The Kingdom

by Clive Cussler

  “The lot must be at least two acres. It’s a wonder it’s stayed out of the hands of developers.”

  “Not considering who owns it.”

  “Good point,” Sam said. “I have to admit, this is a little spooky.”

  “I was going to say a lot spooky. Shall we?”

  Sam doused the headlights, then shut off the engine, leaving the house illuminated only by what little pale moonlight filtered through the mist. Sam grabbed a leather valise from the backseat, then they climbed out and shut the car’s doors. In the silence, the double thunk seemed abnormally loud. Sam dug his micro LED flashlight from his pants pocket and clicked it on.

  They followed the walkway to the front door. Probing with his foot, Sam checked the stability of the stairs. He nodded to Remi, then mounted the steps, slipped the key Zhilan had provided them into the lock, and turned. With a snick, the mechanism opened. He gave the door a gentle shove; the hinges let out a predictable squelch. Sam stepped across the threshold, followed by Remi.

  “Give me a little light,” Remi said.

  Sam turned and shone the beam on the wall beside the doorjamb, where Remi was hunting for a switch. She found one and flipped it. Zhilan had assured them that the home’s power would be on, and she’d been true to her word. In three corners of the room, floor lamps glowed to life, casting dull yellow cones on the walls.

  “Not as abandoned as King made it sound,” Sam observed. Not only did the bulbs in the lamps work but there wasn’t a trace of dust to be seen. “He must have the place cleaned regularly.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?” Remi asked. “Not only does he keep the house for almost forty years after his father disappeared, he doesn’t change a thing, and he has it cleaned while the yard goes to seed?”

  “Charlie King himself strikes me as strange, so, no, this doesn’t surprise me. Give the guy germ phobia and hide his fingernail clippers, and he’s halfway to Howard Hughes territory.”

  Remi laughed. “Well, the good news is, there’s not much ground to cover.”

  She was right. They could see most of Bully’s house from where they stood: a twenty-foot-square main room that appeared to be a den/study, the east and west walls dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with books, knickknacks, framed photos, and display cases containing what looked to be fossils and artifacts.

  In the center of the room was a butcher-block kitchen table that Lewis had been using as a desk; on it, an old portable typewriter, pens, pencils, steno pads, and stacks of books. On the south wall were three doorways, one leading to a kitchenette, the second a bathroom, and the third a bedroom. Beneath the tang of Pine-Sol and mothballs, the house smelled of mildew and old wallpaper paste.

  “I think the ball’s in your court, Remi. You and Bully were—or are—kindred spirits. I’ll check the other rooms. Holler if you see a bat.”

  “Not funny, Fargo.”

  Remi was a trooper through and through, never afraid to get her hands dirty or to jump into danger, but she loathed bats. Their leathery wings, tiny claw hands, and pinched pig faces struck a primal chord in her. Halloween was a tense time in the Fargo household, and vintage vampire movies were banned.

  Sam stepped back to her, lifted her chin with his index finger, and kissed her. “Sorry.”

  “Accepted.”

  As Sam stepped into the kitchenette, Remi scanned the bookcases. Predictably, all of the books appeared to have been written prior to the 1970s. Lewis King was an eclectic reader, she saw. While most of the books were directly related to archaeology and its associate disciplines—anthropology, paleontology, geology, etcetera—there were also volumes on philosophy, cosmology, sociology, classic literature, and history.

  Sam returned to the den. “Nothing of interest in the other rooms. How about here?”

  “I suspect he was a—” She paused, turned around. “I guess we should decide on a tense for him. Do we think he’s dead or alive?”

  “Let’s assume the latter. Frank did.”

  Remi nodded. “I suspect Lewis is a fascinating man. If I had to wager, I’d say he’d read most of these books, if not all of them.”

  “If he was in the field as much as King said, when would he have had the time?”

  “Speed-reader?” Remi suggested.

  “Possible. What’s in the display cases?”

