The Shroud Codex (37 page)

“Know that I and Paul are eternally grateful for all you have done for us both,” Anne wrote in conclusion. “You became part of our destiny the moment you accepted Paul as your patient.”

She signed her name simply, in the same firm hand with which she had written the letter.

Castle knew he had a lot of thinking to do, but one thing was certain. He needed some distance to gain perspective. He took out his cell phone and called Gabrielli.

Castle began a little tentatively. “Marco, I’ve been doing some thinking since we got back from Turin.”

“And what have you concluded?” Gabrielli asked, having no idea where his friend and associate was headed.

“Maybe you should write that book about the Shroud on your own,” Castle suggested. “I’m not sure I’m ready to be your coauthor.”

Gabrielli thought quickly. He was not about to let go of the opportunity of a lifetime to debunk the Catholic Church. “Well, I will miss your help,” he said, “but I guess that just means more royalties for me.”

Castle agreed, said good-bye, and wished his friend good luck.

The next call he made was to Norman Rothschild, the venerated psychiatrist who had brought Castle into the profession. It was afternoon in New York and Rothschild answered the phone when he recognized Castle’s name showing up on his caller ID.

“How’s Rome?” Rothschild asked.

“A little more interesting than I had anticipated,” Castle answered.

“I can tell from the tone of your voice. I’ve been worried about you since you first briefed me on your new patient, Father Bartholomew. I’ve been following the television reports.”

“I figured you would,” Castle said.

“What’s going on?” Rothschild asked. “I haven’t heard anything since you left for the Vatican.”

“I can’t explain it to you now; it’s too complicated. But I’m sure you will be catching up, once you turn on the television. Will you have time for dinner early next week, after I return to New York?”

“You know I will,” Rothschild said affirmatively. He was looking forward to seeing Stephen in the city. “When are you flying home?”

“I will leave Rome on Sunday,” Castle said. “I’ll take tomorrow to rest. Can we have dinner Monday evening?”

“Of course we can,” Rothschild said enthusiastically. “I will clear off my calendar whatever I need to clear. Call my office and my assistant will work out the details.”

“Sounds good,” Castle said appreciatively.

“Just tell me this,” Rothschild said seriously, wanting to be sure before they ended the conversation. “Are you okay or do you need some assistance right now? I have colleagues I trust in Rome.”

“I’ve been through a lot,” Castle said, “but I think I’m okay for now.”

Ending the call, Castle decided to turn his attention to dinner.

“What does the chef recommend?” he asked the waiter politely, ready to accept just about anything the waiter had in mind.

Sunday evening

New York City, 8:00
P.M.

Day 32

Anchor Dave Dunaway had Fernando Ferrar appear in person on his Sunday evening broadcast to promote the hourlong special on Father Bartholomew and the Shroud of Turin that Ferrar had produced for national broadcast the coming Wednesday. Since Friday, Ferrar’s video of the events that transpired in the Chapel of the Shroud had been broadcast by the network and picked up on the Internet.

“What is the official status of Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy?” Dunaway asked.

“According to Italian law enforcement authorities, both are listed as ‘missing persons,’” Ferrar reported. “I was there in the Chapel of the Shroud in Turin, Italy, when the burst of light flooded the room. The pope was standing within five feet of me at the time. What I experienced, I can’t explain. But what I think happened is that Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy’s bodies seemed to vaporize into what I can only describe as pure energy.
It looked to me like they disappeared right through the Shroud.”

While Ferrar was speaking, the audience saw the video of the moment—the light flash as Father Bartholomew stood there and reached out to Anne; as he grabbed her hand, she was absorbed into the light. It looked like both were vaporized, with the light leaving the room through the Shroud. When it was over, the pope and the others in the room were on their knees or knocked flat on the floor. When the commotion settled in the chapel, Bartholomew and Anne were gone.

“When I got back to my feet, I noticed that the eyes of the man on the Shroud had opened,” Ferrar said. “I couldn’t believe it, but before that the eyes were closed. I know that for certain. The day before the private showing with the pope and Father Bartholomew, the archdiocese allowed our video team to bring in high-definition cameras to record very detailed images of the Shroud for broadcast. We must have been in the Chapel of the Shroud doing the HD taping for somewhere around five hours last Thursday. I got a chance to study the Shroud very closely with my own eyes.”

