by Robin Cook
“Here, take this in one hand and the bucket in the other,” Shawn said, after switching on one of the flashlights.
“I don’t think I need it with the headlamp.”
“Take it,” Shawn insisted.
Shawn squeezed past Sana and quickly descended to the solid door. With every step he felt his excitement grow. He couldn’t help feeling optimistic. He was convinced that the ossuary would be where Saturninus said he’d put it almost two millennia ago.
After unlocking the solid door, he once again moved aside so Sana could precede him.
Then, after relocking it, he pushed past his wife to descend quickly to the level of the Roman-era cemetery. He was ready to turn west but sensed Sana wasn’t behind him.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked as he looked behind to see her descending slowly, her headlamp and flashlight moving erratically in rapid arcs.
“I don’t like this,” Sana said.
“What don’t you like?” Shawn demanded, and under his breath he murmured, “What the hell now?” They were just beginning, and he was already finding his wife a progressively frustrating handicap. For a moment he thought about having her wait in the car, but then he remembered he needed her. What he was planning was defnitely a two-person job.
“My lights don’t seem to reach the ceiling. It gives me a strange feeling.”
“The ceiling has been purposefully darkened so visitors don’t see the steel supports. It’s for atmosphere.”
“Is that what it is?” Sana said. She reached the ancient cemetery level and allowed her lights to play across the dark entrances of the mausoleums.
Shawn rolled his eyes.
“This place is even eerier at night than during the day,” Sana remarked.
“Because the freaking lights are turned off, for shit’s sake,” Shawn growled.
“What was that noise?” Sana demanded with desperation.
“What noise?” Shawn questioned with near equal concern.
For a few moments of frozen panic they strained to hear sound—any sound. The silence was deafening.
“I don’t hear anything,” Shawn said finally. “What did you hear?”
“It sounded like a high-pitched voice.”
“Good grief! Now you’re imagining things.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, but what I’m not sure is whether you can do this. We’re so close.”
“If you’re sure I didn’t hear anything, let’s finish this and get out of here.”
“Can you calm down?”
“I’ll try.”
“All right, let’s go, but stay close.”
Shawn led the way west in the direction of Peter’s tomb. Sana followed a step behind, avoiding glancing into the mausoleums as they passed their dark, foreboding entrances.
Suddenly, Shawn stopped, and Sana jolted into him.
“Sorry,” Sana said. “You have to let me know if you stop.”
“I’ll try to remember,” Shawn said as he pointed off to the left with his flashlight.
“There’s the Roman sarcophagus I pointed out this afternoon. That’s where we’ll put our excavated debris. Do you think you will be able to bring it back here while I dig?”
“You mean by myself?”
Shawn silently counted to ten. “If I’m digging, of course it would be by yourself,” he said impatiently.
“We’ll see,” Sana said. The idea of wandering around in the necropolis alone was daunting, and hardly alluring. All she could hope was that somehow she’d adjust.
Shawn held his tongue. Instead, he continued on, rounding the southern tip of the red wall. Despite the climb, Sana stayed close. A few moments later, they were standing in the large chamber on the east side of Peter’s tomb complex near the original monument called the Tropaion of Peter. Shawn shined his flashlight down through one of the many glass panels of the deck, which had been built to allow modern-day tourists to see into the tomb’s interior.
“We’re almost there,” Shawn commented, his voice brimming with excitement. “We’ll soon be at the level of the floor of Peter’s tomb.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Sana said. “Let’s get on with this.”
“Right!” Shawn agreed with alacrity. It was what he wanted to hear.
Lifting the three-quarter-inch glass panel in the far corner that served as access to the lower level took considerably more effort than Sana expected. After much straining, they got the panel on end and leaning against the wall.
“Let me go first,” Shawn said. Sana nodded. Descending below the glass deck was the part that she was looking forward to the least, and if she was going to have a problem with claustrophobia, this was where it would begin.
