Текст книги "The Tombs"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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“I assume we’re going to dive the river no matter what we see.”

“The more we do what Bako and his people think is getting us closer to the underwater tomb, the more they’ll ignore Albrecht and the others.”

Tibor said, “We may have Bako all confused and frustrated now, but don’t let it make you too comfortable. He has enough men to do many bad things at once.”

They spent several days on their magnetometer survey of the lower river. Each evening, they went to see Albrecht and his team at the building in the city center that they had rented as a lab.

“It’s definitely a battlefield,” said Albrecht.

“How could it be anything else?” said Enikö Harsányi. “So far, we’ve found six hundred fifty-six adult male bodies, all armed, and all apparently killed together and then buried where they fell.”

Imre Polgár said, “Many of them—perhaps a majority—show signs of having serious wounds that had healed. We found impact fractures, stab and slash wounds that hit bone. These were career fighters. The term should probably be warriorsrather than soldiers.”

“And who are they?” asked Remi.

“They’re Huns,” said Albrecht.

“Definitely Huns,” Enikö Harsányi agreed. “All of them so far.”

“How can you tell?” Sam asked. “DNA?”

Albrecht took them to a long row of steel tables, where skeletons lay in a double row. “There isn’t a DNA profile of a Hun. The core group in the first and second centuries were from Central Asia. As they came west, they made alliances with or fought, defeated, and absorbed each tribe or kingdom they met. So by the time they were here on the plains of Hungary, they still had many individuals with genes in common with Mongolians, but others who appeared to be Scythian, Thracian, or Germanic. What they shared wasn’t common ethnicity but common purpose. It’s like asking for the DNA profile of a seventeenth-century pirate.”

“So how do you identify them?”

“They were horsemen. They traveled, fought, ate, and sometimes slept on horseback. We can tell by certain skeletal changes that all of these men spent their lives on horses. But there’s much more conclusive evidence.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

“The Huns weren’t regular cavalry, they were mounted archers. In Asia they developed this tactic with the help of an advance in the bow and arrow.”

He very carefully picked up a blackened piece of wood with irregular curves. “Here it is. It’s a compound bow, and the style is distinctive. See the ends where you nock the string? They’re called siyahs. They’re stiff, not flexible. The wood isn’t just a piece of wood. It’s layers of laths glued together. There are always seven siyahs, made of horn, and the grip is bone. It made for a very short bow that they could use on horseback and it gave much greater velocity to the arrow. This is probably as good a specimen of a Hun bow as exists today. So far, we’ve found over four hundred of them.”

“Huns against who?” asked Sam.

“That, I’m afraid, is a more difficult question. The victims were all over the field together. They were laid out with no separation for affiliation, simply covered with earth where they fell. They all had the sort of armament that a Hun would use, primarily the compound bow. They also carried a long, straight, double-edged sword in a scabbard that hung from the belt, and a short sword, or dagger, stuck horizontally in the belt. They wore goatskin trousers and a fabric or fur tunic. Some had leather vests.”

“There are still puzzles and mysteries,” said Dr. Polgár.

“I can see some right here,” Remi said. “Nobody looted the battlefield.”

“That’s one,” said Dr. Harsányi. “A well-made sword was a prized possession. A compound bow made of wood, bone, and horn took a very skilled craftsman much preparation, a week of labor, and months of drying and curing. It’s not the sort of thing one leaves on the field.”

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 Margitwas 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 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.”

“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. And 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.

In the evening, Sam and Remi joined Albrecht and his colleagues in studying the objects found in the excavation at the field. The remains of warriors that had already been given preliminary examinations, photographed with their possessions, and catalogued were being placed in wooden boxes, to be archived at the Aquineum Museum, part of the Budapest History Museum, which was housed in the huge Károlyi Palace.

Sam and Remi wandered among the skeletons that had been laid out on tables and tarps to be studied and photographed but which had not been professionally examined since they’d been exhumed. At one point, Sam stopped for a moment. He knelt by a skeleton, craning his neck to see the face from another angle.

“What’s wrong?” said Remi.

“Have you ever tried to get people to keep a secret?”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s pretty much how girls spend sixth grade.”

“Ever succeed?”

“No. Once you tell someone that what you’re saying is a secret, that makes it valuable, a commodity to be traded. Once someone says he has a secret, it means he wants to tell. It’s an invitation to nag him until he gives it up.”

“Here are a thousand people who had a secret. Not one of them told?”

“Got to hand it to the Huns,” she said. “They knew it’s hard to talk when you’re headless. We didn’t have that option in sixth grade.”

“Of course. But even if these men all knew they were going to be killed, they still had relatives they would want to help. I can believe they were all fanatically loyal to Attila, but by then he was dead. Without Attila, the Huns were a loose federation. Didn’t even one of these guys hedge his bets?”

“Apparently not or we would have a history course about some other guy who came onto the scene with a boatload of treasure.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Sam said. They walked along the rows of skeletons, passing dozens, then more dozens, a hundred.

“Wait,” said Remi. “Take a look at this one.”

Sam joined her beside the skeleton. The skeleton had a gold ring around his neck like a Celtic torque. Beside him was a sword with a scabbard with silver mountings. He was wearing a vest that had been made of sheepskin. There were but a few wisps of the shaggy wool left on the outside, and the whole inner leather surface had turned a deep brown.

