“Odin! Who’s your favorite brother? Don’t answer right away, take your time and think about it. As long as the answer is Canaan, you can say anything you want,” Canaan Titan laughed into the phone over the sound of the Aegean Sea crashing into the rocks below his balcony.

“Well, when you put it that way… Why don’t you and Atlas arm wrestle for it?” Odin replied from his condo overlooking the Las Vegas Strip.

“Two words. Gutenberg. Bible. Two more words. First. Folio,” Canaan replied, with a tone of finality.

Odin, who’d been leaning on his headboard watching his wife, Clara, sleeping, sat upright and paused before replying, letting Canaan’s answer marinate in his brain for a moment.

“Those words always get my attention. What about them?” Odin whispered.

“Up for sale,” Canaan said.

Odin quietly slipped out of the room, walking into the kitchen. He pulled a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator.

“Impossible,” he responded. “I’d know about them if they were. Why are you pushing my buttons, Canaan? You must want something. Do you need bail money?”

“It’s a private estate auction. High-end. Invite only. In Vienna. Jewelry, art, cars, all sorts of stuff. Including a library filled with rare books. And I’m talking ultra-rare.”

Odin opened his laptop and started typing as he chatted with his brother.

“What estate? And why wouldn’t I know about it? And when you say ‘Gutenberg Bible,’ what do you mean? A few leaves?”

“The way I understand it, it’s complete. In vellum.”

Odin Titan’s spine tingled. “In vel-…are you fucking kidding me? I’m on the next flight to Vienna. Whatever it takes, I want it. It’s mine. Get me in that room,” he commanded. His Googling came up empty. He began querying colleagues in the rare book world, via e-mail, to ask if they’d heard anything about a Gutenberg Bible for sale. “Whose estate did you say it was?”

“I have a last name. Brentford. That’s all I know,” Canaan explained.

“Brentford?” Odin Titan racked his brain. He knew all the major players in the rare book world, or so he thought. A complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, printed in the mid-1450s by the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg, hadn’t come up for sale since 1978. Four decades ago, that copy fetched over two million dollars; the scarcity of the work and the rarity with which it came to market meant that a price tag upwards of forty or fifty million dollars wouldn’t be unreasonable if one came to market today.

Only twenty-one complete, original Gutenberg Bibles were known to exist, and only three of them bound in calfskin, or vellum.

Odin doubted a “secret” complete copy was out there “in the wild,” but if there was even a slim chance that Canaan’s information was accurate, he’d pursue it to the ends of the Earth. A First Folio, the other book Odin’s younger brother mentioned, was a 1623 collection of thirty-six William Shakespeare plays. Odin’s personal library contained two partial First Folios, but he desperately wanted to add a complete copy to his collection. If this mysterious Brentford fellow actually had a Gutenberg Bible, it was completely reasonable to think he might own a First Folio as well.

“Where are you now?” Odin asked his globe-trotting brother. The last he’d heard, Canaan was in Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania.

“Greece,” Canaan replied. “A little island in the Aegean.”

Odin rolled his eyes. Sometimes he wondered if it was Canaan’s goal to never spend two nights in a row in the same country. Then again, after the years his younger brother had spent in a Kazakh prison, Odin supposed he couldn’t blame him for having a bit of wanderlust.

“I’ll meet you in Vienna.” Odin checked the time on his watch and did a quick mental calculation as to how soon he could have one of the Titan jets ready and how long it would take to get to Vienna. “Day after tomorrow, unless the sale will be sooner?”

Canaan began to respond, but the phone had been pulled away from Odin’s ear.

“You’ll be nowhere but right here with me,” Clara Titan, Odin’s wife, reminded her husband. She’d heard him talking in the kitchen and had tiptoed up behind him. “It could be any day now. I’m not having you off chasing a book.”

“It’s not a book,” Odin insisted, placing his hand over the phone. “It might be a Gutenberg Bible!”

“Well, these,” Clara said, cupping her hands around her belly, swollen with Titan twins, “Are definitively, one hundred percent, your babies. So, I don’t care if it’s an autographed copy of the Bible signed by Jesus himself, you’re going to be right here with me for the delivery. My due date is less than a week away. Had you forgotten?”

Odin sighed, then placed his hand on Clara’s face. “No. I hadn’t forgotten. I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t possibly have forgotten. He’d never seen anything as beautiful as the way Clara had been glowing since early on in her pregnancy. Her body was full and lush, and their sex had never been more intense and amazing.

He needed no reminder that his wife was pregnant.

He started to speak, but reconsidered. He nodded in resignation. “Canaan, still there?”

“Sure am. Sounds like domestic bliss over there,” he joked.

“Shut up, Canaan. Anyway, Clara is due any day now. I can’t be away. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to acquire those books. You’re my proxy. We’ll talk more soon. Get whatever details you can and figure out how to get yourself on the guest list for the auction. I’m going to have Raven dig up what she can on Mr. Brentford and I’ll send one of my book guys to meet you there to authenticate whatever it is they have.”

“The sale is a week from yesterday,” Canaan answered. “I’ll work on getting in. But there will be some heavy hitters involved. I’m talking the heaviest kind. It might take more than the highest bid to bring home the Gutenberg.”

Odin knew that such a rare and priceless item would bring politicos and even royals out of the woodwork. Beyond money, influence could be up for grabs. Having a president or a prince in one’s pocket might be more than worth the price of a fifteenth century holy grail of the publishing world.

“Raven can do her thing, and I’ll have Duncan fly over there to provide you whatever support you need. He’ll get you all set up in Vienna,” Odin said.

Duncan Gilchrist was one of Odin’s closest advisors and friends, part of the Titan Holdings legal team. With a Master’s in business from Wharton and a law degree from Stanford, he was one of the few people Odin Titan considered an intellectual equal, and he knew Duncan would protect his interests in Vienna. He just needed Canaan to get him a proverbial seat at the table.

“You mean he’ll be my babysitter,” Canaan countered.

“He’ll have a leash in his hand, but the collar will be around my wallet more than your neck,” Odin joked. “And Raven will watch your back. She won’t be happy about missing Clara giving birth, but my wife scares me more than she does.”