We walked directly to the gravesite. Eidhalt and his man stared at the enormous stone with the large letters FRIEDL on it. “His grave was to be unmarked,” he said. “Leave it to ignorant Americans to look anyway,” he said.
Jedediah walked behind the gravestone and pulled out shovels and a pick ax. He tossed one of the shovels to the other German, looked around, and slammed his shovel into the dirt. He smashed it with his foot, then dug up a foot of dirt and threw it over his shoulder. He stopped, took off his turtleneck, and was wearing just his tanktop T-shirt.
Eidhalt frowned as he saw the tattoos in the dim light.
Jedediah looked at him and didn’t respond. He looked at the other German and said, “Dig.”
Eidhalt said, “Do we have time to do this?”
Things were out of his control and he didn’t like it.
“One hour.” Jedediah responded as he smashed his shovel into the ground again and tossed another pile of dirt. The ground was soft and moist and turned over easily. The other German tried to keep up, but was contributing a quarter of the total effort. Jedediah was like a human steam shovel. His massive muscles were visible in the moonlight. They glistened with sweat as he grunted and tore through the dirt.
A little over an hour later Jedediah and the other German were deep enough that only their heads showed above the hole. The German was exhausted. Jedediah kept digging. His shovel hit something hard. His muffled voice called out from below, “We’re there.”
He scraped his shovel on top of a casket. He said, “Two caskets side by side. The other two must be underneath. Let me get these two first . . . let me see if I can . . . open it from the side. Otherwise I’ll need the pick ax.”
I pointed my flashlight on the caskets as the German climbed out. Jedediah knelt on one casket with his hands in between the two. The latches faced each other and were in the middle of the grave. He tried to pull up the lid of the opposite casket without luck. He looked up at me and squinted in the light. “Hand me the crowbar.”
I handed down the three-foot-long crowbar. He placed it under the edge of the lid and stomped on it with his booted foot. The lid popped open, revealing the deteriorated white satin lining and a skeleton. Pieces of clothing and hair lay around, remnants of what had been there more than ninety years before. Jedediah looked up at us, grabbed the shovel, and slammed it into the skeleton at the base of the skull, severing the spine. He took the burlap bag hanging out of the back of his jeans and tossed the skull into the bag. He slammed the lid closed on that casket, went to the end, then grabbed under the lip and pulled it until it was standing upright. He then leveraged it over until it was standing on top of the other one. I knew he was strong, but to watch him exercise his nearly superhuman strength with such ease and fluidity was remarkable. He handled the casket—which had to weigh two hundred pounds—like it was a bushel of corn. He took his crowbar out, and pried the lid open on the next one underneath the one he’d already opened. I illuminated the inside of the casket with my flashlight while standing on the edge of the gaping hole.
The inside of this casket was much less luxurious. It was wood-lined, probably with spruce, as it showed no evidence of bugs. The skeleton looked a little shorter than the previous one. Probably one of the females, but we weren’t taking any chances. Jedediah lifted the skeleton out of the casket, grabbed the spine with one hand and the skull with the other, and tore it off. He dropped the skeleton back into the casket and put the skull into the sack.
I glanced at Eidhalt who was nearly falling into the hole with fascination and amazement. Jedediah moved the first two caskets back to where they started, handling them like they were empty boxes, and pried open the lid of the third. He didn’t even hesitate. He slammed the shovel into the spine again. The skull flew forward and hit the front of the casket. Jedediah tossed it into the sack with the other two skulls, slammed the lid shut, wrestled the casket up, and opened the fourth. This was the largest skeleton of all. Probably the father, or Friedl himself. He smashed his shovel down, severing the spine of the fourth buried Friedl. The skull came free but the shovel continued through the bottom of the casket. The metal blade was completely out of sight. Jedediah looked surprised. He removed the skull and tossed it into the bag where it clicked audibly into the other three, then pulled his shovel back out. He closed the lid on the casket, and pulled it until it stood upright. He maneuvered around it and moved it to the other end of the hole, and looked down to where his shovel had gone through. We could see what appeared to be metal underneath the dirt. He got on his knees and began moving the dirt aside to reveal what appeared to be an aluminum floor for the grave plot. He could see the hole his shovel had made, but could not see what was on the other side of the aluminum. He looked up at us. We stared at him and the aluminum with puzzlement.
I asked the obvious question, “What is that?”
“Looks like a floor.”
