The Prisoner's Gold

55

The next few seconds in the Gulfstream were completely silent.

The pilot shut off the missile alarm, and team members each retreated into their own morbid thoughts as they waited to explode in a ball of fire. A split-second over the border, something whizzed past them on the left, fast enough to rock the plane. It was followed immediately by an explosion that lurched the Gulfstream forward.

Inexplicably, a third jet passed directly overhead, aiming back toward the Chinese border. Its wash forced them to dip suddenly, but then the Gulfstream corrected its course and continued deeper into Bhutan airspace unharmed.

‘What was that?’ Cobb shouted.

‘Holy shit!’ Garcia blurted as he stared at his screen. ‘There’s another jet up here. It took out the missiles with countermeasures. I don’t know where it came from, but it certainly did the trick. The Chinese jets just turned back for home.’

The team let out a collective cheer, shocked by their good fortune.

‘Where the hell did the reinforcements come from?’ McNutt asked.

Papineau smiled. ‘Some friends of mine from l’Armée de l’Air. They were in Sikkim on joint task-force training exercises with the Indian Air Force. I gave them a call.’

McNutt stared, open-mouthed.

‘I wasn’t always a businessman,’ Papineau said.

Cobb realized he was talking about French mandatory military conscription, which would still have been in place when Papineau was graduating from high school. He probably would have served in North Africa or Lebanon. It wasn’t something Cobb had ever thought to investigate, despite having Garcia look into Papineau’s business dealings over the last decade.

The plane banked in an easy turn to the right, and Cobb could see the white Himalayas below the dipped wing through the small Plexiglas window. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere we can all decompress,’ Papineau said as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘Then we need to examine what the monk gave to you.’

The Hyatt Regency in Katmandu, Nepal, was a luxury hotel that catered to the business set. With excellent restaurants, expensive decor, expansive meeting rooms, and a well-trained staff eager to please, it was a great place for the team to catch their second wind.

They had retired to their respective suites to rest for a few hours before regrouping and discussing their next move. Cobb had tried to sleep but failed miserably. He was too wound up. He knew Garcia would be, too, and that he would already be trying to decipher the contents of the USB drive the old monk had slipped to Cobb in the Potala.

Concerned for the monk and his brethren, Cobb had accessed the hotel’s Wi-Fi to check the news about the palace, but the media hadn’t gotten wind of the turmoil.

Or more likely, the Chinese had clamped down on all news coming out of Tibet.

Fed up with waiting, Cobb left his suite and headed down the hallway for Garcia’s room. Just before he got to the door, he heard someone approaching from behind.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ McNutt called out to him.

Cobb shook his head. ‘I thought I’d see if Hector is restless too.’

Cobb and McNutt knocked on the door in unison. Sarah opened it a moment later. She had changed her clothes, but she looked as tired as Cobb felt.

‘Sorry, wrong room,’ Cobb said. ‘We were looking for—’

Sarah opened the door wide, and they could see Garcia at his desk, pounding away on his keyboard. Maggie was seated on the cream-colored sofa, looking at a tablet and swiping rapidly through images that Garcia streamed to her.

‘Welcome to the party,’ Sarah said, ushering them into the room.

Cobb and McNutt stepped inside and crossed the dark wooden floors. Exhausted from the day’s events but too tired to sleep, they quickly grabbed chairs in the sitting area.

‘No one else could sleep, either,’ Garcia said, not looking up from his laptop. He had changed into cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read: I’M NOT ANTI-SOCIAL; I’M JUST NOT USER-FRIENDLY.

Cobb looked around the room. ‘Papi must have been able to get some sleep, at least.’

‘Actually,’ Sarah said, ‘he just went to get ice. He’ll be right back.’

‘How is it going with the USB?’ Cobb asked.

Garcia kept typing. ‘It wasn’t encrypted. We’re going through it now with the translation software. Maggie has a lot of stuff already.’

Maggie looked up from her tablet. ‘Shall we wait for Jean-Marc?’

Just then they heard a knock at the door.

This time, Sarah made no move to get up. Instead, McNutt stood and quickly paced down the hallway to the door. Cobb noticed he did not look through the peephole in the thick wood, but rather stopped at the doorway to the bathroom and edged into it before calling out, ‘Who’s there?’

‘It is I,’ Papineau said.

As McNutt moved to open the door, Cobb was once again impressed with the sniper’s ingrained security-consciousness. He would never use a peephole, alerting anyone on the other side of the door to his location via the shadow cast through to the front of the glass, and he knew well enough to stand aside from the door should shooters be waiting on the opposite side.

Papineau entered the suite carrying a silver tray with several cups of steaming coffee. ‘I was going to have a Scotch,’ he admitted sheepishly, ‘but I thought perhaps coffee would be better for all concerned.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ McNutt said as he took the tray and set it on the coffee table in the center of the sitting area.

Papineau wasn’t sure what stunned him more: the sniper’s good manners, or the fact that McNutt called him ‘sir’ instead of ‘Papi’.

Cobb noticed the change in McNutt as well, but the truth was Papineau had earned it with that miracle at the border. Cobb wondered idly whether the favor from the French Air Force was provided courtesy of loyalty or massive stacks of euros. He would have Garcia dig into Papineau’s military days later. Not that he suspected he would find anything damning; he simply wanted all the pertinent information on the background of his people. If he had known about Papineau’s military connections, he might have used them earlier instead of relying on Papineau to think of doing so at the last minute.

McNutt passed coffee around to everyone, and they all took sips of the imported brew before Papineau looked around expectantly. Cobb noticed he did not attempt to retake command of the room by asking everyone to begin. Cobb appreciated the gesture.

‘Okay,’ Cobb said. ‘What do we have?’

Garcia answered first. ‘We have a shit-ton of photos of two separate books. We’re running the translation program on the pages right now. It should be done any minute.’

Maggie took over from there. ‘The first book is an official account from a clerical monk named Thokmay. He was basically the right-hand man to the Sakya lama, who was the head of the religious administration unit in Tibet during the thirteenth century. Thokmay’s account will hopefully mention Marco Polo’s visit to Lhasa. Unfortunately, I haven’t found such a section yet. The book is a massive volume consisting of over three thousand pages. It will take some time to dig through everything.’

‘Okay, not a problem,’ Cobb said. ‘And the other book?’

Maggie pointed at Garcia. ‘Still waiting on that one.’

Cobb rubbed his tired eyes and thought back to the events at the Potala. Based on the urgency in the old monk’s voice and the death grip that he’d had on his arm, Cobb had assumed that the contents of the USB drive would be staggering. Then again, maybe he had misread the situation. The palace was under attack and the monk was obviously scared. Maybe his superhuman kung fu grip had more to do with the adrenaline surging through his veins than anything else.

A ding on Garcia’s computer pulled Cobb out of his thoughts.

It was soon followed by a shriek of feminine joy.

Strangely, the sound had come from Garcia.

‘No way!’ he shouted, his voice cracking in midsentence. ‘Maggie! Take a look at this!’

She rushed to his side. ‘At what?’

He pointed at the translation on his screen. ‘Can this be right?’

She looked at the computer, then at Garcia, then back at the computer.

Sarah stood as well. ‘What is it? Is it important?’

‘Very important!’ Garcia shouted.

Maggie’s face broke into a huge grin as she turned to explain their discovery. ‘Obviously I haven’t had a chance to go through the data yet but, if this translation is correct, the second book on the drive is much more significant than the first.’

‘Why? What is it?’ Cobb demanded.

She smiled at him. ‘It’s the personal diary of Marco Polo.’