For a moment, the Cardinal looked at the old Professor, as if he was about to say something more, but then with a loud swish of his robe, he turned and left.
Professor Wainright swiped another Port from a passing tray, and sat back down in his chair. Smiling.
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Chapter Thirteen
There was a lot to be organised. The Professor and Jason met the next day and started to plan the activity that would unroll before them. It was important to establish the age and origin of the Crown as soon as possible, to ensure they would not be wasting their time in conducting further genetic research, should they be successful in finding any blood residue on the thorns. To authenticate the Crown, they would need to co-ordinate various activities and pieces of analysis with the Biology, Physics and Chemistry departments, in each case requesting the utmost security and secrecy.
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There was a great deal of work to be done, and since it was unlikely that they would have the relic for an indefinite period of time, they would have to work fast and furiously. Professor Wainright and Jason determined that in the creation of a potential clone, only a few select people should be involved and each of them had to be completely trustworthy. In the end the choice easily came down to two people, each of whom had been working for the Professor for between five and ten years. They were like family to him, he knew their backgrounds, their parents, their life stories. He knew they could be trusted completely.
First of all there was Louisa, thirty-five years of age, jet black hair and too attractive for her own good. Not exactly the typical, unattractive, white coated scientist you would expect to find hiding behind a microscope. She was outgoing, witty and a joy to be with, combined with a scientific mind and a genuine desire to change the world.
Wainright had jokingly teased her on more than one occasion, that apart from her excellent qualifications, the main reason he had hired her was for her looks. Afterwards though, he had come to wonder at her intelligence and the insight she brought to difficult and seemingly intractable problems. She was one of the cleverest people he had ever met, a rare combination of beauty, intelligence and charisma.
Then lastly there was Don. Don was a quiet, rather small, round-bellied man in his late thirties. Solid as a rock, no humour, but reliable and a genius. His accent betrayed his origins from the north of England, and his only love in life apart from genetics was beer and darts.
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The Cardinal’s assistant called the Professor’s office late the next afternoon, informing Wainright that he was acting with full authority in the name of the Cardinal with respect to the ‘Cardinal’s request to the University of Oxford, regarding the verification of the authenticity of the Crown of Thorns.’
“Naturally, you will appreciate that this is a matter of the greatest delicacy Professor, and the Cardinal, although extremely pleased that you have accepted to conduct the work in his name, would greatly appreciate the utmost secrecy concerning this. He would appreciate if no one came to know that it had left France.” The assistant had explained. The Professor loved the way the Cardinal had turned it around, and that this was now officially his idea. No doubt, should they prove it was authentic, the Cardinal would now be able to claim full credit for the whole project. It didn’t matter though. The point was that the Crown would be arriving in Oxford in three weeks time, and would be staying with them for between four to six months, depending upon how fast they could complete their investigations.
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The next three weeks in the I.G.E.G.G.M. were a blaze of activity. The Pharaoh project was turning out to be incredibly successful. One fertilised egg had already been implanted in the first surrogate mother, and the other two implantations would be performed in the next few weeks. That project was running smoothly.
With the Pharaoh project running independently in the background, Wainright brought a new group together, dedicating a complete lab on the third floor of the north wing of the institute for the ‘Haissem’ project, as he had begun to call it -Haissem being the word Messiah in reverse, a subtle attempt at providing a relevant pseudo code-name for the project.
The Haissem lab was the most secure of the I.G.E.G.G.M labs, with three levels of decontaminating airlocks that had to be crossed through before entering the main working area of the clean lab, and with two armed guards stationed permanently on guard outside the lab twenty-four-hours a day. Such security was standard practice for all Class A genetics projects and was mandated by the government regulations, so in itself the guards wouldn’t draw any extra attention to the project. Everyone else in the building who worked on other projects at the I.G.E.G.G.M. just thought it was another of the Professors many new projects and didn’t give it a second thought. They had their own work to get on with.
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The preparations were complete two days before the Crown arrived, and the night before its arrival the Professor called everyone together for dinner. Lydia was also in Oxford for the weekend, visiting Jason while on a week's leave from Egypt, and she was immediately accepted by everyone as an honorary founding team member. It was a great evening, the wine flowed freely, and everyone was inspired and excited. The next day couldn’t come fast enough.
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It arrived rather unceremoniously in a blue Securicor van, escorted by the Cardinal’s assistant, who watched the Professor sign a document of receipt and then promptly disappeared, without so much as a “God Bless” or a “Hail Mary”.
The group gathered in the air-purified lab, each member wearing their full Class A biological protective ‘bunny suits’ with protective face masks to prevent contamination of the samples in the lab.
As they removed the Crown from its velvet lined heavy duty metal container, which Jason suggested would probably have survived a nuclear attack, they stared in wonder at the small object in front of them.
