Intervention (6 page)

Sana straightened back up. “Was this letter part of the codex or merely stuck into the book as an afterthought?”

“It certainly wasn’t an afterthought,” Shawn said cryptically. “It was done very deliberately, but not for the reason you might imagine. Remember how I described the codex’s cover? Along with other scraps of papyrus, this letter was sandwiched in behind the leather to make it what we would think of as a hardcover book. I’d heard that had been done with other volumes of this particular treasure trove of codices.”

“You found more than one?”

“No, I came across only this one codex. But I recognized it instantly. Here, sit down.

I’ve got some explaining to do, especially since we’re not going home tomorrow as planned.”

“What are you talking about?” Sana demanded. “I’ve got to get back to rescue several experiments.”

“Your experiments are going to have to wait, at least for a day, or maybe two days at most.” Shawn placed his hand on Sana’s shoulder in an attempt to ease her down onto the couch.

“You can wait if you want, but I’m going back,” she said, making a point of pushing his hand off her shoulder. She wasn’t going to allow herself to be bullied.

For a moment wife and husband glowered at each other. Then both relented without a harsh word.

“You’ve changed,” Shawn commented at length. He acted surprised rather than angry at her unexpectedly rebellious announcement.

“I think it’s safe to say you’ve changed as well,” Sana responded. She made a distinct effort to keep any suggestion of irritation out of her voice. She didn’t want to get into a long, drawn-out emotional discussion at the moment. Besides, he was right. She had changed—not markedly, but in a very real way, a response to his changing.

“I don’t think you understand,” Shawn said. “This letter may very well lead me to the apotheosis of my career. To take advantage of it, I’m going to need your help for a day—

two, tops. I have to see if the author, Saturninus, was telling the truth. I cannot imagine why he would have lied, but I have to be sure. To do that, we’re going to be flying to Rome early tomorrow morning.”

“Do you need my help literally or figuratively?” Sana questioned. To her it made a difference.

“Literally!”

Sana took a breath and eyed her husband. He seemed sincere, which changed things in her mind. He’d never actually asked for her help before. “All right,” she said. She sat down. “I’m not yet agreeing, but let’s hear your explanation.”

With rekindled enthusiasm, Shawn grabbed the desk chair and planted it in front of Sana. Sitting down, he leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “Have you ever heard of the Gnostic Gospels found here in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945?”

Sana shook her head.

“How about the book
The Gnostic Gospels
by Elaine Pagels?”

Sana shook her head again with a touch of irritation. Shawn was always asking her if she read this treatise or that one, and invariably she’d have to say no. As a molecular biologist, she’d not had a lot of time to take many liberal-arts courses, and often felt inferior as a result.

“I’m surprised,” Shawn said. “Elaine Pagels was a bestseller, a real commercial hit that put Gnosticism on the map.”

“When was it published?”

“I don’t know, around 1979, I guess.”

“Shawn, I was born in 1980. Give me a break!”

“Right! Sorry! I keep forgetting. Anyhow, her book was about the significance of the Nag Hammadi find, which were thirteen codices, including this one I’ve come across today. This book was originally part of that find that in one fell swoop doubled the extant books about early Gnostic thought. In many ways the find was in the same league as the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Palestine two years later.”

“I’ve heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

“Well there are people who believe the Nag Hammadi texts are equivalently important for understanding religious thought around the time of Christ.”

“So, this book you found today is one of those codices found in 1945.”

“Correct. It’s known, appropriately enough, as the Thirteenth Codex.”

“Where are the others?”

“They’re here in Cairo at the Coptic Museum. Most had been confiscated by the Egyptian government after a few had been sold. Those that had been sold eventually made their way back here where they belong.”

“How did number thirteen get separated from the others?”

“Before I answer that, let me give you a thumbnail sketch of the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. It’s fascinating. Two young fellahin boys named Khalifah and Muhammed Ali were out at the edge of the desert near modern-day Nag Hammadi, supposedly looking for a kind of fertilizing soil known as
sabakh.
Where they were looking was at the base of a cliff called Jabal al-Tarif, which, by the way, is honeycombed with caves, both natural and ancient man-made. Their method was to blindly poke deep into the sand with their mattocks. I don’t know how that helps, but to their surprise on the day of the discovery, instead of coming across the
sabakh
they were looking for, one of them heard a suspicious hollow clunk when he pounded his mattock into the sand. He cleared away the sand and came across a sealed earthenware jar about three to four feet in height. Hoping to find some ancient Egyptian antiquities, they found the codices instead.”

“Did they have any idea of the value of what they’d found?”

“Not a clue. They carried the cache home but dumped it next to the family’s cooking oven, where the mother used some of the papyri pages to start the family’s cooking fires.”

“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)

G
oddamn 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.”

“What now?”

“More photos,” Jack said, reaching for the digital camera. “Then we’re going to remove both arteries and check the interiors.”

Ten minutes later Jack had the vessels on the cutting board with the brain. They looked like two small headless red snakes who’d swallowed something blue. The discoloration was more apparent than when the arteries had been in situ.

“Here goes nothing,” Jack said. Steadying each blood vessel between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he used his right to make a careful incision through one side of each artery’s wall. He then opened both of them lengthwise, spreading them out on the cutting board inside out.

“Would you look at that?” he said, still holding the scalpel.