by Paul L Maier
“Ah! It was most necessary. Otherwise you would have blown yourself to bits in our minefield here unless Allah had mercy on you! Come, we show you the way.”
Jon’s third mistake was not to arrange for clothing after his landfall in Jordan. Wet suits were hardly de rigueur on jet planes. Serendipitous was the fact that Rast was nearly his size, and he let Jon borrow one of his suits.
His fourth error was unavoidable. No “Ernst Becker” had ever entered Jordan—at least his pass-port bore no Jordanian entry stamp—so how could he hope to clear passport control in leaving the country? But with Jordan’s foreign minister personally seeing him off at Queen Alia Airport in Amman early the next morning, passport officials were more than cooperative.
TWENTY-FOUR
Glastonbury whisked Jon through customs at Heathrow Airport, and they sped along M-4 to London in a service Jaguar festooned with Scotland Yard’s coat-of-arms. Sandy McHugh had flown in from Washington on an earlier jet and now joined them at the University of London Institute of Archaeology in Bloomsbury. Gladwin Dunstable and Tom Paddington were also there, awaiting his arrival. Cordial hellos were exchanged around the conference table, after which Jon turned to Dunstable and said, “Do forgive us for our sudden intrusion into your busy career!”
“Not at all. Glad to be of service,” said the ruddy, lanky, flaxen-haired archaeological scientist, whose gaunt features melted into a warm smile.
“Were you able to find that bake oven in Pompeii and bring us a sample?”
“I was. It took a bit of doing—the authorities there were just a shade perplexed—but here it is.” He reached into his attaché case and put a plastic packet onto the table. “But I do have a question for you, Professor Weber. Why on earth did you want me to do this? Oh, I have some inkling, of course, but Reginald said you’d give me the full detail.”
Jon proceeded to expose the rationale that had led to his assault on the titulus, and concluded, “Since only a small part of the original soot you sent Jennings from Pompeii was tested at Weizmann, might the rest conceivably have been used to make ink for the papyrus and the titulus? Since carbon from Pompeii would test out to no later than AD 79, it could have served as an admirable pigment base. So I thought that a C-14 test of materials scraped from the titulus could be compared with what you just brushed off the same oven. An identical or very similar reading might well prove conclusive.”
Frowns around the conference table were hardly what Jon had expected. Dunstable finally broke the silence. “Well, let’s see what you have for us by way of quantity.”
Jon removed the clear plastic vial from the pouch around his neck and laid it in front of Dunstable and McHugh. They picked it up and examined it closely.
“Careful, gentlemen,” said Jon. “This may sound overblown, but the spiritual future of the West could depend on the little grains inside that thing!”
Sandy shook his head a little wistfully and said, “We may have enough in your sample for C-14, Jon. But if we do, what would it prove if the results were close? It could be a case of pure coincidence.”
“What do you mean?”
Dunstable, picking up the argument, said, “Put the case, Professor Weber, that Rama is fully authentic. Your scrapings, then, could test very closely to my soot—age-wise—and still have come from a totally different source.”
Jon saw that truth in an instant, and he started to feel monstrously foolish, a dolt who had desperately run with the wrong idea, disgracing both himself and his profession. He stood up and paced the room, tapping his right fist into his left open palm. His harrowing adventure in securing wisps of material that might, after all, prove utterly useless added to his sense of futility.
Groping for words, he said, “In other words, gentlemen, this whole ghastly effort of mine was quite probably worthless? I risk my life, and surely my reputation, and it’s all in vain? Can’t you at least do some sort of comparative analysis? Some other tests, chemical or whatever?”
McHugh was doodling on his pad, but then stopped, looked over to Dunstable, and smiled. The director nodded and said, “Yes. There are other analysis procedures, and they may be far more serviceable than radiocarbon in this case.”
“Yes indeed, Jon,” said Sandy. “I’d think comparative microscopic analysis would be first, followed by PIXE. Do you have facilities for Particle Induced X-ray Emission Analysis here, Dr. Dunstable?”
