The Lost Throne by Chris Kuzneski Read Free Book Online

one, seven.”
    Payne turned on the speakerphone and dialed the number that had placed fifteen of the seventeen calls. There was a slight delay before his call went through, followed by the unfamiliar sound of a foreign ring. Much different from the sound in America. More like a windup phone from yesteryear. It rang once. Then again. Then a third time. Yet no one picked up.
    A fourth ring. Then a fifth. Then a sixth.
    Finally, after the seventh ring, the ringing stopped and someone answered.
    “Da?”
said the voice in Russian.
    Payne and Jones looked at each other, confused. Not only didn’t they speak much Russian—although they knew that
da
meant “yes”—they realized this wasn’t the same man who had left three messages for Payne. This voice was younger. More tentative.
    “Hello,” Payne said, not sure what to say. “Do you speak English?”
    “Nyet.”
    Payne grimaced. The guy claimed he couldn’t speak English, yet he knew enough about the language to understand the question. “Are you sure?”
    “Da!”
    Payne covered the mic on his phone. “I think he’s retarded.”
    Jones tried not to laugh. “Let me try.”
    “Help yourself.”
    He took a deep breath then spoke phonetically, mumbling one of the few phrases he knew.
“Govorite li vy po angliyski?”
    Payne stared at Jones, surprised. “What the hell did you say?”
    Jones signaled for him to shut up, hoping the Russian would respond. When he didn’t, Jones repeated one word.
“Angliyski?”
    It meant
English.
    Several seconds passed before another word was spoken. This time it came from a female with a thick accent. “Hello?”
    “Hello,” said Jones, surprised by the development. “Do you speak English?”
    “Yes.”
    “Great. That’s great—”
    “He find it,” she said, interrupting him.
    “Excuse me?”
    “He find it,” she repeated. “He not steal it. He find it.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The phone. He find phone. My son not steal phone.”
    Jones frowned at the news. Someone had ditched the phone. “Where did he find it?”
    “How you say,
garbage
? He find on garbage.”
    “Did he see who threw it away?”
    The woman talked to her son in Russian. A few seconds later she translated his response. “He see no one. He find phone. Not steal.”
    “Thank you,” Jones said, realizing this was a dead end. “Tell him to enjoy the phone. We’ll call back if we have more questions.”
    She said nothing and hung up.
    Payne asked, “What do you think?”
    “I think her kid found the phone.”
    “That’s not what I meant. Do you think our guy threw it away? Or did someone else?”
    Jones shrugged. “In his third message he mentioned that he had to switch phones, so maybe he threw it away. Maybe he was afraid it was being traced and decided to ditch it. I honestly don’t know. As of now I don’t know enough about this guy to make any assumptions.”
    Payne nodded. It was a good point. “Now what? Should we call the pay phone?”
    “It’s worth a try. Who knows? Maybe he’s standing next to it, waiting for our call.”
    Somehow Payne doubted it. More than two hours had passed since the caller’s last message and he sounded way too spooked to stay in one place for long. But what other options did they have? They had no more leads, and Russia was several thousand miles away.
    “Here goes nothing,” Payne said as he dialed the number.
    The same foreign ring emerged from the phone—more of a buzzing than an actual ringing. But unlike before, no one answered. It just rang and rang and rang.
    “It was worth a shot,” he said as he hung up. “I’ll try again later.”
    Jones nodded as he stared at the phone list. Something about it didn’t seem right.
    “What’s wrong?” Payne asked.
    “I don’t know. I get the feeling we’re missing something.”
    “Like what?”
    Jones ignored the question as he counted the phone calls. “Five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . . wait! How many phone calls did you