Дэвид Балдаччи - King and Maxwell

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.

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 and hit the brakes. He guided the car over to the side. Luckily there were no other vehicles on this stretch of road. He lifted both bodies out of the vehicle, pushed them over the barrier, and watched as they rolled down the dirt slope and settled at the bottom on a pile of boulders. He did not have time to give them a proper burial. He simply muttered a prayer.

Then he glanced over at the flaming car. His first impulse was to run over and find out who they were and why they were after him. But the flame ball increased as the gas in the tank was burned off. He quickly realized there would be nothing useful left. Just blackened corpses, bone, and twisted metal.

He drove off with no guard and no driver and his clothes covered in the guard’s blood. He had a destroyed rear window, a blood-splattered interior, and no guarantee that he had not been betrayed. If they did know where he was, another car would be sent after him. Or they might simply be waiting up ahead for him. And “up ahead” was formidable enough as it was, and it didn’t involve men with guns.