The Tombs

Remi pointed at the nearest skeleton. “And the wounds are peculiar, aren’t they? They’re not random the way they usually are in a blade fight.”

“No,” said Albrecht. “The Huns were archers, and yet we haven’t found any arrow wounds—no arrowheads that stuck in a bone or pierced a skull. And we haven’t seen the sorts of injuries usual to the battles of the period. No arms lopped off, no leg wounds that must have bled out. Every wound is a big, fatal trauma—there are nearly four hundred beheadings and a very large number of what I believe to be throats so deeply cut that the blade hit the anterior side of the vertebrae.”

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 perso

“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 ru

“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.”