Shawn took the time to strap on his knee pads and pull on his work gloves, and advised Sana to do the same. From then on they would need to be crawling about, as the height of the excavated floor to the glass deck didn’t allow either of them to walk upright.
Sitting on the edge of the deck with his feet dangling though the open space, Shawn inched himself forward and then swung down to stand on the earthen floor. After Shawn had ducked down and moved away from the opening, Sana mimicked his motions, and soon they were crawling ahead, pushing their respective buckets in front of them.
The floor was what Shawn had originally described, a kind of compacted clayish dirt mixed with gravel. Although Sana was becoming progressively anxious as they moved away from the opening in the deck, she was encouraged by one thing. The dirt, unlike the other areas in the necropolis, was bone-dry, suggesting the ossuary, if they found it, would be as well.
After advancing diagonally under the glass deck, they reached the section of the excavated space that extended under the level above. The ceiling now matched the hardpan of the floor. Sana noticed that there were no supports, and she stopped crawling, eyeing the ceiling with distrust.
Shawn continued forward for another ten feet and stopped to shine his flashlight down a tunnel to his left. “Here we are,” he said. He turned to see that Sana had halted about eight feet back. He waved to her to follow him. He wanted to show her where he believed they were going to find the ossuary.
“Is it safe?” Sana questioned while eyeing the ceiling.
“Perfectly safe,” Shawn said, following her line of sight. “The dirt at this level is like concrete. Trust me! You’ve come this far. I want to show you where I’ll be digging.” Reluctantly, Sana crawled forward and found herself looking down a narrow tunnel about four feet wide, three feet high, and five feet deep. At the mouth of the tunnel and at its end were supports of rough lumber, each consisting of two stout vertical members and a thick crossbeam forming a truss.
“Why are there supports in there and not here?” Sana asked. She couldn’t help but worry that nothing was holding up the ceiling above where she and Shawn were currently crouching.
“The first support here at the lip is holding up the graffiti wall, while the inner one is supporting the foundation wall for the vault of Peter’s tomb. The space beyond the inner truss is the interior of the tomb. If you want to crawl in there, you’ll be able to see a notched niche in the base of the red wall if you look to the right. That’s where the bones the pope claimed were Saint Peter’s were found, the ones they have a level up in the Plexiglas boxes.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Sana said. The thought of crawling on her stomach through the low tunnel into Peter’s tomb made her queasy and awakened the claustrophobic fears she’d been trying to suppress. It took all of her self-control to keep from fleeing back out to the area under the glass deck and then back up through the opening to the gallery above.
“Let me show you something else,” Shawn said as he crawled into the tunnel and then rolled over on his back. He pointed up at the ceiling using his flashlight and tapped the ceiling between the two trusses. “The ossuary will be up here, if it wasn’t discovered by accident when either the red wall or the graffiti wall was erected.
Now, hand me the drill and the goggles. I’m going to probe a bit and see if I can make contact with stone.” Sana concentrated on Shawn’s commands to avoid thinking about the entire mass of Saint Peter’s Basilica pressing down on top of her. When Shawn was ready to begin, she said: “If you don’t mind, I’m going to move out to the more open area under the glass deck. I’m having a bit of trouble breathing here.”
“Suit yourself,” Shawn said, distractedly. He was thrilled to be back to field archaeology. After he put the pail next to his body, he tried the drill. Its whine seemed particularly loud in the confined space. Satisfied with the drill’s performance, he put the tip of the bit up against the ceiling. The bit cut through the hardpan like a knife through butter. Within seconds it buried its four-inch-long shaft up to the hilt. Dry dirt rained down mostly on his chest, although some went into the bucket. Mildly disappointed not to hit stone on the first attempt, he pulled the drill bit out and moved six inches to the left and tried again.
After thirty minutes he still hadn’t hit stone, despite covering the ceiling with dozens of probing holes. He was ready to switch to the masonry hammer and chisel when he noticed something: The excavators had not burrowed under the vault’s supporting wall as he’d thought, but rather had poked directly through its base. When he looked carefully, Shawn could actually see butt ends of the wall’s brick just outside the vertical supports of the inner truss.