“We do. And I agree. So if you don’t mind, Professor Weber, I’ll have our best man, George Lawton, start comparing the two samples optically. Oh, not to worry. I’ll tell him they both came from the Magna Carta, and that every last particle must be saved. After that procedure, I’d suggest scanning electron microscopy on both samples, and then on to PIXE, and perhaps ESCA.”
“ESCA?” Jon inquired.
“Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis. It brings out some of the elements PIXE doesn’t cover. Do you concur, gentlemen?”
Sandy gave Jon a thumbs-up sign.
“Fine! No, excellent,” said Jon, saturated with relief.
Dunstable stepped out of the room with the samples and returned in a short time. “Now,” he said, “while that’s being done, do tell me why you suspect Austin Balfour Jennings, Professor Weber. In the world of archaeology, that’s rather like saying your great William Foxwell Albright was a charlatan and a scoundrel.”
“I know that. And I can’t begin to describe the pain I feel in my very bones at the mere idea. But what about the carbonized wooden handle you never sent him? And the grams of soot that never reached the Weizmann?”
“Thin, thin, thin, Professor Weber. That could have been nothing more than a memory lapse on Jennings’s part. And the Weizmann likely specified the amount of soot he was to send.”
“I realize that well enough. And I never would have done all this if it hadn’t been for new information uncovered by Tom Paddington and MI-5. This finally set a motive into place, you see. Mr. Glastonbury told me the details by phone in Jerusalem. Why don’t you tell him, Reginald? Or you, Tom?”
Glastonbury opened his palms toward Paddington, who responded. “Well, even though I hate to admit it, Reginald certainly did the spade work. He found out, for example, that in his younger years at Oxford, Jennings was not simply gifted in Semitics, but a veritable genius in Aramaic linguistics. His teacher, Professor Giles Weatherby, threw up his hands one day and said, ‘Enough! I can’t teach you any more, Austin. Rather, it’s high time you teach me!’ Now, we thought that rather strange in view of Jennings always letting Dr. Weber do the translating in Israel.”
“Well, he may have neglected his Aramaic in the meantime,” Dunstable objected. “That was years ago.”
“That may be,” said Paddington. “But then the Queen involved herself in this affair. As ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England,’ she was deeply concerned about what Rama was doing to the Christian faith, particularly since the dig was conducted under a British banner. Reginald and I were called in to Buckingham Palace, and we briefed her on all the information we had to date. She then asked that we use all the resources of both Scotland Yard and MI-5, so we sent a small army of intelligence operatives to Oxford and Northern Ireland to fill in the gaps in our Jennings file.”
“Oh?” said Dunstable. “What did you find?”
“Little, at first, other than the standard Jennings biography you already know. But then we uncovered fresh data on his personal life that exposes a motive for the first time, we think. While he was a teaching fellow at Oxford, he fell in love with an Irish student named Colleen Donnegal, who hailed from Drogheda on the Irish east coast. Evidently she was quite a charmer, very much like Shannon, Dr. Weber. In any case, she returned his affections, but drew the line on any further romance.”
“Why?” asked Sandy McHugh. “Because he was Protestant and she Catholic?”
“Orange versus green was only part of it. Miss Donnegal was a novice, you see, at the Sisters of Salome Convent at Monaghan—that’s near the border with North
ern Ireland—and she had taken her first vows to be a bride of Christ and not Jennings. The cloister had sent her on scholarship to Oxford to learn Old Testament Hebrew, and she was sup-posed to return and teach classes at the convent. She did return, and Jennings was heartbroken. He sent her letters, but they were never answered. He later learned she never received them.
“That Christmas, Jennings surmised that she might be allowed to spend the holidays with her family at Drogheda, so he lay in wait there. He was right. He saw her leaving home the day after Christmas and confronted her. She was overjoyed to see him again and furious at the nunnery for intercepting her mail. To make a long story short, she returned home to pack her things as if she were returning to the convent, but instead eloped with Jennings to England.”
“Well, that’s quite romantic,” said Dunstable, “but hardly any motive for—”
“There’s more,” said Paddington. “They lived happily for several years at Oxford, although Mrs. Jennings had a guilt complex because of the way she left the nunnery. She also held firmly to her Catholicism.”
