Intervention

by Robin Cook

  “Do you think it would have been easy to steal the body of the Virgin?”

  “Actually, I think it would have been. There seems to have been a surprising lack of interest in the Virgin Mary after the crucifixion, so that her death, according to Saturninus, in AD 62, drew little or no attention. None of the four Evangelists mentions much about her after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and Paul gives no indication whatsoever of a special place for her in the early Church. In fact, he mentions her only once in Galatians, and that was fleetingly, without even using her name. It wasn’t until toward the end of the first century that Mary began getting more recognition. Today there is no question of her importance, which is why I believe this letter is so significant.”

  “I didn’t get the impression from Saturninus’s letter that Simon Magus had any connection with the initial theft of Mary’s remains.”

  “Nor did I. My sense is that his interest was driven by his desire to secure for himself the curative power related to Jesus of Nazareth, and he didn’t share the political interests of the Zealots. Saturninus doesn’t mention how Simon learned that the Essenes had hidden the body in one of the Qumran caves, nor does he say how he managed to gain control of the bones. Perhaps by then no one cared. Simon was disappointed the remains didn’t have the power to heal, which was obviously his reason to gain possession of them, and it was only after the fact that he got the idea to follow Peter, first to Antioch, and then Rome, with the plan to trade them for Peter’s curative power.”

  “But Peter rebuffed him again.”

  “Apparently so, and according to Saturninus, with equal passion as when he had offered silver.”

  “Why do you think Saturninus and Menander decided to bury Mary’s bones with Peter?”

  “I believe for the reason he states in the letter. They were both impressed with Peter’s ability to cure by laying on of hands. We know they were impressed, since ultimately both became Christians, and Saturninus became a bishop of a major Roman city.”

  “I wonder what happened to Simon’s remains. It would have been ironic if they ended up with Peter as well.”

  “Indeed,” Shawn said with a smile. “But I doubt it sincerely. Saturninus surely would have said if he and Menander had done it.”

  “So, what are your plans?” Sana questioned. “Let me guess. You want to go to Rome and see if this ossuary Saturninus described is where he said he and Menander put it?”

  “Exactly,” Shawn said eagerly. “Apparently, just around the time Simon died during his attempt to rise up to heaven, Peter must have been martyred. With Peter’s followers building him an underground tomb, Saturninus and Menander would have had a convenient opportunity to join Mary’s ossuary with one of her son’s closest apostles. Frankly, I think it was a very respectful gesture on their part, and it certainly suggests that they at least held Mary in high regard.”

  “I didn’t understand the part of the letter describing where they put it,” Sana said. “Do you?”

  “I do. The tomb was a barrel vault, comprised of two parallel foundation walls holding up a vault. To build such a tomb, a rather large hole has to be excavated so that the walls can be put up. Saturninus says that they placed the ossuary at the base of the north wall outside of the tomb, approximately in the middle, and covered it with dirt. That is consistent with the facts, because the foundation walls of Peter’s tomb run east-west.

  “Why did they put the ossuary outside the tomb, rather than inside with Peter?”

  “Obviously, they had to hide the damn thing outside,” Shawn said impatiently, as if he thought Sana’s question was inane. “They were doing this sub rosa, so to speak, without anyone else’s knowledge.”

  “Don’t be condescending!” Sana snapped. “I’m doing my best trying to understand it all.”

  “Sorry,” Shawn said, realizing that if he wanted her to come, he had to be patient. “Getting back to the ossuary’s placement, I have to tell you that it is unbelievably serendipitous for us for two reasons: First, I don’t think that area of the tomb has ever been touched; second, the last time the tomb was excavated, which was in the nineteen-fifties, the archaeological team actually tunneled under the area, probably passing beneath Mary’s ossuary, to reach the inside of the tomb. What that means is that all we will have to do, at most, is remove maybe a few inches of packed debris and the ossuary will drop down into our waiting hands.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “I think it will be. Just before you got here I was on the phone with my assistant, Claire Dupree, back at the Metropolitan. I’m having her overnight my file on Saint Peter’s tomb to the Hassler in Rome. I still have the access permit to the necropolis under Saint Peter’s Basilica from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which James arranged directly through Pope John Paul II. The file also contains my Vatican ID card, and most important, the key for the Scavi, or excavation office, which is the same as to the site itself.”