I looked at Eidhalt. “Graves have floors in Germany?” He shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
Jedediah slammed his shovel into the aluminum again and again until he’d outlined a square with one side still attached. He bent the aluminum up and then back so the square was exposed as a hole. He looked up at me. “Toss me your flashlight.”
He caught it and plunged the light into the hole. It wasn’t just a floor. There was empty space on the other side of the aluminum. Jedediah got down on his knees and put the light into the hole. He turned and looked up at us. “It’s an aluminum box the size of the whole grave area. And it’s full of ammo.”
I asked, “Ammo? Bullets?”
“Well ammo boxes, steel ammo boxes.”
“Can you get one?”
He nodded and turned back toward the hole. He lay down on the dirt and reached his arm in and pulled out one of his ammo boxes. It was nine inches tall, twelve inches long, and four inches wide, with a lid that opened lengthwise. He put the small flashlight into his mouth, pointed it at the ammo box, undid the clasp and opened it. He pointed the light into the box and we all saw it at once. Gold. Jedediah let the lid fall back away from the opening, put the flashlight into his left hand and reached into the box. He pulled out what appeared to be a solid gold coin, one of hundreds shining in the intense LED light.
I said, “Is that box full of those coins?”
Jedediah examined the coin, and nodded. “Nazi coins. Gold Nazi coins. Minted in,” he turned the coin over to the other side, “1944.”
I asked, “Are they real?”
Jedediah was apparently wondering the same thing himself. He felt the coin, pressed a fingernail into it, bit it, and said, “I don’t really know what a gold coin feels like. Feels a tiny bit softer than a U.S. silver dollar would, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know why somebody would bury a bunch of fake coins.”
The other German said, “How many boxes are down there?”
Jedediah put his head into the hole and shown the flashlight around again and counted. He came back out of the hole. “Hard to say for sure, but looks like maybe ten.”
“Is there a floor underneath this aluminum that you just cut through?”
Jedediah nodded, “Looks like a box. A big aluminum box. Nothing else in it except these ten ammo cans. My guess is they’re all full of these gold coins. But I can check them.”
I nodded. “Open them all.”
He did. Each box was full of the same gold coins. All apparently minted at the same time, never used for anything and stored away for sixty-five years.
Jedediah stood up, took his shovel and slammed it down through the hole all the way through to the bottom of the aluminum box he had identified. The shovel tip penetrated the bottom layer of aluminum and then stopped. Thom looked up and said, “Looks like that’s it. Nothing but dirt on the other side of this aluminum bottom.”
I said, “Hand the ammo boxes up to us.” Eidhalt’s man asked, “Why store them here?”
Eidhalt said what I was thinking. “Because they knew the name of the first Nazi martyr. They knew somebody would come back some day.”
Jedediah asked from inside the grave, “Why not a bank account?”
I answered. “Bank accounts are traceable, and safe deposit boxes have keys. Whoever had the Blood Flag, had the future of the Nazi movement. And whoever buried this gold wanted to finance it.”
Jedediah was skeptical. “How would they have known about DNA in the forties?”
I said, “How do we know the gold was buried in the forties? We don’t. But whoever had the gold didn’t have the flag. He wanted them to go together. And maybe there is gold buried under every one of the martyrs’ graves that Hitler honored.”
I looked around the graveyard then said to Eidhalt, “Since it was our idea to dig up Mr. Friedl, the gold is ours.”
Eidhalt was instantly angry. “We are the future of the Nazi movement. I am the future. This entire unification movement is mine. The gold stays with the movement.”
I looked at him intensely. “I am the movement in the United States. This is our gold.”
He bristled. “This is on German soil, put here by Germans, for the future rise of the Nazi party. It was put there for me.”
I knew this was the moment. I looked at him and said, “We both have important roles. I say we split it.”
He was surprised by my sudden change of heart.
I said, “Five boxes each. But we need to get it out of here tonight. We can’t leave anything here for somebody else to come and get. Once somebody sees this fresh dirt, they’re going to start digging.”
His face lit up. “I accept. But these are heavy. How do we get them out of here?”
“We’ll drive right into the cemetery and load the boxes into our cars. We’re going to have to move fast. Call me in the morning and let me know where you want us to bring the flag for the testing.”
“I think we should keep the skulls, you have the flag.”
I shook my head vigorously. “No way. We’re not letting these out of our sight.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “How do I know that you haven’t brought a phony flag with you and skeletons that you know will match? No. You keep the flag, we’ll keep the skulls, and we’ll meet at the lab and give them both things at the same time.”