“Yes, I picked up that part of it,” said Glastonbury. “Her psychiatrist at Oxford was most helpful. But continue, Tom—”
“Just after Shannon was born, she suffered a long postpartum depression. She felt the only way to overcome her conscience pangs at breaking her vows was to make peace with the Monaghan Convent. She wrote the abbess, asking for her for-giveness. The mother superior, in turn, sent her a letter of absolution, but suggested that she return there for a contemplative week, after which they’d formally release her from her vows. Jennings pleaded with her not to go, but the psychiatrist agreed that this could be the best possible therapy for her. So, leaving her husband to care for Shannon, she left for Monaghan.”
“I’m starting to feel sick,” said McHugh. “I think I know how this is going to end—”
“You’re right. The abbess turns out to be just a little to the right of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. She’d ‘never lost a novice,’ she claimed, and wasn’t about to start now. She’d release Colleen Jennings from her vows, all right—her marital vows. The marriage had no validity, she claimed, since it wasn’t performed in the Church. When Colleen objected, she had her afternoon tea laced with laudanum. Colleen started having visions, stayed in the nunnery, and one day they found her hanging in her cell, a belt around her neck.”
Grumbles of exclamation boiled up in the group as Paddington continued, “Jennings, of course, was beside himself. He took off a whole semester from Oxford to trace down the truth, and finally learned it from a cook at the convent. He then brought formal charges against the abbess, but the Irish courts permitted canon law to govern the case, and the ecclesiastical court threw it out ‘for lack of evidence.’ Green versus orange, of course, plus powerful intervention by the Irish Catholic church, which felt it had to hush-hush a scandal of this magnitude.
“Now, of course, Jennings was fit to be tied. Over some late-night beers at a pub in Armagh, his hometown, he spilled his awful story to others at the table, who turned out to be militant Protestant Orangemen. Without telling him, they crossed the border one night—Monaghan is just down the road from Armagh—and set fire to the convent, leaving a note to the effect that they were avenging ‘the kid-napping and death of Colleen Jennings.’ Two aged nuns died in the blaze.”
“Oh, no!” said Sandy. “And, of course, here comes the IRA, hot for revenge!”
“Exactly. A week later, a hit squad from the Irish Republican Army slipped across the border, raided the Jennings’s homestead at Armagh, and killed his mother and younger brother, wiping out the fam-ily—except for Austin Balfour.”
“Good Lord!” Dunstable exclaimed. “I do begin to see motive here. But what ever happened to the wicked mother superior?”
“The Church sacked her into retirement,” said Glastonbury. “But Jennings probably didn’t feel vindicated by that for . . . for losing everything but Shannon.”
“Incredible!” said Jon. “Shannon never mentioned any of this to me. She thinks her mother died of some rare form of pneumonia.”
“Shannon didn’t—doesn’t—know these hideous details,” said Glastonbury. “‘Pneumonia’ was the story Jennings passed on to her. He didn’t want her to suffer from the true story.”
“When did all this happen?” asked Dunstable. “And why didn’t we hear about it?”
“In 1974, only a few months after Shannon was born. Why didn’t you hear about it? Jennings wasn’t famous in those days, and this was ‘only another statistic’ along that bloody border. Obviously he never revealed it in later interviews, probably blanking it out of his mind—or planning a diabolical revenge of his own.”
“All right, then,” said Dunstable, “let’s sum up. Jennings was dealt a horrible card by the Irish Catholics. They killed his wife, mother, and brother, so now he’ll have his revenge on them—indeed, all of Christianity—by writing up the Aramaic, which he clearly could do as a linguistic genius, and then hoaxing the rest of it, which he could bring off as an archaeologist. Is that it?”
“That was my conclusion, I regret to say,” said Jon.
“Ours too,” said Glastonbury.
“Sounds logical to me,” said Sandy McHugh.
“Well, I’d be tempted to agree with you, certainly,” said Dunstable. “But I find two serious problems with that line of thought. One, I could understand a rabid anti-Catholicism on his part, but Rama is aimed at all of Christianity, not just Catholicism. And two, he set about his Aramaic mastery long before the tragedies of 1974, didn’t he?”
