King and Maxwell (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 6)

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.