His position was actually smart. “I agree. Call Jedediah tomorrow and tell us where to meet.”
He nodded. “If this is the Blood Flag, and if this matches, you will have invigorated Nazism like nothing else could have. This will be the very thing that we needed to unite all movements around the world.” He looked at me directly, “And I will need you as part of the international movement.”
Jedediah jumped out of the grave. “I’ll get the car.”
As soon as we cleared the curb at the edge of the cemetery, I started driving around Munich randomly. After an hour, when I was sure we weren’t being followed I pulled off the road under some overhanging trees.
We opened the trunk and took out the suitcase holding the Blood Flag. I gently removed it and laid it on the seat, and folded back the false bottom to the suitcase. I took out one of my two handguns that I’d placed there in its holster, and put it on my belt. I handed Jedediah the other one. He checked it and put it inside his waistband in the small of his back. As we drove on, randomly watching the traffic, I started calculating. Each ammo box weighed about fifty pounds. Assuming the gold was relatively pure, with sixteen ounces to a pound, that was eight hundred ounces of gold. At twelve hundred dollars per ounce that made nine hundred and sixty thousand per box. About a million dollars. Five million dollars for our five boxes.
We headed out of Munich. Jedediah asked where we were going. I told him I wanted to end up in a random German town and stay in a nondescript hotel no one would ever think of. When we learned where we had to be later that morning, we’d be there. But no one was going to know where we had come from. I wasn’t even going to tell Alex or the BKA.
Michelle’s voice was echoing in my head. This was where it started getting dangerous. Five million in gold and a flag people would kill for. Danger I’d brought on myself. All to prove a point, or prove something to myself, as she saw it. Unnecessarily.
I stayed on two-lane German roads. After driving through the dark countryside for a half hour, we entered a town. By the time we pulled in it was two in the morning. All I needed was a light. I didn’t mind waking somebody up. It wasn’t a big town, maybe five or six thousand people. It was near the mountains so I hoped it had a tourist base, and at least a couple hotels. We looked for any signs of life and then I saw a hotel sign. It was lighted, although the building was dark. As we pulled up in front, I could see the glimmer of a light in the lobby. I walked in and went to the reception desk, which had a bell on top. I rang it a couple of times and waited. I heard someone stirring in the back. A woman in her sixties came out through the door in her house slippers. The back of her hair was flat. She regarded me with skepticism. She said nothing.
I said, “Do you speak English?”
“A little.”
“I’m here with five other colleagues. We are a geological team studying the mountains. I apologize for arriving so late, but we didn’t finish our work until recently. So if possible, I’d like six rooms. Do you have six rooms available?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Six? I see only you.”
“One is out in the car with me, the other four are on their way.”
“It’s one hundred euro per room. How many nights?”
“One night. Then we’re back on the road.”
“How are you paying?”
“In cash, if that is alright.”
She nodded. She turned and prepared six electronic keys. She put each of them in small envelopes and put the room numbers on them. She stopped. “Do the rooms need to be together?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She nodded and finished preparing the keys. She handed them all to me and I handed her six hundred euros. I then took another one hundred euro bill and put it on top. “That’s for disturbing you. I’m sorry, again, for the late arrival.”
She waved me off. “Check out time is eleven.”
“We’ll be on the road long before then. I’ll leave the keys on the desk. We also have some boxes with valuable equipment that I’ll be taking up to our room; nothing too large but we need to have them with us. I can’t leave them in the car. So, we’ll be making a couple trips in the elevator, but we’ll try not to disturb you.”
I went back out to the car and got Jedediah. I said, “I got six rooms.” He looked at me confused. “That oughta do it.”
“If somebody finds out we’re here they’ll have a one in six chance of finding us. And if we hear a lot of ruckus, we’ll be ready.”
“We’re staying in the same room?” He said as he opened the trunk and surveyed the ammo boxes.
“Absolutely. Now that we’ve shown the flag we’ve set all kinds of forces in motion. Let’s get this stuff up to the room. From now on one of us will always be awake.”
It took us several trips. The room I picked was on a middle floor. It was close to the elevator so we could hear if it opened on our floor.
We closed and bolted the door. We put the ammo cans on the far side of the bed and the suitcase with the Blood Flag on top of the bed. Jedediah glanced at the door. “Think they’ll try anything tonight?”
