Free The Old Boys by Charles McCarry Page B

call A.D. 36—names, places, mysterious events,” Hawk said. “Which of the disciples was the handler, the lot. What Roman purposes were.”
    Heydrich was overjoyed with the scroll. He was not, however, a man to live long without suspicions. He became convinced that the Amphora Scroll was a hoax, that the Jews who had translated it were playing a joke on him, making a fool of him with the Jesusstory. It was just too good to be true. Hawk offered to find Aryan scholars who could decipher and translate the scroll, but Heydrich decided that Lori would do it. Hawk was detailed to arrest her husband and son and then to kidnap Lori as she rode in the park. His men delivered Hubbard and Paul to Gestapo headquarters for questioning and Lori to a Gestapo safe house in a wooded section of Berlin. There Heydrich asked her to do him the great favor of translating something from ancient Greek.
    “According to Heydrich, she read and translated the language of Homer as fluently as English or French,” Hawk said. “And so the Baronesse became, with Heydrich and me, the third person on earth still living to know that the Amphora Scroll existed, and the only one of the three who had seen with her own eyes exactly what it said.”
    Her translation of a Greek typescript of the scroll, completed at amazing speed, confirmed the accuracy of the scholars’ version, which she had not seen.
    “After this, more than ever, Heydrich was entranced by this woman,” Hawk said. “And when he was named Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941, she went along with him. As did the Amphora Scroll, sealed now in a vacuum inside a glass tube. Heydrich kept it in a special cradle on his desk in his official residence in Prague. I think it amused him to hide the rarest treasure of the last two thousand years in plain sight.”
    I asked Hawk for a photograph of the entire Amphora Scroll. He professed not to have one. But he did let me see some of his many photographs of Lori in the company of her kidnapper. And he presented me with a copy of the picture of Lori’s hand holding the manuscript, along with a shot of Heydrich and Lori in Berlin, heads close together, reading the Amphora Scroll with what appears to be a painting by Frans Hals hanging on the wall in the background.
    The photograph was staged as if Hals had controlled the models, arranged for the costumes, imagined the props. But of course it was Heydrich, an artist in his own way, who had done all that.

1

    During my brief absence spring had turned to summer in Washington. A fierce white sun burned over the city as my flight from Miami, where I had changed planes, came in for a landing at Reagan National Airport. Granted, I was in a classical frame of mind after all that talk about the Amphora Scroll, but from the air the shimmering Greco-Roman structures on the Mall looked more than ever like some misplaced imperial outpost from the time of the Caesars. Except for Charley Hornblower, our man in Washington, the Old Boys had scattered to their various operational destinations and I had hoped to slip in and out of town unnoticed. However, when I arrived home I found a long string of telephone messages from Stephanie. Each one was a bit higher on the treble scale than the one before, so I believed that she meant it when she said that she had something important to discuss with me. My bones ached. The tambaqui I had eaten the night before had had a bad effect on my stomach and so had Simon Hawk. I took a hot shower and had a large cup of espresso coffee before deciding not to call her back.
    As I was drinking my second cup of coffee I heard the mail slot in the front door open and close. Had someone slipped a letter bomb through the slot? Had Stephanie entrapped me at last? ThenI heard heavy footsteps in the yard. Charley Hornblower’s long foxy face—Ben Franklin eyeglasses, lantern jaw, claret nose—appeared in my kitchen window. When he saw me through the glass, he smiled. It was the