Free The Kingdom by Clive Cussler

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