I sat down and started unlacing my boots. “They don’t know where we are. Alex and Florian will know where they are because of the GPS tracker we put in the skull bag. She’ll call us if she thinks they’re up to something. And while they may want us dead, they’re just now getting their feet under them. They may fear that we have duplicate flags, and maybe the one we showed them was a duplicate. Even if we have the real one, it doesn’t mean we’d show it to them first thing. What they know is that we’ll have to bring the real one to the DNA lab. That’s when he’d make a move.”
“Think he will?”
“Maybe. But even if we authenticate the real one, we could switch it any time with a fake.”
Jedediah pondered the problem for a while. Then he asked, “How can he prevent it?”
“Oh, he could try to attach something or mark it somehow. It’s hard to imagine anything that we couldn’t either remove or duplicate given enough time. So, I don’t know what he’ll propose. He may propose taking it with him. Which isn’t going to happen.”
Jedediah lay down on the bed and put his arms up over his head on the pillow.
I nodded. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”
Early in the morning, before the sun was up, I walked out of the hotel through a side door to buy some pastries and coffee and brought them back to the room. Jedediah looked as intense as I felt. Neither of us spoke. He wasn’t used to having the feeling that people were after him. I wasn’t either. I couldn’t really tell him it was all in his mind because it wasn’t.
As we ate our pastries in silence Jedediah’s phone rang. I looked at the number. It was Eidhalt. I answered. “Yes?”
“We have the lab. They can do it all today. We . . . encouraged them.”
“Where and what time?”
The address was in the center of Munich. “Nine o’clock. Can you be there?”
I looked at my watch. It was 7:00 a.m. “Yes. See you there.” The line went dead.
I gave Jedediah his phone. “Let’s go. I want to get there before they do.”
“We taking the gold with us? ’Cause if we go into the lab someone will break into the car. You know that.”
“You drive. I’ll call Florian on the way.”
“We keeping these rooms?”
“No, we’re out of here. Nothing traceable.”
I pulled the car around to the front, while Jedediah carried the gold and the flag down to the car. As we headed toward Munich, I dialed Florian. He answered on the first ring. I told him the name of the lab. “We’re meeting at nine o’clock.”
“It’s a good lab. They can do it.”
“We need to give you the items we found for safe keeping. Tell us where to meet.”
Florian gave us an address and we typed it into our nav system. We headed directly there and arrived fifteen minutes before eight. Alex was with Florian and Patrick and three other men. I said to Florian, “You have to give me your word that no one else will touch these. You have to keep them, and keep them safe. But I have to have your word that no one will even look at them. Otherwise, I’ll have to come up with another plan.”
Florian nodded his head knowingly. “This is not a problem, we will take care of them and return them. The gold was quite unexpected.”
We moved the ammo cans to his trunk and closed it. Alex tried to read my face. I gave her a knowing look that everything was fine. Patrick asked, “Can I take one piece of gold to have it checked out? See if it’s real gold and truly Nazi minted?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want anyone’s attention on any of this other than what we have already. Especially tied to the BKA.” I turned to Alex. “I’m beginning to think we should have let him have all the gold,” I said. “We don’t need to give him another reason to do something stupid.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve got to get to the lab.”
Florian asked, “How will this happen? You will give the flag to the lab?”
I nodded. “And I think we will wait there until they’re done with it.”
“It’s a reputable lab. Unless they have somebody on the inside—a couple of people—I don’t think they could do anything with it. We’ll see if it matches.” We arrived at the lab intentionally late. I wanted them all there. Jedediah and I got out of the car with our weathered brown suitcase and walked in.
Eidhalt was waiting. “All set?” I asked.
“Yes. They are waiting for us.”
Jedediah asked, “What did you tell them they were doing?”
“I told them it was a family issue. That we represented some grandchildren who wanted to determine whether the flag you have is from their grandfather’s unit and the one on which he died. It’s simply a historic curiosity, and that he was buried in a family grave so we had to bring all four of the family members for testing.”
I nodded, “Did they buy it?”
A slight smile formed on his hard face. “They think it’s odd, but they say they can do the test. And we offered them five times the cost of the test to put us in the front of the line.”
“Hope they’re quick. We’re not leaving the flag here.”
It caught him by surprise. “They have a safe.”
I shook my head. “Whatever can be put into a safe can be taken out. They can get whatever DNA they need off the flag, then we’ll be on our way.”
“What if they need more?”
“Then they don’t know what they’re doing and we’re at the wrong lab. If they can’t do it here, we’ll take it back to the States and get it authenticated.”
“These skulls aren’t going anywhere,” he said firmly.
“Then let’s do it. Do you know the people here?”
