Read Intervention for Free Online Page B

hotel room’s door?” she questioned in a mildly sarcastic tone.
    Shawn chuckled, recognizing the unreasonableness of what he’d said. “I suppose that does sound a bit unrealistic. At least you didn’t have to come barging in here like there was a fire, scaring me out of my wits. I was concentrating.”
    “Why aren’t you at the pool?” Sana repeated. The door slammed on its own behind her.
    “It’s our last day, if you haven’t forgotten.”
    “I haven’t forgotten,” Shawn said, a gleam coming into his eye. “I’ve been busy.”
    “So I see,” Sana said, eyeing the gloves and the magnifying glass. She went back to unbuttoning her blouse and headed into the bathroom. Shawn came to the threshold.
    “I just made what I thought was my biggest archaeological find in that antiquities shop I told you about. The one where I got the prehistoric Egyptian pot.”
    “Excuse me,” Sana said, easing Shawn back from the threshold so she could push the door almost closed. She didn’t like to change in front of anyone, even Shawn, especially since their level of intimacy had faded of late. “I remember,” she called out. “Does it have something to do with your white gloves and the magnifying glass?”
    “It certainly does,” Shawn said to the door. “The concierge helped me out with the gloves and the magnifying glass. Talk about your full-service hotel!”
    “Are you going to tell me about your find, or do I have to guess?” Sana asked, now interested. When it came to his profession, Shawn didn’t exaggerate. For sure, he’d made a number of important finds digging in multiple locations throughout the Near East earlier in his career. That was before becoming a high-ranking curator whose responsibilities had devolved to be more supervisory and fund-raising than fieldwork.
    “Come out, and I’ll show you.”
    “Is it not as good as you hoped? I noticed you used the past tense.”
    “At first I was disappointed, but now I think it is even a hundred times better than my initial impression.”
    “Really?” Sana questioned. With her bathing-suit bottoms halfway up her thighs, she stopped. Now her curiosity had truly been piqued. What could Shawn possibly have found to warrant such a description?
    “Are you coming out? I’m dying to show you this.”
    Sana wiggled her bottom into the suit and adjusted the crotch, then checked herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She was reasonably happy with what she saw. A devoted runner, she had a slim, athletic figure and short, dirty-blond but healthy hair. Gathering up her clothes, she opened the door. Depositing the clothes carefully on the bed, she walked to the desk.
    “Here. Put these on,” he said, handing her a second pair of freshly laundered white gloves. “I got them especially for you.”
    “What is it, a book?” Sana asked, once she got her hands into the gloves. She could see an ancient-looking leather-bound volume sitting on the corner of the desk.
    “It’s called a codex,” Shawn said. “It’s an example of the first books that superseded the scroll, since you can get more in it and access various portions of the text far easier.
    What makes it different from a real book, like the Gutenberg Bible, is that it was done completely by hand. Handle it carefully! It’s more than fifteen hundred years old. It had been preserved for more than a millen nium and a half by being sealed in a jar buried in the sand.”
    “My word,” Sana said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hold something quite so old for fear it might disintegrate in her hands.
    “Open it!” he urged.
    Gingerly, Sana folded back the cover. It was stiff, and the binding audibly complained.
    “What’s the cover made of?”
    “It’s kind of a leather sandwich stiffened with layers of papyrus.”
    “What are the pages made out of?”
    “The pages are all papyrus.”
    “And the language?”
    “It’s called Coptic, which is kind of a written version