The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

a bit on one side of his skull, waited sullenly for him at the reception desk.
    “A room, please.” Pendergast kept his collars turned up and stood in a way that blocked most of his face. He spoke in a gruff voice with a Midlands accent.
    “Name?”
    “Crowther.”
    The clerk shoved a card over to Pendergast, who filled it in with a false name and address.
    “Mode of payment?”
    Pendergast took a sheaf of pound notes from his pocket and paid in cash.
    The man gave him a swift glance. “Luggage?”
    “Bloody airline misplaced it.”
    The clerk handed him a card key and disappeared into the back, no doubt to go back to sleep. Pendergast took his card key and went to the bank of elevators.
    He took the elevator to his floor—the fourth—but did not get off. After the doors closed again, he remained on the elevator while it waited at the floor. He opened his bag, took out a small magnetic card-reading device, swiped his card through it, and studied the readout that appeared on the small LCD screen. After a moment he punched in some other numbers, slowly repassed the card through the reader, and tucked the device back into his bag. Then he pressed the button for the seventh floor and waited while the car rose.
    The doors rolled back on a hall that was brightly lit with fluorescent tubes. It was empty, the same blue-and-gold rug stretching the length of the building, doors lining both walls. Pendergast exited the elevator, walked quickly to room 714, then paused to listen. It was quiet within, the lights out.
    He inserted his key card, and the door snapped ajar with a little trill and a green light. He slowly eased it open and stepped inside, quickly shutting it behind him.
    With any luck, he would simply locate the box and steal away without waking the inhabitant. But he was uneasy. He had done a bit of research into Jordan Ambrose. The man came from an upper-middle-class family in Boulder, Colorado; he was an expert snowboarder, climber, and mountain bike rider who had dropped out of college to climb the Seven Summits. It was an accomplishment claimed by only two hundred people in the world, summiting the highest peak on each of the seven continents, and it took him four years. After that, he had become a highly paid professional mountaineer, guiding trips to Everest, K2, and the Three Sisters. During the winter he made money doing extreme snowboarding stunts for videos and also collected money from endorsements. The expedition to Dhaulagiri had been a well-organized and financed attempt to scale the unclimbed west face of the mountain, one of the last epic climbs left in the world, a staggering twelve-thousand-foot sheer face of rotten rock and ice swept by avalanches, high winds, and temperature swings from day to night of fifty to sixty degrees. Thirty-two climbers had already died in the attempt, and Ambrose’s group would add five more fatalities to the list. They hadn’t even made it halfway up.
    That Ambrose had survived was extraordinary. That he had made it to the monastery was nothing short of miraculous.
    And then, everything he had done since the monastery had been out of character—beginning with the theft. Jordan Ambrose didn’t need money, and up to this point had shown little interest in it. He wasn’t a collector. He had no interest in Buddhism or any kind of spiritual seeking. He had been an honest and highly intelligent man. He had always been focused—one might say obsessed—with climbing.
    Why had he stolen the Agozyen? Why had he carted it all over Europe, not looking to sell it, but trying to arrange for some kind of partnership? What was the purpose of this “partnership” he sought? Why had he refused to show it to anyone? And why had he made no effort to contact the families of the five dead climbers—who were all close friends of his—something utterly at variance with the climbing ethic?
    Everything Jordan Ambrose had done since the monastery had been completely out of character.