As a splurge, they had ordered breakfast in the room. At Daniel’s insistence, it included mimosas. Jokingly, he told Stephanie that she’d better get accustomed to such living, because it would become the order of the day once CURE went public. “I’ve had enough of academic poverty,” he’d declared. “We are going to be on the A list, and we are going to act the part!”
At nine-fifteen, both had been surprised by a call from the concierge’s desk saying that a courier had dropped off a package from a Dr. Claire Schneider labeled URGENT. They were asked if they wanted it sent directly to the room, and they had responded in the affirmative. As they assumed, the package contained Butler’s skin biopsy, and they were duly impressed with Butler’s efficiency. Its arrival was several hours earlier than they had hoped to see it.
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.