The Kingdom

by Clive Cussler

  “That’s very diplomatic of you, Remi, but let’s be honest: Russell and Marjorie are scary. Combine their appearance with their over-the-top friendliness and you’ve got a pair of Hollywood-born serial killers. Did you see specific traces of Zhilan in them?”

  “No, and I’m half hoping there aren’t. If she’s their mother, that means she was probably eighteen or nineteen when she had them.”

  “Which would’ve put King in his mid-forties at the time.”

  “Did you notice the lack of Texas accents? I think I caught a trace of Ivy League in some of their vowels.”

  “So Daddy shipped them out of Texas and off to college. What I want to know is, how did they know what flight we were on?”

  “Charlie King flexing his muscles? Showing us he’s well connected?”

  “Probably. That might also explain why he didn’t tell us to expect the Wonder Twins. As powerful as King is, he probably fancies himself a master at keeping people off guard.”

  “I’m not fond of having them shadow us everywhere.”

  “Neither am I, but let’s play along tomorrow and see what they know about Frank’s activities. I have a sneaking suspicion the King family knows a lot more than they’re letting on.”

  “Agreed,” Remi replied. “It all adds up to one thing, Sam: King is trying to play the puppet master. The question is, why? Because he’s a control freak or because he’s hiding something?”

  The door chimes rang. As he moved to the door to retrieve an envelope that had just been slid under it, Sam said, “Ah, confirmation of our dinner reservations.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, only if you can be ready to leave in thirty minutes,” replied Sam.

  “Love to, and where are we going?”

  “Bhanchka and Ghan,” responded Sam.

  “How did you remember?”

  “How can you forget such memorable food, the ambience, and Nepalese cuisine in Nepal!”

  Twenty-five minutes later Remi had changed into Akris slacks and a top, with a matching jacket thrown over her arm. And Sam, freshly shaved, wearing a blue Robert Graham shirt and dark gray slacks, ushered her out the door.

  Remi was only marginally surprised to awaken at four a.m. to find her husband not in bed but rather in an armchair in the suite’s sitting area. When something was badgering Sam Fargo’s subconscious, he rarely could sleep. She found him under the soft glow of a lamp reading the dossier Zhilan had given them. Using her hip, Remi gently shoved aside the manila folder. Then she settled into his lap and wrapped her long La Perla silk robe tightly around her.

  “I think I found the culprit,” he said.

  “Show me.”

  He flipped through a series of paper-clipped pages. “The daily e-mail reports that Frank was sending King. They start the day he arrived here and end the morning he disappeared. Do you notice anything different about the last three e-mails?”

  Remi scanned them. “No.”

  “He signed each one ‘Frank.’ Look at the ones prior.”

  Remi did so. She pursed her lips. “Simply signed ‘FA.’”

  “That’s how he signed e-mails to me too.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Just speculating. I’d say either Frank didn’t send the last three e-mails or he did and was trying to embed a distress signal.”

  “I think that’s unlikely. Frank would have found a more clever code.”

  “So that leaves us with the other option. He disappeared earlier than King believes.”

  “And someone was posing as him,” Remi concluded.

  THIRTY MILES NORTH OF

  KATHMANDU, NEPAL

  In the predawn gloom, the Range Rover pulled off the main road. Its headlights swept over green terraced fields as it followed the winding road to the bottom of the valley, where it intersected another road, this one narrower and rutted with mud. The Rover bumped along the track for several hundred yards before crossing a bridge. Below, a river churned, its dark waters lapping at the bridge’s lowermost girders. On the opposite bank the Rover’s headlights briefly illuminated a sign. In Nepali, it read “Trisuli.” Another quarter mile brought the Rover to a squat gray-brick building with a patchwork tin roof. Beside a wooden front door, a square window glowed yellow. The Rover coasted to a stop before the building, and the engine shut off.

