“What a tragedy.”

“As I said, there are academics who still wince at the thought today. Anyway, friends and neighbors of the boys, including a Muslim imam who was also a history teacher, suspected they were valuable and quickly intervened. The codex that I came across today worked its way down the Nile to reach Cairo via various antiquities dealers. There the five of its missing texts, which also turned out to be the most extraordinary, were removed and smuggled out to the United States. Luckily, by that time Egyptian government agents had been alerted, and they then managed to buy or confiscate the remaining codices, including eight of the pages removed from the thirteenth. The thirteenth itself they didn’t find, and somehow it got lost in someone’s antiquities inventory to await a safe time to fence it. My guess would be that it somehow got forgotten until recently, when my friend Rahul got access to it. My appearance today was clearly serendipitous. He’s in contact with a number of curators around the world. He wouldn’t have had a problem disposing of it.”

“But isn’t it against the law to sell it or even own it?”

“Absolutely!”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Not really. I think of myself as its rescuer. I don’t intend to keep it. My goal from the beginning was to be the person to publish the contained texts and reap the professional benefits. Unfortunately, that is no longer much of an issue.”

“Why not? How many texts are remaining in the codex?”

“Quite a number.”

“What exactly are these Nag Hammadi texts?”

“They are Coptic copies of Greek originals with names like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the Apocalypse of Peter, so forth and so on.”

“What are the names of the texts remaining in the Thirteenth Codex?”

“That’s the problem. All of the remaining texts are additional copies of texts previously found in the first twelve codices. Even in the initial fifty-two texts of those twelve volumes, only forty had been new works. It’s similar in that respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls, where there was some redundancy as well.”

“Which leads us to the letter you found sandwiched in the cover.”

“Exactly,” Shawn said. He got up, gingerly picked up the three pages, and quickly returned to his chair. “Do you want me to read it, which I’ll probably do a shoddy job at, or will you be content for me to paraphrase? One way or the other, it’s going to go down as one of the most historically significant letters in the history of the world.”

Sana let her mouth drop open in mock astonishment. She even rolled her eyes. “Are you developing a new tendency toward hyperbole? Earlier you said your find today was a hundred times better than your previous most important archaeological find, or something like that. Has it now ascended to being one of the most historically significant letters in the history of the world? Aren’t you pushing the envelope here?”