Jon pushed one of the latches shut and was ready to do the same for the other when Shannon said, “Please, let’s sneak another peek at it before you close it, Jon.”
“We just saw it.”
“I mean, I only want a quick glimpse of a page of text again. I’ve actually… missed it, strange as that may seem.”
“I don’t think it strange at all,” Jon said. “I feel the same way.”
Bartholomew and Gregorios looked on and smiled, sharing an almost-sacred sympathy for the text.
The clasps popped open again, and Jon carefully lifted the codex out of the cavity prepared for it.
“Strange,” Jon said. “I don’t recall that the cover was this well preserved.” He opened the codex… and gasped. He turned several pages frantically and gasped even more loudly. There was no vellum, no uncials written in four neat columns, nothing -other than several hundred pages of cheap, bare white foolscap.
Jon stood, pulse coursing wildly, and asked the patriarch to step over to his side of the table. Bartholomew did so, a quizzical look in his eyes.
“O The Mou!” the Ecumenical Patriarch cried. “This cannot be! Gregorios, come! Look!”
When he did so, his face contorted into that of a gargoyle. He turned several pages, teetered, and then collapsed into a chair. “This… this is not possible!”
The scene had become surreal. Yes, this is not a bad dream, Jon had to remind himself. Yes, we are in New York. Yes, the people are real. Yet they were all staring at an impossibility.
Jon came alive with a fusillade of queries. “Did you check this through with your luggage or as a carry-on, Your All Holiness?”
“As a carry-on, certainly.”
“And was it in your possession the whole time?”
“Yes, yes, it was.”
“Ever since you left the patriarchate?”
“Yes.”
“Did you open the case and the codex just before leaving the patriarchate?”
“Oh yes, it was the last thing I did.”
“You opened it up and saw the vellum pages, the uncials…?”
“Yes. I even read the opening words of Matthew’s Gospeclass="underline" ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.’ Then I closed it and blessed it.”
“How did you get to the airport?”
“We drove in a BMW owned by the patriarchate. When I entered our car, Brother Gregorios put the case into the trunk, along with our other luggage.”
“When you arrived at the airport, did this case stay with you?”
“I carried it myself for the patriarch,” Gregorios said.
“Did you open the case at the airport?”
“Yes…”
“And the codex was inside?”
“Yes.”
“Did you open the codex?”
He paused and frowned. “No, I… I did not.”
“Was there, perhaps, some reason why you did not?” Jon felt he had to tread gingerly here to avoid giving the impression that he was some sort of grilling prosecutor.
“We were at the customs line, and everyone seemed to be rushed. Besides, the codex was there.”
“What happened when you went through customs?”
“They waved us through,” the monk replied.
“But the case had to go through security just before the gates, right?”
“Yes.”
“And it went through?”
“Yes.”
“And this was the only time it was not in your hands? Or those of the Ecumenical Patriarch?”
“Yes, the only time.”
“And you had it with you at all times in the departure lounge?”
“Yes. I hardly ever took my eyes off it.”
“But you didn’t open the codex again?”
Gregorios hesitated-was it embarrassment?-and said, “No.”
“And on the flight to New York-where did you stow it?”
“In the overhead storage bin, where there was plenty of room.”
“And when you went through customs here in New York?”
“They just told us to go through. Nothing was searched.”
Jon worked on the options, one by one. At last he said, “Now, this is important. When is the last time you saw the actual pages of vellum and the uncials written on them?”
Gregorios looked at Bartholomew and both had to agree. “When we left the patriarchate.”
“And that was the last time you opened the codex? Not after you went through security?”
“No, that was the last time. Now I see that this… this was a terrible failure on our part…”
While Jon was tempted to agree, he guarded his tongue. “Well, with the case intact-this is the original case, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes…”
“With the original case in your hands, you’d really have no reason to open it. Please don’t be too hard on yourselves.”
It seemed only a modest comfort for the patriarch and his archivist. Both were terribly distraught. Shannon looked quite pale. Jon fought off the feelings of despair welling up inside him with a boiling anger that the prize should have been snatched from them just before the moment of victory. He paced around the conference room, one hand wringing the other for an explanation.
Clearly, the codex had been stolen sometime between Bartholomew’s leaving the patriarchate and his arrival in America-a bewilderingly broad span of time and place. One obvious, unguarded period of time would have been while the case was in the overhead bin on the transatlantic flight. They had flown business class, so the perpetrator most likely also had a business-class ticket, although he might have penetrated the business-class cabin if the flight attendants were chatting among themselves, as was often the case.
Jon explained his thinking to the others. Then he asked, “During the flight, did either of you notice anyone opening or trying to open your particular overhead bin?”
The two Greeks looked at each other; both shook their heads.
“Then, if it did happen on the flight, it would have to have taken place while you were both sleeping.”
“But even if they were, Jon,” Shannon interposed, “what about the others in their delegation? Wouldn’t they have noticed someone disturbing their overhead bins? Were the others near you on the flight, Brother Gregorios?”
“Yes, Madame Weber. We were all on the left side of the cabin.”
“And you had daylight throughout your flight?”
“Yes, we ‘chased the sun,’ as we say it in Greek, all the way across the Atlantic.”
“Good point, Shannon,” Jon said. “So the only other times the case was out of your hands had to be when you left the patriarchate and it was put into the trunk of your limo and when it went through security at the departure in Istanbul. Please recall again everything that happened there-I mean, every last detail.”
The patriarch took a deep breath. “We arrive at the airport. We check in at the counter. All the time I am watching the black case, and so is Brother Gregorios. We take our boarding passes and carry-ons to the security line. We start to go through the line. But then they direct us to a special security line-probably to make it easier for us. We put our things in those gray plastic boxes and push them along the moving track. Here I watch the black case very carefully. The belt starts to move. It stops; it reverses. It starts again, then stops again and reverses several times. It often happens this way at airports.”
“It happens all the time,” Shannon commented.
“Yes. Then, as our case again goes through the machine, the scanner person looks at his screen and calls over a supervisor. They study the screen for a while. I worry that they may want to open the black case and give us problems with the codex. But this does not happen. Finally the belt moves on; we collect our things and walk to the gate.”