King and Maxwell

by David Baldacci

  “Always lots of homework,” he said dully. However, he made no move to open a book or pick up a pencil.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting to it?”

  “I suppose.” He paused, gritting his teeth. “Where do you think my dad is right now?”

  “Maybe on a plane back here from the Middle East.”

  Tyler listlessly thumbed through some pages in his math textbook.

  Michelle doubted he was focusing on the formulas she could see on the pages. She eyed him more closely. “Before your dad deployed the last time, did he talk to you about anything?”

  He stared at her blankly. “Anything like what? We talked about lots of stuff.”

  “Anything out of the ordinary? It could have been something seemingly innocuous.”

  Tyler thought about this and then slowly shook his head. “He told me to work hard in school and swimming. To mind Jean. And to keep out of trouble. Stuff like that.”

  Michelle nodded. “Well, keep mulling it over. Something else might strike you.”

  Michelle heard the noise before Tyler did. She pushed him down under the table and with one long leap reached the wall light switch and plunged the room into darkness.

  Her Sig was in her right hand. She blinked rapidly to adjust her eyes to the absence of light.

  Tyler whispered, “Michelle, what is it?”

  “Someone outside,” she whispered back. “You stay there. Get your phone out. Tap in nine-one-one. If I’m not back in five minutes call them.”

  “But—”

  “Just stay down and stay quiet, Tyler. It’ll be okay.”

  Michelle crab-walked out of the room, her gaze swiveling and taking in as much as her lines of sight would allow. She did not like noises in the night that she knew represented stealthy footsteps. Sean had neighbors on both sides of him, but there were buffers of trees on both those sides, too. A nice little screen for felons to do their work.

  Michelle’s immediate thought was that the three stiffs at the mall had friends who had returned to finish the job.

  She took a quick peek out the front window.

  A sedan was there that hadn’t been before. She couldn’t tell if anyone was inside or not. Her Land Cruiser was parked in the driveway but she couldn’t risk trying to reach it with Tyler in tow. She continued to watch out the window, all the while keeping her ears peeled for sounds of intrusion.

  She stiffened when she saw the man come around the corner of the house.

  “Shit!” she hissed.

  She opened the front door and called out to him. “Is there something you wanted, Agent McKinney?”

  He turned and saw her. Her manner had been jocular. When she saw his face, her jocularity vanished.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He came toward her. “Can we talk?”

  “What are you doing here? How did you even know to come here?”

  “We’re DHS,” he growled. “We do have resources.”

  “Sean’s not here. But you can talk to me.”

  He nodded and passed by her into the house. She glanced over his shoulder and checked the perimeter one more time before securing the door behind her.

  Michelle called out to Tyler in the kitchen that things were okay. She flicked on the lights, and he came into the living room on wobbly legs. He flinched when he saw McKinney.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Agent McKinney with Homeland Security.”

  “Homeland Security?” said Tyler. “Why are you guys involved?”

  McKinney said, “We keep the homeland secure. Like the name implies.” He stared hard at Tyler and then shot Michelle a glance. “Why is he here? Damn, can’t you guys heed a warning?”

  Michelle said, “It’s a long story but Tyler is safer with us. So why are you sneaking around Sean’s house?”

  McKinney sat down and slipped out a pack of Marlboros. “You mind if I smoke?”

  “Yeah, I do. And I know that Sean sure as hell would.”

  He put the smokes away and sat back. “Do you guys have any idea what you’re involved in?”

  “We’re working on it,” said Michelle. “Any help you’d like to give us would be appreciated.”

  “An international incident,” said McKinney, who didn’t seem to have heard her.

  Michelle sat down across from him while Tyler remained standing and looked stunned.

  “What kind of international incident?” asked Michelle calmly.

  McKinney studied her. “I’m not sure I can answer that.”

  “Then why the hell are you even here?” she said hotly. “To tell us you can’t cooperate with us? Trust me, we got that message loud and clear before.”