Jason and Don were both not Christians, but as they looked at it before it was placed in the airtight-humidity controlled safe in the laboratory, they both felt something which they couldn’t immediately describe.
Something...there was ‘something’ about it. Jason felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end, and Don felt a wave of emotion running through his body. The first real emotion he had probably felt in years. Where it had come from he didn’t know. Just that suddenly it was there, and that he felt awe, sadness, joy, and expectation all at once, conjured up from nowhere by the simple object before them.
Neither of them really knew what to expect, but Jason had imagined something round, with a patchwork of thorns interwoven to form a sort of “thorn tiara”, like he had seen sitting on Christ’s head in the religious pictures in the art galleries. Whatever they had imagined, what they had in front of them now didn’t exactly match their expectations. The Crown turned out to be a rather simple affair, more triangular in form than round, with numerous large thorns sticking out at obscure angles from several coarsely interwoven branches. Jason’s first thought was that it was ugly, and would have been very painful to wear.
It was a dark brown in colour, and the surface of the thorns were smooth in some places but rough in others. In places it looked dirty, and the surface of the thorns had begun to peel back revealing the inside of the plant stem underneath.
The Professor and Jason examined it with magnifying glasses as it sat on a dish before them, hoping to be able to see some obvious signs of some blood on the surface of the thorns. Unbelievably, two of the thorns on the inside of the crown gave them immediate hope. The tips were pointing inwards and were discoloured at the ends, being slightly darker than the rest of the surface.
The Professor was quick to point out though that they shouldn’t get their hopes up. If there were any samples to be taken they were most likely to get them from inside the thorns, from blood soaked up int
o the membranes of the plant, and not from the outside surface.
But as they locked away the Crown and returned to their own homes that night, each person could not help but think of the discolorations they had seen on those thorn tips, and sleep didn’t come easy to any of them as they lay in the darkness of their rooms wondering what the months ahead would contain.
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Chapter Fourteen
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“Louisa, I’ve made an appointment for you to go to the Science Engineering Lab and have several spectro-holograms made of the Crown. They’re expecting you at ten, so you’d better get your skates on.” The professor announced at the first of their team meetings: whenever Wainright was working on a new or an important project he had a team meeting at 8.30am every Monday morning to get an update on the week before and plan the week ahead.
“Why a hologram?”
“They’re not just holograms, my dear. They are spectro-holograms. The object in question is recorded using multiple wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, the images formed by the interference patterns of the different wavelengths being recorded on the recording crystal on different lattice planes. A computer can then scan the images from the recording crystal into the computer and we can generate holograms of the object at any wavelength of light we want. We can then view the holographic image in the infra-red, ultra-violet or even the X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The professor explained enthusiastically.
“How can that help us?” Jason asked.
“First of all, we need to know exactly what the object looks like. To get any blood samples we may have to conduct destructive testing on the material of the Crown…i.e. remove bits or even whole thorns from the branches that make it up…Of course, using the digital holographic maps we will be able to use other thorns to make exact replacements for the ones we test destructively, so that later on no one will be able to tell that any are missing."
"Secondly, and this is the neat thing, dried blood cells resonate at a certain frequencies when stimulated. By irradiating the Crown with that range of frequencies, electromagnetic radiation will be reflected back from the Crown at those frequencies only where blood residue is present, and we will be able to get a holographic mapping of all the areas on the Crown where blood samples exist!”
“If there are no blood samples on the surface of the Crown, what then?” Jason asked.
“Then the next step is to conduct Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scanning of the Crown on a spread of different frequencies. I’ve arranged for this to be done at the hospital. NMR scans allow us to see the inside of the Crown at any depth or level we want. From that we can build up a map of the inside of the thorns, and that will allow us to pinpoint exactly where any blood may have been soaked up into the membranes within the thorns! Jason, that will be your job...”
“.… And remember, whenever you handle the crown, you must use your laboratory gloves. Never, on any account, should you touch it without wearing gloves!”
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When transporting the Crown from department to department they had agreed to used minimal security to avoid drawing attention to themselves, carrying it in its secure metal box in one of the laboratory's small white vans.
Later that morning Louisa arrived at the Engineering Science lab and was met at the entrance by a tall, good looking young American in his early thirties.
“Hi…you must be Louisa. I’m Mike Sanderson!” he introduced himself, smiling ear to ear, and revealing a perfect set of white teeth.
“Hi Mike...” Louisa replied, nervously shaking his hand and trying to hide the immediate attraction she felt to him. It was a long time since she had felt so drawn to a man. She had very high standards which were seldom met.
Mike was extremely good looking, but Louisa matched him in her beauty, and Mike felt drawn to her in return...in spite of his training.
