He first heard a latch open, followed by what sounded like a coin hitting a tile floor. Kishan grabbed the illuminated clock from the desk to light the floor below him. A small metal key caught his eye. He looked toward the closet door across the office, the one he was certain only his father had ever entered. It was nothing but a simple key, but if it were to open the door, Kishan felt sure it would reveal his father’s deepest secrets.
No one but Ravi enjoyed access to the closet. Ravi’s secretary and others in the office referred to it as the “Forbidden Zone” or the “Bomb Shelter.” Some had jokingly speculated it was the true resting place for Mahatma Gandhi. Others said it was a portal to the famous Lost Temples of India. Whatever lay inside the closet, Kishan was certain that if he disobeyed his father’s explicit instructions to stay out of it, he would face the most severe punishment. It was even possible his father would disown him. Kishan quickly calculated in his mind the distance between Mumbai and Turin. He knew his father did not plan to return for several more days.
His curiosity got the best of him. He quietly crept across the office with key in hand and stopped at the closet door to take a deep breath. The moment of indecision ended. There was no way he could resist the urge to find out what was behind the mysterious door. He inserted the key into the lock, closed his eyes, and turned the key ever so gently to the right. The moment he did, the closet door sprung open as if on a spring, revealing a space as dark as ink. He felt around for a light switch inside the closet and found one with his palm, but stopped short before he flipped it on, afraid of the light that would set his father’s office aglow. He stepped inside the closet, shut the door behind him, and hit the switch.
The first thing that struck Kishan when his eyes adjusted to the light was the size of the room he had entered. It was no mere closet. The room, windowless, faced the interior of the building and was deceptively large, nearly the size of Ravi’s office itself. The second thing that struck Kishan was the altar.
In the center of an array of shelves before him was a modest red velvet pad on the floor—presumably to kneel on—in front of what could only be described as a shrine. In its center were two large candles and a photograph of Pope Augustine giving a blessing to Ravi in the pope’s offices in the Vatican. Right beside the photo was a large black-and-white picture of Mother Teresa in what appeared to be a hospital, surrounded by children.
To his right, Kishan caught sight of a large collection of framed photos on the wall, none of which he could place. One, encased in a cheap and worn plastic frame, was a tattered photo of a mother and father holding the hands of a small boy who stood between them. Kishan wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be the only photo Ravi had of his parents before they had both died so young. They almost looked like children themselves. He had never seen another picture of them.
Arrayed in a square in the center of the wall was another collection of photos Kishan hadn’t seen before. They were photos of trips he and his father had taken over the years. His favorite was one of the two of them in their seats at a Chicago Cubs game, taken during their trip to America. Both of them were smiling broadly. Kishan recognized every moment when each of the pictures had been snapped. On a small table below the photos were a stack of his school report cards, ones his father had obviously felt should be safely stored.
On the opposite wall, centered in the middle, was a heavily decorated diploma encased with an 18-karat gold medal bearing the image of Alfred Nobel. Kishan had been shown the prize by his father once before, but after that it had disappeared. He was tempted to touch it, but he thought better of it and left it alone. Then he turned back toward the wall with the door he had entered through and gasped.
As he approached the sight, his stomach turned. It was a collage of death: a collection of at least a hundred Polaroid photographs of dead, mutilated children was strewn across the wall, pinned there haphazardly with thumbtacks in no apparent order. He could barely bring himself to look at the photos of the unfortunate children. Some with eyes completely missing, others in various stages of decomposition, and many more malnourished—they had obviously starved to death. Kishan turned his head away in disgust. He didn’t need someone to tell him where these victims were likely found. He had been rescued by Ravi from this world. They were the product of the slums of Mumbai, the poverty of Calcutta, and countless other cities and rural regions of India from Pradesh to West Bengal. Kishan tried to imagine why his father would collect and display such horrible images. He’d always sensed his father’s frustration. While Sehgal had made it in this world and Kishan had been spared a life of misery, there were so many others like him who had met with senseless death by poverty. Kishan was certain the photos were kept as painful reminders of the work Ravi had left to do.
He wanted to leave the forbidden room as soon as he could but first turned toward the only other small table in the room. He was shocked to see a pistol lying there. His father was passionately opposed to firearms, and yet here was a particularly lethal-looking gun. Next to the gun was a stack of books, some magazines, and dozens of brochures. Kishan picked up one of the books, leafed loosely through it, and then turned to the pile of magazines and articles nearby to scan their contents. This was strange, he thought. He stuffed one of the pamphlets into his jacket pocket and made his way quickly toward the door. He turned off the light, closed the door behind him, and wondered what could possibly possess his father to hide a gun and take an interest in something as strange as the Demanian Church.
CHAPTER 20
Turin, Italy
June 2014
Bondurant was certain there was no time to lose. Even though one of his best friends and most qualified scientists he knew lay semiconscious in the hospital from his accident the night before, it was critical to examine the photo imagery Harry Sato had gathered before the accident that almost destroyed the Shroud. It was one of the few puzzle pieces Bondurant could put quickly into place to answer an important question about the Shroud without having to wait weeks for answers.
