The past few days, she’d simply turned off her phone to stop the incessant tweeting.
Tweet, tweet, tweet . . . Tweet, tweet, tweet . . . Tweet, tweet, tweet.
She reached over and turned it off now. She had nothing to say to the man.
CHAPTER 30
St. Michaels, Maryland
July 2014
Bondurant sat alone in the teleconference center at the Enlightenment Institute a few minutes before nine on a Saturday morning. The marine layer typical of midsummer wrapped around the Chesapeake Bay shoreline and swallowed the Institute’s Victorian home at the end of Perry Cabin Drive in a light fog.
Looks like D-Day, Bondurant thought. He’d not yet had breakfast but had made enough coffee to last the morning. Its welcome scent had permeated just about every room on the first floor, including the one he was in. He turned from the massive window that faced the bay and stared at a bank of flat-panel monitors that formed a video wall in front of him. The screens sat arrayed from floor to ceiling. They would light up one at a time as the videoconference participants logged in. He had made arrangements so that his team could conference in from around the world, a few as far away as India and Japan.
He had taken an early swim off the dock by his trailer, trying to relax, but he was still as edgy as he had been for days. Spread before him was a stack of confidential reports, all written by the handful of scientists who had worked alongside him in Turin just two weeks before.
He yawned and rubbed his eyes. For over a week now, he had found it tough to sleep, and the reasons increased by the hour. There was the Vatican, of course. It had leaned on him hard to publish. Few scientific studies in his lifetime would likely draw as much interest as the outcome of his investigation. Given the stakes, Bondurant found the Vatican was relatively calm, but they were putting him under pressure to come to his conclusion soon. There was also the national and international media that had stalked him for weeks, hoping to find leaks that would indicate whether the Shroud was real or not. TV satellite trucks had hunkered down at the Institute and near his trailer overlooking the river. They bristled with activity at the slightest sign that an announcement might be forthcoming. There were the editors from an assortment of publishing houses in New York vying for book contracts for him. And, if that wasn’t enough, there was the stunning piece of confidential and contradictory evidence turned up by Sehgal that turned the totality of findings gathered by the rest of the team upside down. The purpose of the Saturday morning call was to get to the bottom of it.
And there was Domenika, of course. She had seen none of the preliminary reports Bondurant’s team of experts had shared with one another, but he had placed her on the videoconference call list, and she had registered to be on the call. She may have ignored his personal calls since Turin, but, feelings aside, it was critical to officially reveal where their conclusions were headed, particularly given the strange news Sehgal had brought forward. He figured that she believed the outcome was certain to go in the Vatican’s favor and wasn’t waiting for the report to be printed before moving ahead to develop a plan for releasing the good news of his team’s findings. That was a problem. He was concerned about her getting out ahead of the actual evidence, not all of which she had seen.
But his thoughts of Domenika that morning were only partly about ancient relics and media releases for the Church. Instead, they had everything to do with his feelings since he had so quietly slid from her hotel room in Turin just weeks before. In his mind, the irony was thick. He now longed to see the woman he had insulted when they’d first met. What he wouldn’t give to see her again in person so he could tell her the truth about how he felt.
The truth was that he had fallen in love with her. He had kicked himself every day since their last evening together for not telling her outright.
I don’t know. I just love the thought of you, he thought he remembered saying.
Are you kidding me? he asked as he mocked himself over and over. Is that what you said? He cringed every time he remembered what he’d said to her and what he’d left unsaid. No other woman had ever made him feel this way.
Bong.
The chime that signaled the first participant had joined the videoconference sounded. The automated voice introduced the first caller. “Now joining the conference: Domenika Jozef.”
And there she was, on screen 3, beamed in from Rome with a positively radiant look on her face. It was the first time Bondurant had talked to her or seen her since they had left Turin.
“God, I miss you,” Bondurant let out involuntarily. He couldn’t help himself.
“Oh, Jon,” she said and smiled. It was midafternoon in her apartment in Rome, and he could see the jagged skyline of the city in the window behind her.
She looked a little apprehensive, which Bondurant figured was tied to her having ignored his calls. “What’s up with that ashtray on your desk? It’s empty.”
Bondurant grinned broadly. “I haven’t smoked since you asked me to quit that night in Turin.” He looked at his watch. It had added ten years, blinking “21:08.” She deserved the credit, he felt.
“And the scotch?” Domenika asked.
“Drew the line there,” he said. He slowly reached over and slid the bottle of Macallan on his desk several inches out of camera range.
“Well, I did you some good, then,” she said. He could tell she liked having such a powerful effect on him.
“Domenika, I know you must be busy because you’ve not been returning my calls, but I really need you to listen to me for just a minute,” Bondurant said. He had been rehearsing for days what he wanted to say to her and was anxious to get it out.
Domenika looked away from the monitor for a few seconds as if to avoid what he might say next.
“There is something I’ve wanted to tell you since Turin,” Bondurant said. “It’s something I need you to know. I know I’m going to look ridiculous for saying it on a videoconference call, but—”
“Jon,” Domenika interjected, “there’s something I’ve wanted to talk with you about as well, but I don’t think I was ready yet. At least until now. It’s why I’ve been avoiding you. But maybe now’s not the time either,” she said.
