Дэвид Балдаччи - King and Maxwell

“Back from the dead?” said McKinney.

Sean looked down at him. “Why were you called in on this to shake us down? Who made the call?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Well, you should at least try to answer it for yourself. Any IDs on the dead guys?”

“Part of an ongoing investigation and thus not any of your business.”

“They looked like military but they had no ID,” said Sean.

“Military like Wingo?” asked McKinney curiously.

“Who wasn’t really in the reserves at all.”

“How do you know that?”

“That’s confidential and I keep confidences. So, did some higher-ups at the Pentagon sic you on us?”

“That is no concern of yours.”

“Oh, it’s very much a matter of concern for me. Those men were going to kill us, Agent McKinney. And they almost did kill someone I care about. I always take things like that very personally.”

McKinney grabbed Sean’s arm. “If you keep this up, I will have your ass arrested.”

Sean pulled McKinney’s hand off. “And if you keep stomping on my constitutional rights I will have a field day with you and DHS both in court and in the press.”

Sean rubbed a trickle of blood off his face and started for the door.

Michelle glanced at McKinney. “You really are a piece of work.”

McKinney ignored this and said, “Hey, King. What’s next for you? Getting the kid shot?”

Sean kept walking.

Michelle followed and slammed the door behind her.

SEAN SAT IN THE truck, Michelle next to him. They were in the hospital parking lot. Sean hadn’t yet started the vehicle.

Michelle said, “Just take deep breaths. And we need to get some ice for your face before it gets really swollen.”

“This was my fault, you know that, right?” He kept staring straight out the windshield.

“No, I don’t know that. I think it was the fault of the prick who shot her.”

“She never would have been involved in this except for me, Michelle.”

“Actually, I think I was the one who forced you into calling her. So if you want to place blame, lay it on me. But this kind of talk isn’t getting us anywhere. If you really want to make it up to Dana, then I say we need to get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

Sean started the Land Cruiser. “Your logic is overwhelming, but logic is not going to cut it this time. We are going to attack this thing, though. Only not head-on.”

“Why not?”

Sean pulled out of the parking lot. “Three guys at the mall. They weren’t Feds. They looked to me like ex-military. They had the beef, the buzz cuts, the firepower, the veneer of authority.”

“Ex-military. What would ex-military be involved in here?”

“Well, Sam Wingo wasn’t in the reserves. He was regular Army. The DoD built a subterfuge and put him on a mission to deliver something. That mission got screwed and Wingo is off the grid. He contacted his son to tell him he was sorry. So, what was he delivering and who has it now?”

“Do you think Wingo took it?”

“I don’t know. You vet a guy for a mission like that, you must feel he’s pretty solid.”

“So maybe the mission was a setup from the get-go and Wingo the fall guy. That might explain the email to Tyler.”

Sean nodded in agreement. “The man Tyler described to us does not sound like a traitor. But if the mission had gone off as planned, what would the Army have told the Wingos? That Sam was KIA? MIA?”

“If that was part of the plan,” said Michelle, “I’m betting a dad like Sam Wingo would have wanted someone there to be with Tyler. They don’t have any other family, so…”

“So enter Jean Wingo as the stepmom.”

“Which would explain the weird circumstances of the wedding. Tyler not even being invited. It being before a judge and all.”

“Hell, they might not even be married,” pointed out Sean.

“Right. I doubt Jean is even her real name.”

He said, “So much deception, whatever that asset was it must’ve been really important.”

“But now we have possible former military in the mix. What could they want?”

“You think they might have the asset?”

Michelle shrugged. “Maybe. But if so, do they also have Sam Wingo?”

“He got the email off to Tyler. What if he escaped and is now on the run?”

“Then he has the military and these other guys on his butt.”

“Lucky him.” Sean looked out the window. “We almost bit the bullet today too.”

“I know. It was close.”

“So these guys are good.”

Michelle said, “More than good, I’d say.”

“But we can take them. We did take them, in fact.”

She glanced at him. “In the future it depends on how many of them there are. I left my superpowers back on my home planet.”

“Well, they have three fewer bodies to throw at us after today.” Sean rubbed his swollen jaw.

“When General Brown hears all the facts, Sean, he’ll be sorry he punched you.”

“I seriously doubt that. The next time the guy might just shoot me.”

“So how are we going after this if we can’t hit it straight-on?”

“Tyler is vulnerable, Michelle. If they went after us, they’ll go after him in a heartbeat.”

“So we stay away from him?”

“No, I think we need to be his protection detail.”

“We can’t cover him twenty-four seven,” countered Michelle.

“No, but we can do our best.”

“And solving the case?”

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Care to share?”

“If Sam Wingo communicated with his son?”

Michelle caught on instantly. “Then Tyler can communicate with his dad by hitting reply.”

“That’s right. Only we’ll be asking the questions.”

“Sean, what do you think is going on?”

He drew a long breath. “Like Dana told us, I think the Army had some top-secret mission and it all went to hell in a handbasket. And whatever Wingo was brought in to deliver is out there in the wrong hands.”

“But what could it be? A nuke? A biological agent?”

“I don’t know, Michelle. I really don’t know. But if it is a nuke or some turbocharged version of the Black Plague, we might find out about it a lot sooner than we’d like.”

“Why do we humans make things so complicated?”

“Because we’re afraid that keeping things simple makes us unsophisticated. And uninteresting.”

“You could be a philosopher. But how do we engage Tyler without making him a target?”

He said, “There’s no way to do that. So we have to keep him safe at the same time he’s helping us.”

“But he lives with his stepmother.”

“Did I say it was going to be easy?”

Sean gazed gloomily out the window. This was as bad as he had felt since, well, since watching Michelle fighting for her life in a hospital bed. He blamed himself for that one, too. If he had figured things out faster, she never would have been harmed.

“Why don’t you text Tyler and see if he can meet us later? We’ll have to keep it under the radar.”

Michelle keyed in the text and fired it off.

Five minutes passed and then she got a response.

Michelle read it twice to make sure she was actually seeing what she was seeing.

“Sean?”

“Yeah.”

“I think we might have a lot more access to Tyler than we thought.”

“Why?”

“Because apparently his fake stepmom has disappeared too.”

THEY DIDN’T MEET AT THE PANERA, or at the pool.

It was a spot off a rural road about ten miles west of where Tyler lived. When he pulled up in his dad’s pickup truck, Sean was already there.

Tyler climbed out of the truck and looked at him.