“Of course you can’t see it,” Shawn barked. “I haven’t dug it out yet. I’ve just located it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Listen, just hand me the hammer and the chisel. I’ll show you, you nonbeliever.”

Sana didn’t necessarily disbelieve Shawn, but like him, she didn’t want to get her hopes up. Sana got the tools and handed them in to Shawn.

Shawn attacked the tunnel’s wall. The process was more difficult than he’d expected, and it took many blows to drive the chisel several inches into cement-like dirt after which he’d wiggle the chisel free. The noise of the steel hammer against the steel chisel was sharp and penetrating, almost painful in the narrow confines. In an attempt to speed up the process, Shawn almost buried the chisel, before pounding it laterally to loosen the surrounding dirt. This took a lot of blows, and each reverberated with a sound like a gunshot, leaving both Shawn’s and Sana’s ears ringing. Sana found she had to cup her ears with her palms to protect herself from the near-painful noise.

After half an hour of pounding the hammer while on his side, Shawn had worked up a mild sweat, and his shoulder was aching. Needing a rest from the continuous effort, he put down the tools and rubbed his complaining muscles briskly. A moment later the beam from Sana’s headlamp merged with his. To his surprise, Sana had actually poked her head into the tunnel.

“How’s the progress?” she asked.

“Slow going!” Shawn admitted. With his gloved hand he wiped off the limestone surface he’d been laboriously exposing. Despite trying to avoid striking the stone with the chisel, he’d nicked it half a dozen times. The nicks stood out sharply as light cream-colored defects against a field of brownish tan. As an archaeologist, he regretted having to employ such a heavy-handed technique, but he had little choice. He knew security made their rounds at the eleven p.m. shift change and he wanted to be long gone. It was already close to ten.

“Do you still think that’s it?” Sana questioned.

“Well, let’s put it this way: It’s a dressed piece of limestone that is surely not indigenous, and it is exactly where Saturninus said he’d placed it. What’s your take?”

Sana couldn’t help but take offense at Shawn’s condescending tone. She was asking a legitimate question because all that was visible was a flat piece of stone, and considering all the construction and modifications that had occurred around Peter’s tomb over thousands of years, there’d probably been multiple opportunities for a stone slab to have been accidently buried where this stone was. With an edge to her voice, Sana made her thoughts known.