Again, as Ferrar talked, the broadcast showed images of the video team taping the Shroud, a close-up of the closed eyes in the image of the Shroud before the event, and the open eyes after the event.

“You interviewed Dr. Ruth Bucholtz, an internationally renowned particle physicist, didn’t you?” Dunaway asked. “What does Dr. Bucholtz think happened last Friday in Turin, Italy?”

“That’s right,” Ferrar said. “We caught up by remote from Rome with Dr. Bucholtz in her office at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. I believe we have a clip of that interview now.”

A split screen showed Ferrar in the television studio in Rome and Dr. Bucholtz in her Geneva office, being interviewed by Ferrar remotely.

“What you filmed, I believe, is the first documentation of an ‘event horizon’ in which people passed from our normal four dimensions into one of the additional dimensions required by advanced particle physics to explain quantum phenomena observed since Einstein first formulated the general theory of relativity,” Bucholtz said.

“Can you translate that for our audience?” Ferrar asked. “I’m afraid you lost me once you started talking about quantum physics and Einstein. I barely got through physics class in high school.”

“Sure,” Dr. Bucholtz said, smiling at Ferrar’s self-putdown. “I think what your video shows really happened. It was not a trick. Father Bartholomew and Anne turned into pure energy. They transitioned from earth to some other dimension that we humans do not normally experience.”

“I was raised Catholic,” Ferrar said, “and what you are saying sounds a lot like the resurrection of Jesus Christ, especially when we are talking about the Shroud of Turin. Are you saying Father Bartholomew became Jesus and Anne Cassidy was like the Virgin Mary? According to what I was taught in Catholic catechism, Jesus died on the cross, was resurrected, and ascended into Heaven. His mother, the Virgin Mary, also died and was assumed into Heaven. Is this what you are talking about?”

“I’m not saying that Father Bartholomew became Jesus or that Anne Cassidy was the Virgin Mary,” Dr. Bucholtz said to clarify things. “But I think they both went through an experience that the New Testament describes as the resurrection of Jesus and the ascent into Heaven of Jesus and his mother.”

Cutting back to the studio in New York, Dunaway had a look
of amazement on his face. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he said to the national audience. “You’re telling me that Dr. Bucholtz is an internationally respected physicist who works at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” Ferrar affirmed.

“And she believes in resurrections and ascents into Heaven?” Dunaway asked. “Is that consistent with being a scientist?”

Ferrar laughed quietly in agreement. “It seems like the world of advanced particle physics and the world of religion may be a little closer than we typically assume.”

“But Bucholtz wasn’t your only interview, right?” Dunaway skillfully shifted the focus of the discussion. “You also interviewed a well-known skeptic.”

“That’s right,” Ferrar said, picking up Dunaway’s segue. “I also interviewed Dr. Marco Gabrielli, a professor of chemistry on the faculty of the University of Bologna. Gabrielli has made a career debunking religious and other paranormal phenomena. He’s best at exposing frauds, like statues of Jesus that appear to cry tears of blood, when all that’s involved is filling a porous cavity in the statue’s head with a liquid solution that looks like blood. Here’s what Professor Gabrielli told us.”

Another split screen showed Ferrar in the television studio in Rome interviewing Gabrielli in his office in Bologna.

“It was classic misdirection,” Gabrielli said on camera. “Every magician in the world since before the time of Houdini knows their illusions depend on creating a diversion that distracts the attention of the audience. That burst of light that blinded all of us in the Chapel of the Shroud was one of the best I’ve ever seen. We were all thrown into confusion, even me. Who knows what really happened? Sure, it looks like Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy vaporized into pure energy and disappeared through the Shroud, but can you prove to me there wasn’t a trap door in that
room that allowed them to escape without any supernatural effects whatsoever?”

“So you disagree with Dr. Bucholtz, then.” Ferrar pressed the chemist. “You don’t think we witnessed any ‘event horizon’ or ‘passing into another dimension’? Nothing supernatural as far as you’re concerned, is that right?”