“No, Domenika,” Bondurant said. “Please. What is it?”
“It’s about our last night together,” Domenika said. “But I—I—I just don’t want to go about a sensitive conversation like this the wrong way. It’s very—well, it’s very important to me.”
Domenika looked uncomfortable as she spoke, and Bondurant could hear real anxiety in her voice. He decided to put his own unease about what he wanted to say aside for the moment to hear her out.
“What is it, Domenika?” Bondurant said. He could tell she was trying to gather the courage to say something obviously important. “You can talk to me about anything.”
“All right,” she said. “Well, here goes. It’s about our last night together, at the hotel.”
He knew immediately where she wanted to go with the conversation, as he’d had to deal with a lot of similar phone calls like this before. Only for this one, he didn’t have any difficult explaining to do.
“Well, you weren’t there when I woke up in the morning,” Domenika said. “I kind of thought you would be. A lot of that night still seems pretty hazy to me. The morning after too. When I woke up, you were gone and already on your plane headed home, so we never got to talk in person. I mean, did we . . . well— Jon, is anyone else logged in on this call yet?” she asked.
“No, no. You’re the first one on,” Bondurant said, now in a minor panic. He knew he had little time before the rest of the team joined the call and his opportunity to express his feelings would be lost. He had plenty to get off his chest with her as well.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
Bong.
“Now joining the conference,” said the automated voice.
“Dr. Terry O’Neil.” O’Neil appeared on another monitor and took up almost the entire scre
en.
“Really? Right now, Terry?” Bondurant said.
“What was that, Jon?” O’Neil asked. “Aren’t we scheduled for our call?”
“Nothing, nothing. Sorry, Terry,” Bondurant said. “We’re just getting some technical issues ironed out here. How are you?”
“Excellent. I’m sure you saw from the draft I sent last night that I have some very interesting news for you, right?” O’Neil’s excitement as he spoke was unusual for him.
“Yes, I saw your report, Terry. It’s unbelievable, really. But I don’t want to get into the subject until the rest have the chance to log in.”
Bondurant looked at the other monitor and could see Domenika had broken into a smile, pleased with what she had overheard so far.
In the next five minutes, Bondurant’s video wall of monitors lit up with one face after another as his team joined the conference call across thirteen time zones. O’Neil, who had completed the radiocarbon dating tests of the Shroud, had joined from London. Ravi Sehgal appeared from Mumbai and scribbled notes while he waited for the call to commence. He was ready to relay his own findings on DNA and blood type. Jean Boudreau was on the line from Paris to discuss the origin of the relic’s fabric. Michael Lessel called in from the University of New Mexico. His labs had completed the work on soil-particle analysis. Lisa Montrose from Duke University was ready with her data on material pigmentation. And, finally, there was Harry Sato, who beamed in from Japan, where it was ten p.m.
“First, let me begin by thanking all of you for joining me, especially those of you calling in at some odd hours,” Bondurant began. “I’d like to start with a summarization of what I see as the key findings from each of your reports and, if I may, to focus on an area where some of the data is telling us a very contradictory and somewhat disconcerting story from the trend suggested by all the rest. I wish that science were not such a messy process, but no one’s ever said that discovery is always neat and tidy. I’m afraid we have that in spades with this investigation as well.”
Bondurant glanced at Domenika’s screen for a moment and watched as his words produced a quizzical look. The others on the call who had reviewed Ravi Sehgal’s striking conclusions nodded in agreement with Bondurant’s assessment of where the investigation stood. Domenika, who was not privy to the various drafts from each of the scientists involved, was to receive a final report for the Church from Bondurant only when it was complete. She didn’t know about the contradictions he referred to.
“As to the critical indicators on the age and geographic origin of the Shroud, there appears to be uniform agreement,” Bondurant said. “And the news is . . . well—how do I put this?—just astounding. I have to say I would never have believed it before today, but data is data, and I am willing to eat my words as readily as the next guy when I have to. Jean, you are reporting that everything you can glean from the fabric sample you collected points to the first century AD, Middle Eastern origin. Is that correct?”
“There is no doubt about it, Jon,” Boudreau said as he took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “The sample we took from the Shroud is of a thread pattern specific to the Palestine region, first century. I have at least a dozen other such material samples of this known origin in my lab, and there is no mistaking it. The linen of the Shroud matches the biblical time period and Eastern Mediterranean geographic region, as claimed. We detected no weaving or sewing that would suggest the handiwork of artisans outside the region or time period in question.”
Bondurant looked over at screen 3 again and watched Domenika as she listened intently and took notes. She was clearly pleased with what she’d heard.
“Okay, so the fabric’s authentic to the time period. I have to say again, I’m stunned. That, in and of itself, is real news. Dr. Lessel, you are reporting as well that the fifteen separate soil samples and other minerals you retrieved off the Shroud are typical of the region surrounding the Jerusalem area. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct. First let me be clear about what we found very little of, which is probably more important,” Lessel said. “Only about five percent of the particulate matter we found on the relic is specific to regions of the world exclusive to its stated origin, that being the European continent, where the relic’s been stored for centuries. That’s consistent with what one would expect.”
