The Kingdom (6 page)

Sam recounted their meeting with Charlie King. “Remi and I discussed this on the plane. He says all the right things and has the ol’ country boy routine down pat, but something doesn’t sit right about him.”

“His girl Friday, for one thing,” Remi said, then described Zhilan Hsu. While outside King’s presence, the woman had a thoroughly unnerving demeanor, her behavior aboard the Gulfstream had told a different story. King’s displeasure over the number of ice cubes in his Jack Daniel’s and her mortified reaction told them not only that she was frightened of her employer but that he was a domineering control freak.

“Remi’s also got an interesting hunch about Ms. Hsu,” Sam said.

Remi said, “She’s his mistress. Sam’s not so sure, but I’m positive. And King’s grip on her is iron-fisted.”

“I’m still preparing a biography of the King family,” Selma said, “but, so far, still no luck on Zhilan. I’ll keep working. With your permission, I may call Rube.”

Rube Haywood, another friend of Sam’s, worked at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They’d met, of all places, at the CIA’s infamous Camp Peary covert operations training facility when Sam was with DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Rube was an up-and-coming case officer. While “The Farm” was a prerequisite course for someone like Rube, Sam was there as part of a cooperative experiment: the better engineers understood how case officers worked in the field, DARPA and the CIA proposed, the better they would be able to equip America’s spies.

“If you need to, go ahead. Another thing,” Sam added. “King claims he has no idea what his father’s area of interest was. King claims he’s been searching for him for almost forty years and yet he knows nothing about what drove the man. I don’t buy it.”

Remi added, “He also asserts that he hasn’t bothered contacting either the Nepalese government or the U.S. embassy. Somebody as powerful as King would get action with just a few phone calls.”

“King also claimed Frank wasn’t interested in his father’s Monterey house. But Frank’s too thorough to have ignored that. If King had told Frank about it, he would have gone.”

“Why would King lie about that?” Pete said.

“No idea,” replied Remi.

“What does all that add up to?” Wendy asked.

“Somebody who’s got something to hide,” replied Selma.

“Our thoughts exactly,” Sam said. “The question is, what? King also has a tinge of paranoia. And, to be fair, as wealthy as he is, he’s probably got scammers coming at him in droves.”

“In the end, none of that matters,” Remi said. “Frank Alton is missing. That’s where we need to focus our attention.”

“Starting where?” asked Selma.

“Monterey.”

Sam took the corners slowly as the car’s headlights probed the fog that swirled over the ground and through the foliage that lined the winding gravel road. Below them, the lights of the cliff-side houses twinkled in the gloom, while farther out the navigation beacons of fishing boats floated in the blackness. Remi’s window was open, and through it they could hear the occasional mournful gong of a buoy in the distance.

Tired though they were, Sam and Remi were anxious to get started on Frank’s disappearance, so they’d caught the evening shuttle flight from San Diego to Monterey’s dual-runway Peninsula Airport, where they’d rented a car.

Even without seeing the structure itself, it was clear Lewis “Bully” King’s home was worth millions. More accurately, the property on which it sat was worth millions. A view of Monterey Bay did not come cheap. According to Charlie King, his father had purchased the home in the early fifties. Since then, appreciation would have worked its magic, turning even a tarpaper shack into a real estate gold mine.

The car’s dashboard navigation screen chimed at Sam, signaling another turn. As they rounded the corner, the headlights swept over a lone mailbox sitting atop a listing post.

“That’s it,” Remi said, reading the numbers.

Sam pulled into a driveway lined with scrub pine and a rickety no-longer-white picket fence that seemed to be held erect only by the vines entangling it. Sam let the car coast to a stop. Ahead, the headlights illuminated a thousand-square-foot saltbox-style house. Two small boarded-up windows flanked a front door, below which was a set of crumbling concrete steps. The facade was painted in what had likely once been a deep green. Now what hadn’t peeled away had faded to a sickly olive color.

At the end of the driveway, partially tucked behind the house, stood a single-car garage with drooping eaves troughs.

“That’s a nineteen-fifties house, all right,” said Remi. “Talk about no frills.”

“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:

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:

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.