Her voice suddenly softened. “Jon, let’s just say I gave it a lot of thought. In the end, I think the Church owed you one. More than one. It owes you a lot, and—”
She stopped herself short, and Bondurant could tell she was hesitant to continue.
“Let’s just say doing nothing was the right thing to do,” Domenika said.
Bondurant was perplexed. Not a word of her explanation made any sense. The Church owed him nothing, and he was left with a puzzle even larger than the one he’d been thinking about for days. He decided not to press it. What mattered most was that the Shroud was safe and his work would continue, thanks to her. It was an unexpected gift he would not soon forget. He would repay it someday if he could. He focused once more on his friend on the other side of the glass.
“You know what’s going to give me nightmares for a very, very long time?” Bondurant said. “The sight of Harry when he is fully conscious and finds he’s lost both hands,” he said. “He was an inventor. His hands were his life. That’s going to haunt me forever.”
Domenika grimaced at the sight of Sato. Motionless, he faded in and out of a drug-induced sleep. He hadn’t yet turned his head or noticed his visitors behind the glass. Both arms lay limp at his side, covered with bandages that extended to his elbows. The doctors at Amedeo di Savoia had hoped they would be able to save Harry’s hands, or at least portions of what remained, so that he would enjoy some semblance of use. But, unfortunately, the immense heat generated by the halogen lamp he had heroically smothered was so intense, it was as if he had caught a bolt of lightning in both hands.
“Some are called, Jon,” Domenika said softly.
“What does that mean?” Bondurant asked. This was no time to prepare for another sermon he didn’t want to hear.
“It means that some are called in service to the Lord in ways they may never expect. Dr. Sato gave of himself to protect the very image of Jesus Christ, our Lord. There are few higher callings I can think of than that.”
“Maybe that’s the case in your mind, Domenika,” Bondurant said. “I know what you want to believe. But we don’t yet know whose image is on that Shroud. Only that it does not seem man-made.”
“You saw it yourself. The image is miraculous,” she pressed.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Tell that to Harry, who will likely never take his kids by the hand again.”
“Oh, do we have to start with this again?”
She frustrated him to no end. How such an intelligent woman could be taken in by dogma not even a child would accept was beyond him.
“I suspect—”
Domenika wouldn’t let him finish. “I suspect you will be singing a different tune when this is all over, Doctor,” she said.
The reversion to addressing him now as “Doctor” rather than “Jon” did not escape him either.
“What I mean, Domenika, is that—”
Bondurant stopped himself short. Sato had slowly turned his head and noticed them at the window for the first time. His legs began to stir. Bondurant could tell Sato recognized them through the glass. Sato motioned Bondurant to his bedside with a slight movement of his forehead and eyes, as if to say “Come here.”
The signs that met Bondurant at the entry door to the ICU could not be more clear:
ENTRY BY PERSONS OTHER THAN HOSPITAL PERSONNEL STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.
Bondurant turned to Domenika.
“Keep an eye out,” he whispered.
“What? Are you kidding me? You can’t go in there,” she said as she grabbed him by the sleeve.
Bondurant turned and peered down the quiet, dimly lit hallway littered with empty gurneys and an assortment of wheelchairs. He saw only a single nurse preoccupied with paperwork at the brightly lit receiving desk at least a hundred feet away.
“Shh,” he whispered, placing his forefinger to his lips.
Before she could protest further, Bondurant was free of her grasp and slipping deftly through the door.
He approached Sato’s bedside. Sato motioned with his eyebrows, as if to ask Bondurant to come in closer. Bondurant saw that Sato had over a dozen tubes and wires running to and from his body.
“Jon,” Sato whispered hoarsely as tears welled up in his eyes. “I am so sorry.”
“Harry, please. I am the one who’s sorry. I got you into this mess in the first place. I’ll never forgive myself. Never.”
“How badly was the relic harmed?” Sato asked, straining to speak.
