Chyna Stone Adventures: The Complete 8-Book Series

by K. T. Tomb

  “You’ve proven yourself, Siri. You deserve it,” she replied. “You understand that means you’ll have to relocate don’t you?”

  “I realize that and I’m ready to go whenever you want me to.”

  “That’s great, Siri. Sandra will be in touch with you soon with the job offer and stuff. Take a read and let me know if you have any concerns.”

  “I’ll look out for it, Chyna. Thanks for the opportunity to do this; I’m really excited about it.”

  “I’m glad you are Siri, we’re excited to get to have you all to ourselves! Bye, we’ll talk soon.”

  “Bye, Chyna.”

  As Sirita hung up the phone, she realized how stunned she was. Chyna Stone was not a woman who came across as anything but completely professional and she was pleasantly surprised to experience a slightly softer side of her; she’d even called her by her nickname, Siri. For the first time since she’d been working for Found History, Sirita felt that Chyna also liked her as a person rather than just appreciating and valuing the quality of her work; it made her feel special.

  Growing up as an orphan in New Delhi, Sirita had known hardship all her life. She had struggled to stay in school while giving full time care to her convalescent aunt who she had lived with throughout her childhood. After passing her high school entry examinations, she had won a scholarship lottery which placed her in a missionary high school for girls, all expenses paid. She found out many years later that it was her aunt who had entered her name in the lottery and though she died shortly after, Sirita was glad that she had lived to see her in her crisp white uniform, going off every morning to school.

  With her aunt gone, Sirita had no family left and suddenly, being under aged, she was at risk of being put into a state institution for orphans. She lived in her aunt’s house as if the old woman was still alive, making her neighbors think that she was now in the care of an uncle or older cousin; whatever would convince them so they wouldn’t call the authorities. The years went by quickly and when she finally turned sixteen, she was no longer in danger of being incarcerated. Sirita still lived in the same apartment she had shared with her aunt. It had been the only thing her uncle had left behind for them but it was fully paid for and neither had ever been in need of shelter.

  After graduating from a community college with a secretarial degree, Sirita had been one of India’s pioneers in the field of online freelancing. With a good computer and a fairly high speed internet connection, she could interface with multiple clients and companies around the world. She soon built a reputation for honesty and integrity with her clients and they in turn never hesitated to recommend her services to other people. She did data entry work, transcriptions, translations and built databases, until she eventually settled into being a virtual assistant. She did everything for her clients from setting up their appointments and syncing it to their handheld devices to managing the entire digital filing system of small corporations. But she had lost a few clients after the financial crisis began in 2008, when a lot of her clients either downsized drastically or went under completely.

  Found History had been her saving grace; she worked for a moderate retainer in addition to an hourly rate once she received an assignment from them. It wasn’t going to give her financial freedom but it was steady work and she enjoyed it immensely. So many times while Chyna and the team had been in Turkey over the last year, Sirita had found herself sitting at the computer daydreaming about all the places they were visiting and the people they were meeting. She couldn’t help but be a tiny bit jealous. Now, she was getting her chance to be a part of it all, to relocate to another country, experience another culture, work for a company she admired and with people she respected. It was her big break!

  ***

  That afternoon, Chyna, Lana and Oscar sat around the desk in the conference room to discuss the Syrian assignment as well as the underlying mystery of the Phoenician Falcon.

  “We’ve got to get the logistics for the trip in place quickly, Lana,” Chyna said. “The sooner the details are covered the better for us because we’ve all got a lot to get done before we leave next weekend.”

  “I’ve already got the flights booked,” Lana started. “Your e-tickets will be in your email inbox by five o’clock today. Hotel rooms in Damascus are reserved as well; we’ll be staying at a place called the Albal Hotel. It’s supposed to be a great little boutique place that’s quite popular with the business crowd and the Land Cruiser is also booked, the rental company will send someone over with it to pick us up at the airport.”

