With the biopsy in hand, they had been able to catch the ten-thirty shuttle flight to Boston, getting them into Logan Airport just after noon. Following an even more hair-raising taxi experience than those in Washington, as far as Daniel was concerned, with a driver from Pakistan in a rattletrap vehicle, they were dumped off at Daniel’s condominium apartment on Appleton Street. A change of clothes and a quick lunch followed by a short ride in Daniel’s Ford Focus brought them to CURE’s current digs in East Cambridge on Athenaeum Street. They entered through the front door. The company occupied the ground-floor suite immediately to the right of the entrance.
When Daniel had first founded CURE, it had occupied most of the first floor of the renovated, nineteenth-century brick office building. But as the money crunch deepened, space was first to go. Currently, it was one-tenth of its original size, with only a single laboratory, two small offices, and a reception area. Second to go were the nonessential personnel. The employees included Daniel and Stephanie, who’d not drawn salaries for four months, another senior scientist by the name of Peter Conway, operator-cum-receptionist/secretary Vicky McGowan, and three laboratory technicians soon to be reduced to two or maybe even one. Daniel had not yet decided. What Daniel had not changed was the board of directors, the scientific advisory board, and the ethics board, all of whom Daniel intended to leave in the dark about the Butler affair.
“It’s only two-thirty-five,” Stephanie announced, after closing the door behind them. “I’d say that’s good timing, considering we woke up in Washington, D.C.”
Daniel merely grunted. His attention was directed at Vicky, who was handing him a bundle of telephone messages, a few of which needed explanation. In particular, the venture capital people from the West Coast had called instead of returning Daniel’s email. According to Vicky, they were hardly satisfied with the information they’d gotten and were demanding more.
Leaving Daniel to deal with business matters, Stephanie went into the laboratory. She called hello to Peter, who was seated before one of the dissecting microscopes. While Stephanie and Daniel had gone to Washington, he’d stayed behind to keep all the company’s experiments going.
Stephanie unloaded her laptop onto the soapstone surface of the particular lab bench she used as her desk; her private office had been sacrificed in the initial downsizing. With Butler’s skin biopsy in hand, she walked over to an operative area of the laboratory. She removed the piece of skin aseptically, minced it, and then placed the minced material in a fresh batch of culture medium, along with antibiotics. When it had been safely stored in an incubator in a T-flask, she returned to the area she used as her desk.
“How did things go in Washington?” Peter called out. He was a slightly built fellow who looked like a teenager, despite being older than Stephanie. His most distinguishing characteristics were ratty clothes and a shock of blond hair that he wore in a ponytail. Stephanie had always thought he could be a poster boy for the hippie-dominated sixties.
“Washington was okay,” Stephanie answered vaguely. She and Daniel had decided not to tell the others about Senator Butler until after the fact.
“So, we’re still in business?” Peter asked.
“It looks that way,” Stephanie replied. She plugged in her laptop and turned it on. A short time later, she was connected to the Internet.
“Is the money coming from San Fran?” Peter persisted.
“You’ll have to ask Daniel,” Stephanie said. “I try to stay clear of the business side of things.”
Peter got the implied message and went back to his work.
Stephanie had been eager to look into the issue of the Shroud of Turin from the moment Daniel had suggested she take it on as her initial contribution to the Butler project. She’d thought about beginning that morning after her shower and before Butler’s skin biopsy had arrived but had decided against it because connecting to the Internet with a modem was agonizingly slow now that she was spoiled with CURE’s broadband connection. Besides, she thought she’d no sooner get herself involved and have to break off. Now she had the rest of the afternoon.
Calling up the Google search engine, she entered SHROUD OF TURIN and clicked on the SEARCH button. She had no idea what to expect. Although she remembered sketchy references to the shroud when she was a child and still a practicing Catholic as well as something about its being declared a fake after carbon dating when she was in her first year of graduate school, she’d not thought of the relic in years and assumed other people felt similarly. After all, how excited could one get about a thirteenth-century forgery? But a blink of the eye later, when the Google search was completed, she knew she was wrong. Amazed, she found herself staring at the number of results: more than 28,300!
Stephanie clicked on the first result, called the Shroud of Turin website, and for the next hour found herself totally absorbed by the extent of information available. On the very first introductory page, she read that the shroud was “the single most studied artifact in human history”! With her relative lack of familiarity with the shroud, she found that a surprising statement, especially considering her general interest in history; her undergraduate major had been chemistry, but she’d had a minor in history. She also read that a number of experts felt strongly that the question of the shroud’s authenticity as a first-century artifact had not been settled by the carbon dating results. As a woman of science, and knowing the precision of carbon dating, she could not understand how anyone could hold such an opinion and was eager to find out. But before she did, she used the website to examine photographs of the shroud that were presented in both positive and negative format.
