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Kane . . .
    One of the men yelped. He saw the man twirl pointing his pistol toward the woods. A low growl flowed from the forest, a shadow shifted to the left, twigs cracked. Other throats rumbled in the darkness, noise rising from all sides. More shadows shifted.
    The two men spoke rapidly in Hungarian, their eyes huge.
    It was the cemetery’s pack of wild dogs.
    Then Tucker felt something cold and wet touch the fingers behind his back. He jumped, startled. He hadn’t heard a thing. He reached back there and found fur. Then something heavy was dropped into his palms.
    The pistol.
    “Good boy,” he whispered under his breath. “Stay.”
    It seemed Kane had won over some friends.
    Tucker gently placed the pistol on the tomb behind him. Using the ongoing distraction, he reached blindly back to Kane to investigate the audio glitch. He didn’t want to be cut off from his partner any longer.
    Especially not now.
    He needed this link more than ever.
    He toggled the camera off, then on again, rebooting it, praying that was enough.
    A moment later, a satisfying squelch of static in his left ear meant all was right with the world.
    “All done, Kane. Go back and hide with your friends.”
    All he heard as Kane retreated was the softest scrape of nail on marble. Within another minute, the forest went quiet again, the pack vanishing into the night.
    The two guards shook off their fear, laughing brusquely now that the threat seemed to have backed off, sure they had intimidated the pack away.
    As Tucker listened to the soft pant of Kane in his ear, he slipped the pistol into his belt and hid it under the fall of his jacket.
    And not a moment too soon.
    A shout rose from the open crypt. The light grew brighter. Then Domonkos’s pocked face appeared and barked new orders, smiling broadly. Tucker could almost see the sheen of gold in his eyes.
    Had they actually found the stolen treasure?
    Tucker was forced to his feet and made to follow Domonkos down into the crypt. He guessed they needed as many able-bodied men as possible to haul up the treasure from below. Tucker mounted the steps, trailed by the other two men.
    The narrow stairs descended from walls made of brick to a tunnel chiseled out of natural stone. He lost count at a hundred steps. Conversation had died down as they descended, stifled by the weight of stone above and the dreams of riches below. Soon all Tucker heard was the men breathing around him, their echoing footfalls, and somewhere far below the drip of water.
    Good.
    At last, the end of the staircase appeared, lit by the glow from Csorba’s flashlight.
    Reaching the cavern, Domonkos entered ahead of them, sweeping his arm to encompass the space as if welcoming them to his home. He found his voice again and chattered happily to his comrades.
    Tucker took a few steps into the space, awed by the natural vault, dripping with water, feathered with thick capes of flowstone and spiked above by stalactites. Tucker wondered how many Jewish slaves Oberführer Erhard Bock had worked to death to tunnel into this secret cavern, how many others had died to keep its secret—and as he stared over at Csorba, he wondered how this Jewish scholar could so blithely discount his own heritage and prepare to steal gold soaked in his ancestors’ own blood.
    Csorba stood next to a stack of crates, each a cubic foot in size and emblazoned with a swastika burned into the wood. He had broken one open, pulled down from the top of the pile. Hundreds of gold ingots, each the size of a stick of butter, spilled across the floor.
    Csorba turned, wide-eyed.
    He spoke to the others, who all cheered.
    He even shared the news with Tucker.
    “Erhard Bock lied,” he said, awe filling his voice. “There are not thirty-six crates here. There are over eighty !”
    Tucker calculated in his head. That equaled over $200 million.
    Not a bad haul if you don’t mind murdering some innocent cemetery caretakers, a kindly university professor, his