“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 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.”