“What a tragedy.”
“As I said, there are academics who still wince at the thought today. Anyway, friends and neighbors of the boys, including a Muslim imam who was also a history teacher, suspected they were valuable and quickly intervened. The codex that I came across today worked its way down the Nile to reach Cairo via various antiquities dealers. There the five of its missing texts, which also turned out to be the most extraordinary, were removed and smuggled out to the United States. Luckily, by that time Egyptian government agents had been alerted, and they then managed to buy or confiscate the remaining codices, including eight of the pages removed from the thirteenth. The thirteenth itself they didn’t find, and somehow it got lost in someone’s antiquities inventory to await a safe time to fence it. My guess would be that it somehow got forgotten until recently, when my friend Rahul got access to it. My appearance today was clearly serendipitous. He’s in contact with a number of curators around the world. He wouldn’t have had a problem disposing of it.”
“But isn’t it against the law to sell it or even own it?”
“Absolutely!”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Not really. I think of myself as its rescuer. I don’t intend to keep it. My goal from the beginning was to be the person to publish the contained texts and reap the professional benefits. Unfortunately, that is no longer much of an issue.”
“Why not? How many texts are remaining in the codex?”
“Quite a number.”
“What exactly are these Nag Hammadi texts?”
“They are Coptic copies of Greek originals with names like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the Apocalypse of Peter, so forth and so on.”
“What are the names of the texts remaining in the Thirteenth Codex?”
“That’s the problem. All of the remaining texts are additional copies of texts previously found in the first twelve codices. Even in the initial fifty-two texts of those twelve volumes, only forty had been new works. It’s similar in that respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls, where there was some redundancy as well.”
“Which leads us to the letter you found sandwiched in the cover.”
“Exactly,” Shawn said. He got up, gingerly picked up the three pages, and quickly returned to his chair. “Do you want me to read it, which I’ll probably do a shoddy job at, or will you be content for me to paraphrase? One way or the other, it’s going to go down as one of the most historically significant letters in the history of the world.”
Sana let her mouth drop open in mock astonishment. She even rolled her eyes. “Are you developing a new tendency toward hyperbole? Earlier you said your find today was a hundred times better than your previous most important archaeological find, or something like that. Has it now ascended to being one of the most historically significant letters in the history of the world? Aren’t you pushing the envelope here?”
“I’m not exaggerating,” Shawn said, his eyes shining.
“Okay,” Sana said. “I think you’d better try to read the whole letter to me. I don’t want to miss anything. You mentioned Jesus of Nazareth. Does the letter involve him?”
“It does, but indirectly,” Shawn said. He cleared his throat.
As her husband started to read, Sana shifted her eyes out the hotel window. The sun reflected in a blaze of light off the Nile’s surface in the foreground; on the horizon loomed the famed Pyramids of Giza, with the Great Pyramid towering over the others. If the ancient letter turned out to be half as important as Shawn was implying, she couldn’t have wished for a better place to hear a translation.
5
8:41 A.M., MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
(3:41 P.M., CAIRO, EGYPT)
Goddamn it, Vinnie,” Jack Stapleton growled. Jack was along the left side of the body of Keara Abelard. He’d been bent over the woman’s back for more than twenty minutes, carefully biting off pieces of the cervical transverse processes with his ron geurs, trying to expose the two vertical arteries as they coursed up through the neck. The arteries pierced each vertebra laterally before making an S-curve around the atlas, or first cervical vertebra.
“Sorry,” Vinnie said, but without sufficient remorse.
“Can’t you see what the hell I’m trying to do?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to expose both vertebral arteries.”
Keara’s neck was pressed down on a wooden block, her face pointing down at the floor, on the table, her brainless calvarium pointing at the autopsy room’s door. The brain sat alone on a cutting board at the foot of the table.
Vinnie stood at the end of the table with his hands on either side of Keara’s head, trying to stabilize it as Jack nipped off pieces of bone. It was a slow process. The idea was to expose the arteries without damaging them. Jack recorded his progress with a series of digital photos.
“If you can’t hold the head still, I’m going to have to find someone who can. I don’t want to make this my life’s work.”
“All right already,” Vinnie complained. “I got the message. For a second there I was thinking about the Giants and the worry they’re not even making the Super Bowl much less winning it.”
Jack closed his eyes and silently counted to ten. He knew he was being tough on Vinnie. Holding on to a body part while Jack nibbled away was a grunt’s job, and he would have hated to do it himself. Still, the case had to get done. The problem was, his emotional instability was causing him to be less patient than usual.
“Just try to focus a little more,” Jack said, making a conscious effort to calm his voice. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Got it, boss,” Vinnie said, tightening his grip on the woman’s head.
The rest of the autopsy room was a beehive of activity with all eight tables in use, but Jack was oblivious to it all. He now had a preliminary diagnosis as to the cause of Keara’s death, and his attention was focused. The arteriogram showed an almost complete blockage of both vertebral arteries, the source of much of the brain’s blood supply. The blockage appeared to have occurred over a relatively short period of time. But why? Was it a natural occurrence, as in some sort of emboli, or accidental, like an injury? The fact that it was so symmetrical was the most difficult to explain. It was a unique case for Jack, and he had eased up on himself for not thinking of doing a vertebral arteriogram before removing the brain. It had been a mistake but ultimately not detrimental.
Twenty minutes later, Vinnie leaned down to view Jack’s handiwork. “It’s looking good to me,” he said.
Jack straightened up, pleased. The field looked like an anatomy textbook illustration of the course of the vertebral arteries, particularly at the base of the skull. “Can you see the bluish discoloration and swelling around the S-curves on both sides?” Jack asked. “Come around to get a better look.”
Vinnie traded places with Jack. From that vantage point he could see what Jack was referring to. Each vertebral artery had a two- to three-inch section with a swollen bluish cast, the right slightly more pronounced than the left. “What do you think it is?” Vinnie said.
Jack shrugged. “Looks to me like an injury of some kind, but since there was zero bruising on her neck, it’s a bit strange. In fact, she had no signs of trauma of any form. And it’s peculiar how symmetrical it is.”
“Could it be a whiplash injury, something like that?”
“I suppose it could, but there’d be the history of the automobile accident. When I glanced through the medicolegal investigation report, there’d been no mention of any auto accident. I think I might be in for a bit of investigative work myself. There has to be an explanation.”