types of pollen. One quite prolific at that time throughout Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel…”

  “…The second, however, was of a type fairly unique to the area around Jerusalem. The fact that we could observe this type of pollen indicates that the plant from which the thorns were taken, either grew or was present at some stage in or around Jerusalem. Basically, there is little doubt that the object tested, i.e. the Crown of Thorns… once spent part of its history in or around Jerusalem, between 30AD and 70AD. We couldn’t get more accurate than that, I’m sorry. I haven’t put together my final report yet, but I’ll send it to you as soon as possible. All I can say now in summary, is that...well, we have proven it comes from the same area that Christ would have been in when he was crucified. And we have also shown that it was there about the time Christ was crucified!” Louisa beamed. She hadn’t been expected to tie down any dates, just the geographical origin. That last part had been an extra.

  The Professor smiled at her. He was very proud of her. He had selected the best for this project and he had got the best.

  “So, team...what we have shown in the space of the past month…with the help of all our colleagues here in Oxford, is that the object we have is made of a type of thorn that originates from the area around Jerusalem, and that it comes from the time when Christ was crucified. Whether or not it is the Crown of Thorns that sat upon Christ’s head we may never know. However, in addition to determining its age and origin we have also found several samples of blood on the Crown.” The Professor paused, looking around the faces of his team.

  “On the basis of the information we have before us, I am prepared to declare that this project has a green flag. With all the necessary funding it will take. Jason. It’s your project now. You’re in charge. If there’s a God out there, or in there…” he said pointing to the image of the Crown of Thorns still floating in the air in front of the screen, “ …then it’s up to you to find Him…and clone Him!”

  .

  Chapter Nineteen

  The White House

  Washington D.C., America

  .

  Tim Curts put down the phone and sat at his desk, contemplating what he was going to do for the rest of his day. His two o’clock had just been cancelled, and since it was the Redemption Day holiday everyone else that had any sense was at home with their families. Nowadays, Redemption Day held more significance than the traditional Thanksgiving Day holiday. It certainly had more relevance, the purpose of the day being to celebrate the day the vaccine for the SARs 2 virus had been discovered.

  That’s where he should be too, at home with his family, except that the ‘two o’clock meeting’ was not something he could have said no to. When the President of the United States of America, asked you personally to be in his office in Washington for ‘a two o’clock’, you didn’t say no.

  And then when the President subsequently calls you at one o’clock to tell you that he won’t be able to get out of his golf game in the afternoon after all, and that the meeting can wait till the next week, well, what could you do?

  “No problem Mr President. Enjoy your game. How’s the weather?” Tim had said biting his tongue and cursing under his breath.

  “Excellent. The weather’s brilliant here in Florida! Got to go…my caddies waiting. See you next week Tim.”

  Florida? What the hell was he doing in Florida? And why had he dragged Tim away from his home and family on the most important day of the year, to a meeting he could neve
r have made? Tim swore again under his breath and stood up and moved across to look out of the window into the garden at the back of the White House. He knew better than anyone that it wasn’t a good idea to swear oaths about the President aloud in any office in the White House. All the rooms were bugged. No doubt even his own. He should know. It had been his idea to bug them. He had done that in the second month of his new role as Head of Security at the White House, a role which was now almost secondary to the myriad of other functions he also fulfilled for the President.

  Of course, his day job, his real job…was as a Senior Operative and Field Agent, reporting directly to the Director of the CIA, …but he hadn’t done much for the CIA in the past five years. Nowadays, it was all about protecting the security of the President. Making sure that no one outside, or even inside his team, took a shot at the President and killed him. The irony was that sometimes even he was tempted to take a shot himself.

  Tim Curts was a fair man. Forty five, sandy haired, green eyes, five foot nine, slim and muscular, and very fit. Likeable. Friendly. Sincere. Honest. And fiercely loyal. With an IQ that bumped the top of the scale, he had been an obvious choice for recruitment to the CIA when he graduated from Berkley with a top degree in Biology.

  His career had started off slow, but had really got going during his intelligence stint in Syria during the final years of the first Bush administration.

  America wasn’t half the superpower it used to be. The economy was shot to hell, and manufacturing output was way down. Nowadays America was just a shadow of its former self. Self pitying, weak, without pride, and constantly on the edge of bankruptcy.

  When the SARS pandemic hit America, the economy had collapsed and never really recovered. Even America’s military might was now under threat. There just wasn’t the money to continue funding it on the same scale as before.