Taking a deep breath, James answered softly.

“Is that you, James?” Jack asked.

“It is I,” James said in a depressed tone. He could hear laughter in the background and excited conversation, erasing any last hope in his mind about what he was about to learn.

“I’m not sure you want to hear this,” Jack said. “But—”

James could tell that Jack had been cut off by the ecstatic Shawn, who was apparently fighting with Jack for the phone. James could clearly hear Shawn say, “Is that His Eminent Excellency, hoping soon to be wearer of the Fisherman’s Ring? Let me talk to that pudgy bum!”

James cringed and considered hanging up, but his curiosity prevented him.

“Hey, brother!” Shawn said blithely, coming on the line. “We hit gold!”

“Oh?” James questioned with feigned disinterest. “What did you find?”

“Not one scroll but three, and the biggest says in Greek on the outside: GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SIMON. We have the gospel of Simon Magus. Isn’t that a gas?”

“Was that all that was in the ossuary?” James asked, with a glimmer of hope appearing on the distant horizon.

“No, that was not all, but I’ll give you back to Jack for that. Talk to you soon.”

A moment later Jack came back on the line. “He is one happy archaeologist,” Jack explained. “I’m certain he doesn’t mean to be disrespectful if you heard what he’d said before he got the phone away from me.”

“Just tell me, were there bones in the ossuary?” James asked. At the moment, he was uninterested in manners.

“There were,” Jack admitted. “To me, it looks like a complete skeleton, including a skull that’s in reasonably good shape. It could be more than one skeleton, but there’s only one skull.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” James murmured, more to himself than to Jack. “Can you tell if the remains are human?”

“That would be my guess.”

“How about the sex?”

“That’s harder to say. The pelvis is in pieces, which is the way I’d try to tell. But as soon as I saw the bones when we got the top off the ossuary, I called Alex Jaszek, the head of the OCME department of anthropology, told him what we were doing in a very general way, and asked him if he’d like to come over. He’s on his way.”

“You didn’t mention anything about the Virgin Mary, did you?”

“Of course not. I just said we opened a first-century ossuary.”