The sleep had cleared instantly that night when Max offered her nearly ten times her normal fee to drop everything and fly to Zurich.

“I have heard that you are the best art historian and broker in the world,” Max had said. “And honest… honest. I want my collection handled honestly… morally.” There had been a long silence. Zoe wondered if the man had suffered a stroke and died, but then he broke into a spasm of coughing. Finally, “I have read all of your published works,” be said, “even the books… and”—he coughed again, briefly—”and all of the articles about you.… I believe that you will understand. It is vital to understand.”

As if Max had sensed her continuing reluctance, he had sealed her commitment that night by mentioning that there was a substantial consulting fee in it for her husband as well, since his collection included items that needed the attention of a scholar versed in the ways of religious manuscripts and reliquaries—things Max’s research would have told him were not her strong points. As a result, she often worked with her husband, Seth Ridgeway, who was a professor of philosophy/comparative religion at UCLA. He specialized in a particularly fertile period of religious development from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 700.

A long, low tone sounded from the alarm system and interrupted her reverie. Zoe watched as the bodyguard opened the door. Max seemed energized by the opening and with a great effort sat nearly upright in the wheelchair. “After you, my dear,” he said chivalrously. Zoe looked at the bodyguard who beckoned her forward with a slight bow and a nod of his head.

Instants later, Zoe stepped through the door and looked about. The room had a ceiling that had to be forty feet high, walls painted off-white in order to focus on the room’s objects. Like almost every room she had seen in the vast mansion, this one was almost a cross between a gallery and a warehouse—too filled with art to have a clear focus. Then, as Zoe began to look closely at the art around her, her skin came alive with great electrical coils of astonishment. Here was a legendary Vermeer that had been written about in the artist’s letters but never seen.

Music like the most exquisite orchestral strings filled her heart and demolished the last wisps of the her scholarly objectivity. Instead she opened her soul to the beauty of the art and the music it created in her.

She approached the Vermeer and let its remarkable shadows speak to her. The incredible depth and perspective invited her to step bodily into the scene. Zoe tore her eyes away from the Vermeer and found herself looking at a case containing a Leonardo codex that, as far as she could tell, was not among any previously described or known. Zoe turned slowly, her eyes finding in rapid succession a previously unknown van Gogh, a Picasso thought to have been destroyed, a Gutenberg Bible, and the Torah from King Solomon’s Temple.