  Sam shone his flashlight on the one nearest Remi’s shoulder. She peered into it. “Clovis points,” she said, referring to the now universal name for spear and arrow tips constructed from stone, ivory, or bone. “Nice collection too.”

  In turn, they began checking the rest of the display cases. Lewis’s collection was as eclectic as his library. While there were plenty of archaeological artifacts—pot shards, carved antlers, stone tools, petrified wood splinters—there were pieces that belonged in the historical sciences: fossils, rocks, illustrations of extinct plants and insects, scraps of ancient manuscripts.

  Remi tapped the glass of a case containing a parchment written in what looked like Devanagari, the parent alphabet of Nepali. “This is interesting. It’s a reproduction, I think. There’s what looks like a translator’s notation: ‘A. Kaalrami, Princeton University.’ But there’s no translation.”

  “Checking,” Sam said, pulling his iPhone from his pocket. He called up the Safari web browser and waited for the 4G network icon to appear in the phone’s menu bar. Instead, a message box appeared on the screen:

  Select a Wi-Fi Network

  651FPR

  Frowning, Sam studied the message for a moment, then closed the web browser and brought up a note-taking application. He said to Remi, “I can’t get a connection. Take a look.”

  Remi turned to look at him. “What?”

  He winked. “Take a look.”

  She walked over and looked at his iPhone’s screen. On it he had typed a message:

  Follow my lead.

  Remi didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not surprised you couldn’t get a signal,” she said. “We’re in the boondocks.”

  “What do you think? Have we seen everything?”

  “I think so. Let’s go find a hotel.”

  They shut off the lights, then walked out the front door and locked it behind them. Remi said, “What’s going on, Sam?”

  “I picked up a wireless network. It’s named after this address: 1651 False Pass Road.” Sam recalled the message screen and showed it to Remi.

  “Could it be a neighbor?” she asked.

  “No, the average household signal won’t carry beyond fifty yards or so.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Remi said. “I didn’t see any modems or routers. Why would a supposedly abandoned house need a wireless network?”

  “I can think of only one reason, and, given who we’re dealing with, it’s not as crazy as it sounds: monitoring.”

  “As in, cameras?”

  “And/or listening devices.”

  “King’s spying on us? Why?”

  “Who knows. But now my curiosity is piqued. We have to get back in there. Come on, let’s have a look around.”

  “What if he’s got exterior cameras?”

  “Those are hard to hide. We’ll keep an eye out.”

  Shining his flashlight along the home’s facade and soffit, he walked up the driveway toward the garage. When he reached the corner of the house, he paused and took a peek. He pulled back. “Nothing,” he said. He walked to the garage’s side door and tried the knob. It was locked. Sam took off his windbreaker, balled it around his right hand, and pressed his fist against the glass pane above the knob, leaning hard until the glass shattered with a muffled pop. He knocked the remaining glass shards clear, then reached in and unlocked the door.

  Once inside, he took only a minute to find the electrical panel. Sam opened the cover and studied the configuration. It was an old fuse type. Some of the fuses appeared relatively new.

  “What now?” asked Remi.

  “I’m not messing with fuses.”

>   He tracked his flashlight beam from the panel down to the wooden sole plate, then left to the next stud, where he found the electricity meter. Using his pocketknife, he ripped away the lead wire, then opened the cover and flipped off the main power switch.

  “Providing King doesn’t have a generator or backup batteries hidden somewhere, that should do the trick,” Sam said.

  They returned to the front step. Remi pulled out her iPhone and checked for the wireless network. It had disappeared. “Clear,” she said.

  “Let’s go see what Charlie King’s hiding.”

  Back inside, Remi went straight back to the case containing the Devanagari parchment. “Sam, can you get my camera?”

  Sam opened the valise, which he’d placed on a nearby armchair, retrieved Remi’s Cannon G10, and handed it to her. She began taking pictures of the case. Once done, she moved on to the next. “Might as well document everything.”

  Sam nodded. Hands on hips, he surveyed the bookcases. He did a quick mental calculation: there were five hundred to six hundred volumes, he estimated. “I’ll start flipping pages.”