Stephanie learned that the first person to photograph the shroud in 1898 had been startled by the images being significantly more obvious in the negative, and it was the same for her. In the positive the image was faint, and looking at it and trying to see the figure reminded her of one of her youthful summer pastimes: attempting to see faces, people, or animals in the infinite variations of cumulus clouds. But in the negative, the image was striking! It was clearly that of a man who had been beaten, tortured, and crucified, which begged the question of how a medieval forger could have anticipated the development of photography. What had appeared on the positive as mere blotches were now agonizingly real rivulets of blood. Glancing back at the positive image, she was surprised that the blood had even retained its red color.
On the main menu of the Shroud of Turin website, Stephanie clicked on a button labeled FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. One of the questions was whether DNA testing had ever been performed on the shroud. With excitement, Stephanie clicked on the question. In the answer provided, she learned that Texas researchers had found DNA in the bloodstains, although there were some questions about the provenance of the sample tested. There were also questions raised about how much DNA contamination could have been left by all the people who had touched the shroud over the centuries.
The Shroud of Turin website also included an extensive bibliography, and Stephanie turned to it eagerly. Once again, she was amazed at its extent. With her curiosity now piqued and as a lover of books, she went over a number of the titles. Leaving the shroud’s website, she called up a bookseller’s, which produced a hundred titles, many of which were the same as those in the shroud’s website. After reading some of the reviews, she selected a few of the books that she wanted to have immediately. She was particularly drawn to those by Ian Wilson, an Oxford-educated scholar, who was cited as presenting both sides of the controversy concerning the shroud’s authenticity even though he was convinced it was real, meaning not only was it a first-century artifact—it was the burial cloth of Jesus Christ!
Picking up the phone, Stephanie called the local bookstore. She was rewarded by learning that the store had one of the titles she was interested in. It was The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence by Ian Wilson and Barrie Schwortz, a professional photographer who had been part of an American team that had extensively studied the shroud in 1978. Stephanie asked
for the book to be put aside with her name on it.
Returning to the bookseller’s website, she ordered a few more of the shroud books to be delivered overnight. With that accomplished, she stood up and took her coat off the back of her chair. “I’m heading out to the bookstore,” she called over to Peter. “I’m going to pick up a book on the Shroud of Turin. Out of curiosity, what do you know about it?”
“Hmmm,” Peter voiced, as he screwed up his face as if in deep thought. “I know the name of the city where it’s kept.”
“I’m serious,” Stephanie complained.
“Well, let’s put it this way,” Peter said. “I’ve heard of it, but it’s not that it comes up in conversation too often with me and my buddies. If I were pressed, I’d say it’s one of those objects the medieval church used to fan the religious fires to keep the collection boxes full, like pieces of the true cross and saints’ fingernails.”
“Do you think it’s real?”
“You mean Jesus’ burial cloth?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell, no! It was proved to be a fake ten years ago.”
“What if I told you it was the most investigated artifact in human history?”
“I’d ask you what you’d been smoking lately.”
Stephanie laughed. “Thank you, Peter.”
“What are you thanking me for?” he asked, obviously confused.
“I was worried my lack of familiarity with the Shroud of Turin was somehow unique. It’s reassuring to know it’s not.” Stephanie pulled on her coat and headed for the door.
“How come the sudden interest in the Shroud of Turin?” Peter called after her.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Stephanie yelled over her shoulder. She crossed the reception area diagonally and poked her head into Daniel’s office. She was surprised to see him slouched over his desk with his head in his hands.
“Hey,” Stephanie called. “Are you okay?”
Daniel looked up and blinked. His eyes were red, as if he’d been rubbing them, and his face was paler than usual. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said, as if exhausted. His earlier ebullience had fled.
“What’s going on?”
Daniel shook his head as his eyes wandered around his littered desk. He sighed. “Running this organization is like keeping a leaky boat afloat with a thimble for bailing. The venture capital people are refusing to release the second round financing until I tell them why I’m so sure Butler’s bill won’t come out of the subcommittee. But I can’t tell them, because if I do, it will invariably be leaked, and Butler would most likely renege about keeping his bill under wraps. Then all bets are off.”
“What kind of money do we have left?”
“Almost nothing,” Daniel moaned. “This time next month, we’ll be dipping into our line of credit just to meet payroll.”
“That gives us the month we need to treat Butler,” Stephanie said.
“What a lucky break that is,” Daniel snapped sarcastically. “It irritates me to death that we have to stop our research and deal with the likes of Butler and possibly those infertility clowns down in Nassau. It’s a goddamn crime that medical research has become politicized in this country. Our founding fathers who insisted on separation of church and state are probably turning over in their graves with these relatively few politicians using their supposed religious beliefs to hold up what will undoubtedly be the biggest advance in medical treatment.”
“Well, we all know what’s really behind this current Luddite bioscience movement,” Stephanie said.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s really abortion politics in disguise,” Stephanie said. “The real issue is that these demagogues want a zygote to be declared a human being with full constitutional rights no matter how the zygote was formed and no matter what the zygote’s future holds. It’s a ridiculous stance, but nonetheless if it happened, Roe versus Wade would have to be thrown out.”
