The Tombs Read online

  Sam said, “What it looks like to me is a mass execution. We don’t see a second faction because the killers buried the victims and walked away.”

  “It does look that way,” said Remi. “But if these men died so heavily armed, why would they let themselves be killed?”

  “We don’t know,” said Albrecht. “We’ve just begun our work, but we’re asking ourselves these questions as we recover the rest of the remains.”

  The next day, Sam and Remi arrived in the morning at the dock where the Margit was waiting to tow the magnetometer. Tibor sat, eagerly reading a newspaper. When he saw them, he said, “Sam. Remi. You have to see this article.”

  “What is it?” asked Remi.

  Tibor spread the paper out on the dock so they could all look at it at once. On the front page were pictures of six people. The photographs looked like mug shots, with the subjects staring straight into the camera. Remi knelt on the dock. “Sam! It’s them, the people from Consolidated Enterprises.” She turned to Tibor. “What does it say?”

  “Six people, all carrying American passports, have been arrested by Szeged police on suspicion of having committed an armed raid on the Bako pharmaceutical factory a week ago. In the raid, eight security personnel from the Bako company were killed.”

  “Eight?” said János. “It must be all of the five we hit and the three we tied up in that building. Bako must have had those men killed himself.”

  “It sounds that way,” Sam said. “I was sure most of the five were just wounded and we didn’t harm the other three at all.”

  “What can we do?” Remi asked. “We can’t let these idiots take the blame for murder.”

  Sam took out his phone and dialed the house in La Jolla. The phone rang once.

  “Hi, Sam. What’s up?”

  “Hi, Selma. The six people from Consolidated Enterprises seem to have been sent to Szeged to keep spying on us. They’ve been arrested for the raid on Bako’s factory. But I think that at the time when that happened, they were still in the custody of Captain Klein in Berlin.”

  “You want me to straighten this out for them?”

  “Let’s put it this way. If they were to remain in jail for, say, thirty days, I would not be unhappy. If they were to be convicted of eight murders, I’d feel awful, and Remi would make sure I felt worse.”

  “You bet I would,” she said.

  “Hear that?” he said.

  “I did,” said Selma. “From what I’ve learned about Consolidated, they’re awful people, but they don’t deserve capital punishment just yet. I’ll call Captain Klein in Berlin and get what I need to spring them, but I won’t pass it on to Consolidated’s New York office unless things get really ugly. How does that sound?”

  “Great. Thanks, Selma.” He hung up and looked at Remi. “I hope we haven’t just made ourselves the only suspects.”

  “Us? I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about,” Remi said. “Remember? There was an order for the local police to keep us under surveillance. If they arrested us, they’d have lots of explaining to do.”

  “She’s right,” said Tibor.

  “Get used to that,” said Sam.

  The excavation of the field grew much larger as the students and their professors worked. It was the next week that the lawyers arrived. Tibor’s guards saw them first and called Tibor on the boat.

  There were a half dozen of them in two big black cars. They pulled up along the road next to the excavation and got out. They all wore immaculate white shirts, dark suits, and striped neckties. When they walked, they were careful to step just on the pavement so no dust would dull the shine of their Italian shoes.

  One of them, a shorter, thicker, older man than the others, came forward. He approached a blond female student who was running dirt through a screen with a wooden frame to find small objects. He said, “Go get your bosses.”

  “The professors?”

  “Are they professors?” he said. “Then tell them class is in session and don’t be late.”

  The student ran off along one of the narrow paths that had been left among the grids and stopped at a spot where Albrecht Fischer, Enikö Harsányi, and Imre Polgár were conferring with some other colleagues in khaki clothes. The girl delivered her message, and they all came back up the path.

  Enikö Harsányi arrived first. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Dr. Harsányi. Can I help you?”

  The older man in the suit said, “My name is Donat Toth and I’m an attorney. I have an injunction here to make you stop digging on this land.” He held out the paper.

  A second woman stepped from the group and took the paper. She glanced at it and said, “I’m Dr. Monika Voss. I’m the regional director of the National Office of Cultural Heritage. My office has granted this group a permit to carry out this excavation.”

  Albrecht Fischer held out an official-looking document. Donat Toth took it, glanced at it, and handed it to one of the other suits, who examined it and passed it on. When it came back, he said, “This is out of date. My client now owns the land and will be taking possession today.”

  “This is the property of the city of Szeged,” said Dr. Voss.

  “My client, Mr. Arpad Bako, has submitted a very high offer to the city of Szeged, which has been accepted.” He held out some more papers.

  Dr. Voss looked at the papers, then took out a pen and wrote something on one of them. She said, “The National Office of Cultural Heritage hereby voids this sale.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I just did.”

  “No, you can’t! We put cash money into this!”

  “Get it back. Any land containing cultural treasures is under control of the Office of Cultural Heritage. Act number 64 on the protection of cultural heritage says so.”

  “Who says that what’s on this land is cultural treasures?”

  “The definition of a cultural treasure is in the law too—all goods of more than fifty years of age, including archaeological findings from excavation. I’ve identified some here, and no local government officials can overrule my determination.”

