“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 right 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 Margitin 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.”