Sana stepped into the gowning room and quickly changed. Even though the sequencer had now completed the process, she wanted no contamination into the room, as she might be running certain samples again, or even a totally new sample, depending on what she found. When she was gloved, gowned, hooded, and bootied, Sana went into the lab proper and walked directly to the sequencer. Taking the stack of pages from the printout, she sought the pages that really counted to her. It took only a few minutes. It turned out there were three, and when she finally isolated them, she glanced at each and then looked again, like a double take. Then she shook her head and looked yet again. She couldn’t believe it, but there was no way she was going to sit herself down and compare every one of sixteen thousand four hundred and eighty-four base pairs on all three pages. Feeling suddenly light-headed, Sana sat down just the same. She didn’t try to do any comparing herself—that was what computers were good for. Instead, she’d sat down to try to fathom what the results were suggesting, something Sana felt from her experience to be impossible.

The problem was this, and Sana checked again to be certain: The mitochondrial DNA sequence of the pulp of the tooth Sana had pulled from the skull coming from the ossuary matched—base pair for base pair, sixteen thousand four hundred eighty-four—with a contemporary woman, as Sana had ordered the computer to check once it had established the sequence by using the brand-new international mitochondrial library called CODIS 6.0.

Although finding a match in the contemporary world wasn’t that abnormal because identical twins matched, the problem, however, in this case was that the woman in the ossuary was more than two thousand years old! As exceptional as this match was, the second match was even more fantastic, and frankly inexplicable to Sana. She looked at it and shook her head. “This cannot be,” she said out loud. “This simply cannot be.”

Suddenly, Sana leaped to her feet and, running out of the lab and through the gowning room, emerged into the office mildly out of breath. Both Shawn and Jack had been seriously startled. Sana didn’t care. Instead she gasped, “The impossible has happened!”

Jack, who had forgiven her startling him faster than Shawn, crowded around her and took the printout page she held out to him. He was eager for an explanation.

“That’s the woman in the ossuary’s MT-DNA sequence,” Sana spat out, hitting the page Jack was holding with the back of her hand. “This is the exact same sequence in a contemporary Palestinian woman,” Sana continued, handing the second page to Jack. “And this sequence, which is also the same, is the mitochondrial sequence of Eve!” She gave Jack the final page. She was out of breath from excitement.