  “I’ll go to court.”

  “Others have. They lost and so will you.”

  Two of the younger lawyers moved in close to Donat Toth and whispered to him with great concern. He waved them away. “What’s to stop me from tearing up this permit?”

  One of his legal advisers said apologetically, “Three years in prison, sir.”

  Toth threw the permit in the general direction of the professors, but it simply floated peacefully to the ground. One of the students picked it up, blew the dust off it, and handed it to Albrecht Fischer. The men in dark suits returned to their cars, turned around, and drove off. Just as they did, Sam, Remi, Tibor, and János arrived in Tibor’s taxi.

  When the boat crew had heard the story, Tibor said to Sam and Remi, “Defeating Arpad Bako’s lawyers isn’t the same as defeating Bako.”

  Sam said, “We need to buy the archaeologists more time.”

  “How much more?”

  “Albrecht thinks they can finish here in another week,” said Remi. “They’ve got the locations of the bodies mapped and most of them photographed and removed. In one more week, he thinks they’ll have everything removed from the site.”

  Sam stared out at the excavation site for a moment and then said, “Here’s what we do. Tomorrow we’ll pick a spot. We’ll stop going up and down the river, anchor, and then start diving. The next day, we’ll go to the same place. We’ll let them see us going down with markers.”

  “Then what?” asked Remi.

  “Then we double down. We do everything we would do if we were bringing up something big and valuable. We want to rent a dredger mounted on a barge. We’ll bring in bulldozers and dump trucks to build our own road to the riverbank righ
t where we’re diving.”

  Tibor said, “Are you sure you want Bako to think you’ve found the treasure?”

  “I want him to think we know where it is, but that there’s a lot of heavy work to do to recover it.”

  “All right,” said Tibor. “I’ll start with my uncle Géza. He has a construction company, and there are always equipment operators who need work.”

  The next day, Sam and Remi were out on the deck of the Margit in their wet suits, with compressed-air tanks and other gear in a rack near the stern. They set out buoys and flew a red flag with a white stripe to let passing boats know that there were divers in the water and then submerged.

  They explored the bottom of the river together, finding an array of metal objects. There were broken pipes, anchor chains, a few hundred-gallon barrels that had held some liquid that had long ago leaked out through rusted holes. Interspersed with the familiar were the unidentifiable: heavily rusted ferrous objects that could only be described as round or long and thin or hollow. Their names and whatever they had been used for were long lost, but these objects were of greatest interest to Sam and Remi. Anything that looked very old and mysterious was a find. They gathered a pile of these objects under the silhouette of Tibor’s boat and then surfaced.

  Across the river, inside the cargo bay of the parked truck that shadowed them each day, the five men had been joined by Arpad Bako. The five all stood very straight, and all of them remained silent, while Bako looked through a spotting scope at the divers. Bako was a tall, muscular man who wore his curly hair long, so it draped across his forehead and hung over the back of the collar of his white shirt. His suit was a fine garment from a personal tailor he had flown in from Italy. His dark eyes were sharp and alert.

  Gábor Székely, the squad leader, said, “You see, Mr. Bako? The whole operation is different now. We’re wondering if all that digging being done up the river might just be a diversion from the real operation here.”

  “It told them the tomb was near, I think,” said Bako. “Attila was buried near the Tisza and then the river was diverted to cover the grave. You know that.”

  “Anytime you give us the word, we can shoot them. With four rifles, we could get all of them in a couple of seconds and be on our way.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Bako said. “The casket could be under twenty feet of sediment by now. The outer one is made of iron and the inner ones from heavier metals. That’s why they’re making these elaborate preparations—to dig down, attach cables and chains to it, and lift it to the barge. Then they’ll move it from the barge to a flatbed truck on that road over there. That moment is weeks away and will cost them millions of dollars to reach. Let them do the work.”

  While Bako and Székely watched, the people on the boat swung the arm of an electric winch out over the water and lowered the cable. There were a series of sharp tugs on the cable, and then the winch began to pull something up from the bottom. Soon a large nylon net emerged, dripping and draining water. In the net were rusted objects, all of them unidentifiable.

  Arpad Bako began to shift his weight, first to one foot, then the other, back and forth, in his excitement. “Look!” he cried. “Look! They’re bringing something up!”

  “It looks like a bunch of rusty junk.”

  “It’s fifteen hundred years underwater!” he yelled and punched Székely’s arm hard. “Anything from the Huns is what we’ve waited for. Those fools are doing our work for us.” His hands kept clenching into fists. “Watch them! Don’t let anything go unnoticed.” He turned to the man with the camera. “Get clear shots of everything they bring up. Until they move the barge with the crane in over the tomb, they’re working for us. When that happens, you can end their employment.”

  SZEGED, HUNGARY

  “WE’RE DONE,” ALBRECHT SAID. “WE’VE EXCAVATED THE entire grid. The artifacts and remains have all been removed from the site, and most are properly packaged and catalogued. In a few days we’ll move them to a temporary facility in Budapest for safekeeping while the museum there prepares space for them.”

