Once inside, he took only a minute to find the electrical panel. Sam opened the cover and studied the configuration. It was an old fuse type. Some of the fuses appeared relatively new.
“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.