Bondurant smiled. “Not a scratch on it. You saved it, Harry.”
“I have a few of my own, though, huh?” Sato said as he forced a smile and looked down at the bandages that enveloped both his hands. “I have been fading in and out for a few hours, Jon. They told me before they put me under that there was no chance of saving them. But that little priest, the one with the hump. He says he disagrees.”
“Father Parenti? He’s been here to see you?”
“Yes, snuck in just like you.” Sato’s breathing was labored. “At first, he scared the heck out of me. I thought he was here for the last rites.”
Bondurant laughed.
“But we prayed together. Never done that before. He had an old cloth he put on me for a minute. He says it will save my hands and maybe even me as well,” Sato said. “He called it a ‘laying on of hands.’ We both laughed about it. I’ll take any cure he’s got.”
Bondurant reached out and stroked Sato’s forehead. He pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen in front of his eyes.
“Jon?” Sato whispered. “Listen to me.”
Domenika began to tap lightly on the window. Jon turned and saw a panicked look on her face. Someone was coming.
Bondurant took a knee, leaned in, and placed his ear close to Sato’s lips so that he would not have to strain to speak.
“Some are called,” Sato said, almost inaudibly.
Bondurant froze in place. He couldn’t believe his ears. “Harry, what did you just say?” he asked as he bent over him to completely block Domenika’s view.
“I said ‘some are called,’ Jon.” Sato’s eyes closed momentarily as if to gather the strength to remain conscious for a few more moments. “When I was hanging there, as terrified as I was, I had a moment of real clarity. An epiphany.”
“You mean like one of those ‘whole life passes before you’ moments?” Bondurant said sympathetically.
“Yes,” Sato said. “One of the electrical cords had gotten itself wrapped around my neck so tight, I started to choke and lose it. Jon, I mean really lose it.”
Domenika began to tap harder on the glass, a real sense of urgency now showing on her face.
“Jon, I have heard,” Sato said as he began to wheeze slightly, “that at that very moment when it is almost done for you, some see the face of Jesus.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard,” Bondurant said reassuringly.
“Well,” Sato said as his breathing strained from the pain, “I was staring right at the face of Jesus, Jon. Literally. He was not a foot from my face. I am not a religious man. And I said a prayer that I would live to see my kids. And, Jon?” Sato began to drift off.
“Yes, Harry?”
Sato looked up one last time as he tried to finish his sentence before he succumbed to sleep once more.
“The Shroud of Jesus Christ is real.”
At that moment, two hospital orderlies burst into the room and ordered Bondurant to leave.
“Just what do you mean, Harry?” Bondurant said. “I’ve seen your photos. Is that your professional opinion? Do you know what you’re saying?”
Sato could not answer. He had fallen back into a deep, morphine-induced sleep.
“You can read the sign? You can read the sign?” one of the orderlies shouted as he tugged Bondurant from the room and toward the elevator. “You too, miss. This way.”
As soon as they were clear of the elevator and the orderlies, who had unceremoniously shoved them out onto the first floor and toward the exit, Domenika tur
ned to Bondurant.
“What was that all about? What did he say?” Domenika asked as her eyes grew wide with curiosity.
Bondurant hesitated before responding.
“Did you know your Father Parenti was here before us?” he asked.
“No, he didn’t tell me.”
Bondurant searched for what to say next about Sato’s parting words. He dared not repeat them to Domenika. If Sato, whom he trusted implicitly as a scientist, was hazily casting about odd notions from a drug-filled dream, that was one thing. But if Harry, his lifelong friend and a known agnostic, had undergone a near-deathbed conversion to Christianity, that was something different and altogether important.
“Harry? He said he was sorry,” was all Bondurant could bring himself to say. “That’s about all I got from him. The rest, well, it was the morphine talking, I’m sure. It just had to be.”