In general, he was not attracted to English women, finding them too weak minded and white. The sun never shone in the UK anymore, the skies being almost permanently covered by grey, depressing clouds. Climate Change had a lot to answer for. He preferred sun-tanned American women, who invariably took a lot more pride in their appearance than the English ladies.
“Let me help you with that!” Mike took hold of the containing box for the Crown and carried it up the three flights of stairs to the laboratory. The elevator in the Engineering department never worked.
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The laboratory had been set up in advance and was ready for them when they arrived. ‘Officially’ the object that was being examined was a religious relic from Russia from around the turn of the first millennium, and they were researching the likelihood of it having belonged to one of the Saints who lived in the tenth century. Not interested in religious relics, Mike handled the container carefully but didn’t pay much attention to it.
Instead, he paid a lot of attention to Louisa. He flirted with her throughout the day, and by the end of the afternoon she was obviously beginning to warm to him, even accepting his invitation to dinner one night the next week. When the work in the laboratory had been completed, Louisa gave him her telephone number and left with the Crown in its protective metal box. Mike promised to call her in the next few days, once the data was ready for handing over.
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It was standard practice on all commercial holographic projects to hand over all the computer data, holographic plates and holographic crystals, and any exposed recording medium used. All rights and copies belonged to the commissioning party. For the analysis of the Crown, Professor Wainright had agreed with Mike’s boss, Prof. Smythe of the Engineering lab, that all the images and data would be handed over to Jason, who was Wainright’s student and who was basing his doctorate’s DPhil. on ‘the analysis and application of computer techniques to the verification of historical artefacts using genetic coding’.
Prof. Smythe's team had developed a software programme that enabled the analysis of the holographic images at all the different wavelengths, and to assist Jason in his research they had agreed to provide a copy of the programme so that Jason could do further analysis in his own time.
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It took two days for Mike and his lab assistant to complete the imaging and package all the data up in a suitable database, integrated with their software programme so that they could hand it over to Jason for them to run on their own Cray computer in the I.G.E.G.G.M lab.
The images that had come out were good, and although it was not allowed, a gut instinct told Mike to make a copy of one of the holographic images to keep secretly for himself. He had a hunch that there was more to the project than he knew about, but didn’t know what...yet.
Unfortunately, because of the secure encryption tagging system that they used on the data, it wasn’t possible to also copy the actual raw data from the holographic analysis without Jason knowing it, so when Jason came to collect the data two days later he handed over the complete package he had prepared for him. The data, the images, …everything.
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There was something about the project which troubled Mike. He had once been trained how to spot when a person was lying, and once he knew the physical telltale signs, he found it quite easy to spot when a person was not telling the truth.
And Louisa had lied when she had described the history of the religious artefact and their reason for conducting research on it. It hadn’t bothered him at the time, but afterwards when she had left, he remembered it, and it disturbed him.
So why had she lied? And what was it really all about? He had to know, and he knew the person who could tell him. Louisa.
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Chapter Fifteen
Mike was a hard worker. He had always been a good student, conscientious, loyal and extremely patriotic. When he graduated from Harvard with his degree in Physics, he met all the criteria laid down by the CIA for the ‘Good Citizen’ programme, his good looks being a special bonus which would come in very handy in his future career: five foot ten, tanned sk
in, brown hair, smouldering dark brown eyes, high cheek bones with dimples in both cheeks. When Mike smiled, women melted in response to his irresistible Latin looks, and firm, strong body.
They had recruited him when he was doing his doctorate in Physics at MIT, and after graduating he had spent twelve months undergoing specialised field training, which qualified him to act as an undercover field agent in the coming years. Everyone who had worked with him on the programme agreed that Mike was going to be a very rewarding investment and would make an ideal agent for the United States of America.
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Apart from having the fees and expenses for all his college education reimbursed to him, Mike had welcomed the opportunity to serve America. His vision was to help restore the country to its former glory.
When the SARs 2 virus had swept across America, society had started to collapse and it was only by the temporary imposition of martial law that total anarchy had been avoided.
When the president, vice-president and a third of the Senators in the Senate had been infected with the virus and died, the military had stepped in and taken control of the country for a few months, until the next elections had swept General Jamieson into power as the new President of America.
General Jamieson was regarded as being the architect behind the successful ongoing war against terrorism. Surprisingly, no one had blamed him for not being able to prevent the terrorist attack that had seen the release of the Flu virus into the subway of New York.
However, the swift arrest and subsequent military executions of the terrorists responsible had helped raise his profile even higher amongst his fellow Americans. It was no surprise therefore that Jamieson was considered by the American public to be the one leader who could best lead their weakened country back to its former strength.
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 99