Through the rib cage and past the backbone, they could see something that looked like rows of designs and, below it, a large and elaborate shape. Remi said, “Doesn’t that look like print? And surely that’s a picture of something.”

“Kind of odd,” said Sam. “While he was wearing the vest, you wouldn’t be able to see the designs.”

“Priscus wrote that they wore their leather clothes until they fell off them. The only time you’d see this is after he was a skeleton.”

Sam raised his hand in the air. “Albrecht!” he called. “Can you spare a minute?”

Albrecht came from across the big room and joined them. He looked down. Then he knelt beside the skeleton, moving his head to see the vest through the ribs. Very faintly he breathed, “Oh, no.”

Remi said, “Doesn’t it look like writing?”

“It iswriting,” said Albrecht. “We’ve got to get the vest off him so we can see all of it.” They carefully lifted the upper part of the skeleton, leaving the severed head on the tarp. While Sam held the torso, Remi and Albrecht slipped the vest down off the shoulders and then the arms. They laid it out on the tarp. Albrecht looked at the shapes closely.

“It’s Gothic. It’s an early eastern Germanic language, probably what half of Attila’s troops spoke.”

“Can you read any of it?”

“Quite a lot of it, actually,” he said. “There was a nobleman named Ulfilas who commissioned a translation of the Bible just about when Attila died, so we know a lot of the vocabulary and structure. And it has a lot of similarities to other Germanic languages. In English you say have. In German it’s haben. In Gothic it’s haban. Generally, Gothic retains a zthat German lost. Things like that.”

He read. “‘Two days and a half north, one half day west. He’s where the fourth-night moon is widest.’ Fourth-night moon. I have no idea what that means.”

Sam said, “I do. The moon is on a twenty-eight-day cycle. If you start a cycle with the new moon or the full moon, the fourth night is always a crescent.”

“Look at the picture,” said Albrecht.

“That’s the waxing crescent,” Sam said. “The left edge is lit up.”

“Do you think it’s a calendar?” Albrecht said.

“No,” said Remi. “This guy was the cheater. He didn’t get to talk, but he made a map. The crescent is the shape of the bend in the river that they cut off when they diverted it. He’s telling us where Attila is buried.”

SZEGED, HUNGARY

SAM AND REMI WERE IN THEIR HOTEL SUITE, AND SELMA Wondrash was on Remi’s computer screen. “Wendy and Pete and I have done the comparisons and angle measurements and calculations many times and we’re sure that we’ve found the spot that was indicated on the vest. The Roman soldiers of that era could cover twenty-five miles in a day on foot. The Huns were horsemen. When they wanted to, they could probably do twice that distance. But this time they had to transport a heavy load, so we’ve brought the estimate back to about twenty-five. That means we have a distance north along the river of sixty miles and a distance west of twelve miles. Using aerial photography and satellite images, we do find a dry channel with a crescent-shaped accumulation of alluvium on its west, or outer, side. And the later shortening and straightening of the Tisza left the spot not only dry but nowhere near the modern course of the river.”

“You’re using the same reasoning we are,” said Sam. “The cargo must have weighed several tons, so it was loaded on a huge wagon, probably drawn by a herd of oxen. They would have gone across the plains east of the river, where they didn’t need a road, and probably stayed out of sight of the river until the end. In fact, they probably had groups of outriders on all sides to be sure nobody came close.”

“Agreed,” said Selma. “So when we compare the map on the vest with the aerial photographs, we get a spot at 46° 25' 55" north and 19° 29' 19" east. That’s about a hundred thirty miles south of Budapest.”

“What’s there?”

“Well, it could be worse,” she said. “It’s not a cathedral or a nuclear power plant. It’s the Grape Research Institute, in Kiskunhalas. The halaspart means ‘fish.’ In medieval times the town was surrounded by lakes, presumably fed by the river. They’re long gone, but the memory lingers on, as does the sandy soil, which is terrific for growing wine grapes.”

“How does a modern person get there?”

“From Szeged, you take Route 55 until you reach Route 53, then switch.”

“We’ll let you know when we’ve figured out how to do this,” Sam said. “We’ve got a whole lot of activity going on at the Tisza River to make Bako’s men think we’ve already found the tomb underwater.”

“If I were you, I’d keep that up,” she said. “Arpad Bako has been investigated for three murders besides Tibor Lazar’s son. And I wish you good hunting. If anything comes to mind that I can do, give me a call.”

“We will.”

The next morning, Sam and Remi went down to the Tisza River as usual and spent most of the day diving to keep up the pretense that they’d found something. It wasn’t until after dark that Sam, Remi, and Albrecht saw Tibor arrive in an eight-year-old Mercedes sedan. “Is this your car?” Sam asked.

“My personal car?” said Tibor. “No. I own it, but we use it as a cab. We have a number of regular customers who don’t want a taxi with a sign on it. We take them to restaurants and parties. In Hungary, the legal amount of alcohol you can drink and drive is zero, so they need to be driven. Me, I walk. I don’t need a car.”

Sam loaded the metal detector, three short-handled spades, and night vision goggles into the trunk and climbed into the sedan with the others. Tibor drove them north along the river, staring intently into the rearview mirror at times.

“Are we being followed?” asked Remi.

“I don’t think so,” Tibor said. “It’s hard to tell on these country roads, though. If somebody is behind you when you leave one town, he’ll stay behind you all the way to the next town. And it’s dark, so all you can see is his headlights.”