  “That’s a huge accomplishment in a few weeks,” said Remi.

  “We knew we didn’t have years to do it, and thanks to my Hungarian colleagues and their students we were able to bring in at least fifty trained assistants every day, and as many as a hundred some days.”

  “That’s probably what did the most to keep you safe,” said Sam. “It’s hard to commit a crime in front of that many people.”

  “How many warriors did you find in all?” asked Remi.

  “A thousand.” Albrecht turned away and took a step or two, suddenly interested in looking closely at the skeleton on the table beside them.

  “You mean you just have a rough number?” she said. “You haven’t done a final count yet?”

  “Exactly one thousand.”

  Sam and Remi looked at each other. “That can’t be meaningless,” said Sam.

  “No,” Albrecht said almost under his breath, still staring at the skeleton. He looked up reluctantly. “In fact, before we were willing to accept that number, Imre and Enikö and I counted them again together. Our current theory is that these men were a unit of some kind. The Huns aren’t known to have divided themselves into units of a hundred and a thousand, the way the Romans did. But there’s no reason to think they never formed temporary units for particular tasks. A commander might have said, ‘I need a thousand men for this scouting party and another thousand men to carry out a raid.’”

  Remi said, “I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but Sam and I have been doing a lot of reading about the Huns since you called us in. I can’t help wondering if you and the others aren’t ignoring a possible explanation just because it’s too good to hope for.”

  Albrecht sighed. “We don’t want to jump at the idea you’re alluding to because of its implications. Not only would it provide encouragement for Arpad Bako, but it could set off a gold rush among the public. Think of the implications.”

  “Think of the evidence,” she said. “Here are a thousand men exactly, all of them Huns who were all killed apparently on the same day, around the year 450, but not in a battle. They’re at the center of Hun power, where there were hundreds of thousands of allies but no enemies. They were killed without a fight.”

  Sam said, “And they were buried with their belongings, including their weapons. They weren’t dishonored or mutilated after death. I think Remi has to be right. They were Attila’s personal bodyguards. They were sent off to bury him and his treasures in a secret place and then divert the river over the tomb so it wouldn’t be found. When they came home, they were killed to prevent them from revealing the location of the burial.”

  Remi said, “They’d need at least a thousand men to divert a river. They’d have had to dig across one of the loops to make a shortcut channel.”

  Sam said, “They were all heavily armed, all seasoned warriors with healed wounds. Why would they let themselves be killed without even drawing a sword unless—”

  “Unless they were fanatically loyal to Attila, like personal bodyguards,” said Remi. “They would feel they were dying with their leader as they had always expected to.”

  “Yes, it makes sense. Yes, it fits,” said Albrecht. “But to accept that story would be a terrible mistake. The tomb of Attila would be worth billions. The Huns were like a giant broom sweeping across Asia and Europe, from beyond the Volga to the Seine, taking everything of value with them. If we announce we’ve found the men who buried Attila, this whole region will be dug up in a year. Other artifacts of incalculable value will be destroyed, and nobody will be any closer to finding the tomb than they are now. If you accept the old stories, the job of the guards was to take the body and the treasure far from here.”

  “You’re scholars,” Sam said. “I know you can’t falsify your description of the find when you publish it. An
d as soon as it’s published, others will immediately see what Remi and I see.”

  Albrecht looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Arpad Bako thought I might be on the edge of confirming the myth of Attila’s treasure. Should I make him into a genius?”

  “But it’s never been about treasure for you,” said Remi. “It’s about uncovering the past. As you already said, this doesn’t bring anybody closer to the treasure. It just confirms one part of the story—that the guards were killed.”

  “I know,” Albrecht said. “I just don’t want to help the criminal who kidnapped me to end up with one of the greatest treasures in antiquity.”

  “All right,” said Sam. “Now that your find has been secured, Remi and I will begin to pack up to go home. You and the others can release just the information you want to, on your own timetable. But I feel I should remind you that big secrets have a habit of finding their own way out. You and the other archaeologists aren’t the only ones who saw this. So did hundreds of students. Most of them haven’t gone far enough in their studies to interpret what they’ve seen. But in a couple of years, many of them will get curious and start doing research.”

  Albrecht threw his hands up in despair. “What would you have me do?”

  “What scientists and scholars always do, in the end,” said Remi. “Keep looking, and thinking, with an open mind, and reporting your best interpretation of what you see.”

  “You’re right,” said Albrecht. “I know it, and I feel ashamed for being so hesitant. Please don’t leave us yet. If you could keep Bako and his men occupied for a few more days, we could get the finds to the National Archives.”

  The next morning, the work at the river continued. Sam and Remi dove in the murky water while Tibor’s friends and relatives continued to level and grade a straight roadbed from the road to the river. All that day Remi and Sam scoured the riverbed for rusted objects of various sizes and shapes, lifting them onto the boat. At the end of the day, as usual, they unloaded the boat and trucked the objects to a storage building at the University of Szeged, always covered with tarps so Arpad Bako’s watchers would be curious without being able to satisfy that curiosity.