  Russell and Marjorie King climbed out and headed for the door. A pair of shadowed figures emerged from behind each corner of the building and intercepted them. Each man carried an automatic weapon diagonally across his body. Flashlights clicked on, panned over the King children’s faces, then clicked off. With a jerk of the head, one of the guards gestured for the pair to enter.

  Through the door, a single man was sitting at a wooden trestle table. Aside from this and a flickering kerosene lantern, the room was barren.

  “Colonel Zhou,” Russell King grunted.

  “Welcome, my nameless American friends. Please sit.”

  They did so, taking the bench across from Zhou. Marjorie said, “You’re not in uniform. Please don’t tell us you’re afraid of Nepalese Army patrols.”

  Zhou chuckled. “Hardly. While I’m sure my men would enjoy the target practice, I doubt my superiors would look kindly on my crossing the border without going through proper channels.”

  “This is your meeting,” Russell said. “Why did you ask us here?”

  “We need to discuss the permits you have requested.”

  “The permits we’ve already paid for, you mean?” replied Marjorie.

  “Semantics. The area you wish to enter is heavily patrolled—”

  “All of China is heavily patrolled,” Russell observed.

  “Only part of the area in which you wish to travel falls under my command.”

  “This has never been a problem in the past.”

  “Things change.”

  “You’re squeezing us,” Marjorie said. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were hard, mean.

  “I don’t know that expression.”

  “Bribery.”

  Colonel Zhou frowned. “That’s harsh. The truth is, you are right: you have already paid me. Unfortunately, a restructuring in my district has left me with more mouths to feed, if you understand my meaning. If I do not feed those mouths, they will begin talking to the wrong people.”

  “Perhaps we should be talking to them instead of you,” said Russell.

  “Go ahead. But do you have the time? As I recall, it took you eight months to find me. Are you willing to start from the beginning again? You were lucky with me. Next time, you might find yourself imprisoned as spies. It could still happen, in fact.”

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Colonel,” Marjorie said.

  “No more dangerous than illegally crossing into Chinese territory.”

  “And, I suppose, no more dangerous than not having your men search us for weapons.”

  Zhou’s eyes narrowed, darted toward the door, then back to the King twins. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said.

  “She would,” Russell said. “And so would I. Bet on it. But not now. Not tonight. Colonel, if you knew who we were, you would think twice about extorting more money from us.”

  “I may not know your names, but I know your kind, and I have a hunch about what you are after.”

  Russell said, “How much to feed these extra mouths?”

  “Twenty thousand—in euros, not dollars.”

  Russell and Marjorie stood up. Russell said, “You’ll have the money in your account before day’s end. We’ll contact you when we’re ready to cross.”

  He could tell from the chill in the night air, the utter lack of traffic sounds, and the nearby and frequent clanking of yak bells that he was fairly high in the foothills. Blindfolded as soon as he’d been shoved into the van, he had no way of knowing how far from Kathmandu they’d taken him. Ten miles or a hundred, it didn’t really matter. Once outside the valley in which the city rested, the terrain could swallow a person who
le—and had done so, thousands of times. Ravines, caves, sinkholes, crevasses . . . a million places in which to hide or die.

  The floor and walls were made of rough planking, as was the cot. His mattress was a straw-filled pad that smelled vaguely of manure. The stove was an old potbellied model, he guessed, from the sound of the kindling hatch banging shut whenever his captors entered to stoke the fire. Occasionally, over the tang of wood smoke, he caught the faint smell of stove fuel, the kind used by hikers and mountaineers.

  He was being held in an abandoned trekkers’ hut, somewhere far enough off the regular trails that it received no visitors.

  His captors had spoken fewer than twenty words to him since his abduction, all of them gruff commands given in broken English: sit, stand, eat, toilet . . . On the second day, however, he’d caught a snippet of conversation through the hut’s wall, and while his grasp of Nepali was virtually nonexistent, he knew enough to recognize it. He’d been taken by locals. Who, though? Terrorists or guerrillas? He knew of none operating within Nepal. Kidnappers? He doubted it. They hadn’t forced him to make any ransom recordings or letters. Nor had they mistreated him. He was fed regularly, given plenty to drink, and his sleeping bag was well suited for subzero temperatures. When they handled him, they were firm but not rough. Again he wondered, who? And why?