“So,” Bondurant noted as he tapped his pencil on the table, “there is no evidence that the fabric contains grave dust of any kind that would sufficiently suggest it is of European origin or traveled to or from any other region beyond the Middle East?”
“None. And, on the flip side, there was ample evidence of the presence of travertine aragonite limestone, which, as you know, is prevalent in the ancient tombs of Jerusalem. Their chemical signatures are a precise match. Similarly, the vast majority of the ancient pollen samples we lifted from the fabric are specific to the Jerusalem area as well.”
“Okay,” Bondurant said as he nodded his head in assent. “Moving along, we get to Terry O’Neil’s radiocarbon dating analysis. Take it away, Terry. The findings are striking, are they not?”
“Yes, they are, Jon,” O’Neil said. He leaned back in his chair. “Not really what we were expecting to see, given previous radiocarbon dating results of the relic. As you know, we disintegrated several samples in the tests, fully expecting to date the artifact to roughly eight hundred or maybe a thousand years ago. But that’s not what we found at all. The analysis, repeatedly and very definitively, points to an object that is somewhere—remember, this is not an exact science—between nineteen hundred and twenty-one hundred years old. We are ninety-five percent certain it falls within this two-hundred-year range.”
“About the biblical time of Jesus,” Domenika said for emphasis.
“That’s right,” O’Neil said. “This process is never going to give you full precision, an exact decade of origin, but I can guarantee you, this is no medieval relic. It’s roughly two thousand years old.”
Domenika smiled broadly into the camera and stared directly at Bondurant. He averted his eyes from her screen to concentrate.
“Dr. Montrose,” Bondurant said, “your review is fascinating as well.”
“To tell you the truth, Jon, I had expected from the outset that we were going to discover that this sepia-colored image was just too good to be true. That it had been applied by some medieval brush or instrument, and that a crude chemical compound used as a paint would be relatively easy to detect.”
“Not exactly what you found, correct?” Bondurant said.
“On the contrary,” Montrose said. “We found no evidence of this. What we also discovered is that the image formed on the Shroud is really no miraculous occurrence. What we see on the Shroud—what forms its human image—is exactly what one would expect to see in the way of residue left on linen material like this from a body in the first hours of decomposition following death.”
“Such as?” Bondurant asked.
“Such as residue from the skin stemming from the chemical breakdown of cellular enzymes within the human body postmortem. We call it autolysis.”
“Autolysis?” Domenika asked.
“Yes. The microscopic particles we were able to collect originated from the ‘off-gassing’ of these enzymes from a corpse. We found mixed within them various organic acids—propionic acid and lactic acid, to name just two—that are the result of a corpse moving from Stage One to Stage Two in the decomposition process. Nothing unusual, Jon.”
“Dr. Sato, my friend,” Bondurant said. “I have your report here as well.”
“Yes, Jon,” Sato said. “As you know, my computer image analysis could not be brought to a conclusion for various reasons beyond our control. But I want to thank all of you for your well wishes and support, especially you, Father Parenti.”
“I’m afraid he couldn’t join us, Dr. Sato,” Domenika said. “But I’ll pass on your kind words.”
“Yes, please do. It’s a miracle, actually.”
Sato
held his hands in front of the camera to reveal only small scars on both palms. Bondurant reared back in his seat. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This couldn’t be right. The healing was unexplainable, given how badly burned and disfigured they had been just a few weeks before.
Domenika looked shocked. She quickly made the sign of the cross, no doubt certain a miracle had taken place.
“Can you see the stigmata?” Sato joked. He held both hands close to the camera so that everyone on the call could see the small wounds centered on his palms. There were slight indentations in his flesh similar to what one might experience through crucifixion.
“Jon, you saved my life, and I swear that little priest saved my hands. For that I am grateful,” he said. “In any event, with the work we were able to complete and the images that survived the hard-drive crashes related to the accident, I am prepared to report that there is no evidence as far as I can see that the image on the Shroud was forced or formed unnaturally by an artificial process. None at all. In fact, we tried but could not replicate on any material the same effect that appears on the linen.”
Bondurant tried to shake off the shock and confusion that had set in when he saw Sato’s hands completely intact.
“All right,” Bondurant said, trying to force himself to focus. “My turn. Let’s turn to the image on the Shroud itself and talk for a moment about the anatomical forensics review. I want to summarize it for you this way: I don’t know if the image on this Shroud is that of a person named Jesus Christ, the supposed Savior of mankind. I don’t believe any living being is qualified to say that this day or any other day.”
Domenika cast both eyes upward.
“But,” Bondurant continued, “my interest was in determining whether the image presented on the Shroud is proportional to a human being in every respect, and whether the markings of purported torture as related in the biblical stories present themselves as credible. Essentially, my interest was in knowing whether there were any irregularities in the image that would cause one to believe it is out of form, out of character or scale, anatomically speaking.”
The Shroud Conspiracy Page 21
