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NEAR SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
After parting company with King, Sam and Remi had returned to Pulau Legundi, where, as expected, they found Professor Stan Dydell surveying the site. Remi’s former teacher at Boston College had taken a sabbatical to participate in the multiple excavations. After hearing their news about Alton, Dydell agreed to oversee the dig until they returned or found a permanent replacement.
Thirty-six hours and three connections later they landed in San Diego at noon local time. Sam and Remi had driven straight to the Alton home to break the news to Frank’s wife. Now, with their luggage deposited in their own home’s foyer, they’d made their way downstairs to Selma’s domain, the workroom.
Measuring two thousand square feet, the high-ceilinged space was dominated by a twenty-foot-long maple-topped worktable lit from above by halogen pendant lamps and surrounded by high-backed stools. Along one wall was a trio of half cubicles—each equipped with a brand-new 12-core Mac Pro workstation and a thirty-inch Cinema HD Display—a pair of glassed-in offices, one each for Sam and Remi, an environmentally controlled archive vault, a small screening room, and a research library. The opposite wall was dedicated to Selma’s only hobby: a fourteen-foot, five-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium filled with a rainbow-hued assortment of fish. Its soft gurgling lent the workroom a mellow ambience.
Above the first-floor work space, the Fargos’ home was a three-story, twelve-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style house with an open floor plan, vaulted ceilings, and enough windows and skylights that they rarely had their lights on for more than a couple hours a day. What electricity they did draw was primarily supplied by a robust array of newly installed solar panels on the roof.
The top floor contained Sam and Remi’s master suite. Directly below this were four guest suites, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen/great room that jutted over the cliff and overlooked the ocean. On the second floor was a gymnasium containing both aerobic and circuit training exercise equipment, a steam room, a Hydro-Worx endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand square feet of hardwood floor space for Remi to practice her fencing and Sam his judo.
Sam and Remi took a pair of stools at one corner of the worktable. Selma joined them. She wore her traditional work attire: khaki pants, sneakers, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses complete with a neck chain. Pete Jeffcoat and Wendy Corden wandered over to listen. Tan, fit, blond, and easygoing, Selma’s assistants were quintessential Californians but far from beach bums. Jeff had a degree in archaeology, Wendy in social sciences.
“She’s worried,” Remi now said. “But did a good job of hiding it, for the kids. We told her we’d keep her updated. Selma, if you could touch base with her every day while we’re gone . . . ?”
“Of course. How was your audience with His Highness?”
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 h
im 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.”
MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA
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.
