Free The Old Boys by Charles McCarry Page A

the romance of the thing. Imagine, from his point of view, the prospect of owning an authentic dispatch from a secret policeman who had worked for Caligula.”
    Imagine it, indeed. The harmonies must have been deafening.In short order Hawk found himself on a small motor yacht off the sunny coast of Crete, commanding a dozen young troopers who could not believe their luck.
    “My Jew had a pretty shrewd idea of where wrecks might be found,” said Hawk, “and by a mixture of his scholarship and Heydrich’s incredible luck, we found one in a matter of weeks. It had been a galley. Human bones had long since been dissolved by the salt, but the ship’s keel and ribs were still intact. Coins bearing the head of Augustus and all sorts of corroded bronze objects were scattered about. And of course, masses of perfectly preserved amphorae.”
    The Roman amphora, smaller than the Greek one on which it was modeled, was an object whose combination of beauty and utility moved Hawk’s soul. He had seen them in museums, of course, but it was quite another matter to descend three or four fathoms into the murk and behold by the bent light of the sun these marvels of ancient handicraft, so shapely, so perfectly symmetrical. They lay in profusion on the bed of the sea where they had rested since the time of Christ. The divers hauled the amphorae to the surface one by one. Except for a few empty or broken ones, they were still watertight and still held precisely 25.5 liters of whatever the Romans had put into them before setting sail. Under Hawk’s personal supervision the beautiful jugs were carefully opened. Their contents included thick, sour wine that was sometimes still drinkable, water, grain and other foodstuffs, all duly numbered.
    Number eighty-seven was filled with wheat (“so fragrant still that it made me sneeze,” said Hawk).
    And buried in the wheat was the Amphora Scroll.
    “The scroll was sealed in thick red wax,” said Hawk. “My heart has never before or since beaten so fast as when I loosened the seal with my razor.”
    Unrolled, the scroll was almost a meter in length. It was written in Greek, filled from edge to edge with the dense handwriting of a Roman official who signed himself Septimus Arcanus. AlthoughHawk had learned the rudiments of ancient Greek at Worksop College and improved his knowledge of the language at Marburg, he was unable to puzzle out the text. Once he got used to the handwriting, he realized that the manuscript was written in cipher. Decoding it was beyond his abilities, so at this point he had no inkling that he held in his hands a world-shaking document that was beyond price. The fact that it was in cipher suggested that it was a secret communication, and that alone made it an even greater object of fascination than a decipherable manuscript would have been.
    He was terrified that exposure to air and sunshine would fade the ink or cause the parchment to disintegrate. After all, it had been made from the skin of a kid that had been slaughtered almost exactly nineteen hundred years before.
    Heydrich promoted Hawk to
Haupsturmführer,
the SS rank equivalent to captain, decorated him, and presented him with an engraved pistol. Heydrich was tremendously excited by the fact that the manuscript was in Greek and in code. He wanted to know without delay what it said.
    The Jewish scholar whose brilliant theory had just been vindicated by his worst enemies was brought upstairs once again.
    “It turned out that he had a good knowledge of ancient ciphers, and in no time at all he cracked the code,” said Hawk. “It was a very simple one, based on a key that was easily deduced. Naturally he was also perfectly fluent in ancient Greek, so we soon had a complete translation. When I read it, I did not believe it.”
    Hawk had another scholar, even more eminent than the first man, arrested. His decipherment and translation matched the first man’s almost exactly.
    “It was all there, dated in the year we