  So far, they’d made only one major mistake: while they’d bound his wrists securely with what felt like climbing rope, they’d failed to check the hut for sharp edges. In short order, he’d found four of them: the legs of his cot, each of which jutted a few inches above the mattress. The roughly cut wood was unsanded. Not exactly saw blades, but it was a place to start.

  5

  KATHMANDU, NEPAL

  As advertised, Russell and Marjorie pulled into the Hyatt’s turnaround precisely at nine a.m. the next morning. Bright-eyed and smiling, the twins greeted Sam and Remi with another round of handshakes, then ushered them toward the Mercedes. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air crisp.

  “Where to?” Russell asked as he put the car in gear and pulled away.

  “How about the locations where Frank Alton seemed to be spending most of his time?” Remi asked.

  “No problem,” replied Marjorie. “According to the e-mails he was sending Daddy, he spent part of his time in the Chobar Gorge area, about five miles southeast of here. It’s where the Bagmati River empties out of the valley.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes.

  Sam said, “If it was your grandfather that was photographed in Lo Monthang—”

  “You don’t think it was?” Russell said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Daddy thinks it was.”

  “Just playing devil’s advocate. If it was your grandfather, do you have any idea why he would have been in that area?”

  “Can’t think of a thing,” replied Marjorie flippantly.

  “Your father didn’t seem familiar with Lewis’s work. Are either of you?”

  Russell answered. “Just archaeology stuff, I suppose. We never knew him, of course. Just heard stories from Daddy.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but did it occur to you to learn what Lewis was up to? It might have helped in the search for him.”

  “Daddy keeps us pretty busy,” Marjorie said. “Besides, that’s why he hires experts like you two and Mr. Alton.”

  Sam and Remi exchanged glances. Like their father, the King twins seemed only marginally interested in the particulars of their grandfather’s life. Their detachment felt almost pathological.

  “Where did you two go to school?” Remi asked, changing the subject.

  “We didn’t,” Russell answered. “Daddy had us homeschooled by tutors.”

  “What happened to your accents?”

  Marjorie didn’t answer immediately. “Oh, I see what you mean. When we were about four, he sent us to live with our aunt in Connecticut. We lived there until we finished school, then moved back to Houston to work for Daddy.”

  “So he wasn’t around much when you were growing up?” Sam asked.

  “He’s a busy man.”

  Marjorie’s reply was without a trace of rancor, as though it were perfectly normal to bundle your children off to another state for fourteen years and have them raised by tutors and relatives.

  “You two ask a lot of questions,” Russell said.

  “We’re curious by nature,” Sam replied. “Comes with the job.”

  Sam and Remi expected little to come of their visit to Chobar Gorge, and they weren’t disappointed. Russell and Marjorie pointed out a few landmarks and offered more canned travelogue.

  Back in the car, Sam and Remi asked to be taken to the next location: the city’s historical epicenter, known as Durbar Square, which was home to some fifty temples.

  Predictably, this visit was as unrevealing as the first. Shadowed by the King twins, Sam and Remi walked around the square and its environs for an hour, making a show of taking pictures, checking their map, and jotting notes. Finally, shortly before noon, they asked to be taken back to the Hyatt.

  “You’re done?” Russell asked. “Are you sure?”

  “We’re sure,” said Sam.

  Marjorie said, “We’re happy to take you anywhere you’d like to go.”

  “We need to do some research before we continue,” Remi said.

  “We can help with that too.”

  Sam put a little steel in his voice: “The hotel, please.”

