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She turned the screen toward him. He said, “It looks like wood to me too. There’s no bark on it, so it may be thick planks instead of tree trunks.”
“Then get back to work.”
Sam reinserted the bit and attached its threaded extension and began to drill. The wood was hard and had a dense grain, but he definitely could tell he was drilling through wood and not stone. He was cautious because if he broke the drill, he didn’t have another. At the end of about ten minutes, it abruptly sank a few inches. “We’re through the wood,” Sam said. “We’re there.”
He removed the drill and its extension and set them aside. He and Remi fed the fiber-optic rig down into the new shaft while Remi watched the image on the screen. When the tip light and camera reached the place where the drill had sunk suddenly, the space opened up and the computer image changed.
As they lowered and turned the rig, they could see the inside of the rectangular space clearly. “It’s the tomb,” said Remi. “I’m recording it.” With difficulty, Sam turned his body in the narrow space of the box to join her in front of the computer screen. They could see a body, now a skeleton, lying on a mat at the rear of the tomb. He was dressed in a rich red costume, with a cape, a pair of high boots, and a piece of headgear unlike anything they’d ever seen. This hat, or helmet, was at least two feet in length, shaped like a narrow cone, with a complicated design of gold that protruded an inch or two from the front above the forehead. He wore a belt with a long straight sword in a scabbard and a dagger that was about half as long. His coat was held in place by gold buttons, and then more gold buttons studded his outfit. The chamber was well supplied with weapons, including a round shield with a silvery plated surface, bows, and quivers full of arrows. They could see jade and gold jewelry, carved ivory boxes, saddles and bridles decorated with more gold.
They manipulated the fiber optics, the size and brightness of the computer image, and searched for the most important part of the treasure, the message from Attila. After twenty minutes or so of recording every item in the tomb, Remi whispered, “I haven’t seen anything that could be it, have you?”
“No. I’m going to try something else.” Sam pulled the rigid rig up, then went to work on it. He removed the metal tubes that housed the cable and then he removed the extension. What he had left was a long, black, insulated optical fiber. On the far end was the rounded tip with the light and the tiny camera. Slowly, carefully, he inserted the flexible cable into the drill hole. Many times he had to pull it back an inch or two to straighten it or twist it to get around a snag. At last, after many minutes of feeding it in, it cleared the drill shaft, then curled a bit so they could see the sides of the stone chamber. “Wait. I see something.”
“There,” said Remi. “There it is.”
She took the fiber-optic cable and twirled it with her fingers so she could aim it. The image was a set of deep scratches made with a knife on the wall. Ego Attila filius Munzuci. It went on, and Remi made sure to get every bit of it recorded, then sent it to Selma’s computer, and then copied it on the disk, which she took out and put into the deep cargo pocket of Sam’s pants. They began to dismantle their equipment and put it into their backpacks. As they began to open the hinged bottom of the box, Sam stopped.
“Wait,” Sam whispered. “I hear something. Footsteps.”
Remi closed the computer, turned off the fiber-optic light, and pulled it out of the hole. Sam put it into one of the backpacks, with the drill and bit, while Remi put the computer into the other backpack.
They listened. Remi lowered her head to the ground and squinted through the opening at the edge. “It’s men. Five—no, six. They’re coming this way, of all the million ways.”
The footsteps grew louder and louder, as did the men’s voices. There was laughter. They were loud and jovial. There was the clank of a bottle dropping into an empty steel drum used as a trash barrel. Sam and Remi remained motionless, barely breathing.
The footsteps passed by so close that Remi thought she could pick out each man from the others. There was one who seemed to have a stone in his shoe because his walk was scrape-thump, scrape-thump, trying to get it out from under his foot. He called out to his friends as they moved off.
Next there was a creaking sound. The man had sat on top of their box. He took off a shoe, and when he shook it to get the stone out, they could hear the squeak of the dowels in the holes. He put his shoe back on and tied it, and then they heard him trot off after his friends.
Remi exhaled and leaned on Sam. They sat still for a few minutes, and then she looked out again. “It’s clear.”
They opened the hinged section of
the box, crawled out, put their backpacks on, then unhooked the box’s sides and top and made it into a pile. Sam took a cap from the end of the fiber-optic machine, pushed it a couple of inches into the hole he had drilled, and then poured dirt over it and walked across it a couple of times.
They began to walk away from the spot toward the edge of the green market, carrying the pieces of their box. As they did, they heard the sound of a car starting. They stepped close to a wall in the shadows and waited until the car pulled up, its headlights off, and stopped. Nurin got out and opened the trunk. They put the collapsed box inside and then the backpacks. They got into the car and Nurin drove off toward the Zhambyl Hotel.
Sam took out his telephone and called Selma. “Sam?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s around five in the evening there, right?”
“That’s right. And five a.m. there.”
“Remi just sent you the video of the inside of the tomb, including the message.”
“We’ve got it and it’s unbelievable. Here’s Albrecht.”
“Sam. Does the other side know where the tomb is?”
“No. When we saw them, they seemed to be waiting for something, not searching with archaeological equipment. They were just sitting around a table at an outdoor café.”
“Then I implore you, don’t try to excavate. It’s not essential that we be the ones to excavate Mundzuk’s tomb and attempting to do so could easily get you both killed. As soon as we’re there, I’ll send a letter, with the magnetic map and the exact position marked, to Taraz State University and the national government in Astana. The country takes enormous pride in its heritage and they have more right to the burial you found than we do.”
“As soon as you’re where? Here?”
“Rome, Sam. Rome!”
“What?”