Fortunately for Bondurant, the vast majority of the evidence he needed from Sato’s work had already been neatly packaged by Sato’s team on a hard drive, and the drive was now in a computer at Bondurant’s fingertips. Bondurant would have preferred to have Sato right at his side to interpret the findings, but that was impossible now. He had received a lot of on-the-job training from Sato about how to interpret the results of photo imagery, and he felt he could adequately manage a rough interpretation of the evidence on his own.
But, just as with the holographic examination of the Shroud he’d conducted a few days before, Bondurant had Domenika in the examination room. This time she’d been an invited guest. He wanted her there so that she could view the evidence at the same time he did. Bondurant felt particularly certain that Sato’s computer-aided photo imagery might cast particular doubt on the authenticity of the Shroud, and if that were to happen, he wanted Domenika present to see it.
At this point, even Bondurant had been surprised at his own findings drawn from holographic presentations of the Shroud. There was no question his study of the ghostly image that had arisen from the lab table several nights before pointed in one clear direction: the Shroud of Turin could indeed be the burial cloth of a crucified man. Now Sato’s results could help confirm or deny that finding, and it would only require a few minutes of study to determine the truth.
As Bondurant calibrated the massive projectors that would beam the high-resolution image of the Shroud upon a giant screen, as large as that of a movie theater, Domenika settled into her chair at the control desk. Bondurant pushed a button, and the entire examination room faded to black and left the control board as the only source of dim light in the room. “You’re sure you’re plugged in this time?” Domenika teased.
Bondurant winced.
“Yes,” he said somewhat sheepishly. After a few taps on his keyboard, a massive image of the face of the Shroud was projected on the screen.
“Good
, then,” Domenika said. “I see you’ve chosen the face of our Savior to start with.”
“Yes, I have,” Bondurant said. “It’s the face on the relic that so many Christians identify as that of Jesus Christ. I figure let’s get right to the heart of the matter.”
“Fine,” Domenika said. “The image is certainly sharp. And large. I’ve never seen the face of our Lord in such magnificent detail before.”
“Harry’s equipment is worth many millions of dollars. The image has never been as clearly and sharply seen as this,” Bondurant said. “Now I’m going to center on the image’s right cheek, just below the eye, and I’m going to magnify it one thousand times.”
He zoomed in to the shade of the image’s face. Black and white lines, most of them haphazard as to their direction, appeared before them.
“Huh,” Bondurant said.
“ ‘Huh’? What does ‘huh’ mean?”
“It means ‘huh,’ ” Bondurant said. “Just ‘huh.’ You’ve said it before.”
“Yes, but when I say ‘huh,’ ” Domenika said, “it usually means I’m a little surprised. What does ‘huh’ mean to you?”
“It means I’m a little surprised.”
Domenika shook her head.
“You know, sometimes you just—”
Bondurant cut her off.
“Let’s go to ten thousand times now,” Bondurant said. He typed another command into the keyboard.
Now the image before them revealed the same lines as before, only when Bondurant moved the image from place to place across the screen, every line magnified. The lines looked random in nature, and did not seem to follow any particular pattern or direction.
“What the . . . ?” Bondurant said in amazement. He then stared in silence at the screen.
“Jon, you’re driving me nuts,” Domenika said. “What’s ‘what the’? Is that good or bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It depends on your point of view,” Bondurant said. “For me right now, it’s bad. For you, it’s good.”
“What do you mean?” Domenika said. “C’mon. Act like a scientist. What is ‘what the’ in scientific terms?”
Bondurant moved his cursor so that he could capture as much of the image of the face on the Shroud as possible at such high resolution before he responded.
“ ‘What the’ means my mind just can’t grasp what my eyes clearly see,” Bondurant said. “I was expecting something totally different.”
“What were you expecting?” Domenika asked.
“Paint strokes, actually,” Bondurant said. “There’s always been the speculation that the famous Shroud of Turin was actually the work of an artist with a lot of imagination, a bolt of linen cloth, and a fine paintbrush. But this is not the work of an artist.”
“How can you tell?”
“These are not brushstrokes,” Bondurant said. “There’s no uniformity whatsoever in the lines that configure the image we see. And they are not patterns conjured up by a machine. The randomness of the lines is just too great.”
“So what are you saying, Jon?” she asked.
Bondurant moved the magnification down to 100X.
“I’m saying that the evidence so far is telling me we are looking at an image that was formed naturally, and not by man,” Bondurant said.
Domenika drew her chair as close as possible to Bondurant’s and simply smiled. Bondurant went through the same procedure as they looked at over a dozen other areas of the Shroud with the same magnifying tool. On each occasion, he found the same result. No evidence of medieval artistry or more modern-day technique appeared to create any point on the image of the Shroud. The evidence simply wasn’t there.
