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.