  McKinney cracked his knuckles. “The dead guys were former military.”

  “All of them?”

  He nodded. “But they’d been out of uniform a long time and had gotten into stuff that men who wore the uniform of this country never should.”

  “Like what?” asked Michelle.

  “Drugs and gunrunning, for starters. And some militia activity with maybe some domestic terrorism thrown in. The list only gets longer after that.”

  “Do you think that’s what this is about?”

  “I don’t think so. But I can’t be sure.”

  Michelle looked up at Tyler, who blurted out, “My dad wouldn’t be involved in anything like that.”

  McKinney turned to him. “He seems to be right in the middle of it, whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “What was the mission, McKinney? What was Sam Wingo doing? We know he was delivering something but it never got there.”

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “Does it matter?” Michelle said.

  “It might,” snapped McKinney.

  “Look, we’re both trying to get to the truth.”

  He looked at Tyler again. “Your old man contacted you, didn’t he? Slipped you a coded message?”

  Tyler immediately looked at Michelle. She hesitated but then nodded.

  Tyler said, “Yeah, he did. After he was supposed to be dead.”

  “And what did the message say?”

  Michelle answered. “That he was sorry and wanted Tyler to forgive him.”

  “You’re sure that was all?”

  “Yes,” said Tyler defiantly. “I wish it had been more but that’s all there was.”

  “Sounds like a confession to me,” said McKinney.

  “Don’t think so,” said Michelle before Tyler could say anything.

  “Why?”

  “Just my gut.”

  McKinney snorted with derision.

  She ignored this and said, “What was he delivering? And was it just him?”

  “It was apparently just him. Which makes no sense at all considering the cargo. But then maybe the military does things differently.”

  “So what was the damn cargo?” asked Michelle.

  McKinney cracked more knuckles. “Every alphabet agency and all the uniforms are mixed up in this shit. It’s big, really big.”

  “I’m sure it is. Big enough for you to get a call from the Pentagon and read us the riot act. But that doesn’t explain why you’re here. Like you said, you’re DHS. You have lots of resources. You don’t need to come to us for anything.”

  “What you say is perfectly true,” he said.

  “And still, here you are.”

  McKinney let out a long breath. “I checked you two out some more. You and King. That’s why I’m here. People I respect say you’re both the real deal. That you can be trusted. That you’re sharp.”

  “Okay,” said Michelle warily. “But why do I think one reason you’re here is that you’re having trouble getting straight answers from your side? And maybe there’s a lack of trust going on.”

  McKinney hiked his eyebrows at this but said nothing.

  Michelle said again. “So what was the cargo?” She added, “Come on, the suspense is killing me, Agent McKinney.”

  McKinney glanced at
Tyler and then back at Michelle. He seemed to have finally made up his mind. “Forty-eight hundred pounds.”

  Michelle’s brow furrowed. “That was the weight? Well over two tons?”

  McKinney nodded.

  “So what was it?”

  “What do you know that weighs forty-eight hundred pounds?”

  “What are we playing here, Jeopardy!?” Michelle snapped.

  “A nuke or a dirty bomb?” said Tyler anxiously.

  McKinney shook his head. “No.”

  She said, “Too light for a tank or a plane. Bioweapons? Some off-the-rack centrifuges? A few hundred al-Qaeda terrorists?” she added sarcastically.

  McKinney shook his head.

  “Okay, we give, what is it?” said Michelle.

  McKinney cleared his throat. “One billion euros.”

  CHAPTER

  30

  SEAN WAS SEATED ACROSS FROM Mary Hesse at a restaurant in Chantilly, Virginia. She was in her mid-forties, attractive with dark hair and a slim figure. She seemed to have a problem making eye contact with Sean. She wore glasses but kept taking them off and wiping the lenses with her napkin.

  Nerves all around, observed Sean.

  “So you worked with Sam Wingo?” he prompted for the second time. This was shaping up to be like pulling teeth, he thought. But in situations like this patience was a virtue even though it felt like an ulcer.