Silence blanketed the room, broken only when Dunstable resumed, “So I wonder if we’re not jumping to a . . . a very monstrous conclusion here, gentlemen, impugning the character of one of the great scholar archaeologists of our time, a man who has already suffered more than we ever knew.”
Again silence shrouded the discussion.
“Well,” Glastonbury conceded, “you do make sense with those points, Gladwin. It could be that we’re down the wrong track after all—”
“We’re so prone to finding ‘culprits,’” said Paddington, “that it hardly ever occurs to us that there may be no culprit in a case like this . . . that the finds are, very simply, genuine.”
Jon was starting to feel like a worm . . . or worse. He should have been in Dunstable’s corner, defending Jennings wherever possible. And here, Judas-like, he seemed to be leading the attack. Talk about erring heroically!
The door of the conference room opened, and Dr. George Lawton walked in, a short wisp of a man in laboratory whites, with overlong strands of brown hair carefully combed across his bald pate. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “but we have some preliminary results of our comparative study.”
“Do proceed,” Dunstable directed.
“We examined the two samples with standard microscopes, using various light sources and diffrac-tions, and found some rather considerable differences. The carbon granulation from the Pompeii sample is of fairly uniform consistency, whereas the Weber sample has different granulation size in the carbon, as well as admixture of collagen fibers.”
Jon tried to save his case. “But my carbon served as pigment for ink and had a binder, so shouldn’t we expect different granulation? And the collagen fiber must have come from the parchment—”
“Oh, indeed, Dr. Weber, the differences are quite easily explained, and I was merely citing the differences. Now, as to similarities in the samples, we have only two. One isn’t very significant, I’m afraid. I refer to the color of the carbon granules: both seem to have a similar degree of ‘blackness,’ shall we say.”
“Bah,” Dunstable retorted. “Black is black. Carbon is carbon.”
“To be sure,” replied Lawton, “though slight color differentials are possible in carbon. But the second parallel is more interesting. In both samples, we found particles of a hard or gritty substance that is not carbon. They were stained black like the carbon granules, but wer
e much harder.”
“What in the world are they?” asked Dunstable.
“We tried to clean several of the particles—rather unsuccessfully—though we did start to see a slight vermilion cast appearing. Perhaps they’re grit or sand of some kind.”
Jon suddenly brightened and hit the table with a fist. “Ceramics! Could they be fired clay particles, Dr. Lawton? Consider the origin, gentlemen. Do we have bits of that Pompeii oven in both samples?”
“But of course,” said Glastonbury, who always managed the first word, or at least the second, if he had been preempted. “Brushing across a ceramic surface could have removed such particles, not, Gladwin?”
“Quite possibly. But why would the particles survive in Professor Weber’s sample?”
“Well, I doubt if Jenni—” Sandy McHugh stopped and tried to keep it objective. “I doubt if the perpetrator would have put his ink through a strainer or filter, now, would he?”
“He might have,” Dunstable replied, “or he might not. But surely this is worth pursuing. I suggest you isolate those noncarbon particles, George, clean them as best you can, and then let us have a look.”
“Indeed. Excuse me, gentlemen.”
After Lawton returned to his laboratory, Jon suddenly straightened in his chair and said, “I just recalled something, and I hope I’m not too late. Gideon Ben-Yaakov gave me twenty-four hours since yesterday at this time to arrange testing at Rehovot. He’ll draw a blank if he checks, and if he goes public with this, all may be lost. May I use your phone, Dr. Dunstable?”
“Certainly.”
“Scotland Yard will underwrite the call,” said Glastonbury. “Here, use our charge number—”
“And if he isn’t cooperative,” said Paddington, “MI-5 will contact Mossad in Israel and try to explain things to him.”
The overseas operator had the Israel Antiquities Authority within two minutes, but a secretary there explained that Ben-Yaakov had gone for the day. Jon pleaded with her until she released his home phone number, which he then called. The phone rang and rang. No answer. “Please God,” Jon sighed, “don’t let him have gone public with this!”
