Zoe glanced at her watch.

“Something wrong?” Seth asked.

“Max.” She frowned. “He said there was something he was going to have a courier deliver here. I thought it would be here by now.”

“Something?”

“I said he’s an odd bird.” Zoe shrugged, then shook her head as she sat down next to him. She looked first at the manuscript pile and then back to Seth. “So what’s there to understand in all that Greek, professor?”

“First of all, it’s a passion—”

“Another nifty torture tale, right? Maiming martyrs for fun and profit.”

Seth nodded. “First part, this”—he tapped the pages with his index finger—”is the narrative. The second part—the stuff we don’t have yet—is supposed to be the actual word-for-word transcription of the trial.”

“I’m amazed every time I think about how much paperwork the Romans stashed away in their archives.”

“They practically invented bureaucratic paperwork,” Seth agreed.

“So what’s so special about this one?” Zoe asked. “I thought passions were usually embellished by the good church fathers beyond any connection with reality—you know, good propaganda for the faithful.”

“Usually are.” He raised his eyebrows and lifted his face to the ceiling for a moment Then: “The first thing to understand is that if this document is authentic, this will turn out to be one of the many lost writings of Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius. It’s the story of a young woman named Sophia and, according to what’s written here, she lived in a tiny, remote mountain village near the Anatolian city of Smyrna. The place is called Izmir today—in Turkey—but back then it was right in the hotbed of the early Christian church, not a long way from some better known New Testament cities such as Ephesus and Philadelphia—”

“I know that, sweetheart,” she said warmly. “I’m not your student anymore.”

“Sorry.” He gave her one of the quick lopsided smiles that had captivated her so thoroughly the first day she had seen him at the podium. It was a smile that had launched her on a campaign of seduction, lust, and love that led her from being student to lover and, finally, wife.

“Okay. Anyway, Sophia’s little village near Smyrna was a pastoral, herding-type settlement, more like a medium-term resting place for nomads, and from what I can tell here, it probably never had more than two or three hundred people, tops. There was little commerce with the outside world—no temple, no church, synagogue, pagan altar—nothing. That in itself is unusual because at the time this was written—A.D. 325, just a few months after the Nicean Conference—religion was the hot topic everywhere. People talked religion like sports scores or Beltway scandals today. Back then there were scores of different sects and variations of Christianity, and all of them were scouring the earth for converts in between bare-knuckle bouts over who was the”—he used his index and middle fingers to form quotation marks—“One True Church.”

“Gee, they sure started early.” Zoe frowned. “Worship our true god of love and kindness or we’ll rip your babies apart.” She shook her head disdainfully and settled herself into the far end of the sofa, facing him.