  “Sounds good, Lana,” Chyna replied. “Good job, as usual.”

  “I’m planning to take our usual equipment with us,” Oscar said. “I didn’t feel the need to be shy with what I packed for us since some of it will likely be staying in Istanbul to get the office up and running.”

  “Good thinking, Oscar. Did you start making a list of the stuff you need to order to fully outfit the new operations as well as augment the office systems here and your mobile lab?”

  “I’ve got something started, but I’m also waiting to get Nigel started before I make any orders. Maybe he’ll be able to give me some suggestions of how to build the central servers here so they can handle both static locations as well as the remote one. I’m really keen on the security of the system as well as fluidity to manage the additional data and traffic.”

  “Sounds like you’re on the right track,” Chyna said. “When do I get to meet Nigel?”

  “He’ll be here to run some practical tests tomorrow. Provided he meets my standards in the server room, I’ll be around to introduce him to everyone.”

  “That sounds awesome,” Lana said, a little bit sarcastically. “Invasion of the computer geeks! Now there’s going to be two of you around here, I can hardly wait.”

  Oscar shook his head and rolled his eyes at her, convinced she was just jealous he was having a smooth time getting his end of the business straightened out.

  “I spoke to Rashid yesterday,” Lana continued. “He’s put me in contact with a woman called Shakira Mendes who’s supposed to be Istanbul’s real estate agent to the moguls. I’ve got her scouting office space for us according to your specifications, Chyna. She didn’t sound like it would be difficult to find the right place. He also recommended that we stick with Citibank, they’ve got branches over there and since we already bank with them it should make things way smoother.”

  “That’s really great news, Lana. Let Shakira know I want three hundred and sixty degree views of the spaces she’s proposing as well as a street view and forward me the links to those when they start coming in. I’ll ask Sandra to contact Dean at the bank and have him set up the Istanbul accounts. What about the licensing?”

  “Sandra told me she hired a lawyer that Rashid recommended highly, a Mr. Farouk Jureidini. He already has the information he needs about Found History to start the initial applications. I think she’s having him apply for international driver’s licenses for all of us, as well as an international firearm license for you.”

  “I have to say that you have all impressed me.Great job everybody! I spoke to Sirita this morning and she’s gung ho on joining us in Istanbul. So now that she’s onboard, I’m looking for an apartment for her and a house for us. I already ordered the cars.”

  “Would you like me to ask Shakira to send you a listing of residences, Chyna?” Lana asked

  “No, I don’t want to distract her. I’ll find somewhere but what I will do is send her the addresses of the places I like so she can have them inspected for me and broker the deal as well. That way, I’m confident I got a great place and she makes a commission.”

  “Okay,” Lana replied.

  “So, Boss lady, what kind of cars did you buy?” Oscar asked, trying to hide his enthusiasm. He was quite the motor vehicle aficionado, especially in trucks and SUV’s. Oscar’s prize possession was a 1990 Chevrolet Silverado that he’d had completely restored, then had it candy painted in black and feathered with the class
ic Harley Davidson stripes down the sides. It was lifted and customized in every way that a real truck maniac could dream off.

  Chyna smiled and replied, “I got myself the new Audi Q7 and I bought a Range Rover for y’all.”

  “Sweet,” he said.

  “So, where are we with the falcon?”

  Lana took over the conversation from there. She turned on the projector and showed them a few slides. So far she had discovered that the falcon wasn’t from the region and, just as Chyna had suspected, it was part of a set of two and they were Norse. The question then was: how did they get there?

  “Vikings did sail the rivers of western Europe and portage over land in their time,” Chyna pointed out. “In fact, they were known to have gone as far asPersia. Why wouldn’t you think they put it there?”

  “The design and the age place them in Norway in a region close to Oslo. There’s a goldsmiths’ mark that identifies a well-known craftsman whose mark has been primarily found on relics identified with King Ottir of Oslo around the eighth century A.D. and the timing is consistent with the dating that was included in the report from Syria. The Norsemen were never known to raid or migrate further east than maybe Belarus, they were obsessed with the wealth of England around that time.”