“Just by reputation. I spoke with the head of the lab last night. I tracked him down to his house. They’re expecting us.”
Eidhalt went to the receptionist desk and asked for Herr Bloch.
While we waited for Bloch there were awkward periods of silence. I was imagining how many ways they could try and separate us from the flag.
Eidhalt finally said to me, “Are you armed?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Curious. In case someone tries to take the flag.”
“No one knows about the flag except you. Who would take it?”
He shrugged and tried to look disinterested. “There are thieves all around. Crime has been increasing.”
“Probably true. But if I were armed it would be illegal in Germany, right?”
“That is true.”
I saw the door open and a gentleman who was almost certainly Bloch walked toward us. He was of medium build with a shaved head and glasses. He wore a white lab coat and black soft-soled shoes.
I said in a low voice to Eidhalt, “I may be armed, and my good friend may also be armed, and I may have several friends here with me from the United States who have an ability to look very German. Or maybe I should have friends with me. If the crime problem is so bad, I should have lots of friends with me who could help me in a time of crisis. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
He looked at me with some alarm then turned to Bloch. They greeted each other in German and then he introduced us to Bloch as the one who had the flag Eidhalt wanted to buy for his clients, assuming it could be authenticated as having come from their grandfather’s unit. Bloch looked at Jedediah who stared at him with that serial killer stare that he had mastered. It gave people a cold chill.
Bloch said in English to all of us, “So you have some blood to have tested?”
“Yes. There is blood from a few different people, but we’re sure blood from one of the people whose skulls we have is on the flag.”
He waved his hand and said, “Come into the lab and let’s sit down at our conference table and discuss this.”
We walked through the first door and into the lab area, which was large and impressive. He took us to a conference room that had a long white table and ten leather chairs. The lighting was intense and direct from numerous small halogen lights in the ceiling. Jedediah and I sat on one side of the room while Eidhalt and his men sat on the other side, with Bloch at the end. Bloch started, “Let’s understand exactly what we’re doing.” He looked at me. “Since you have the flag, tell me what your objective is.”
“They,” I said, indicating Eidhalt, “believe their family member’s blood is on this flag, and if so, they would like to purchase it.”
Bloch nodded and looked at Eidhalt. “What is it that you are going to use to prove this?”
Eidhalt lowered the satchel gently onto the table. The skulls clicked together.
“You have a skeleton?”
“There was some question of which skeleton it was. There were four in the grave so we have all four.”
Bloch indicated the bag with his chin. “What pieces?”
“The skulls.”
Bloch nodded. “Let’s see them.”
Eidhalt opened the bag and pulled out the four skulls and set them in front of him. It looked like four people sitting under the table with their heads projecting through.
Bloch nodded again. “They are in good condition. You do understand that we will have to bore into the skulls and take out the inside of the bone to extract the DNA. It is a process.”
“We understand. That’s no problem.”
“So these are your relatives and you’re okay with us drilling holes in their heads?”
“Yes. My clients’ need to know.”
“Why?” he asked with some skepticism.
Eidhalt looked at Bloch intensely. “It’s important to the family.”
Bloch shrugged. “Let’s see the flag.”
Jedediah opened the suitcase gently and lifted out the flag. He unfolded it onto the table next to the skulls. With the intense halogen lighting you could see the dark blood stains on the still bright red background. Bloch was taken aback. No one had told him it was a Nazi flag. He looked around the room then took out what looked like a jeweler’s eye and examined the flag closely. He went to several areas that were clearly stained and looked at them closely. He picked up the flag gently. He folded the corner up and looked at the flag on the other side. He laid it back down. “I believe I can get enough material off of this flag for DNA testing. I will take samples from several different locations without cutting the flag, and prepare each of those samples separately for testing. I will then take bored sections from the skulls to extract the DNA and keep those four sections separate. You understand that will give us many different possibilities.”
I nodded, “But that means that at least thirty of those will be non-matches because we don’t expect three of them to match. Only one of them bled onto the flag.”
“Yes, but they are related. What is their relationship?”
“Father, mother, and sister.”
“Well, it is possible then that they will have some match. It won’t be as likely or as good as the gentleman himself, but you could get some matches.”
“Well, any match would confirm what we’re here to find out. Because no one else would match. Right?” I asked.
“Well, it is theoretically possible. But it’s close to a one in a billion chance that any given person will match another. So you’re right. If there are any matches in any of these sets, then that confirms that the family member died on this flag. But if all goes well, we should get one perfect match. If he bled sufficiently, and as you said most of this blood is his, we should be able to match it perfectly. It will take some time.”