  Russell shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  From inside the lobby, they watched the Mercedes pull away. Sam pulled his iPhone from his pocket and checked the screen. “Message from Selma.” He listened to it, then said, “She’s dug something up on the King family.”

  Back in their room, Sam put the phone on Speaker and hit Speed Dial. After thirty seconds of crackling, the line clicked open. Selma answered with, “Finally.”

  “We were on a tour with the King twins.”

  “Productive?”

  “Only in that it reinforced our urge to get away from them,” said Sam. “What’ve you got for us?”

  “First, I’ve found someone who can translate the Devanagari parchment you found at Lewis’s house.”

  “Fantastic,” Remi said.

  “It gets better. I think it’s the original translator—the A. Kaalrami from Princeton. Her first name is Adala. She’s almost seventy and is a professor at . . . Care to guess?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  “Kathmandu University.”

  “Selma, you’re a miracle worker,” Remi said.

  “Normally, I would agree, Mrs. Fargo, but this was dumb luck. I’m e-mailing you Professor Kaalrami’s contact info. Okay, next: after hitting dry hole after dry hole in researching the King family, I ended up calling Rube Haywood. He’s sending me information as he gets it, but what we’ve got so far is interesting. First of all, King isn’t the family’s true surname. It’s the anglicized version of the original German: Konig. And Lewis’s first name was originally Lewes.”

  “Why the change?” asked Remi.

  “We’re not entirely sure at this point, but what we do know is Lewis immigrated to America in 1946 and got a teaching job at Syracuse University. A couple years later, when Charles was four years old, Lewis left him and his mother and started his globe-trotting.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I found out what business Russell and Marjorie are handling there. One of King’s mining concerns—SRG, or Strategic Resources Group—acquired permits from the Nepalese government last year to conduct, and I quote, ‘exploratory studies related to the exploitation of industrial and precious metals.’”

  “Which means what, exactly?” Remi asked. “That’s an awfully vague mission statement.”

  “Intentionally vague,” Sam said.

  Selma replied, “The company isn’t publicly traded, so information is hard to come by. I found two sites that are being leased by SRG. They’re to the northeast of the city.”

  “A tangled web,�
� Remi said. “We’ve got the King twins overseeing a family mining operation in the same place and at the same time Frank disappears while looking for King’s father, who may or may not have been ghosting around the Himalayas for the past forty years. Am I forgetting anything?”

  “That about covers it,” Sam said.

  Selma asked, “Do you want the particulars on the SRG sites?”

  “Hold on to it for now,” Sam replied. “On the surface it seems unrelated, but, with King Charlie, you never know.”

  After asking the Hyatt’s concierge to arrange a rental car, they took to the road, with Sam driving and Remi navigating, a Kathmandu city map flattened against the dashboard of the Nissan X-Trail SUV.

  One of the few lessons they’d learned (and had since forgotten) from their last visit to Kathmandu some six years earlier came rushing back to them soon after leaving the hotel.

  Except for major thoroughfares like the Tridevi and the Ring Road, Kathmandu’s streets rarely bore names, either on maps or signs. Verbal directions were given relative to landmarks, usually intersections or squares—known as chowks or toles respectively—and occasionally to temples or markets. Anyone unfamiliar with such reference points had little choice but to rely on a regional map and a compass.

  In Sam and Remi’s case, they were lucky. Kathmandu University lay fourteen miles from their hotel in the foothills on the extreme eastern outskirts of the city. After spending twenty frustrating minutes finding the Arniko Highway, they made smooth progress and arrived at the campus only an hour after setting out.

  Following signs in both Nepali and English, they turned left at the entrance, then drove up a tree-lined drive to a brick-and-glass building fronted by an oval plot brimming with wildflowers. They found a parking spot, walked through the glass entrance doors, and found an information desk.

  The young Indian woman sitting at the counter spoke Oxford-tinged English. “Good morning, welcome to Kathmandu University. How may I help you?”

  “We’re looking for Professor Adala Kaalrami,” said Remi.