  “That was five years ago.”

  “True, but I’d be astounded if anything has changed. It’s one of the frustrations as well as joys of Italy that rarely does anything change, at least in the bureaucratic arena.”

  “What if the keys don’t fit or the permit has been revoked?”

  “I cannot imagine that happening, but if it does, we’ll have to cross that bridge at that time. If worse comes to worst, I’ll call James. He can arrange for us to get in there. It just might mean an extra day.”

  “You think James would do that if he gets to read Saturninus’s letter, which I assume he’d demand to do. I don’t think so. Also, let’s say we do get in there for argument’s sake, and we do find the ossuary. What in heaven’s name do you plan to do with it?”

  “Bring it secretly to New York. I don’t want to jump the gun with this windfall project. When I announce it, I want to have studied the bones and fully translated any and all writings, most specifically, the Gospel of Simon.”

  “It’s against the law to take antiquities out of Italy.”

  Shawn regarded his wife with a touch of irritation. Over the previous year she had developed an independent streak, as well as an aggravating tendency toward negative thinking, and this was a good example. At the same time he reminded himself that in his enthusiasm over the previous hour, he was guilty of glossing over a few pesky details, like how the hell he was going to get his find back to New York. He, more than anyone, knew that Italy had become very protective about its historical treasures being pirated out of the country.

  “I’ll send the damn thing from the Vatican, not Italy,” Shawn decided abruptly.

  “What makes you think sending it from the Vatican is going to be any different? It will have to clear customs one way or the other.”

  “I’ll send it to James and label it his personal property. Of course, that will mean I’ll have to call him beforehand and tell him it is a surprise, which it certainly will be, and tell him not to open it until I get there.”

  Sana nodded. She’d not thought of that. She supposed it might work.

  “Hell, I’ll be giving it back after the fact,” Shawn said, in partial justification.

  “Wouldn’t they let you work on it at the Vatican? Why take it back to New York at all?”

  “I can’t be sure of it,” Shawn said without hesitation. “Besides, a number of people would demand to be involved and share the spotlight. Frankly, I don’t want to do that. I’ll take some flak for removing it from the Vatican necropolis and sending it to New York, but the positive will overwhelm the negative, I’m certain. To sweeten the deal, I’ll even give the Vatican the codex and Saturninus’s letter, and they can keep them or send them back to Egypt. It will be their call.”

  “My sense is that the Catholic Church is not going to like anything about this affair.”

  “They’ll have to adjust,” Shawn agreed with a snide smile.

  “Adjusting is not easy for an institution like the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church bel
ieves the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven like her son, bones and all, since hers was a virgin birth without original sin.” Sana had been raised a Catholic until her father’s death when she was eight. From then on she’d been raised an Anglican, her mother’s religion.

  “Well, as the expression goes, the ball will be in their court to deal with that issue,” Shawn added, with his smile lingering on his lips.

  “I wouldn’t make light of it,” Sana said.

  “I won’t,” Shawn said categorically but then added with gathering emotion, “I’m going to enjoy it. You’re right about Mary’s bones not being here on earth, but that dogma is relatively new for the Catholic Church. For centuries the Catholic Church just avoided the issue, letting people believe what they wanted to believe. It wasn’t until 1950 that Pope Pius the Twelfth made the determination ex cathedra and invoking papal infallibility, which for me, as you know, is pure nonsense. I’ve had this argument with James a thousand times: The Catholic Church wants it both ways. They evoke a divine basis for papal infallibility regarding Church matters and their interpretation of morality based on a direct apostolic lineage to Saint Peter and ultimately to Christ. Then, in the same breath, they dismiss some of the Church’s medieval popes as being only human.”