All of us immediately thought of the meeting. Eidhalt asked, “How much time?”
Bloch considered, “Well, we have to culture the DNA and grow it in the lab. Then the matching testing itself shouldn’t take more than a day, so I would say that we can have an answer for you by Wednesday.”
Eidhalt immediately turned to me and said, “So you will leave the flag here until Wednesday.”
“You’ve forgotten what we just said,” I said harshly. “I’m not leaving it anywhere for any period of time. If they need to take samples, they can take as many samples as they want. From any part of the flag they want.”
I looked at the owner of the lab. “You can take the samples right now, can’t you? It can’t take that long.”
He looked at his watch. “The people that will do that are involved in another extremely important matter.”
I raised my voice, “I don’t give a shit how important their other matter is. We’re paying you a lot of money. Get them over here now and take the samples. We will all watch and then I’ll take my flag and go. Then we’ll come back and you can tell us what the results are. Get them now.”
Bloch looked a little concerned and quite peeved, and said, “Let me see.” He left the conference room and left us alone with the flag.
Eidhalt said, “I don’t think you trust me.”
I responded, “You are correct.”
“We’re on the same team. We are trying to get things together for our meeting. We are supposed to be working together.”
“You’re the one putting the meeting together. You haven’t even told me where it’s going to be or what will happen. This is all about you. Not about the movement. You’re trying to put yourself at the top of the movement. I get that. But don’t expect me to trust you because of it.”
Two men and a woman came into the conference room where the flag was spread out on the table. It was too large for the table, and was bunched at the two ends; but the black and white striping and the red color made clear what kind of flag it was. They tried not to look startled. They bent and examined the flag with a magnifying glass. We all stood around wondering whether there would be any problem.
Bloch said, “We will begin. I have informed Franz, our lead laboratory technician. He understands what we’re doing.” He asked Franz, “Do you have your locations selected?”
Franz answered, “Yes. We will take numerous samples because of the number of people.”
One of his colleagues handed him a small case, which he opened. It contained glass test tubes with screw-top lids. When he unscrewed one of the lids, it came out with a Q-tip-like swab attached to the lid. He dipped it in some liquid that was in a small container also in the kit, and leaned down to examine the first place in the flag he wanted to lift a blood sample from. He rolled over the same spot with the moistened swab in an area about one inch by two inches several times, like he was painting the spot with an invisible liquid. I expected the swab to turn pink with blood remains, but it didn’t. It remained pure white and moist. After fifteen or twenty seconds, he was satisfied and put that swab back into the tube and screwed the top on. He spoke in German to his colleague who wrote on the tube. He took out another test tube with the swab cap and began working on another spot. His two colleagues did likewise. Before long, they had twenty or thirty different swabs that had extracted whatever they could from the flag and they had placed them back into the tubes with markings showing the location of the sample on the flag. Why the location would matter, I didn’t understand. But, I also didn’t care. Franz was done. He placed the last vial into the box. He closed it and locked it, and nodded to the head of the laboratory. He said, “We have all the samples we need.”
I asked, “Do you think you got enough?”
“It’s impossible to say at this point, but the flag is in such good condition that I am hopeful. I have pulled DNA from much rougher pieces of cloth that were much older.”
I turned to Bloch. “How long before you’ll have the results?” The clear implication of my question was that his answer the last time we asked was inadequate.
Everyone in the room looked at him in expectation. He pondered.
“We have to take the skull samples . . . we must have the DNA replicate itself, we have to put it in a machine overnight. I would say by this time tomorrow, we should have an answer.”
I nodded and took the corner of the flag into my hands. “I’ll give you my phone number.” As I began folding up the flag, I said to him, “You do understand how important it is that this be kept confidential. Right?”
He nodded. “All our work is confidential.”
“Not all your work involves something of this magnitude. The bigger the magnitude, the bigger the public interest might be, the more important it is to keep it confidential. You understand?”
He frowned. “I thought this was a simple family issue.” He paused. “But of course, nothing will be said to anyone. I will make sure.”
I took the folded flag and handed it to Jedediah who put it back into the leather suitcase and closed it. I said to everyone in the room, “Then we will be going.” I looked at Eidhalt. “Call me if you hear first so I can meet you here to get the results.”
He looked enthusiastic. “Of course. I look forward to it.”
I nodded, and Jedediah and I walked out of the room quickly.