The Lost Throne

9

Jones had spent several minutes analyzing the phone logs, focusing his attention on the coded sixth column while overlooking the simplest approach of all: dialing the number.

“You know,” Payne joked. “For the smartest guy I know, you’re pretty stupid.”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I did! I’ve been calling you stupid for years.”

Jones sneered. “I meant about the phone.”

“Honestly? I got caught up in all your excitement.”

“In other words, you just thought of it yourself.”

Payne shrugged. “Maybe.”

“When you call,” Jones said, trying to shift the focus from himself, “remember to use the international code for Russia. It’s zero, one, 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 say you missed?”

“Seventeen.”

“That’s what I thought. But there are only sixteen on this list.”

Payne picked up his copy of the printout and counted the calls. “You’re right. Sixteen.”

“Check your phone again. Count the missed calls.”

Payne did what he was told. “Seventeen.”

“So we’re missing a call.”

He nodded. “And I know which one. The guy called every half hour except for one instance around nine this morning.” He scrolled through his phone. “Nine-fourteen to be exact.”

Jones double-checked his list. “Bingo! That’s the one.”

“Why wasn’t it listed?”

“I have no idea. Let me check the original file again.” Jones hit a few buttons on his laptop and studied the document. Several seconds passed before he noticed the problem. “For some reason my printer only printed the first page of the phone log. Hold on. Let me print page two. It looks like this call came in from a different country code, so it was listed on a different sheet.”

Both men stared at the printer as it sprang to life.

A moment later it was spitting out a sheet of paper that was nearly blank. One line for the header. One line for the phone call. Then nothing but empty white.

Still, the missing page gave them their biggest break yet.

A phone number that they recognized.