King and Maxwell

by David Baldacci

  “Like what?”

  “I hired these detectives because I didn’t think the Army was telling me the truth about my dad.”

  “I know you were upset about what they told you. But why in the world would you think they’d lie about that?”

  “Because at first they told me he was shot. Then they said he was blown up and that there was nothing left of him and there was no need to go to Dover. I’m not really sure how the Army could have gotten that so wrong.”

  “Well, maybe they did. Mistakes happen, even in the military. The stories my mom could tell you.”

  “Yeah, well, they shouldn’t make mistakes about stuff like this,” Tyler replied, his voice sounding hoarse.

  Kathy put a hand on his shoulder. “No, you’re right, they shouldn’t.”

  “But then some more men from the Army came to see us. And also guys in suits who they said were with another agency, only I don’t know which one.”

  “Why did they come to see you?”

  “To tell me to fire King and Maxwell.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think they wanted them digging around into my dad’s case.” He looked over at Kathy. “Something is going on here that’s really weird.”

  “Like what?”

  He pulled the truck off to the side of the road and put it in park. He turned to her. “I got an email from my dad.”

  “When?”

  “After he died.”

  Kathy stared at him, her face growing pale. “How could that be?”

  “It was date-stamped. They told me when my dad was supposed to have been killed. The email was sent days after that.”

  “Maybe somebody else sent it.”

  “Couldn’t have. It was in the code only my dad and I would know how to read.”

  Kathy looked out the window and shivered. “This is really creepy, Tyler.” She glanced back at him. “Do you… do you really think your dad might be alive?”

  Tyler didn’t answer right away. He was afraid that if he said what he believed, it would not come true. “Yeah, I do.”

  “But your dad was a sergeant in the reserves. Nothing against him but why would this be such a big deal for the Army? It wasn’t like he was a general.”

  “I think my dad was a bigger deal than people knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He left the Army right before his twenty years was up. Who does that? He blew his pension.”

  “That lady detective said the same thing.”

  “You met with Michelle?” he said, surprised.

  “And Sean. Earlier today. They knew we were friends.”

  “So that means they’re still working the case,” he said thoughtfully.

  “The Army might not like that, Tyler.”

  “I don’t give a crap what the Army doesn’t like. This is my dad we’re talking about. If he’s not dead, I want to know where he is. I want him to come back home. I’m not letting this drop.”

  “I guess if it were my mom, I wouldn’t let it go either.”

  “You can’t tell anybody about this.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  He stared at her intently and then turned the truck around and drove her back home.

  When Tyler got back to his house, his stepmother wasn’t there and her car was gone. He went up to his bedroom and studied his cell phone. He started to make a call on it but then stopped. What if they had his phone under surveillance?

  He ran back downstairs, climbed into the truck, and drove off again.

  There was a payphone, one of the last in the area, at a 7-Eleven about two miles from his house. He dropped in the coins and dialed the number.

  Michelle answered on the second ring.

  Tyler said, “I want to hire you again.”

  “You sure?” said Michelle.

  “Very sure,” replied Tyler.

  “Good, because we were never really off the case.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  SAM WINGO HAD FINALLY DOZED OFF on the bus on which he was a passenger, but he was nearly lifted out of his seat when the vehicle struck a particularly large pothole. He looked out the window into the gathering dawn. The terrain was bleak and would grow bleaker still. He might as well have been on the moon.

  He turned to the person sitting next to him. She was an old woman dressed in traditional Muslim garb. A crate of vegetables was in her lap. She was softly snoring. She was obviously more used to the rough roads than he was.

  Years ago he had traveled from Turkey into Iran for some clandestine work with a team of soldiers. They had made their crossing at the foot of Mount Ararat where Noah, according to the Scriptures, had completed his voyage on the Ark. The trip from Istanbul to Tehran could normally be made overland in three days. But Wingo’s team had not been able to avail itself of ordinary modes of transportation, nor could the men make the border crossing at a legitimate site because they would have been arrested on the spot. Thus a three-day journey had taken a week.

  Six hours after the team had arrived at its destination in Iran, three terrorists who had escaped American justice were dead. Wingo and his team had gotten out of the country a lot faster than they had taken to get in. The exit plan had been carefully constructed and still they had barely made it, with Iranian security forces right on their heels.

  His journey now wasn’t carefully constructed. He was flying by the seat of his pants. His odds of success, he knew, were abysmal. And yet he didn’t care. He was going to make this work because he was going to get back to his son.