  It quickly became evident that whoever King had hired to clean the house had paid scant attention to the cases; while the books’ spines were clean, their tops were covered in a thick layer of dust. Before removing each volume, Sam examined it with the flashlight for fingerprints. None appeared to have been touched for a decade or more.

  Two hours and a hundred sneezes later they returned the last book to its slot. Remi, who had finished photographing the display cases an hour earlier, had helped with the last hundred volumes.

  “Nothing,” Sam said, backing away from a bookcase and wiping his hands on his pants. “You?”

  “No. I did find something interesting in one of the cases, though.”

  She powered up her camera, scrolled to the relevant picture, and showed Sam the display. He studied it for a moment. “What are those?”

  “Don’t hold me to it yet, but I think they’re ostrich egg shards.”

  “And the engraving? Is it a language? Art?”

  “I don’t know. I took them out of the case and photographed each individually as well.”

  “What’s the significance?”

  “For us in particular, probably nothing. In a larger context . . .” Remi shrugged. “Perhaps a lot.”

  In 1999, Remi explained, a team of French archaeologists discovered a cache of two hundred seventy engraved ostrich shell fragments at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa. The shards were engraved with geometric patterns that dated back between fifty-five thousand and sixty-five thousand years ago and belonged to what is known as the Howiesons Poort lithic cultural period.

  “The experts are still debating the significance of the engravings,” Remi continued. “Some argue it’s artwork; others, a map; still others, a form of written language.”

  “Do these look similar?”

  “I can’t recall, offhand. But if they’re of the same type as the South African shards,” Remi finished, “then they predate the Diepkloof find by at least thirty-five years.”

  “Maybe Lewis didn’t know what he had.”

  “I doubt it. Any archaeologist worth his or her salt would recognize these as significant. Once we find Frank and things get back to normal”—Sam opened his mouth to speak, and Remi quickly corrected herself—“normal for us, I’ll look into it.”

  Sam sighed. “So for now, all we’ve got that is even remotely related to Nepal is that Devanagari parchment.”

  4

  KATHMANDU, NEPAL

  Sam and Remi awoke to the sound of the pilot announcing their final approach to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. After having spent the majority of the past three days in the air, it took a solid thirty seconds before either of them was fully awake. Their United–Cathay Pacific–Royal Nepal flight had taken nearly thirty-two hours.

  Sam sat up, stretched his arms above his head, then reset his watch to match the digital clock on his seat-back screen. Beside him, Remi’s eyelids fluttered open. “My kingdom for a good cup of coffee,” she murmured.

  “We’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

  Remi’s eyes opened the rest of the way. “Ah, I’d almost forgotten.”

  In recent years, Nepal had gotten into the coffee business. As far as the Fargos were concerned, the beans grown in the country’s Arghakhanchi region produced the best black gold in the world.

  Sam smiled at her. “I’ll buy you as much as you can drink.”

  “My hero.”

  The plane banked sharply, and they both stared out the window. In the minds of most travelers, the name Kathmandu evokes exotic visions of Buddhist temples and robed monks, trekkers and mountaineers, incense, spice, ramshackle huts, and shadowed valleys hidden by Himalayan peaks. What doesn’t occur to the first-time visitor is the image of a bustling metropolis of 750,000 people with a ninety-eight percent literacy rate.

  Seen from the air, Kathmandu seems to have dropped neatly into a crater-like valley surrounded by four towering mountain ranges: the Shivapuri, Phulchowki, Nagarjun, and Chandragiri.

  Sam and Remi had been here on vacation twice before. They knew that despite its population, Kathmandu, on the ground, felt like a conglomeration of medium-sized villages shot through with veins of modernism. On one block you might find a thousand-year-old temple to the Hindu Lord Shiva, on the next a cell phone store; on major thoroughfares, sleek hybrid taxis and colorfully decorated rickshaws competing for fares; in a square, located directly across from each other, an Oktoberfest-themed restaurant and a curbside vendor selling bowls of chaat to passersby. And of course, tucked into the mountain slopes and atop the craggy peaks surrounding the city, hundreds of temples and monasteries, some older than Kathmandu itself.