CHAPTER 22
Turin, Italy
June 2014
When Bondurant entered the break room four doors down the hall from where the Shroud rested safely on its examination table, he encountered complete silence. Usually this was a lively place for banter and casual conversation, but now, aside from the hum of the snack and soda machines against one wall, the place was eerily quiet. What made the room unusually uncomfortable was that two of the most prestigious scientists in their fields sat across a small table from each other and glared.
Bondurant didn’t like the look of the scene, most especially the obvious tension between the two men. He also didn’t appreciate being woken from the nap he had planned for the only three-hour break he had that evening.
“I’m told that each of you wanted to talk about the samples we’ve collected off the Shroud,” Bondurant said.
It was four o’clock in the morning. Only three days of study on the Shroud were left. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and placed an aluminum briefcase on the table between his two colleagues. It contained the five small samples of the Shroud, each in its vacuum-sealed bottle. He opened the briefcase between them.
Both O’Neil and Sehgal immediately dove toward the bottled samples like crabs scrambling for a prized prawn. The shoving and elbowing almost sent the briefcase tumbling toward the floor. Bondurant slammed the case nearly shut with both O’Neil and Sehgal’s hands trapped inside. As he pressed down on the case, both of the combatants pulled their arms out.
“He started it,” O’Neil cried out.
“No, he started it,” Sehgal said.
“Gentlemen, if that’s what you are, these sample containers are fixed inside the case,” Bondurant said. “Try as you might, there’s no yanking them out.”
O’Neil and Sehgal both studied their forearms to determine whether they’d been bruised.
“Just what is going on, Terry? Ravi?” Bondurant said as calmly as he could on one hour of sleep.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on, Jon,” O’Neil said. He was twice the size of Sehgal, and the thunder in his voice was meant to prove it. “This ‘blood merchant’ here is attempting to turn our entire test protocol on its head. All along he’s insisted he can characterize the DNA off the Shroud with a single droplet of blood. Now he wants more. He wants all the blood we have off the Shroud.”
Bondurant was sleep deprived, but he was awake enough to understand the consequences of what O’Neil had said.
“Ravi, is Terry accurately representing your point of view?” Bondurant asked. “You’ve always insisted that, given the molecular structures you deal with, you needed only a speck, way less than a drop of the subject’s blood to get us all the data we need. What’s changed your mind?”
“I’ve not changed my mind,” Sehgal said. “I think you must have misheard me at the start. Indeed, my work is at a molecular level. But there is a chance that if I come away with just a single droplet of blood, there might be contaminants that would render the sample useless. I am trying to be safe, that’s all.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” O’Neil said, “but wasn’t the entire reason you won the Nobel Prize in this area because you figured out how to decontaminate DNA at the microscopic level in the first place? Why would you be worried about that now?”
Bondurant stared at Sehgal with some trepidation. He didn’t believe he’d ever “misheard” Sehgal, and he was absolutely certain Sehgal had said that a single droplet of blood from the Shroud would suffice for the all-important DNA work they were counting on from his tests. Something had changed Sehgal’s mind about the amount of blood he needed off the Shroud, and Bondurant wanted to figure it out.
“We are working on the very leading edge of biology and chemistry, Dr. O’Neil, and there are always factors we need to consider as we work. I have said from the beginning that we would need every bit of bloodstained material we could get to ensure we provide the best data possible,” Sehgal said.
Now, that’s a lie, Bondurant thought. Sehgal had said when he was first asked to join the Shroud team that he would need only a few molecules of blood.
“Ravi,” Bondurant said, “you know that if we cede the only two blood samples we have to you, it will cut the number of samples we have to test using carbon dating, right?”
“I do,” Sehgal said.
“Jon,” O’Neil said. “Ravi’s mind may have changed in the middle of all this, but mine certainly hasn’t. I’ve said from the start that if you want ninety-five percent certainty on the age of this Shroud, I need all four samples promised. Anything less than that, and the age of the Shroud is going to be called into question. There goes your whole project. It’s as simple as that.”