  “Calm down!” Sana ordered. Shawn’s voice had been steadily rising as he spoke. “You and I are having a discussion here, not a debate.”

  “Sorry. I’ve been wound up from the moment Rahul placed the codex in my hot little hands.”

  “Apology accepted,” Sana said. “Let me ask you another question about Saturninus’s letter. He used the word sealed when referring to Mary’s ossuary. What do you think they meant by ‘sealed’?”

  “Offhand, I’d guess wax. Burial practices at that time involved putting a corpse in a cave tomb for a year or so, then collecting the bones and putting them in a limestone box, which they called an ossuary. If the decay wasn’t complete, the box could have stunk to high heaven unless sealed. To do that, they would have had to use something like wax.”

  “Saturninus said that Mary’s body was put in a cave in Qumran. How dry is it there?”

  “Very.”

  “And how dry is it in the necropolis beneath Saint Peter’s?”

  “It varies, but there are times when it’s relatively humid. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering what kind of condition the bones might be in if the ossuary stayed sealed. If dampness has been excluded, I might be able to harvest a bit of DNA.”

  Shawn chuckled with delight. “I’d never even considered that. Getting some DNA could add another dimension to this story. Maybe the Vatican could make some money by creating Bible Land, something akin to Jurassic Park, by bringing back some of the original characters, starting with Mary.”

  “I’m being serious,” Sana said, mildly offended, thinking Shawn was making fun of her. “I’m not talking about nuclear DNA, I’m only talking of my area of expertise: mitochondrial DNA.”

  Shawn held up his hands, again pretending to surrender. “Now, I know you’ve told me in the past, but I don’t totally remember the difference between the two types of DNA.”

  “Nuclear DNA is in the cell’s nucleus, and it contains all the information to make a cell, to allow it to differentiate into, say, a heart cell, and to cause it to function. Every cell has a full complement of nuclear DNA except red blood cells, which have no nucleus. But every cell has only one set. Mitochondria are microscopic energy organelles that in the very distant past when life was just beginning were engulfed by primitive single-cell organisms. Once those single cells had mitochondria, they were able over millions or even billions of years to develop through evolution into multicellular organisms up to and including humans. Since the mitochondria had been freely living organisms, they have their own DNA, which exists in a circular, relatively stable form. And since individual cells have up to a hundred or so mitochondria, the cell has up to a hundred sets of mitochondrial DNA. All that leads to a higher possibility that DNA can be retrievable, even from ancient bones.”

  “I’m going to pretend I understood all that. Do you really think you might be able to isolate some of this circular DNA? That would be fascinating.”

  “It all depends on how dry the bones were initially and how dry they have remained. If the ossuary is still sealed, it’s a possibility, and if it is possible to retrieve some of Mary’s DNA, then it’s too bad she had only a divine son and not a divine daughter.”

  A crooked smile spread across Shawn’s face. “What a strange comment! Why a daughter and not a son?”

  “Because mitochondrial DNA is passed on from generation to generation matrilineally. Males are genetic dead ends, mitochondri ally speaking. Sperm don’t have much mitochondria, and what they do have dies off after conception, whereas ova are loaded with them. If Mary had a daughter who had a daughter, et cetera, until current day, there might be someone alive today with the same mitochondrial sequence. By coincidence, the mitochondrial DNA has a two-thousand-year mutational half-life, meaning that after two thousand years, statistically speaking, there’d be a fifty percent chance the DNA sequence would be unchanged.”

  “Actually, there’s a very good chance Mary had a daughter—in fact, not one but three of them.”

  “Truly?” Sana questioned. “I recall she had only one child, Jesus. That’s what I learned in Sunday school.”

