“I’m not exaggerating,” Shawn said, his eyes shining.

“Okay,” Sana said. “I think you’d better try to read the whole letter to me. I don’t want to miss anything. You mentioned Jesus of Nazareth. Does the letter involve him?”

“It does, but indirectly,” Shawn said. He cleared his throat.

As her husband started to read, Sana shifted her eyes out the hotel window. The sun reflected in a blaze of light off the Nile’s surface in the foreground; on the horizon loomed the famed Pyramids of Giza, with the Great Pyramid towering over the others. If the ancient letter turned out to be half as important as Shawn was implying, she couldn’t have wished for a better place to hear a translation.

5

8:41 A.M., MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
(3:41 P.M., CAIRO, EGYPT)

Goddamn it, Vinnie,” Jack Stapleton growled. Jack was along the left side of the body of Keara Abelard. He’d been bent over the woman’s back for more than twenty minutes, carefully biting off pieces of the cervical transverse processes with his ron geurs, trying to expose the two vertical arteries as they coursed up through the neck. The arteries pierced each vertebra laterally before making an S-curve around the atlas, or first cervical vertebra.

“Sorry,” Vinnie said, but without sufficient remorse.

“Can’t you see what the hell I’m trying to do?”

“Yeah, I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to expose both vertebral arteries.”

Keara’s neck was pressed down on a wooden block, her face pointing down at the floor, on the table, her brainless calvarium pointing at the autopsy room’s door. The brain sat alone on a cutting board at the foot of the table.

Vinnie stood at the end of the table with his hands on either side of Keara’s head, trying to stabilize it as Jack nipped off pieces of bone. It was a slow process. The idea was to expose the arteries without damaging them. Jack recorded his progress with a series of digital photos.

“If you can’t hold the head still, I’m going to have to find someone who can. I don’t want to make this my life’s work.”

“All right already,” Vinnie complained. “I got the message. For a second there I was thinking about the Giants and the worry they’re not even making the Super Bowl much less winning it.”

Jack closed his eyes and silently counted to ten. He knew he was being tough on Vinnie. Holding on to a body part while Jack nibbled away was a grunt’s job, and he would have hated to do it himself. Still, the case had to get done. The problem was, his emotional instability was causing him to be less patient than usual.

“Just try to focus a little more,” Jack said, making a conscious effort to calm his voice. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Got it, boss,” Vinnie said, tightening his grip on the woman’s head.

The rest of the autopsy room was a beehive of activity with all eight tables in use, but Jack was oblivious to it all. He now had a preliminary diagnosis as to the cause of Keara’s death, and his attention was focused. The arteriogram showed an almost complete blockage of both vertebral arteries, the source of much of the brain’s blood supply. The blockage appeared to have occurred over a relatively short period of time. But why? Was it a natural occurrence, as in some sort of emboli, or accidental, like an injury? The fact that it was so symmetrical was the most difficult to explain. It was a unique case for Jack, and he had eased up on himself for not thinking of doing a vertebral arteriogram before removing the brain. It had been a mistake but ultimately not detrimental.