  From Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan normally took about ten hours’ driving, with a border crossing in between. Buses were slower and relatively cheap. Taxis were faster but they cost more. Wingo didn’t really care about money; the difference of a few euros was not important. The problem was getting across the border. And while he had originally been given papers that would have allowed him to do that, he couldn’t use them now. He couldn’t trust anyone, not even, it seemed, his own government.

  While the road between Kabul and Jalalabad was not the best, major portions of it had been resurfaced recently. However, the route was considered one of the most dangerous in the world because of the numerous traffic accidents, many of them fatal. And the driver of Wingo’s bus seemed determined to add to that count. He drove with barely concealed ferocity, both cursing and swerving with regularity and pushing the bus forward with bursts of stomach-lurching acceleration, followed by abrupt braking that threw passengers around like pinballs. Sometimes it seemed like the creaky bus would simply flip over.

  Wingo gazed around for at least the twentieth time at his fellow passengers, who didn’t seem to care about the maniacal driver. They appeared to be typical Afghans or Pakistanis making their way back and forth across the two countries. Wingo was the only Westerner on board, which alone made him stand out. He had tried to lessen this some by darkening his face and covering himself with a hoodie and glasses. And he had grown a full beard since being deployed.

  The largest city in between Kabul and the Pakistani border was Jalalabad, which was the second-largest city in eastern Afghanistan and also the capital of the Nangarhar province. Despite being considered one of the most beautiful of all Afghan cities, with its prime location at the confluence of the Kabul and Kunar Rivers, it was not considered safe for Westerners because the political climate was too unstable. This was so despite the presence of the largest American base in Afghanistan, Forward Operating Base Fenty adjacent to the Jalalabad Airport.

  Wingo knew that the mujahideen had taken the city in the early 1990s after expelling the Soviets. Commencing at that point and continuing until the present virtually every Afghan man had at least one automatic weapon, many of them Russian-made AK-47s. The Taliban had taken control of the city after the expulsion of the Soviets before being defeated by the United States and driven from power in retaliation for 9/11. Wingo also knew the Taliban was desperate to take over Afghanistan once more. And J
alalabad’s proximity to the Pakistani border made it a prime goal for the insurgents’ efforts to reclaim the country; hence the current instability.

  The road ended at the border. Travelers crossed over on foot and then were picked up by buses or taxis for their onward journey—unless it was lunchtime, when the border was closed. Yet there was another complication involved for Wingo. This part of Pakistan was not controlled by the government.

  This was Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly the North West Frontier Territory, and the area was under the rigid rule of local tribes. Foreign travelers had to obtain permission to pass through here, which followed the legendary Khyber Pass between the two countries. The trip would be made by taxi, and in the taxi with you there would be a solider. The permission was free. The taxi ride and accompanying soldier were not. All in all, the price was astonishingly cheap by Western standards. But then again, what was your life worth?

  Wingo could not cross at the border. He had no permission and no papers he could use, and he was in no position to ask for permission, free or not. Thus he was getting off at Jalalabad. He was the only one who did. The bus would continue on and reach the border before it closed at lunchtime. His crossing, if it came, would be at night.

  He had a contact in the city, though, and he intended to exploit that contact to the fullest. Because of the heavy American presence here he had to be careful. There would be watchful eyes everywhere, both Americans and locals. And right now neither side was his ally. He was fluent in Pashto, which was the primary language spoken in the country. He was also conversant in Dari, the second most popular language here. But he could not speak either one in a native dialect; virtually no American could. He would simply keep his mouth closed for the most part.

  He had arranged to meet his contact later in a room in a hotel that was as far from the airport as he could manage. He got to the hotel early so he could see if anything was amiss. He had to trust his contact to a certain degree, but he trusted no one fully.

  It was early in the morning, but the temperature was already nearing sixty. In the heat of the day it would soar into the eighties this time of year. Still, Wingo had endured far worse; a thermometer even close to triple digits was not a particular hardship.

  He waited in the hall outside the room, keeping to the shadows. Through a window in the corridor he could see planes lifting off from the airport. They used to be all military aircraft, but the Americans had released the airport back to the Afghans, and commercial flights had started up soon thereafter. Wingo wished he could have climbed aboard such a flight. The trip in the air to New Delhi would have taken only about ninety minutes. On land the nearly thousand-kilometer distance would take him far longer. But traveling by plane, particularly in this region, involved lots of security checkpoints and required specific documents, none of which he had. So he was grounded, for now.

  He continued to wait in the shadows until he heard someone coming. When the man approached the door, Wingo was next to him in an instant, one hand around the butt of his pistol. The two men entered the room, and Wingo locked it behind them.

