“I used this photography book of Egyptian monuments to get the letter out of Egypt. I’ll have the letter’s pages conserved, but for now it’s keeping them flat.”

Shawn exposed the first page of the letter.

“It looks like Greek,” Jack said, bending over the text.

“It looks like Greek because it is Greek,” Shawn said with a condescending chuckle.

“I thought it was going to be in Aramaic or Latin,” Jack said.

“This is not what we call Attic, or classical, Greek but Koine Greek, which was the language of the western Mediterranean during imperial Roman times.”

“Can you read it?”

“Of course I can read it,” Shawn said, taking mild offense. “But it’s rather poorly written, which makes translating it difficult. It’s easy to tell that Greek was not Saturninus’s first language.”

Jack straightened up. “Amazing! It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“I thought the same thing,” Shawn said, “which is one of the reasons I went into archaeology in the first place. It seemed to me the field was one big treasure hunt. Unfortunately, that’s more romantic than realistic, but finding this letter and then the ossuary has returned me to that romantic notion. Ironically enough, I feel truly blessed.”

“I thought you were agnostic?”

“I still am, for the most part,” Shawn said. “And you?”

“I suppose,” Jack said, thinking of all his personal trials and the damage done to any religiosity he did have. To change the subject, he pointed to the letter and asked Shawn how he’d found it.

“Do you have time for the story?” Shawn asked.

“Absolutely,” Jack said.

Shawn described the whole thing, beginning with an explanation of a codex and continuing on to his visit to Antica Abdul.

“It was pure luck that I stopped in the shop when I did,” Shawn admitted. “Rahul was about to sell it. He has the e-mail addresses of the curators of the world’s famous museums. He’s in regular contact with the who’s who of the field of ancient Near Eastern antiquities.”

“And it’s just a modest hole-in-the-wall antiquities shop in the middle of the Cairo souk?”

“That’s right,” Shawn agreed, “with ninety-nine percent of its inventory being modern fakes. It’s more of a souvenir shop than a true antiquities shop, but it obviously does have some real relics, as I’ve proved on two occasions.”

“So, you’d been there before?”

“I had,” Shawn admitted. He told Jack about his first visit ten years earlier, when he stumbled on the piece of pottery in the window. “You can imagine my shock,” Shawn continued, “when one of my Egyptian department colleagues convinced me it was not a fake. In fact, it is on display downstairs in a prominent location in the Egyptian collection.”

“Did you see the codex in the window like the pot and recognize what it was, or did he just bring it out?”