  She nodded. “Sam was a really nice guy. It was just—” She broke off, looking slightly dazed.

  “It was just what?”

  He put a hand across and tapped her wrist. “Ms. Hesse, I know this is hard. But as I told you on the phone I’m working with Sam’s son, Tyler.”

  “Sam spoke of him all the time. He was really proud,” she said.

  “I’m sure he was. Tyler is a great kid. But he’s terribly worried about his dad.”

  “They said he had been killed in Afghanistan.”

  “We don’t believe that to be true. And I think you were about to say that you thought something was off about Sam, weren’t you?”

  She looked surprised at his observation. “How did you—”

  “I’m former Secret Service. We get really good at reading body language.”

  “Well, he just appeared one day at DTI. No one had seen him previously. No one that I knew had even interviewed him for the job. And while we’re not that big a company we do have certain protocols.”

  “And these weren’t followed with Wingo?”

  “They didn’t appear to have been followed,” she corrected.

  “What else?”

  “He spoke Dari and Pashto, but not, well, not at the level of the other people at the firm.”

  “But I understood he was a salesman. He drummed up business for the company.”

  “We don’t need drumming, Mr. King. We’re swamped, even with the winding down of the wars in the Middle East. There’s still a large military footprint. And commercial companies are starting to go there. They all need translators.”

  “So business is booming and you don’t need salesmen. So what was Wingo doing for you?”

  At this simple question Hesse seemed perplexed. “I’m not really sure.”

  “You’re not really sure? You told me you worked with him.”

  Her face paled, and for an instant Sean thought she might be sick.

  “Take a sip of water and catch your breath,” he advised.

  She gulped some water and wiped her mouth with her napkin.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “You see, he wasn’t really working for us.”

  “So what was he doing?”

  “I was teaching him Pashto and Dari. At least building on what he already knew.”

  “You were teaching him to speak the languages primarily used in Afghanistan?”

  “And other countries in the Middle East as well, including Pakistan. And in Iran, Dari is known as Farsi. It’s a very useful language to know over there, along with Arabic of course.”

  “So if he wasn’t a salesman and he wasn’t qualified to be a translator, were you teaching him to be one?”

  “No. We have immersion schools for that. What I did was work with him one-on-one three hours a day, every weekday. I did that for nearly a year.”

  “Did you ever do that with anyone else?”

  She shook her head.

  “He was a reservist headed to Afghanistan. Maybe he wanted to speak the languages?”

  “But he wasn’t paying us to do it. We were paying him a salary to learn the languages.”

  Sean sat back, obviously flummoxed by this statement. “How do you know that?”

  “Our company bookkeeper, Sue, is a friend. She told me. But the thing is we were getting fully reimbursed for his salary.”

  “Who by?”

  “Some unit at the DoD. I’m not sure which, there are so many. But we were definitely getting paid back. It wasn’t costing us a dime. Our company’s owner is not known for his generosity. He wouldn’t pay for an employee who had no duties.”

  “Did you ever talk to Wingo about this… this unusual arrangement?”

  “I was told not to. I considered him a friend because we spent so much time together. He told me about his son. I told him about my family. I was stunned when he didn’t show up one day. I knew he was leaving for Afghanistan at some point, but I didn’t know he had been deployed. And I didn’t know he was in the reserves.”

  “He was regular Army. I think you were helping prepare him for a mission that required those language skills.”

  “What was the mission?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Good question. I wish I knew.”

  “You said you didn’t think Sam was dead? But it was in the paper.”

  “No, I don’t think he’s dead.” Sean leaned forward. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not in danger or trouble or both. Did he mention anything to you that might help me? Anything at all?”

  “He told me he hoped to retire soon. He wanted to spend more time with Tyler.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, there was something strange right before he left DTI.”

  “What?” said Sean sharply.

  “He said he was going back to Afghanistan soon. I told him to be