I was finishing a bowl of lamb stew—my second bowl of lamb stew—at Pace é Salute, a Corsican restaurant near Lumani that Jean and Elisabeth had recommended. Its name translated as “Peace and Good Health,” both of which I regarded as fine things, but neither could compete with the honeyed lamb stew, made with tender chunks of lamb and a rich sauce of honey, garlic, citrus, and savory broth.
Suddenly Miranda’s question triggered a faint memory—faint but recent, something that had occurred as I was preparing to board my flight from Knoxville to Dulles. Was it really possible that only eighteen hours had passed since my secretary, Peggy, had dashed out to the helicopter with my computer and my passport? Reaching into the inner pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing for the past four thousand miles, I pulled out a letter she’d tucked into my passport—a letter marked “Urgent” that had arrived in the morning’s mail. “I’m glad you said that,” I told Miranda. “I would have forgotten this until the next time I went to the dry cleaner’s. And that might’ve been years.”
The envelope was postmarked Charlotte, North Carolina. Smoothing the letter, I scanned it again, because I’d given it only a cursory glance on the plane. “You’re not the only one interested in C-14 dating. So is the Institute for Biblical Science.”
“The Institute for Biblical Science?” Miranda’s eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”
“Not necessarily,” I said, “though in practice, yeah, science often takes a backseat to the Bible.”
“And they’re writing to ask your advice about C-14 dating? I’m surprised they’re not writing to heap fire and brimstone on you. You’ve taken some fierce swings at creationism from time to time.”
“Not fierce,” I said. “Just factual. Okay, maybe a little fierce, too. I don’t get a lot of fan mail from the fundamentalists.” Putting on my reading glasses—a recent, annoying necessity—I read aloud. “‘Dear Dr. Brockton: I’m writing to ask your opinion on the accuracy of carbon-14 dating. Our Institute is initiating a study of artifacts from the Holy Land, and we would very much appreciate your thoughts on the precision and reliability of C-14 dating for establishing the age of artifacts, as well as human and animal bones. I would also appreciate any insights you have on the feasibility of extracting and sequencing genetic material from bone specimens. We would be happy to hire you as a consultant on this project, although—as you might expect—our budget is limited. Please contact me at your earliest opportunity to discuss this exciting project. Best regards, Dr. Adam Newman, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Institute for Biblical Science.’”
I folded the letter and reached for the envelope, but Stefan held out his hand. “Permit me?” I handed him the page. He read it quickly, then handed it back with a look of disdain. “Do what you want, but I advise you to stay away from them. Crazies. If you work with them, it will damage your reputation.”
Miranda leaned forward on her elbows. “What makes you say that?”
“A colleague of mine did some excavation at Qumran,” he said. “The place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Someone from this place—this so-called institute—didn’t like a journal article she published. They attacked her work, tried to destroy her credibility. They even made threats against her. Very unpleasant.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, stuffing the letter back in my jacket.
“But we digress,” Miranda reminded me. “C-14?”
“Oh, right.” I spooned another dollop of sauce from the bowl. “Yum. If—and mind you, this strikes me as a mighty big if—if the bones from the Palace of the Popes are two thousand years old, the C-14 report will say something like ‘two thousand BP plus or minus one hundred.’ That means ‘two thousand years before the present, with a one-hundred-year margin of uncertainty either way.’ Wiggle room, in other words. So the two-thousand-year-old bones could be as old as twenty-one hundred years or as young as nineteen hundred.”
“Actually,” Stefan said, “we should be able to get closer than a hundred years. If it’s a good sample, an AMS test—accelerator mass spectrometry—can tell us the age plus or minus forty years.”
“Wowzer,” Miranda marveled. “I’m used to time-since-death estimates of days or weeks, not millennia. How does it do that?” It was one of Miranda’s favorite multipurpose utterances; sometimes it meant “Explain, please,” but sometimes—in response to, say, a 3-D laser hologram or a fiery sunset—it meant simply “That’s amazing!”