reasonable clarity.
“And exactly what is it that you’re looking for?” the man asked.
“A valuable codex… that’s an ancient book of manuscript pages sewn together.”
“Oh. Sorry. That’d be impossible to retrieve, Professor, because Harvard tries to show the world how to recycle-green’s their favorite color, not crimson-but you know that. So your book is probably being recycled, even as we speak.”
A stab of despair hit Jon as he handed the phone back to the officer. Both his hands turned into fists, and if Osman al-Ghazali had been within range, he personally would have throttled the traitor for manuscript murder. “It’s destroyed,” he told the women. “This precious, precious treasure is now being recycled, if you can believe it! Into what? Maybe toilet paper…”
Obviously in despair, Shannon and Marylou appeared to search for appropriate words but found none.
The phone rang. It was the dispatcher again, and he wanted to talk to Jon.
“I had it wrong, Professor,” he said. “Turns out that the recycling plant is shut down for repairs, so as of a couple days ago, they’re trucking all waste to the North Andover landfill so that it doesn’t pile up.”
“That’s wonderful news!” Jon said.
“Well, I’m not sure why… I really hate to tell you this, but our chances of actually finding that thing in the landfill are next to impossible. A needle in a haystack would be easier.”
“Please, please,” Jon said, “I really beg of you. You must try to save one of the most important documents in the history of Western civilization.”
“We’ll do our best, Professor, but I’m afraid… Well, we’ll really try.”
They wanted to keep Jon at Mass General that night, but he would have none of it. His wits had now returned and fury was burning through his brain, yet he was still rational enough to let Shannon take the wheel on the drive back to Weston.
Early the next morning, Waste Management phoned again. “It was truck number 68, Professor Weber, that picked up the waste from Harvard Yard about noon yesterday. Driver was Jim Peabody-a good reliable fellow from Bar Harbor, Maine. That’s pronounced ‘Bah Habah’ up there!”
Ordinarily, Jon would have told him to skip such peripheral details, but now he savored every syllable.
“Anyway, Jim dumped his waste at the landfill in North Andover-oh, it’s about twenty miles from Harvard Square-and I’ll tell you what we’ve done. We’ve cordoned off the area in the landfill where our trucks discharged yesterday, and we’re dumping elsewhere while we try to find that big book you told us about.”
“Thank you. Thank you ever so much,” Jon said.
“Again, though, I hate to tell you, it’s going to be a downright miracle if we find it. And even if we do, three thousand pounds of pressure probably crushed that Kotex thing…”
“That’s ‘codex,’” Jon advised.
“Fine. Codex. But it was probably crushed into pulp.”
Jon winced. The statement was true enough. “Just try, please, try . I’ll be driving out to the landfill to help you look.”
“Well, I don’t think… Hold it, on the other hand, it’d be helpful to know exactly what we’re looking for.”
“I’ll be there at eleven, with photographs of the codex.”
For the next two hours, he and Shannon called the secretaries of all departments with offices at or near Harvard Yard with a question that must have seemed quite ridiculous: “What sort of waste did your department discard yesterday?” Of course, there was a quick follow-up to explain the context of that inane query. Clearly grasping at straws, Jon was trying to see if some marker might not be found within all the tons of waste.
But there seemed to be nothing at all unusual. Most of the waste mentioned consisted of cardboard mailers for books sent to professors by publishers in hopes of adoption, interdepartmental communications, intradepartmental memos, book catalogs, advertisements, and the like-nothing with real value as a marker.
One slight glimmer of hope came from the economics department. The secretary there reported that they had discarded about three years’ worth of unclaimed examination blue books the previous day. But could they serve as a marker? Doubtful.
By late morning, Jon, Shannon, and Marylou had raced up Highway 193 to the North Andover landfill, where they were obliged to put on yellow hard hats. Jon passed out photographs of the codex to the dozen or so in the search party that Waste Management was kind enough to supply, all armed with picks to try to pry apart the great, caked slabs of waste. With enormous good fortune, the huge bulldozer that further compacted the slabs of waste by traveling back and forth over them had not yet accomplished that task, or the search would have been fruitless even to attempt. The dozer and all Waste Management trucks were discharging at least a hundred yards away from the zone management had marked off. Jim Peabody, the driver of truck number 68, had shown them approximately where he had dumped his load-to the best of his recall-and was now one of the search party.
But it seemed to be a futile effort. Slab after slab was picked apart, only to disgorge everything from orange peels to coffee grounds to flattened tufts of used Kleenex. By midafternoon, despair started setting in. Jon, returning to Plan B, wondered if the world would have to be satisfied with mere copies of the codex. After all, they did have copies of its every word, so that was at least something.
Yet another part of his mind was telling him, It is humanly possible to examine every last piece of garbage in this sector. Yes, it could take weeks. Yes, it would be enormously expensive. But it can be done.
He was ready to draw up a formal request that exactly this be done when he noticed a thin vein of light blue in one of the untouched slabs. Well, the Department of Economics was near his office, so why not let that vein be the blue-book marker he was seeking. Gently he picked into that slab, and it generously fell apart for him. They were blue books indeed. Student names were written on them, of course, and the department listed on each cover was “Econ.”
Another vein of cardboard framed them off, then a vein of Styrofoam packing. Jon pried the packing material apart and found… the codex. Mercifully, it had been wedged between sheets of protective Styrofoam. In worshipful awe, Jon meticulously disengaged it from its whitish shroud and opened it with tender care. Only a few pages had been detached from their sewn binding by the compacting pressure, but they were still there, nestled underneath the ancient leather cover now embedded with flakes of Styrofoam. The thin board inside had been cracked, but with no apparent damage to the pages of vellum. Only the coverless last page of Revelation had been torn and damaged, though not beyond hope of restoration.
Jon knelt down on the heap of garbage in the North Andover landfill and gave thanks to God.
As miraculous as it was to find the codex in the landfill, Jon thought an even greater wonder was the fact that-with a considerable number now in the know-there had been no real leaks to the media about their astonishing manuscript discovery. Now, however, it was time-high time-to tell the world.
The Ecumenical Patriarch and his party flew in from Istanbul for another visit to New York, where he would have the privilege of making the initial public announcement. His venue would be the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan. Several weeks earlier, Jon had sent out invitations to the most significant religious bodies and media outlets across the world “to attend a press conference in New York at which a significant biblical manuscript discovery will be announced.” He intentionally underplayed the language in his letter for purposes of security, although by now he was developing something of a track record for issuing bland invitations that led to extraordinary announcements.
Kevin Sullivan arrived from Rome with seven cardinals in tow, including Augustin Buchbinder, the Vatican secretary of state. Kevin confided to Jon that Pope Benedict XVI would have loved to come himself, but in Christian concern, he did not want to risk upstaging the Ecumenical Patriarch. Nevertheless, he could not contain his joy that the codex had been found again and implored divine blessing on its reception.
Many of the major religious bodies in America and beyond were allowed four representatives each-including Jews and Muslims-but no political leaders were invited, intentionally so. Seats along one side of the cathedral were reserved for the newspaper and magazine media, as well as the radio and television networks. When Anderson Cooper of CNN arrived, he looked at the forest of TV cameras and commented, “Well, they’re all here-even Kol Israel and Al Jazeera-though I haven’t come across Radio Nepal, yet.”
Before arriving at the cathedral, Jon had put in a busy early morning, making good on his you’ll-be-the-first- to-know promises by putting in calls to all the curious crucial experts who had aided them. All now readily understood the reason for his previous silence.
At 10:06 a.m. on announcement day, the dean of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral stood before a