“Right.” Gabrielli said without any hesitation whatsoever. “Magicians have been making people disappear for generations. Usually they use a curtain, or they have a person go into some sort of a cabinet or box before the magician makes them disappear. But I have to admit that a blinding flash of light is every bit as good as any physical apparatus magicians have designed over the decades to pull off their disappearing tricks.”

“Are you trying to duplicate the illusion right now?” Ferrar asked.

“Absolutely,” Gabrielli said. “And I am pretty well along the way to figuring it out. My only questions now are who was paying Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy for pulling off this trick, and how much money did they walk away with? I also wouldn’t mind tracking them down so I could prove to the world they are frauds. That should be pretty obvious after I find out where they went to spend their money.”

“Well, that should settle it, don’t you think?” Dunaway asked Ferrar as the camera returned to the New York studio.

“It might,” Ferrar said, “except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Dunaway asked, looking surprised.

“We’ve managed to find a picture of Anne Bartholomew, Father Bartholomew’s mother,” Ferrar said as the picture went up on the television screen. “When we set that photo side by side with the recent photos of Anne Cassidy, the woman who came on the scene as Father Paul Bartholomew’s half sister, the two women look exactly alike.”

The photo of Anne Cassidy came on the screen next to the old photo of Anne Bartholomew, the mother of Father Bartholomew, and the resemblance was obvious.

“So, to find out for sure if Anne Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy are the same person, we consulted an expert in face-recognition software,” Ferrar said. “Michael Winters, in Concord, New Hampshire. Winters is founder and CEO of a company that works with casinos to find card counters and cheats even when they try to disguise their facial appearance.”

“Very interesting,” Dunaway said, now looking intrigued. “What did you find out?”

“Here’s a clip from the special,” Ferrar said. “I interviewed Winters in his home office by remote video this morning.”

The split screen came up on camera again. Ferrar in the New York studio was talking with Winters at his computer in his New Hampshire office.

“So, if you are following me,” Winters said in the clip Ferrar had chosen for the promo with Dunaway, “the one dimension of a person’s face that is hard to change is the distance between their eyes, measured from pupil to pupil. People can get their noses or their chins modified relatively easily by plastic surgery, but not the distance between their eyes.”

The camera focused on Winters’s computer. On one half of his computer monitor, Winters showed a photo of Anne Bartholomew from when her son was an infant; on the other half Winters showed a photo of Anne Cassidy from a few days earlier.

“As you can see,” Winters said, “the distance between the eyes of the two women is identical.”

Winters typed in a few keystrokes, and the two photos began to merge.

“As you can see when we overlap the two photos, in this case all the facial features in the two photos match almost perfectly.”

“What’s your conclusion?” Ferrar asked.

“My conclusion is that these two photos show the same woman,” Winters said, looking up from his computer monitor. “I believe I can say that with a ninety-nine-percent confidence level. In my years of working with this software, I can think of only two or three other cases where the faces have matched up so perfectly.”

“So there you have it,” Ferrar said to Dunaway as the scene returned to the New York studio. “We’re going to have to let you, the viewers, decide whether our recorded video documenting that Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy disappeared into the Shroud of Turin is a paranormal event that confirms Christ’s resurrection and the authenticity of the Shroud, or whether Father Bartholomew and Anne Cassidy are nothing more than top-notch charlatans who could show up any day with their next magic act.”

“I can’t wait to see your special,” Dunaway said. “When does it broadcast?”

“This Wednesday at eight
P.M.
Eastern Time,” Ferrar answered.

“Well, I will be sure to be watching,” Dunaway said, wrapping up the promo segment. “And I suspect I will be only one of the millions in your audience on the edge of their seats. What happened in front of our cameras in the Chapel of the Shroud in Turin, Italy, last Friday? A religious experience of the ages or an ingenious magic trick that was brilliantly pulled off? Watch this Wednesday at eight
P.M.
Eastern Time.
Father Bartholomew and the Shroud of Turin: Miracle or Magic?
We will present the evidence so you, the viewers, can decide for yourselves.”