  “Fair enough, so what’s your next step?”

  “I’m going to try and pinpoint the person the falcons belonged to using the angle of the goldsmith. He was popular at the time so it’s possible I can find more about his work, his clients, maybe even some of his more famous pieces. If I’m lucky these might be among them. It seems whenever we unravel the story behind the artifact, the rest just seems to make sense and fall right into place.”

  “You’re so right, Lana,” Chyna agreed.

  Just then Sandra popped her head into the conference room.

  “I’m ready for you to meet the first candidate, Chyna,” she said, smiling.

  “Okay, Sandra. Just let me wrap this up in here.”

  Chyna issued a few last instructions to the others and reminded them about the progress report meeting the following afternoon, and then she excused herself and stood up from the table. In her office, she pulled on her red blazer with the Found History logo on the breast pocket and straightened up the clutter on her desk a little bit. Then she buzzed Sandra and asked her to show the first person in.

  ***

  “You made a real mess of this one Marko, there’s no way Xavier’s going to let this one slide,” Greame said.

  “How the hell was I supposed to know that they would suddenly decide to excavate the Hamah location? It’s been under review for over a decade,” Marko replied, trying his very best to defend himself.

  “I don’t think he’s going to give a damn about the circumstances, that bird statue was made of solid Roman gold, we confirmed it, so all Xavier’s gonna want to know is how the hell are you gonna get it back?”

  Marko couldn’t believe his luck. It had been a breeze getting the statue out of Sweden disguised as props among some cargo he was shipping for a musical play. It had arrived in Milan and then been transported painstakingly over land to Athens without incident but it was then that he realized he had made a mistake taking it to Greece. Ever since the wrecks of the Artemesian fleet had been found and the Minoan Mask recovered, the Greek authorities had been on their toes to abate theft and smuggling of all cultural antiquities. He’d had to high tail it out of the country, chartering a private plane to Damascus to his favorite stash site, a restricted area outside the historic town of Hamah. It had been slated for archeological exploration but nothing had been done by the government along those lines outside of fencing it around; there wasn’t even any security in place.

  He had buried the statue there and was waiting for the go ahead from one of his buyers before he would retrieve it for delivery. When the excavations had started at the site Marko had been in Burma arranging transportation for a cache of rubies stolen from a prominent mine. The statue was among the first items the archeologists recovered from the ground and it was immediately taken to a secure warehouse in Damascus to await carbon testing and cataloguing. The only news he had about the situation at the warehouse was that it was being run by a private company out of Denmark consigned by the Syrian government and that the lead archaeologist, Dr. Jared Epstein, had requested the assistance of the team from Found History in New York to classify the items. As soon as he had heard that, he knew he was in for trouble; it wasn’t going to be easy to get his hands on the statue now. The pressure he was under from his boss, Xavier, and his buyer in China wasn’t helping either.

  The only thing he could think of was to call in Sergio, his hacker. He had tried to get to someone on the inside of Found History but the company was an iron fist, he couldn’t maneuver his way in from any angle; all he could come up with was to hack their systems and try to retrieve the information they had on the statue’s whereabouts and what kind of security it was being held under. Sergio had managed to hack the server of an HSBC bank in England once and made a wire transfer of five million pounds into a numbered account in Cayman. When they had tried to trace it, they found the transaction had been bounced off so many banks that it was irretrievable. Whatever Chyna and her people knew would be on their servers, so the easiest way to get it was to hack it.

  “I’ll get it back, Greame,” he insisted. “Just tell Xavier I need some time to do the reconnaissance. It’s not going to be easy to fool Chyna Stone and her people, I may have to use force to get it back but it will be retrieved.”

  “You’re just lucky those rubies turned out to be a better deal than he had hoped, otherwise your ass would be grass right about now,” Greame replied.

  “At least that counts for something,” Marko said.

