The Kingdom fa-3 Read online

“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 whole-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.

  “Yes, of course. One moment.” The woman tapped on a keyboard below the counter and studied the monitor for a moment. “Professor Kaalrami is currently meeting with a graduate student in the library. The meeting is scheduled to end at three.” The woman produced a campus map, then circled their current location and that of the library.

  “Thank you,” Sam said.

  Kathmandu’s campus was small, with only a dozen or so main buildings centered atop a rise. Below were miles and miles of green terraced fields and thick forests. In the distance they could see Tribhuvan International Airport. To the north of this, just visible, were the pagoda-style roofs of the Hyatt Regency.

  They walked a hundred yards east down a hedge-lined sidewalk, turned left, and found themselves at the library’s entrance. Once inside, a staff member directed them to a second-floor conference room. They arrived as a lone student was leaving. Inside, seated at a round conference table, was a plump elderly Indian woman in a bright red-and-green sari.

  Remi said, “Excuse me, would you be Professor Adala Kaalrami?”

  The woman looked up and scrutinized them through a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. “Yes, I am she.” Her English was thickly accented with a lightly musical quality common to many Indian English speakers.

  Remi introduced herself and Sam, then asked if they could sit down. Kaalrami nodded to the pair of chairs opposite her. Sam said, “Does the name Lewis King mean anything to you?”

  “Bully?” she replied without hesitation.

  “Yes.”

  She smiled broadly; she had a wide gap between her front teeth. “Oh, yes, I remember Bully. We were . . . friends.” The glimmer in her eyes told the Fargos the relationship had gone beyond mere friendship. “I was affiliated with Princeton but had come to Tribhuvan University on loan. That was long before Kathmandu University was founded. Bully and I met at a social function of some kind. Why do you ask this?”

  “We’re looking for Lewis King.”

  “Ah . . . Ghost hunters, are you?”

  “I take that to mean you believe he’s dead,” Remi said.

  “Oh, I do not know. Of course I’ve heard the stories about his periodic manifestations, but I have never seen him, or any genuine pictures of him. At least, not in the last forty years or so. I’d like to think if he were alive, he would have come to see me.”

  Sam pulled a manila folder from his valise, pulled out a copy of the Devanagari parchment, and slid it across the table to Kaalrami. “Do you recognize this?”

  She studied it for a moment. “I do. That is my signature. I translated this for Bully in . . .” Kaalrami pursed her lips, thinking, “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “What can you tell us about it?” Sam asked. “Did Lewis tell you where he found it?”

  “He did not.”

  Remi said, “To me, it looks like Devanagari.”

  “Very good, my dear. Close, but incorrect. It is written in Lowa. While not quite a dead language, it is fairly rare. At last estimate, there are only four thousand native Lowa speakers alive today. They are mostly found in the north of the country, up near the Chinese border, in what used to be-”

  “Mustang,” Sam guessed.

  “Yes, that’s right. And you pronounced it correctly. Good for you. Most Lowa speakers live in and around Lo Monthang. Did you know that about Mustang or was it a good guess?”

  “A guess. The only current lead we have on Lewis King’s whereabouts is a photograph in which he supposedly appears. It was taken a year ago in Lo Monthang. We found that parchment at Lewis’s home.”

  “Do you have this picture with you?”

  “No,” Remi said, then glanced at Sam. Their shared expression said, Why didn’t we ask for a copy of the picture? Rookie mistake. “I’m sure we can get it, though.”

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sp; “If it is not too much trouble. I like to think I would recognize Bully if it were truly him.”

  “Has anyone else come to see you recently about King?”

  Kaalrami hesitated again, tapping an index finger on her lip. “A year ago, perhaps a bit longer than that, a pair of kids were here. Strange-looking pair-”

  “Twins? Blond hair, blue eyes, Asian features?”

  “Yes! I did not particularly like them. I know that is not a charitable thing to say, but I must be honest. There was just something about them . . .” Kaalrami shrugged.

  “Do you remember what they asked you?”

  “Just general questions about Bully-if I had any old letters from him or remember him talking about his work in the region. I could not help them.”

  “They didn’t have a copy of this parchment?”

  “No.”

  Sam asked, “We never found the original translation. Would you mind?”

  “I can give you the essence of it, but a written translation will take a while. I could do that tonight, if you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” said Remi. “We’d be most grateful.”

  Professor Kaalrami adjusted her glasses and centered the parchment before her. Slowly she began tracing her finger down the lines of text, her lips moving soundlessly.

  After five minutes, she looked up. She cleared her throat.

  “It is a royal edict of sorts. The Lowa phrase does not translate well to English, but it is an official order. Of that, I’m certain.”

  “Is there a date?”

  “No, but if you look here, at the upper left corner, there’s a piece of text missing. Was it on the original parchment?”

  “No, I photographed it exactly as it appeared. Do you remember if the date was on the original you saw?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Would you care to venture a guess?”

  “Do not hold me to this, but I would estimate between six and seven hundred years old.”

  “Go on, please,” Sam prompted.

  “Again, you must wait for the written version . . .”

  “We understand.”

  “It is an order to a group of soldiers . . . special soldiers called Sentinels. They are instructed to carry out a plan of some kind-something detailed in another document, I suspect. The plan is designed to remove something called the Theurang from its place of hiding and transport it to safety.”