The Tombs fa-4

by Clive Cussler

  On the last day, they opened Attila’s gold casket. Inside was the skeleton of a man about five feet four inches tall, wearing a red silk tunic and trousers, knee-length leather boots, and a fur cap. His bony hand held a compound bow made of horn, and he wore a sword and a dagger. On the inner side of the gold coffin’s lid was an inscription.

  “You have found the tomb of Attila, High King of the Huns. In order to stand before me you must be a brave and cunning warrior. My last treasure will make you a rich and strong king. Only time, failure, and sorrow can make you a wise one.”

  THE ST. REGIS GRAND HOTEL, ROME

  “PLEASE, EVERYONE, MAKE THREE ROWS.” THE PHOTOGRAPHER from the New York Times waved them into place. Seated in the front row were Albrecht at the center, flanked by Selma and Wendy. The second row was János, Tibor, and Pete. In the back row were Sam and Remi Fargo, and Captain Boiardi of the Italian Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale.

  Dozens of shutters clicked in a complicated volley, with flashes that fluttered like strobe lights. The reporter from Der Spiegel was delighted because he could take many close-ups of the famed German historian and archaeologist Albrecht Fischer while he was posed as leader. Reporters from the Italian papers Giornale di Sicilia, Il Gazzettino of Venice, Il Mattino of Naples, Il Messaggero of Rome, Il Resto del Carlino from Bologna, and La Nazione all jostled one another to get pictures of a sampling of the magnificent treasure, which had been laid out on a white sheet on the carpet and was being guarded by the tall, serious Italian Carabinieri in their dress uniforms. The Carabinieri just looked upward, immune to the allure of the glittering gems and crowns and swords on the sheet.

  After the photographs, the interviews began. Sam and Remi moved off to the far end of the hotel meeting room, but reporters from Le Figaro, Le Monde, the Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian still found them.

  The Guardian’s reporter, a woman named Ann Dade-Stanton, cornered Sam. “Everyone I’ve talked to privately says you were the leader of this series of expeditions and that most of the time the only ones even present were Sam and Remi Fargo. Is this some kind of a dodge? A tax strategy or something?”

  Sam said, “Everybody here traveled, took risks, and worked at some point in a deep hole. Some of us contributed by doing research, making arrangements for travel and equipment, and so on. Others spent more time on the scene. But I wasn’t the leader.”

  Remi said, “The one Sam and I considered our leader and guide to the ancient world was our friend Professor Albrecht Fischer. He has spent his career studying Roman times. He telephoned us after he had made the initial discovery in a field in Hungary and asked us to come and help him. We did.”

  “But you’re world-famous treasure hunters and adventurers. And I understand you paid all the expenses.”

  “We and Albrecht Fischer and Tibor Lazar were partners from the morning when we found the first stone chamber in Hungary. Albrecht had the most knowledge of history and the archaeology of the late Roman Empire. Tibor was born in the part of Hungary where Attila had his stronghold and could get people there to help us, including those with equipment and vehicles. Sam and I had some experience with historical research and donated some money. We all contributed what we had and we all brought in other people who could help.”

  “That’s right,” said Sam. “And along the way, the culture ministries of a number of countries helped us and provided physical protection and preservation of our finds where the world’s scholars will be able to study them—particularly Hungary, Italy, and France. We also had help from the police forces of Berlin and Moscow.”

  “Sam?” Selma whispered. “The website.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Sam. “This is Selma Wondrash, our chief researcher.” He nodded to her.

  Selma said, “We will be putting up a website containing the complete catalog of all the artifacts in each of the treasure hoards and the tomb of Attila. It will include photographs of all of the items inside the treasure chambers in the positions where they were found, as well as close-up pictures made under museum conditions. From time to time, as scholarly articles about them are produced, the articles will be added to the site. We also expect to reproduce this information in a book, under the editorship of Professor Albrecht Fischer.”

  The reporters all dutifully wrote down what they were told and then joined in the celebration. The party went on late into the night. When Captain Boiardi and his men had packed the sample artifacts into their locked cases, they prepared to leave.