  ***

  “Chyna,” Oscar said, stepping through her office door, “I’d like you to meet Nigel. I’m thinking of taking him on as one of our technicians.”

  Chyna stood up and walked around her desk extending her hand to the young man. He shook her hand and smiled shyly. Chyna leaned against the edge of her desk and crossed her arms.

  “Oscar said that if he brought you in to meet me then you were showing the kind of capability he needs in whoever takes the position, so congratulations.”

  “Thank you Miss Stone,” Nigel replied.

  She righted herself and went back to her seat pulling the chair forward and gesturing for them to take a seat.

  “So Oscar, elaborate on what the new structure of your department is going to look like. What’s the plan?”

  “I’m going to have Nigel reconfigure the servers so they can be upgraded to host data from both offices as well as a remote office which will basically be my laptop. He’s already suggested that we should look at installing a military grade firewall to protect our information considering our access to government documents and other sensitive and secret data.”

  “Excellent,” she said, and then turning to Nigel she said. “How long will it take to upgrade and secure the servers?”

  “I can get it done in a night if nothing unexpected happens.”

  “Very good. Can you get the hardware and software you need to do it today, Oscar?”

  “I sure can,” he replied.

  “Then Nigel, get this up and running by tomorrow and you have the job.”

  “Thank you Miss Stone.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, Nigel. Get it done to Oscar’s satisfaction and then you can thank him.”

  A week and a half later, Chyna, Lana and Oscar landed at the Damascus International Airport. It was hot and humid and they were tired and hungry. At baggage claim, Oscar lost his temper when his equipment case didn’t turn up with the rest of the luggage.

  “My brand new HP ZBook 14 was in there,” he lamented. “I hadn’t even had a chance to configure it fully yet. The brain for the Istanbul server was in it as well and that has already been loaded with all the company’s data.”

  He looked absolutely distraught as he gave Chyna the
bad news.

  “They’ve got to find it, Chyna,” he insisted. “I’m not leaving this airport until they do.”

  He pulled his Blackberry from his pocket and pressed the speed dial button that called Nigel.

  “Hey Nigel,” he started, “it seems the airline misplaced the case with the computers. I’m really worried about it, all our stuff’s on that brain, not to mention it cost us a fortune. Did you get a chance to ping the MAC ID before I left with it?”

  “Sure did, Boss,” Nigel boasted. “Would you like me to put a trace on it?”

  “Yes, you do that,” Oscar confirmed. “I’ll let you know if we make any progress on this end.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to Chyna, looking a little more at ease.

  “Let’s hope they find it, but just in case Nigel’s starting a trace on it. If it’s been stolen, as soon as it’s hooked into an internet connection he’ll be able to pinpoint its location to within a fifty foot radius. The problem with that is, depending on where that turns out to be, they may be able to access everything on it before we have a chance to retrieve it, but that’s only if they can get past the password protection and the encryption.”

  “What are the chances that they can do that?” Chyna asked, extremely concerned.

  Oscar laughed heartily as he thought about it.

  “Let’s just say that before they can crack those passwords to even get to the encryption, Nigel could have tracked their location and retrieved the devices from the moon.”

  “I guess we have nothing to worry about then,” Chyna summarized.

  “Yes we do,” Oscar insisted, “that’s ten grand worth of equipment we’re talking about. I want it back.”

  The case was nowhere to be found even though the manifest showed that it had made it to the plane and been scanned and loaded onboard at Heathrow Airport. It must have gone missing after they landed in Damascus. The agent promised that they would continue searching the airport and deliver it to their hotel as soon as it was located. For the moment, it was all Oscar had to hold on to so after they had found the driver and loaded the rest of the luggage; he called Nigel again to put him on high alert. It was a poor start to the trip; luckily he had carried his regular laptop with him on the plane to finish compiling some of the research he and Lana had been conducting on the falcon during their last few days in New York; so he wasn’t completely handicapped.