Bondurant took a break and stared up at the giant screen. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen. Domenika reached over for the computer mouse he’d been using. She double-clicked on an icon for a folder Bondurant had ignored all morning. Before he could look down to see what folder she was opening, she’d already been able to open the image on the screen. It was a photo, and Bondurant could see that the folder she’d opened was entitled “For Bondurant, As Requested.” He leapt to reach for the computer mouse, but it was too late. Domenika held it firmly in her hands.
On the screen before them was a giant photograph of Domenika appearing positively radiant in one of the gardens outside the lab. She wore a pair of faded jeans and a casual white cotton shirt. The photo captured her striking beauty and had obviously been taken with her unawares, most likely through a telephoto lens from afar.
“What the . . . ?” Domenika said.
Bondurant could only look down at his lap. He glanced sideways and saw that Domenika was studying the stolen image of herself in a private moment. She wasn’t smiling.
“I guess it’s my turn now,” Bondurant said. “What does ‘what the’ mean to you?” He still couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“I guess ‘what the’ means,” Domenika said, “that if you wanted a photo of me, you only needed to ask, Jon.”
Bondurant summoned the courage to look at the one and only woman who seemed to have the ability to tie him in knots. He was mystified as to why.
“I guess, well, I guess I don’t know,” Bondurant said. “Perhaps I thought that asking for a photo of you might affect our professional relationship. I don’t know.” At this point, he felt no more than twelve years old.
“Huh,” Domenika said. There was a long pause.
“Now I need to ask,” Bondurant said, “what does ‘huh’ mean to you?”
“It means ‘I like you too,’ Jon, I guess, regardless of our professional relationship. I hope you enjoy the photo. Maybe one day you’ll share one of yours with me?”
Bondurant smiled. He couldn’t believe Domenika had let him off the hook so easily, and he was thankful.
“Of course, I love, I mean, I mean, I’d love to, you know what I mean, I’d love to share a photo with you. That would be great.”
“Jon,” Domenika said. “What does what we’ve seen here today in these photos mean to you? The ones of the Shroud, I mean.”
“We have a lot more tests to run, Domenika. A lot more,” Bondurant said. “I didn’t think it was possible, but so far the evidence points to an authentic Shroud.”
“Huh,” Domenika said, a smile on her face.
“Huh,” Bondurant said as he stared at the photo of Domenika on the screen. His smile grew just as wide as hers.
CHAPTER 21
Turin, Italy
June 2014
I hate hospitals. I just hate them,” Bondurant said as he peered through the green-tinted glass window of the Intensive Care Unit in the Amedeo di Savoia Hospital in Turin. “I start feeling ill as soon as I walk through the door.”
The lime-green cinderblock walls that surrounded them and the glaring neon lights above were just the first measures Bondurant took of the hospital they were in. The smell of bleach permeated the halls.
“Are you saying hospitals make you sick, Doctor?” Domenika asked.
“Let me tell you something about hospitals. Everything about them—the sick people, the odors, the noise—it makes me feel like there must be something wrong with me, but I just don’t know it yet,” Bondurant said. “Whenever I step inside one, I start to think that I might have cancer and don’t know it, or that a heart attack is just around the corner.”
“They remind you that you’re mortal?” Domenika asked.
“Yes, exactly.”
She looked down at Bondurant’s wrist. “Like your watch,” she said.
Bondurant quickly pulled the sleeve of his jacket over his watch to hide it. How did she know about it? “Well, that’s a little different. That—”
“Jon, you are an interesting study,” she chided as she pressed her nose lightly against the glass once again. She stared at Haruki Sato, who lay in a semiconscious state in a room on the other side of the window.
She had called him by his first name again, and Bondurant liked the sound of it. H
e took the opportunity to study her while her eyes were fixed intently on his friend. He had yet to figure out why he cared about her impressions of him or her feelings, but he did.
Two days had passed, and Domenika had yet to inform the Vatican of the accident that had come within inches of destroying its treasured Shroud. I can start this; I can stop it was the refrain he’d heard over and over in his head since the disaster. He was stunned she hadn’t called Rome that night and killed both the project and his reputation on the spot. He was worried about tempting fate, but his curiosity over her sudden change of heart toward him and his work had him vexed. He had to ask.
“Domenika, tell me something. I’m sure you must feel bad about Harry. We all do.”
“Of course,” she said.
“But I know you don’t know him well enough to want to do him a favor, even a little one. And I know I have not been on your most-admired list since we met. It’s no secret you’ve been opposed to this investigation from the beginning. So what I can’t understand is why you’ve given me such a pass.”
“You mean, why have I looked the other way?” she asked, her voice rising.
“Well, I—”
“You mean, why have I put my own career and reputation on the line by ignoring my obligation to protect the Church?” Her voice had jumped an octave.
“It’s just that—”
“Especially where it concerns the near loss of the Church’s most sacred relic on earth?”
There was no disguising her anger, and Bondurant was instantly sorry he’d raised the subject. He had visions of her changing her mind then and there.
The Shroud Conspiracy Page 15