“My God!” Shawn called out for Sana’s benefit. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was out in the area under the glass deck. He knew where she was because of her impatient questions every five minutes on how he was doing. By the sound of her voice, he could tell she was getting progressively anxious, but there was nothing he could do about it other than keeping her in the loop about his progress.
“Did you find it?” Sana responded hopefully.
“No, not yet, but I discovered something else. The vault foundation goes down deeper.
The ossuary had to have been deeper as well. If it is still here, it’s got to be on the right of the tunnel in the direction of the red wall.”
After picking the drill back up and turning onto his left side, Shawn began making holes in the tunnel’s right wall. The first one was midway from the floor to the ceiling and midway into the tunnel, with the result the same as all the holes in the ceiling. Pulling the bit free, Shawn started a second hole at the same level but deeper into the tunnel.
Just three inches in, he hit something hard enough to make the drill practically leap out of his hand. Encouraged, he started another hole three inches above the last. He held his breath as the drill bit knifed through the hardpan. Again, the drill bit hit a hard surface.
Shawn could feel his pulse in his temples. Again, he drilled a new hole a few inches away from the last and felt resistance at the same depth. His excitement grew by leaps and bounds, but he wasn’t ready to celebrate. Instead, he quickly sank more than a dozen new holes, effectively outlining a perfectly flat stone approximately fifteen inches square embedded three inches into the tunnel’s wall. At that point, he called out to Sana.
“I found it! I found it!” he repeated with great excitement.
“Are you sure?” Sana yelled back.
“I’d say ninety percent sure,” Shawn called out.
With such encouraging news, Sana overcame her reluctance and returned to peer into the tunnel. “Where is it?”
“Right here,” Shawn said. He knocked with a knuckle against the tunnel’s wall at the very center of the covey of holes he’d drilled.
“I don’t see it,” Sana said, with gathering disappointment.
“Of course you can’t see it,” Shawn barked. “I haven’t dug it out yet. I’ve just located it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Listen, just hand me the hammer and the chisel. I’ll show you, you nonbeliever.” Sana didn’t necessarily disbelieve Shawn, but like him, she didn’t want to get her hopes up. Sana got the tools and handed them in to Shawn.
Shawn attacked the tunnel’s wall. The process was more difficult than he’d expected, and it took many blows to drive the chisel several inches into cement-like dirt after which he’d wiggle the chisel free. The noise of the steel hammer against the steel chisel was sharp and penetrating, almost painful in the narrow confines. In an attempt to speed up the process, Shawn almost buried the chisel, before pounding it laterally to loosen the surrounding dirt. This took a lot of blows, and each reverberated with a sound like a gunshot, leaving both Shawn’s and Sana’s ears ringing. Sana found she had to cup her ears with her palms to protect herself from the near-painful noise.
After half an hour of pounding the hammer while on his side, Shawn had worked up a mild sweat, and his shoulder was aching. Needing a rest from the continuous effort, he put down the tools and rubbed his complaining muscles briskly. A moment later the beam from Sana’s headlamp merged with his. To his surprise, Sana had actually poked her head into the tunnel.
“How’s the progress?” she asked.
“Slow going!” Shawn admitted. With his gloved hand he wiped off the limestone surface he’d been laboriously exposing. Despite trying to avoid striking the stone with the chisel, he’d nicked it half a dozen times. The nicks stood out sharply as light cream-colored defects against a field of brownish tan. As an archaeologist, he regretted having to employ such a heavy-handed technique, but he had little choice. He knew security made their rounds at the eleven p.m. shift change and he wanted to be long gone. It was already close to ten.
“Do you still think that’s it?” Sana questioned.