  “Sam, Remi,” he said. “The news will be in every major newspaper in the world tomorrow. Before the early-morning online editions come out, we’ve got to take the last of the treasure and transport it to the museum.”

  “Do you have to go so soon?” Remi asked.

  “The longer we wait, the more dangerous it will be. Ancient treasures capture people’s imaginations, and not always in a good way. In the 1920s, Tut’s tomb was a huge fad. And who was Tutankhamen? A rich teenager. This is Attila.” The captain grinned, kissed Remi’s hand and shook Sam’s. “This has been a great pleasure, and the greatest accomplishment of my career.”

  “It has been for us too,” Remi said. “I hope you didn’t mean it when you said you were retiring.”

  “If you don’t retire, I won’t,” he said. “I want to see what else you can find.”

  “We’ll call you,” said Sam.

  The Carabinieri left the hotel, and then the reporters and photographers. Soon the only ones left in the banquet room were Albrecht, Sam and Remi, Tibor and János, Selma, Pete and Wendy. Sam picked up a spoon and tapped it against a champagne glass, making a musical tinkling. Everyone stopped talking and looked in his direction. “All right, everyone. We’ve had a great party. Now Remi and I are going off to get some sleep. Please meet us in the lobby downstairs at nine a.m. with your packed bags. We have drivers coming to take us to the airport. We’re giving you a ride home.”

  As they walked lazily to their suite, Remi yawned. “You’re flying everybody home on a rented jet?”

  Sam shrugged. “Selma, Pete, and Wendy live at our house and we’d have to pay their airfare anyway. Tibor and János saved our lives at least twice each. And Albrecht invited us to be part of one of the great treasure hunts of all time. It’s just two stops.”

  “I don’t want to sound like an ingrate and a shallow woman, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been alone with my husband when I didn’t have a shovel in my hand and nobody was shooting at us.”

  Sam put his arm around her as they walked to the elevator. “Now, that’s true. The first thing it does is make me glad that I married a beautiful woman who likes my company. The other thing is, it makes me glad that most criminals are such terrible marksmen.”

  She stood on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. “I can’t wait to get home.”

  “You’ll get no backtalk out of me.” He unlocked the suite door and they stepped inside.

  The next morning, at nine, they met the others in the lobby, then got into their rented limousines for the fifteen-kilometer drive to Ciampino Airport. The jet Selma had ordered was waiting on the tarmac outside the small private terminal. The group waited until their luggage was loaded and then climbed the steps to board.

  It was just five hundred ninety-six miles from Rome to Frankfurt, where Albrecht left them. “Well, you’ve given me something to think about,” he said. “If I lived two lifetimes, I still wouldn’t be able to complete my study of what we’ve found. I thank you one and all.”

  It was another six hundred ninety miles to Szeged. When they landed at the airport, Tibor and János Lazar stood up and Tibor said to Sam, “Are you coming?”

  Sam took Remi by the hand and said, “Everybody, we’ll be back in just a few minutes.”

  Remi looked at Sam with curiosity, then watched her step as they climbed down from the plane and caught up with the Lazar brothers.

  Remi said, “Tibor, János, I hope we see you again soon. You’re wel
come to visit us in La Jolla, you have our phone numbers and e-mail addresses.”

  Tibor said, “We may, but not yet. We’ve decided to stay home for a while and rest. Now and then we’ll get up to laugh at Arpad Bako. But only for that.”

  “I don’t know how much your share of the treasures will be,” said Sam. “A lot of it will never leave a museum. But you’ll get millions of dollars from what’s sold.”

  “See?” Tibor said. “I told you that it was a good idea to be your friend.”

  The four walked into the terminal and there, on the other side of the waiting area, was a man sitting beside a very large plastic carrier on a wheeled cart. Remi said, “Sam—?”

  The man seemed to hear her voice and turned around in his seat to look at the newcomers from the plane. Remi’s eyes widened and she ran toward him. She came around the large container, looked inside, and sank to her knees. She began to cry. “Jo fiu,” she said quietly. She popped up to her feet and threw her arms around Sam. “Oh, Sam. I don’t believe this.”

