“The anomaly was three brilliant young foreign students at Cambridge—an Indian, a Pakistani and a Kashmiri—who graduated with first-class honors in 1988. They were close friends. All were born poor, but their educational expenses in England, which began when they were ten years old, were paid for. Then when they left Cambridge, they started different businesses, again completely funded. Each was quickly successful. But the Indian died in New Delhi within five years, drowned in a flood, and the one in Pakistan died ten years later, poisoned by bad well water. And the third one, the Kashmiri—Devras Sikari—is still alive, but he’s sold his company and is living in the bush as some sort of combination warlord and would-be saint. The whole situation seemed to beg to be looked into. So that’s what I did. I discovered the three hadn’t known each other before England, all were Hindu and none had ever named their sponsor. The one clue I turned up about that subject was in an obscure Hindu journal. In it, Sikari is quoted as saying that the benefactor was ‘holy, but of this world.’”

“Yes, I’ve heard parts of that. Do continue.”

Crane allowed himself a brief smile. “Sikari’s quote was tantalizing. Why would a benefactor want to hide his generosity? After all, he educated three impoverished children and his story might inspire others to be equally generous.” Unless the person wasn’t altruistic at all, he thought to himself. Unless he had a far different—and far less admirable—motive. “I was finally able to track down the name of the company that paid their expenses. It was a front, leading to more front companies. But one thing was constant. Their security was provided by BlueWatch Global Services.”

Headquartered in Dubai, BlueWatch was the real deal, a private security and private investigation agency with a special division servicing very deep-pocket clients. “Naturally I asked for an interview with the president and board chair, Mr. Francis Xavier Kimball.”

From everything he could tell, Kimball did not exist. Still, Crane was not ready to point that out, at least not yet, because it was his probe into Kimball’s identity that had ignited the Scorpion’s emails that had ended with the invitation to meet. He had never heard of the Scorpion, but one of his sources who was well connected in the underworld of international crime had described him as rich, dangerous, of unknown name and origin, and never seen. Shortly after that, Reuters’s IT security team reported to Crane that the Scorpion’s emails had been routed through multiple countries, including China and Russia, and their signals were untraceable.