Page 118 of Once a Hero

Beatrice heard every word. She waited for Jake to deny it. He did not.

Something in Beatrice’s heart fluttered. She hoped it wasn’t heart palpitations due to the stress of carrying a vest loaded with explosives.

Chapter Forty-Seven

After the vests were removed from Beatrice and her dad, Jake felt a great relief. He silently thanked God and reminded himself to pray with Beatrice later.

“Did you bring the brooches and the circuit board?” Beatrice asked.

Jake handed her the brooches. Their hands touched again. Beatrice gave him a quick hug, and then began removing the amber cabochons from the brooches.

Benjamin handed the circuit board to his father. They were both silent. Many years had passed them by. Father and son met again, but there was nothing left to say. The damages had been done. The grief had been wept away. What more was left?

Jake stayed by Beatrice’s side as she and her brother and dad figured out how to unlock the steel door. It seemed to be holding up the ceiling above it—and thereby the undercroft, the crypt, and the church itself.

The police had handcuffed Molyneux but allowed her to stay to see what was behind the door.

“I waited thirty years or more for this,” Molyneux told them.

The Polish police ended up waiting with the Russians, who had been joined by a representative from the Consulate in Poland.

“The circuit board was embedded inside a postcard, you say?” Chisolm Wright aka Thomas Peterson said.

Beatrice nodded.

“Isn’t the circuit board a modern invention, though?” Jake asked.

“Paul Eisler invented the printed circuit board in 1936, seven years before the Amber Room disappeared,” Beatrice said.

“No kidding.”

“Philomena knew about this place.” Chisolm shook his head. “Yet she never said a word. All those years and not a single time did she talk about this place.”

“Why is that?” Jake asked.

Chisolm shrugged. “Maybe she felt that history was best left alone.”

“If so, why did she try to sell the brooches to the FBI?”

“People do things we don’t understand. Now I realize that I didn’t know her at all.”

Jake wondered. How long had Philomena known about this vault? Why hadn’t she told anyone? It could’ve been her insurance.

Instead, the very person whom Molyneux killed was the one who could have led her to the Amber Room.

That was, if there really was anything left of it.

From the size of the door and the church above, Jake figured that only small parts of the Amber Room were behind that door—if any at all. Most experts believed that the original Amber Room no longer existed.

After a couple more hours of rearranging the stones to fit certain permutations, one of them worked.

“Take a photo of the pattern, Ben.” Beatrice wiped her forehead.

Her face was red and her blouse was soaked through. Rivulets of sweat flowed down her forehead and cheeks.

Jake had ordered fans to be brought in, but it took a while for them to arrive.

Click!

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