The Blood Flag (24 page)

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.”