“And if I don’t get both blood samples I need, there goes your project as well,” Sehgal said.
“What do you mean by that, Ravi?” Bondurant asked. He was becoming really agitated. This was getting out of control.
“I mean I’m off the team,” Sehgal said as he folded his arms.
“So it’s take your marbles and your Nobel and go home, is that it, Ravi?” O’Neil said.
“That’s about right,” Sehgal said.
Bondurant couldn’t afford to let it end this way.
“Ravi, let’s take a step back, can we?” Bondurant asked. “I’d like to sleep on this for what? Another hour? I have the lead on this project, and while I’m tempted to flip a coin, I have to decide what’s best in the way of scientific process and outcome. Ravi, I hope you don’t do us the terrible disservice of walking. It’s a threat I don’t take lightly, given what an honor it is to have your mind on this team.”
With that, Sehgal shook both O’Neil’s and Bondurant’s hands and left the room.
“Now you tell me what that was all about,” O’Neil said. “I know a bait and switch when I see one, Jon.”
“I know, Terry, something’s not adding up,” Bondurant said. “My gut’s telling me this is his once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a mark where the Shroud is concerned, and I’m beginning to wonder if there is more here than Ravi is letting on. If he’s as good as that Nobel Prize says he is, he doesn’t need all this blood. Something else is up his sleeve, and I’m going to need to figure it out.”
“So what are you going to do, Jon?” O’Neil asked. “How are you going to rule?”
“Oh, I’m ruling in your favor, Terry,” Bondurant said. “That’s never been in question. What’s in question now is just who Ravi Sehgal is working for besides me, and why.”
CHAPTER 23
Turin, Italy
June 2014
They waited outside the hospital in the dark for the cab he’d called almost twenty minutes earlier, but it never showed. It was a warm summer evening, the stars were out, and Bondurant figured it was about a half hour’s walk to the university labs, long enough for him and Domenika to clear their heads. The trek ahead of them was well lit and took them through a historic and romantic part of town. But the unplanned walk also provided something that had eluded Bondurant for days—time away from the project alone with the most vexing woman he’d ever met.
The past week had been physically draining for him and his entire research team. He’d spent one exhausting eighteen-hour day after another, meticulously organizing dozens of tests involving the recording of thousands of bits of data and evidence. Then there was the constant management of more than a half dozen “world-renowned” scientists from several different disciplines, all with egos as large as their reputations would suggest. Throw in the permanent maiming of one of his closest friends and add to it the near total destruction of the priceless relic he had the responsibility to safeguard, and Bondurant had seen little rest.
“Jon, let’s reset,” Domenika said as she removed her high-heeled shoes and bounded on her bare feet across the cobblestone street to catch up with him. “Before we go further, I want to talk to you about something. It has nothing to do with the Shroud.”
Bondurant was game to talk about anything but work at the moment. “Sure. What’s on your mind?” He shifted his suitcase—the locked case that held the samples of the Shroud—to his left hand, and with his right he lit up a cigarette and took a long, satisfying drag.
“Do you mind?” she asked as she waved away the smoke that wafted in front of them as they walked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Does this bother you?” He wanted to be polite but had no desire to put it out for her. He needed to relax, and a cigarette would help.
“Greatly,” she said. Domenika reached down, gently grasped his wrist, and pointed to the watch he devised that had so impressed Parenti. She tried to get a glimpse of the numbers on its face, but Bondurant pulled it away quickly. “I bet you’re a whiz at math. You know your habit is subtracting years, not adding them, right?” she said.
“So the good father has briefed you further, I see,” Bondurant said. He knew the habit was indefensible, and an argument for smoking would get him as far with her as his love of scotch. He often smoked simply to keep people at bay so he could be alone with his thoughts, but this walk was definitely an exception. He took one last satisfying drag and flicked the glowing cigarette toward the curb without complaint.
The Shroud Conspiracy Page 16
