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
