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“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 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.”