The Tombs

and converted to cash. This is like salvage archaeology. Either we do it now or we’ll never get another chance. And this is the final treasure, the one Attila’s message said we had to find to get to his tomb.”

“I know,” said Albrecht. “But treasure is never something worth getting killed for.”

“Agreed,” said Sam. “We’ve already pushed our luck to the limit. But we may have a way to push the limit.”

TARAZ, KAZAKHSTAN

THAT EVENING, SAM WENT TO NURIN’S ROOM AND INVITED him to join him and Remi for dinner. He communicated this by a mixture of pantomime and gesture, finally walking to the elevator and beckoning Nurin to follow. When Sam had ushered him to the room, he and Remi presented him with a room service menu.

They asked him to use the telephone to order what each of them wanted for dinner. They had drawn pictures of farm animals and vegetables on a piece of paper. He got the idea, and performed the task. While they waited for their dinner, Remi picked up a magazine from the coffee table and showed him pictures of a fashionable Kazakh woman wearing flat shoes, a flowing dress, and a hijab that covered her hair. She pointed to what must be the address of a store in Taraz. She also showed him an ad for baby furnishings, clothing, and equipment and pointed to that address. Later in the evening, after they’d eaten, she took a notepad and showed him a set of pictures that Sam had drawn. Sam was an engineer, so the drawings were clear and neat, with numbers to show the dimensions.

Sam’s first pictures were of a machinist with a tapping-and-threading machine taking a series of tubes and tapping and threading them on both ends so they could be screwed together. He took out the metal tubes and showed them to Nurin. Next there was a diagram of a large wooden box with dimensions written on it and a man painting it black. Nurin studied the pictures and diagram. Then Remi pointed to both and handed him several thousand tenge. Nurin, who was already eager to do something to stave off the boredom of sitting in a hotel for a week waiting to drive them back, accepted his assignment with pleasure. They could only hope Nurin would buy what they wanted and find a machinist to do the modifications.

Two days later, in the morning, a fashionable woman and her husband in a Kazakh-made business suit walked along the streets of the city pushing a large old-fashioned baby carriage. As it was a bright summer day, the carriage had a silk shawl draped over the carriage’s awning and secured at the foot so the baby inside would be shaded and protected from the dust of the streets. The couple pushed the carriage through the green market, passing by every table or bin in a very systematic way. They went all the way to the end of one aisle, turned, and came back up the next, not skipping any part of the market.

The baby in the carriage was remarkably quiet. Just once, when the mother reached in under the silk shawl to adjust his blanket, did he cry. She reached in again and patted him, and after a minute or so he stopped crying and, a few fretful gurgles after that, went back to sleep.

The couple, when they spoke to each other, did so quietly in French or German. After they had explored the whole market, they moved on. They walked a few blocks surrounding the market and then walked back to the Zhambyl Hotel. A few minutes later, their driver, Nurin, came out to the enclosed lot, folded their carriage, and put it in the trunk of his car. At the same time, had anyone been interested, they could have seen the wife carrying a laptop computer and the husband a lesser-known piece of equipment called a magnetometer up to their room wrapped in the baby’s blanket.

Once they were in their room, Sam and Remi used the laptop computer to convert all of the magnetometer data to a magnetic map of the central market of Taraz. They sent it to Selma and Albrecht at their house in La Jolla. Then they went down to the hotel restaurant for lunch.

The Kazakhstan diet was very dependent upon meat. Sam and Remi managed to avoid horse meat and horse sausage, sheep’s brains, and kuyrdak, a dish made of the mixed innards of several animals. Instead they ordered kebabs, which had pieces of meat that they believed they recognized as fowl, and tandyr nan, a kind of bread, and they were very happy.

When they were back in their room, Remi’s new phone buzzed. “Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Remi, it’s Selma. Are you both there?”

“Hi, Selma. Yes. Sam’s with me.”

“I loved the baby crying. Where did you get that?”

“I found it on YouTube and recorded it on a disk. I just reached into the carriage and played it once and then turned it off.”

“I’ve got Albrecht on now. He’s getting impatient.”

“Okay,” said Remi. “Hi, Albrecht.”

“Hello, Remi. Hello, Sam. You two have succeeded admirably. You’ve mapped the entire central market, or what’s under it.” He laughed. “I didn’t tell you this before, but I was afraid Attila might have been referring to some burial ground outside the city. The early Huns in Asia used to pick a remote valley and bury people under mounds there. If that was the case, we might never find it. But, fortunately, this is different.”

“Do you think the big rectangle near the center is the tomb?”

“I see several notable subterranian features—a long wall, which was at some point reduced to a line of rocks a man could have stepped over, a few outlines of early buildings, and a solid rectangular stone box. I compared its magnetic signature with the one on the Po River in Italy and the one we found in the vineyard at Kiskunhalas in Hungary. I also checked the dimensions of the tombs along the Danube and compared them. We don’t have readings for the chamber in France or the one in Transylvania. But this one is the same shape and presents the same magnetic anomaly, the same disturbance to the earth’s magnetic field, as the ones we have. Like the others, it’s apparently a hollow room or it would have a much stronger signature.”

“Did you happen to measure the exact spot?”

“We did. It’s in the area that you surveyed. On your third pass, you went left to right. At four hundred seventeen meters on that aisle, you passed over the first wall of the crypt. It’s around seven feet below the present surface. At four hundred twenty-two meters, you reached the end of the chamber.”

Remi said, “Do you know if it was a buried chamber to begin with?”

“We can’t know from this data. But it’s below the features around it, as though it were already underground before they were built. And it’s the only structure in the area that fits our experience of a Hun burial of the fifth century.”

“Do you have any questions for us?” Remi asked.

“When you were walking the area, did you see any indication that the ground near this area had been disturbed? Any signs of digging?”

“We didn’t see any,” Sam said. “We don’t even know if Poliakoff’s men are here looking for Mundzuk’s tomb or just hunting for us.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do yet?”

“We’re working on it,” Sam said. “We’ll call you if we accomplish anything. Good night.”

Sam and Remi went to Nurin’s room and examined the large wooden box he had made. It was about five feet on a side and had a hinged lower section. It was held together with dowels fitted into holes and could be taken apart and moved.

Sam explained, with gestures and the clock, that he wanted Nurin to drive Sam and Remi to the market and help them set up the box for one-thirty a.m. He plugged in their electronic equipment to recharge and then they went to sleep.

They awoke at one, dressed, packed up their fully charged equipment—computer, battery-operated drill, steel drill bits, lights, fiber-optic unit and tubes—into their backpacks and went to Nurin’s room. He was awake and ready, with the five-piece box already lying flat in the car trunk. He drove them to the green market and helped them carry the pieces to the deserted spot.

The awnings of the stalls were still up, but the tables and bins were now empty. Stores along the edges of the market were all locked up, with sliding gates across their fronts to prevent burglaries. There were lights on in some of the streets beyond the shops, but the contrast kept the marketplace in deeper darkness beneath its