  Experienced travelers that they were, Sam and Remi were well prepared for customs and immigration and were passed through with a minimum of fuss. Soon they found themselves outside the terminal, standing on the ground transportation sidewalk beneath a modern curved awning. The terminal’s facade itself was done in pristine terra-cotta, with a deeply sloped roof adorned with hundreds of rectangular insets.

  “Where did Selma book us?”

  “The Hyatt Regency.”

  Remi gave her nod of approval. On their last visit to Kathmandu, in hopes of immersing themselves in Nepali culture, they’d stayed in a hostel that happened to be located next to a yak-breeding corral. Yaks, they discovered, had little concern for modesty, privacy, or sleep.

  Sam stepped to the curb to hail a taxi. Behind them came a male voice: “Would you be Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”

  Sam and Remi turned and found themselves facing a man and woman, both in their early twenties and both near-duplicate images of not only each other but Charles King as well—save one startling difference. While the King children had been blessed with their father’s white-blond hair, blue eyes, and big smile, their faces also bore subtle yet distinct Asian characteristics.

  Remi gave Sam a sideways glance that he immediately and correctly interpreted: her hunch about Zhilan Hsu had been at least partially right. However, unless the Fargos were assuming too much, her relationship went far beyond that of a common mistress.

  “We would be,” Sam replied.

  The man, who also shared his father’s height but not his corpulence, stuck out his hand and gave each of them a vigorous handshake. “I’m Russell. This is my sister Marjorie.”

  “Sam . . . Remi. We weren’t expecting a reception.”

  “We decided to take the initiative,” Marjorie said. “We’re here on some business for Daddy, so it’s no trouble.”

  Russell said, “If you’ve never visited Kathmandu before, it can be a bit disconcerting. We’ve got a car. We’ll be happy to take you to your hotel.”

  The Hyatt Regency was two miles northwest of the airport. The ride went smoothly, if not quickly, inside the King children’s Mercedes-Benz sedan. Inside its sound-controlled interior and tinted wi
ndows, Sam and Remi found the trip a tad surreal. At the wheel, Russell navigated the confusing narrow streets easily while Marjorie, in the front passenger’s seat, gave them a running travelogue over her shoulder with all the charm of a canned tour guide script.

  At last they pulled up to the Hyatt’s covered lobby turnaround. Russell and Marjorie were out of the car and holding open the backseat doors before Sam and Remi had touched the handles.

  Like the airport terminal’s, the Hyatt Regency’s architecture was a blend of old and new: a sprawling six-story facade in terra-cotta and cream topped by a pagoda-style roof. The lush manicured grounds occupied twenty acres.

  A bellman approached the car, and Russell barked something in Nepali. The man nodded vigorously and forced a smile, then retrieved the luggage from the trunk and disappeared into the lobby.

  “We’ll let you get settled in,” said Russell, then handed them each a business card. “Give me a call later, and we can discuss how you’d like to proceed.”

  “Proceed?” Sam repeated.

  Marjorie smiled. “Sorry, Daddy probably forgot to tell you. He asked us to be your guides while you look for Mr. Alton. See you tomorrow!”

  With almost synchronized smiles and waves, the King children climbed back into the Mercedes and pulled away.

  Sam and Remi watched the receding car for a few seconds. Then Remi murmured, “Is anyone in the King family normal?”

  Forty-five minutes later they were settled into their suite and enjoying their coffee.

  After spending the afternoon lying around the pool relaxing, they returned to their suite for cocktails. Sam ordered a Sapphire Bombay Gin Gibson, and Remi asked for a Ketel One Cosmopolitan. They finished reading the dossier Zhilan had given them at the Palembang Airport. While on the surface it seemed thorough, they found little of substance on which they could start their hunt.

  “I have to admit,” Remi said, “the combination of Zhilan Hsu’s and Charlie King’s genes produced . . . interesting results.”