Razak looked skeptical.
“And you’ve seen nothing in the antiquities markets yet for the ossuary?”
Barton shook his head. “I checked again this morning for any new items. Nothing.”
Without warning, the floor of the chamber shook beneath their feet, instantly followed by a distant, reverberating drone. Alarmed, both Barton and Razak instinctively reached out for something to steady themselves.
Then as quick as it came, it had disappeared. Though it might easily have been confused with a low-level earthquake, both men immediately grasped that it was something else all together.
39
******
Vatican City
Shortly after nine a.m., Father Donovan buzzed the lab intercom, announcing a call for Charlotte from the United States.
“Well, go get it,” Bersei urged.
She made her way to the phone, sliding the mask off her face. She pressed the speakerphone button. “Charlotte Hennesey speaking.”
“It’s me, Evan.”
Hearing his voice come through the small speaker, her stomach fluttered. “Hi Evan. What time is it there?”
“Very early, or very late, depending on how you want to look at it. Anyway, I just finished running a scan on your sample.”
Something in his voice didn’t sound right. Hennesey heard Aldrich rustling some papers.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m on speakerphone. Let me pick up.” She snapped off her lab gloves and grabbed the receiver. “Okay,” she said.
Aldrich jumped right in. “I began with a simple spectral karyotype to get a preliminary idea of the DNA’s quality. You know what we’d be looking for . . . basic plot of chromosome pairs. That’s when I noticed something very odd.”
“What is it? Is something wrong?”
“Yes, Charlotte. The result was forty-eight XY.”
In a spectral karyotype, dense DNA strands called chromosomes are marked with fluorescent die and color- sorted into pairs to detect genetic aberrations. Since every human inherits twenty-two chromosomes from each parent, an X sex chromosome from the mother, and an additional sex chromosome from the father, a typical result would be forty-six XX for females and forty-six XY for males.
Fortyeight X-Y? Hennesey twisted an earring between thumb and forefinger, trying to let that one sink in. The good news was that the gender was definitely male. That agreed with all the forensic evidence. But Aldrich was suggesting that an extra pair of non-sex chromosomes, or “autosomes,” had appeared in the molecular structure of the sample. Such aberrations were typically linked to serious diseases like Down’s syndrome where an extra chromosome twenty-one was present. “So it’s aneuploidy?” Charlotte whispered.
“Right. We have a mutation here.”
“What kind?” She kept her voice low so as not to draw Bersei’s attention. Glancing over at him, she could see that he was paying her no mind, analyzing the skeletal scans.
“Not sure yet. Got to adjust the gene scanner to handle the additional strands. I wasn’t expecting something like this the first go-round, but it shouldn’t take me much longer. I was able to pull basic coding for the genetic profile. I’ve posted it to your e-mail account.”
“Great. That’ll give me a good head start.”
“How much longer do you think you’ll be in Rome?”
“I don’t know. I think most of the major work is done. I’ll have to make a presentation, of course. Maybe a few more days. I might want to take a couple more just to explore Rome. It’s wonderful here.” “Has the Vatican briefed you fully about the work?”
“Yes, but we’re being told everything here is in strictest confidence. I had to sign a letter of confidentiality. So I can’t really say anything about it.”
“That’s okay Charlie—I don’t need to know. I figure if there’s anyone we can trust it’s the Vatican. I just don’t want BMS involved in anything shady.”
What had he discovered that made him so nervous? she wondered. “One more thing. Did you happen to run the genetic profile against our database to determine ethnicity?”
There was a brief silence. “Actually, I did.”
“Oh.” She was surprised he didn’t mention that. “And what did you find?”
“That’s the other weird thing about all this. I found nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” What he was saying sounded almost ridiculous. Though ninety-five percent of all humans shared the same genetic coding, less than five percent of the genome accounted for differences relating to gender and ethnicity. It wasn’t difficult to spot the variations.
“No matches.”
“But that’s impossible. Did you include Middle Eastern profiles?”
“Yeah.”
