The Kingdom by Clive Cussler Read Free Book Online

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.”

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.
    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