“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 windows, 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.