“Tonight,” James said matter-of-factly. “I have already made reservations for us late this afternoon. I hope you don’t feel aggravated by my presumptuousness assuming you’d agree. The ossuary will be coming with us on the same flight. We’ll be in Rome in the morning, and tomorrow night I will make arrangements to put the ossuary back where it came from. Then, if you’d like, you can come back to New York on Saturday. It’s taking you all the way to Rome, but you’ll be gone for only two nights. Don’t make me beg, Jack.”

Jack suddenly had a thought that made the idea of flying all the way to Europe seem like an interesting idea above and beyond putting the ossuary back into its burial site. It involved one of the three sheets of computer printouts he’d placed in his inner jacket pocket when he’d been packing everything else back into the ossuary in the lab. Instead of adding the printouts to the other objects, since they had come from the lab, he decided to pocket them with the idea of mulling them over at a later date. One of the pages had the name and an address of a patient seen at the Ein Kerem campus of the Hadassah Medical Center.

“I tell you what,” Jack said. “I’ll come tonight and help you put back the ossuary under two conditions. Number one, my wife, Laurie, and our four-month-old child come with us, provided I can talk her into it, and two, I can tell my wife the whole story of the ossuary.”

“Oh, Jack,” James whined. “The reason I need you to help is to avoid telling anyone else.”

“Sorry, James, that’s my offer. But I can assure you she’s as good as I or better when it comes to secrets. Not being able to tell her has been a burden and, frankly, not telling her and going all the way to Rome doesn’t sit well with me. Anyway, those are the two conditions if you want me to go tonight.”

James thought for a few moments and quickly decided that if he had to risk telling someone else, Jack’s wife was probably the best risk.

“All right,” James said reluctantly. “What time can you get back to me?”

“If all goes smoothly, within the hour. Should we meet here or at the airport?”

“Meet here. I’ll have Father Maloney drive us out to Kennedy in the Range Rover.”