“You’re probably right,” Daniel admitted. He exhaled like the sound of air coming out of a tire. “What an absurd situation. History is going to wonder what kind of people we were that allowed a personal issue like abortion to handicap a society for years on end. We took a lot of our ideas about individual rights, government, and certainly our common law from England. Why couldn’t we have followed England’s lead in how best to deal with the ethics of reproductive bioscience?”
“That’s a good question, but it’s not going to do us any good to worry over the answer at the moment. What happened to your enthusiasm about treating Butler? Let’s get it done! Once he’s treated, he’s not going to renege on our deal even if there is a leak to the media, because we’ll have his release. I mean, once he’s been cured he can deal with the media by just denying any accusations as being politically motivated. What he wouldn’t be able to deny is a signed release.”
“You have a point,” Daniel admitted.
“What about Butler’s money?” Stephanie asked. “It seems to me that’s the key question at the moment. Has there been any communication about that?”
“I haven’t even thought to check.” Daniel turned to his computer and, after a few strokes, looked at his special email inbox. “Here’s a message that must be from Butler. It has an encrypted attachment, which is encouraging.”
Daniel opened the attachment. Stephanie stepped around the desk to look over his shoulder.
“I’d say it looks very encouraging,” Stephanie said. “He’s given us an account number for a Bahamian bank, and it appears as if we both can draw from it.”
“It’s got a link to the bank’s website,” Daniel said. “Let’s see if we can find out the balance in the account. That will tell us how serious Butler is about all this.”
A few clicks later, Daniel tilted back in his chair. He looked up at Stephanie, and she returned his stare. Both were taken aback.
“I’d say he’s very serious!” Stephanie remarked. “And eager!”
“I’m flabbergasted!” Daniel said. “I expected ten or twenty thousand, tops. I never expected a hundred. Where could he have gotten that kind of money so quickly?”
“I told you, he has a string of political action committees that are fund-raising workhorses. What I wonder is if any of the people who contributed this money could have ever imagined how the money was going to be spent. There’s a hell of a lot of irony here if they are as conservative as I imagine they are.”
“That’s not our concern,” Daniel said. “Besides, we’ll never spend a hundred thousand dollars. At the same time, it’s good to know it’s there just in case. Let’s get busy!”
“I already started the fibroblast culture with the skin biopsy.”
“Excellent,” Daniel said, as his exuberance of that morning began to return. Even his skin color improved. “I’ll get cracking and find out what I can about the Wingate Clinic.”
“Sounds good!” Stephanie said. She started for the door. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”
“Where are you going?”
“The bookstore downtown,” Stephanie called over her shoulder. She hesitated at the threshold. “They are holding a book for me. After I got the tissue culture started, I began looking into the Shroud of Turin issue. I have to say, I lucked out in our division of labor. The shroud is turning out to be much more interesting than I imagined.”
“What did you find out?”
“Just enough to hook me, but I’ll give you a full report in about twenty-four hours.”
Daniel smiled, flashed Stephanie a thumbs-up, and turned back to his computer screen. He used a search engine to bring up a list of infertility clinics and found the Wingate Clinic’s website. A few clicks later, he was connected.
He scrolled through the first few pages. As expected, it was composed of laudatory material to entice would-be clients. Under a section labeled MEET OUR STAFF, he made a brief side trip to read the professional resumes of the principals, which included the founder and CEO, Dr. Spencer Wingate; the head of Res
earch and Laboratory Services, Dr. Paul Saunders; and the head of Clinical Services, Dr. Sheila Donaldson. The resumes were as glowing as the descriptions of the clinic itself, although in Daniel’s opinion, all three individuals had attended second-tier or even third-tier schools and training programs.
At the bottom of the page, he found what he wanted: a phone number. There was also an email address, but Daniel wanted to talk directly with one of the principals, either Wingate or Saunders. Picking up the phone, Daniel dialed the number. The call was answered quickly by a pleasant-sounding operator who launched into a short, rote eulogy of the clinic before asking with whom Daniel wished to be connected.
“Dr. Wingate,” Daniel said. He decided he might as well start at the top.
There was another short pause before Daniel was connected to an equally pleasant-sounding woman. She politely asked for Daniel’s name before committing whether Dr. Wingate was available. When Daniel mentioned his name, the response was immediate.
“Is this Dr. Daniel Lowell of Harvard University?”
Daniel paused momentarily, as he tried to decide how to respond. “I have been at Harvard, although at the moment I am with my own firm.”
“I’ll get Dr. Wingate for you,” the secretary said. “I know he’s been waiting to talk with you.”
After a sustained blink of disbelief, Daniel pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it momentarily, as if it could explain the secretary’s unexpected response. How could Spencer Wingate be waiting to talk with him? Daniel shook his head.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Lowell!” a voice responded with a clipped New England accent a full octave higher than Daniel would have expected. “I’m Spencer Wingate, and I’m pleased to hear from you. We expected your call last week, but no matter. Would you mind waiting momentarily while I get Dr. Saunders on the line? It will take a minute, but we might as well make this a conference call, since I know Dr. Saunders is as eager to talk with you as I.”