Blood Relics (A James Acton Thriller, #12) by J Robert Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

Vatican?”
    Acton
shrugged. “No one really knows. There’re several places that claim to have the
spear. Besides the one just stolen, there’s one in Vienna and one in Armenia.”
    “And
Antioch,” added Laura.
    “Why
don’t they test them to see if they’re even from the same era?”
    “Well,
there’s a few reasons, not the least of which is people don’t really want to
know. As long as it hasn’t been proven fake, then they can claim it’s real.”
    Laura
gave him a chance to eat a few more bites. “The most famous example is the
Shroud of Turin. Small pieces were given to scientists to carbon date and it
was dated to at least a thousand years after Christ’s death.”
    “But a
lot of people dispute those results. Some say that parts of the cloth many not
be original, instead patches added after the fact to repair damage over the
centuries, others claim that carbon from a fire in medieval times actually
contaminated the samples. And that’s the problem. A negative when testing
something like this doesn’t really prove anything, but people think just
because there was a scientific test that it’s conclusive.”
    Mai’s
meal was forgotten. And so were her nerves. “But why would anyone sew in
another piece of cloth when they knew how important it was?”
    “Well,
take King Tut’s mask. You know, the famous blue and gold king cobra?”
    “Yes,
I’ve seen pictures.”
    “Well,
just last year workers at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo broke off the beard and
rather than tell anyone, they just glued it back on. That glue is now causing
damage to the mask.”
    “Unbelievable!”
    “We see
it all the time, unfortunately.” Laura put her fork down, her meal finished.
“Many times we find artifacts or structures that we now consider priceless, but
during the centuries or millennia were just things handed down over time.
Imagine you have an antique table handed down through the generations. If
something were to happen to it, you would fix it. In some cases, you might need
to even replace a piece, let’s say one of the legs. Because it’s precious to
you, you would insist the work is done properly so you could never tell that
the leg had been replaced. Sometimes this even involves artificially aging the
wood or stone. Now imagine five hundred years from now somebody finds that
table and wants to carbon date it. If they take a portion from the replaced
leg, they’ll find out it was only five hundred years old instead of the actual
seven hundred years. This is why the dating might be a science, but the
selection of what to date can sometimes be an art.”
    “They
actually broke the beard off of King Tut?” asked Sandra. “That’s incredible!
How’d they find out?”
    Acton
pushed his plate away, finished. “Somebody noticed a ring of glue oozing out in
a photograph.”
    “So back
to the original question of why,” interjected Milton. “Do you think someone could
really be after these things for their healing properties?”
    Acton
pursed his lips, leaning back in his chair, swirling his wine. He sighed. “I
can’t think of any other reason. There’s so many other priceless artifacts kept
with the two that were stolen, you’d have to think they’d have taken them as
well if money were the motive.”
    “My
God!” said Sandra. “Do you think it could actually work?” Her hand darted to
her husband’s arm. “Do you think they might try to clone him ?”
    Acton’s
chest tightened slightly as a shot of nervous adrenaline shot through his
system at the thought. “I-I don’t know.” He looked at his wife, memories of The
Vault, a hidden chamber under The Vatican known to almost no one, momentarily overwhelming
him. “Are we getting ourselves into something that we shouldn’t be? Something
bigger than us?”
    Laura
seemed to pale slightly.
    “Maybe
you two shouldn’t get involved.”
    Acton
looked at his friend and shook his head. “No, Hugh’s expecting us. And if this
is some type of