  “I thought you deserved a present,” he said. “But Zoltán deserved a present too and what he seemed to want was you.”

  Tibor, János, and Tibor’s wife’s cousin the dog trainer helped Sam push the cart to the plane. At the foot of the steps, Remi said, “We can’t carry him up those steps in a box.”

  She knelt, opened the cagelike door, and out came Zoltán, first the big black snout and then the broad head and long-furred neck and then the muscular shoulders and body. She put her arms around the dog’s neck and held him for a moment. “Jo fiu,” she whispered. “Good boy.” She stood. “Fel,” she said. “Up.” She began to climb the steps and Zoltán followed her up into the plane.

  Tibor helped Sam carry the big travel carrier and set it down, then used its straps to secure it to an empty row of seats. Then he said to Sam and Remi, “We’ll see each other before long,” and went quickly down the steps and into the terminal.

  As Remi and Zoltán walked back into the passenger area, Selma eyed the big dog. “Oh, good. He’s finally bought you a pony.”

  Remi said, “Selma, this is Zoltán. Come here and let him sniff your hand. He won’t hurt you.”

  Selma put out her hand for Zoltán and then patted his thick neck.

  “—unless I tell him to.”

  Pete and Wendy laughed as Selma retreated. “He’s just right,” Pete said. “If you go to Alaska, he can pull the sled by himself.”

  “Okay,” said Remi. “Now you two.” Pete and Wendy approached Zoltán and patted him. He stood still and tolerated the attention.

  Remi went to her seat beside Sam. To Zoltán she said, “Ül.” The dog sat at her feet. She tickled him behind the ears.

  The refueling and the preflight inspection were completed and the steward closed the cabin door. Sam got up, went to the carrier, and came back with a bag of dog treats.

  “Good idea,” Pete said. “Those will buy us time if he decides to eat us.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Sam. “He’s better educated than we are. He’s trained to recognize which people need eating and to protect the rest of us.” Remi leaned down and hugged Zoltán again, then gave him a treat.

  The pilot started the engines and the passengers fastened their seat belts. As the plane moved ahead, taxiing over the pavement, Zoltán looked watchful and ate his treat. The plane reached the end of the runway and turned into the wind. While the plane accelerated along the runway and then rose into the air, Remi kept her hand on Zoltán’s shoulder to reassure him. “Don’t worry, Zoltán. I’m here with you.” Her safe, calm, musical voice seemed to relax him. As the rattles and vibrations ended and the plane lifted off the ground, Zoltán let his big head rest on the carpet and settled in for a long flight.

  Remi leaned close to Sam and whispered, “I love him. And I love you. But this is so extravagant. A dog like him, with his training, costs as much as a Rolls-Royce.”

  “A Rolls-Royce is a great machine. But it won’t trade its life for yours.”

  Sam tilted back his seat and so did Remi. She rested her head on his chest. Zoltán looked up at them once, then surveyed the cabin and laid his head down again and closed his eyes.

  GOLDFISH POINT, LA JOLLA

  THE FIRST FLOOR

  IT WAS SUNSET WHEN REMI AND ZOLTÁN WENT OUT FOR their evening run along the beach. In the weeks since the Fargos had returned from Europe, Remi had devoted a great deal of time to working with Zoltán. She had wanted him to get used to the part of the world that would be his home.

  So far, Zoltán seemed to like La Jolla. He was utterly calm and peaceful. When she walked, he walked. When she ran, he ran. Today she had run to the little protected beach at the south end of La Jolla that was called the Children’s Pool. Lying on every inch of the beach and the concrete breakwater were about a hundred seals and sea lions. She knew there was no way Zoltán could have seen seals or sea lions in Hungary, but he seemed no more inclined to bother the resting sea mammals than he had been to bother a tree or a park bench.

