Once the automatic sequencer was doing its job, Sana had left the lab and had traveled up to Columbia to make sure all her experiments were being attended to appropriately. She’d been glad to find that everything was now in order. Every one of her four graduate students were now working responsibly, to make up for being lax when Sana had attended the Egyptian conference.

As Sana climbed from the taxi after returning from her lab at the medical school campus, she briefly thought of Luke. She’d thought of him the moment she’d awakened but had decided not to make any snap decisions about the previous evening’s incident, like telling Shawn about it. She knew that if she did tell him the man-boy would be out on his ear, and Shawn would be on the phone, complaining to the archbishop that he’d made a poor choice for an emissary. Since that would put them back to square one with the archbishop’s threats of closing them down, Sana wanted to let the episode percolate in her mind for a while for three main reasons. The first was because, in retrospect, she blamed herself to an extent. Enjoying his company as much as she did, and recognizing her own needs, she’d admitted she’d been titillated herself to some mild degree. The second reason was that although he had essentially attacked her, to her it was ninety percent a defensive act. The final reason was that she was confident he would apologize after he’d given the episode some thought, even though he’d failed to appear that morning to do so.

With the taxi paid, Sana entered the building, flashed her ID to security, who now knew her, and rode up in the elevator. In the outer part of the lab she found Jack working with Shawn on the translation of the first scroll. The unrolling had been completed that morning, which thrilled Shawn. As the translation progressed Shawn was certain that Simon was about to rehabilitate himself to a degree as a theologian in his own right. Shawn had assured the others that Simon was definitely either the first or among the first Christian Gnostics, combining the story of Jesus of Nazareth with basic Gnostic ideas, such as Jesus’ true role as a teacher of enlightenment more than a redeemer of sin.

“Did you guys come across anything particularly interesting while I’ve been away?” Sana asked as she hung up her outdoor coat in one of the coat lockers.

“We’re about to start on scroll two,” Jack answered. “We’re hoping in that one or the third one to have a mention about the bones.”

“Good luck,” Sana offered. “I’m going to head into the lab and see what I’ve got with the mitochondrial DNA. We might have some information in the next few minutes.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Shawn said, preoccupied with what he was doing.