“Well, let’s put it this way: It’s a dressed piece of limestone that is surely not indigenous, and it is exactly where Saturninus said he’d placed it. What’s your take?” Sana couldn’t help but take offense at Shawn’s condescending tone. She was asking a legitimate question because all that was visible was a flat piece of stone, and considering all the construction and modifications that had occurred around Peter’s tomb over thousands of years, there’d probably been multiple opportunities for a stone slab to have been accidently buried where this stone was. With an edge to her voice, Sana made her thoughts known.
“So, now you’re the expert,” Shawn replied sarcastically. “Let me show you something.” Shawn directed the beam of his headlamp to the lower edge of the limestone, where he’d begun the even harder job of undermining the object. At that moment, the entire lower edge was exposed. “Notice something curious,” he said, in the same condescending tone he’d used a moment earlier. “The ‘slab,’ as you call it, is perfectly horizontal and vertical. If it were debris from some other project, chances are it wouldn’t have ended up so perfectly level and perpendicular. This piece of limestone was carefully placed. It wasn’t haphazard.”
“How much longer?” Sana asked in a tired voice. There was no doubt in her mind that her sacrifice of struggling with her claustrophobia was not appreciated. If she’d felt capable of leaving on her own, she would have done it at that moment.
Ignoring Sana’s question and with the circulation restored to his shoulder muscles, Shawn went back to work. Rapidly he completed the filling of the first bucket with dirt.
He then called out for the second to be handed in. Twenty minutes later he had a slit-like opening about four inches deep and four inches wide exposing the end of what he now knew to be a limestone box. The cover was about an inch thick, and was sealed with caramel-colored wax. Giving up on the masonry hammer because of the confined space, Shawn switched to using the chisel as a scraper before pulling out the debris by hand.
Suddenly, Shawn froze. He sucked in a lungful of air as his heart skipped a beat. The lights in the necropolis had flashed on, accompanied by the low rumbling sound of electrical transformers being activated.
13
3:42 P.M., TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
(9:42 P.M., ROME)
Jack was thoroughly disgusted with himself. For the second time in two
days, he’d completely lost control. Yesterday it had been with Ronald Newhouse, illustrating just how poorly he was handling his son’s illness. Thinking back on his actions in the chiropractor’s office embarrassed him, especially since it was Laurie who bore the brunt of the tragedy, while he fled the house on a daily basis to avoid even thinking about it.
Today he’d essentially blamed his four-month-old son for his lapse of sanity, which was even more embarrassing than railing against a quack chiropractor. Guiltily, he thought about how Laurie would respond when she learned he’d told Bingham and Calvin about JJ. Although they hadn’t discussed it openly, both saw the situation as an utterly private affair.
Jack was still sitting at his desk, where he’d retreated after the dressing-down in Bingham’s office. He looked at his in basket, which was overflowing with laboratory results and information he’d requested from the medicolegal investigators. He knew he should get to work, but he couldn’t get himself to start.
He glanced over at his microscope and the stacks of beckoning microscope slide trays, each representing a separate case. He couldn’t do that, either. As preoccupied as he was, he worried he’d miss something important.
Seemingly paralyzed, Jack put his head in his hands. With his elbows on the desk and his eyes closed, he tried to decide if he was actually getting depressed. He couldn’t let that happen again. “Pitiful!” he snarled out loud through clenched teeth, his head still bowed.
Vocalizing such a harsh opinion of himself was like being slapped. Jack sat back upright.
Having in a sense hit bottom, he rallied. With the same rationale that the best defense was a good offense, the way he approached the meeting with Bingham and Calvin, a state of mind that he wished he’d maintained rather than becoming the wimp he had for fearing to be put on leave, Jack steered his mind back to his alternative-medicine crusade. “The hell with you, Bingham!” Jack snapped. Suddenly, instead of being cowed by Bingham, he was defiant. Though he was initially motivated by a desire to distract himself from JJ’s illness, he now thought of the crusade as a legitimate goal in and of itself and certainly not simply a writing exercise for a forensic pathology journal. Instead it was a bona fide way to inform the public about an issue they should care deeply about.