  They turned back and ran along the concrete path toward Goldfish Point, then up onto the green lawn and past the palm trees of the park to the Valencia Hotel. As she looked out beyond the park’s vast lawn to the ocean, she thought about what an incredible place this was. La Jolla meant “the Jewel,” and it was the right name. She and Sam had chosen to build their house up above Goldfish Point, at the north end of the little district. The point was the entrance to the surf-splashed caves along the rocky part of the coast and was named for the bright orange Garibaldi that swam in La Jolla Cove.

  When Remi and Sam had designed their house, they had just spent six years devoting all their time to building and running their company, which produced and sold the argon laser scanner that he had invented. They had been offered an astonishing sum for the company and its patents and had made the sale. For the first time not only could they afford to build a large and expensive house, they had the time and energy to devote to it.

  When it was finished, the house was twelve thousand square feet on four floors planted above Goldfish Point. The top floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite, two bathrooms, two walk-in closets, a small kitchen, and a sitting room with a wall of windows that looked out on the ocean. The third floor held four guest suites, the main living room, the main kitchen, and the dining room. They had decided to use the second floor for a gym, an endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand-square-foot strip for Remi’s fencing and Sam’s judo.

  The only place for an office was the ground floor. It had open work spaces for Sam, Remi, Selma, and up to four researchers. There were more guest bedrooms, a lab, and a fourteen-foot-long saltwater aquarium with plants and animals from the California coast.

  As Remi and Zoltán took their evening jog home, she looked out beyond the cove and saw two yachts she had not noticed there earlier. They sat offshore about a half mile and, from her perspective on the path above the beach, they looked as though they were almost touching. They were both big, fast cruisers in the 130-foot class, a kind of yacht that she had seen European celebrities charter in the western Mediterranean. They were commonly capable of about sixty knots, and a few were faster. She’d seen a few like them in the San Diego Harbor in the past couple years, but they were extremely expensive and better suited for speeding people between the Greek islands or along the French Riviera than plying the Pacific.

  She and Zoltán were past the hotel now and beginning to make their way up to the street that led to the higher wooded plateau where their house stood. She could see it from where they were, perched up on the hillside, its walls of windows facing the ocean on three sides. The lights in the house were warm and welcoming to her. Sam had designed and installed a system of individual sensors that automatically turned on a few lights on each floor at dusk. Because there were few interior walls, that gave most of the house a golden glow.

  Remi kept trotting up the hill, which was the hardest part of her daily run, when she no
ticed that, all at once, Zoltán became oddly agitated. He leapt forward and then stopped abruptly at her feet and stared ahead with his amber-and-black German shepherd eyes. Remi stopped and stood beside him, trying to determine what he was staring at. Something ahead on the winding street was worrying him.

  Remi was concerned and now even more impatient to get home. She knew enough about Zoltán’s sense of smell, his training, and his predator’s ability to detect the presence of living things hidden from human view to know he was evaluating something he considered unusual and important. She considered putting his leash on. Maybe she had discovered a situation where he was unreliable. She’d heard stories of shepherds going after postal workers because of the smell of dry-cleaning fluid on their uniforms. It could be something like that. Actually, no, it couldn’t. He was exquisitely trained, and using the leash would have seemed to her to show a lack of faith in him.

  While she was waiting for him, Zoltán began to move forward again. He didn’t trot, as he had before. His head was low, his nose sniffing the air and his eyes fixed on something Remi couldn’t see. His shoulders flexed as he began to stalk. His whole body went lower now, compact like a compressed spring.

  Remi didn’t talk to calm Zoltán or rein him in. He wasn’t investigating now. He was sure there was a threat. She walked along behind him, marveling at his single-minded concentration. He stopped again, and then she heard the sound. She felt it in her body, the nerves in her hands, because she had heard the same sound so many times when she pushed a loaded magazine up between the grips and into the receiver and it clicks into place. She heard the slide being pulled back to allow a round to pop up into the chamber.

  Zoltán took four steps at a dead run and leapt into the foliage ahead. He came down halfway into a privet hedge, gripping a man’s arm in his teeth. He shook it until the man lost his grip and the gun clattered on the pavement. Zoltán charged forward, pushing the man backward so he couldn’t retrieve his weapon.