The Sacred Blood

“Thanks so much for your hospitality.”

“You’re very welcome. Well then, let’s get you both situated. You can freshen up, take some time to rest.” He led them up a walkway cutting alongside the Apostolic Palace. “Are you available for lunch?” he asked Donovan. “Take some time to catch up? You too, of course, Charlotte.”

“If it’s all right with you, Charlotte,” Donovan replied.

“Sounds great.”

26

******

Tel Aviv, Israel

“So what do you make of all this?” Cohen asked.

Renowned professor of Israeli population genetics David Friedman leaned back in his chair. His protruding dull eyes were magnified through the lenses of thick bifocals. The gaunt thirtysomething had no hair or eyebrows, the result of an extremely rare disease called alopecia universalis. The complete baldness of his body, coupled with his protruding steel-gray eyes, could make one wonder if he’d been beamed to earth by a flying saucer. His mind- boggling intellect was otherworldly too. But it didn’t negate the fact that the man was socially awkward and irritable. And the fact that he staunchly denounced both God and Judaism was a huge tax on Cohen’s patience.

“There’s a lot of information here, Rabbi,” he said, looking exasperated. “I’m going only by data and pictures, not a specimen. I’d be speculating,” he warned. “And unless I was seeing this with my own eyes through a very powerful microscope . . .” He shrugged. The professor’s gaze wandered to his office window, through which he could see students milling about Tel Aviv University’s palm-treed quad.

“Please.” Cohen opened his hands and beseeched with uncharacteristic finesse. “Speculate.”

Moaning, Friedman circled his gaze back to the monitor at the plot of forty-eight chromosome pairs. He shook his head and said, “All right then. First off, I study the human genome. And this? This is too small to have come from a human.”

“How so?”

It had taken till midnight for Cohen to identify nine telling files that had been on Charlotte Hennesey’s laptop. Ziv had copied them onto a flash drive now sticking out of a port on Friedman’s juiced-up Macintosh. All nine files were running on multiple windows layered on the professor’s oversize plasma.

Friedman clicked a tab on the bottom toolbar, and a data file maximized to fill the screen. “See here,” Friedman explained, pointing to the different combinations and sequences of A, C, G, and T—each letter was assigned a different color. Running above them was a continuous series of vertical lines in varying thicknesses that resembled a bar code spread out to infinity. “You know how many base pairs we’d expect to find in the human genome?” The question was rhetorical. Aaron Cohen was an excellent study and could easily find a second career in Friedman’s lab.

“Three billion.”

“And what do you see here?”

On the monitor, next to a field labeled base pairs, was a number: 298,825,111.

“I understand it seems too small. But what if this is from a human specimen?”

“It’s not, Rabbi. I assure you. Look at this . . .” His growing frustration made his bony shoulders twitch as he brought another active window into full-screen view. Feeling like a doctor whose patient wouldn’t accept a cut- and-dried diagnosis, he said, “Here, use those good eyes of yours, Rabbi—the scientific ones. Check your mysticism at the door.” Friedman pointed to the video showing fluoresced chromosomes being extracted with a needle from a cell nucleus. “If this was real . . .” He shook his head again. “This looks like science fiction to me. Watch what happens here.” He waited. “Ah. There. See it? This pair of chromosomes here?”

The rabbi drew close. “Yes.”

“These two chromosomes are instantly replacing extracted genetic material. Rebuilding the genome.”

“Is that not possible?”

“On earth? Impossible.”

“So how do you explain this?”

The professor threw his hands up. “A computer-generated simulation. Hollywood. Who knows? I’m sorry to say that I think you’ve been duped.” Despite his harsh incredulity, the rabbi was not at all discouraged. In fact, he seemed quite pleased. Perhaps the professor himself was being duped? “Does this have something to do with the Cohen Gene project? Is someone making you empty promises? Or are you just testing me?”

“I’d be speculating,” the rabbi noncommittally replied. This actually wrenched a chuckle out of the cantankerous brainiac. “So there’s no way to tell from this if it’s real?” he persisted.

“Get a sample. Then I’ll tell you if it’s real—and which planet it comes from.”

Cohen smirked. “Bring up the other image,” he insisted. “The one with the two chromosome plots side by side.”

Luckily, Charlotte Hennesey’s file-naming system was descriptive. This one was named “karytope.subjectA- henneseyB.” And Ziv had easily discerned from the file’s attributes that this had been the last file running on the geneticist’s laptop prior to its recovery in Phoenix.

Friedman switched windows.

“If I were to bring a sample to you— from Hollywood,” the rabbi said, keeping it light to hold Friedman’s tiny suspicions at bay, “which sample would you need? The one on the left, or the one on the right?” Not that he’d dare share such a thing.

With little enthusiasm, the professor played along with the charade. “This one labeled ‘subject’ is hypothetically from a male,” he said. “And this one here is obviously female, this one labeled ‘Hennesey,’ whatever that means. They seem identical, give or take the sex chromosomes, of course. In this fantasy world, it’s this