  The man was a Pashtun whom Wingo had met three years ago. It was a mission that had ended successfully and allowed the Pashtun to rise higher in his official organization. The men had become as friendly as they possibly could under the circumstances. His name was Adeel, and right now he was Wingo’s last and only hope for getting out of the country.

  Adeel sat on the rickety bed and looked up at him.

  “I understand that it is bad,” he said solemnly.

  “What have you heard?” asked Wingo.

  “Your name over official communication channels. The comments were not flattering.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “A botched mission and missing assets.”

  “Where do they think I am?”

  “No one seems to know. I doubt they think you are in Jalalabad.”

  “I don’t want to be here long. I need to get across the border, unofficially. I have to think my photo will be in the border guards’ hands. And though I look a bit different now, it’s not enough.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” asked Adeel.

  “A mission did go to hell, Adeel. But I was set up. By who, I don’t know right now. But I can’t trust my own guys, that’s how bad it is.”

  Adeel nodded. “Do you trust me?”

  “It’s the only reason you’re sitting here.”

  Adeel lifted a packet of papers from his jacket. “This will get you through to New Delhi. That is all I can promise.”

  “You get me to India, I can make it the rest of the way back to the States.”

  Adeel looked surprised. “You will go back there even though you do not trust your own people?”

  Wingo took the documents, examined them, came away satisfied, and thrust them into the inner pocket of his duffel. “I have a son back there who thinks I’m dead.”

  Adeel nodded. “I have four sons. They often think that their father is dead. I understand. And now I know that you are innocent. Guilty men do not return to their homes.”

  “So you didn’t believe in my innocence from the start?”

  Adeel shrugged. “This part of the world is not known for its trust in anything or anyone.”

  “I have to make this right, Adeel.”

  Adeel rose and said, “Then may Allah be with you, my friend.”

  That night Wingo made the crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, along a route devised by Adeel, while two uniformed guards, cash bribes in their pockets, looked the other way.

  Wingo was out of the fire and now into the frying pan—Afghanistan swapped for Pakistan. His next destination was the city of Peshawar, about sixty miles distant through the switchbacks of the Khyber Pass. He was traveling by private taxi, with a member of the Khyber Rifles sitting next to him as a guard. The journey would take the better part of two hours. Without the local guard, Wingo would be going nowhere. This protection was costing him all of two euros while the taxi was setting him back about four times that. He considered it money well spent. With Adeel’s help he had avoided going through immigration control at the border. Traveling from Afghanistan into Pakistan was a bit more rigorous and chaotic than going the other way.

  He looked out the window of the taxi as they traveled along the pass. This was the same route taken by the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan on their way to violently annex large parts of the known world. The pass had been largely closed during the Soviet occupation, and it was still shut down sometimes to foreigners. Wingo noted the blazing lights of drug smugglers’ massive estates, which dotted the stark, denuded hills, complete with anti-aircraft guns. There would always be money in drugs, he knew, but that wasn’t his concern right now.

  The guard never once looked at him, perhaps on orders from Adeel. Wingo was fine with that. He was not a chatty person and never said with ten words what he could say with only one, or better yet simply a glance.

  After Peshawar would come the capital city of Islamabad. From there he would make his crossing into northern India with the documents provided him by Adeel. Then it was a straight shot south to New Delhi. And from there a long-haul flight home with one connection in Doha, provided he could get a fake passport in India. Total flight time to go halfway around the world, about twenty hours. It had taken him far longer than that to go only two hundred miles.

  Yet he had a lot farther to go to catch his ride on a jumbo jet to the States.

  When he glanced behind him and saw the other vehicle closing in, Wingo suddenly realized that he might not even make it to Peshawar.

  CHAPTER

  22

  WINGO’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT this had been a total setup, with the guard next to him fully in on the conspiracy. When the shot came through the window and blew through the back of the guard’s head, Wingo didn’t think that anymore.

  He screamed at the driver in Pashto to basically put the gas pedal through the floorboard if he wanted
to keep living. The taxi surged ahead even as shots pinged off the car.

  As the dead guard slumped against him, Wingo grabbed the man’s AR-15. He aimed it through the blown-out window, waited for the other car to edge closer, and then pulled the trigger. There were three men in the other car, but he was aiming for only one of them.

  Wingo fired and the other driver’s blood exploded against the windshield. The vehicle veered off to the side, slammed against a solid road barrier, caught fire, overturned, and a few seconds later exploded.

  Wingo turned back around and looked at his driver.

  “Shit.”

  He felt the cab drift. He leapt over the front seat and settled next to the driver. He was an older man who would not age one day more. A bullet to the back of his head, probably a ricochet, had seen to that.

  Wingo took control of the steering wheel, then stretched his leg out