  “One son is Catholic dogma, Eastern Orthodox creed, and even the belief of some Protestant denominations, but there are many people who think otherwise. Even the New Testament in the Bible suggests she at least had other sons, although some people think the term ‘brother of Jesus’ means another close relative, like a cousin, a debate that arose during translation from Aramaic and Hebrew to Greek and Latin. But I, for one, think a brother is a brother. Besides, it makes sense to me that she had more children. She was a married woman, and having a bunch of kids the normal way certainly wouldn’t have taken away from having the first one mystically, if that’s what happened. And I’m not making this up. There’s an awful lot of early Christian apocrypha, which didn’t get chosen to be canonical by being included in the New Testament but which state she had up to eleven children, including Jesus, three of whom were daughters. So there might be someone out there with the same DNA.”

  “Now, that would put my field of mitochondrial DNA on the map,” Sana said, while imagining writing the paper for Nature or Science with such a suggestion. In the next instant, she was mocking herself. She was getting as bad as Shawn by jumping the gun and entertaining far-fetched delusions of grandeur. Maybe she was even worse, since Shawn was already much more famous in his field than she was in hers.

  “Getting back to reality,” Shawn said, “our Egyptair flight leaves Cairo at ten a.m. tomorrow and arrives in Rome at half past twelve. We’re staying at the Hassler. Why not celebrate this coup in style. So, what do you think? Are you coming with me? If all goes well, it’s just an extra day, and the payoff will be immense. I’m truly excited about it. As my last hurrah at fieldwork it will seriously aid my fund-raising.”

  “Do you really need me or am I window dressing to prop you up and keep you company?” Sana asked for reassurance but then inwardly winced the moment the unguarded words spilled from her mouth. It was the first time she’d actually voiced the idea, which she had lately been questioning due to his general behavior plus his lagging interest in intimacy, that Shawn had married her more as a young trophy wife than a true partner. It was an issue that had been progressively bothering her over the previous year and which seemed to be worsening with her own modest professional successes. Although she was planning on bringing the subject up at some point, the last thing she wanted to do was get into a serious row there in Egypt.

  “I need you!” Shawn said definitively. If he’d actually heard what she had said, he didn’t let on. “I won’t be able to do this myself. I imagine the ossuary will weigh ten to fifteen kilograms, depending on its size and thic
kness, and I’m not going to want it to literally drop out of the ceiling. I suppose I could hire someone, but I’d much prefer not to. I don’t want to be beholden to someone for their silence until I publish.”

  Relieved that her verbal slip had gone over his head, Sana fired off another question: “What are the chances that we could get into serious trouble by sneaking into the crypt under Saint Peter’s?”

  “We won’t be sneaking in! We’ll have to get past the Swiss Guards before we even get into the Vatican, and I’ll need to show my all-hours-access permit from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. So we’ll be perfectly legal.”

  “So, you can look me in the eye and promise me we’re not going to be forced to spend the night in an Italian jail?”

  Shawn made a point of leaning over and with his cerulean eyes stared unblinkingly into the depths of Sana’s brown ones. “You will not have to spend an evening in an Italian jail, guaranteed! In fact, when we’re done, we’ll have a late supper with a bottle of the best Prosecco the Hassler can produce.”

  “All right, I’ll come!” Sana said with resolve. She was suddenly enamored with the idea that they were embarking on an adventurous quest together. Maybe it would have a positive effect on their relationship. “But now I want to go down to the pool and get the last bit of sun before we head back to winter.”

  “I’m with you,” Shawn said eagerly. He was pleased. He’d worried she’d turn him down. Although he’d suggested he could hire someone to help get the ossuary from beneath Saint Peter’s, he knew he couldn’t. The risk of the news getting out would be too great. After all, what he was planning to do was, despite what he’d just said to Sana, totally illegal. At the same time he was convinced it was to be his most brilliant coup.

  7

  11:23 A.M., MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008

  NEW YORK CITY

  (6:23 P.M., CAIRO, EGYPT)