“It means I need to tell our employers that we need more of their intervention than I had hoped,” Boone said and then picked up his phone. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to take this to a more secure location.”
I felt my face flush with something that seemed to blend embarrassment and anger, but I nodded nonetheless. When he walked out of the hotel room, I looked at Frank and said, “I thought only spies said that.”
Frank didn’t laugh. Instead, he leaned over and said, “You saw the codex, correct?”
“I did.” I had seen it when Ahmed examined it. “I wasn’t very close, but I saw him looking at a scroll. It was yellowed and written on thick paper, papyrus, right?”
“Right.” He looked thoughtfully out the window and then turned back to me. “He examined the scroll, put it back in the tube, and t
