The Treadstone Resurrection

by Joshua Hood

  Due to the flammable nature of the compounds involved, and the fact that the cartels started hiring FARC—the oldest and largest of Colombia’s left-wing rebel groups—to guard the processing plants, the DEA decided to switch gears. That was when Boggs first met Nick Ford.

  The DEA was great at following the money, planning raids on drug houses and stash spots in the city. But out in the countryside it was a different story. The bush was FARC’s territory, and the paramilitary group had the DEA outnumbered and outgunned.

  It was Boggs’s idea to hire contractors. Former Special Ops and Special Forces soldiers who knew how to operate in the jungle and could take the fight to the enemy. One of the first men he found was Nick Ford.

  Ford was an outstanding leader. In six months his team hit more airfields, fuel depots, and hangars than the rest of the teams combined. After that, it didn’t matter how much coke they produced; if the narcos couldn’t get it out of the country, they were losing money.

  Then President Díaz came to power in Venezuela and the whole dynamic changed.

  “They are right across the border,” Ford said. “Just give me the green light.”

  “You understand the only reason we are allowed to work here is because of the host nation, right? Colombia and the U.S. are allies.”

  “So?”

  “Have you watched the news?” Boggs asked. “We aren’t exactly welcome over there.”

  But Ford wouldn’t let it go, and Boggs agreed to run it up the chain.

  He was expecting to get shot down right away and was surprised when headquarters told him to write up an operations order.

  “I need actionable intelligence,” he told Ford the next time he saw him. “Names, places, pictures, and grids for the airfields. This has to be done by the book.”

  “Won’t let you down.”

  Boggs didn’t know how he managed to pull it off, but a week later Ford was back in Bogotá with a full workup.

  “That place is the Wild West,” he said when they met again, pointing to the region on the map. “The cartel is bringing this stuff across the river and loading the dope into planes.”

  “Who owns the runways?”

  “That’s just it, this area is all flat scrubland. Someone makes a call and a dude in a pickup shows up. They have these weighted barrels that they drag behind the truck, flattens the grass down, and boom, you have a landing strip.”

  “Who’s running the show?”

  “Colonel Carlos Vega.”

  “Of the SEBIN?”

  “I’m telling you, it is a different world over there. Instead of a bunch of cartels fighting with each other and the government, over there, the government is the cartel. They call it the Cártel de los Soles and it’s made up of officers from the Bolivarian National Guard.”

  The Cartel of the Suns.

  Boggs had heard the rumors, everyone at the DEA had, but to actually have proof that the Bolivarian National Guard, Venezuela’s Army, was a state-funded cartel was crazy.

  Two week later, Boggs got Ford the authorization he needed, and Operation Mongoose was a go.

  Now Ford is dead. Did I do this?

  32

  AUBURN, WASHINGTON

  President Diego Mateo was a name Hayes hadn’t thought of since 2009. Not since he left Treadstone and buried all the memories deep into the catacombs of his mind.

  The way Shaw worked the name into the conversation threw him for a loop. It almost seemed like an afterthought.

  Or was it bait? Another test.

  “Where are we going?” Waters asked, breaking his train of thought.

  “First stop is Chicago. We’ve got to pick up a few friends,” Hayes answered from the right seat of the Gulfstream GV.

  “Chicago? This isn’t an Uber,” Waters said.

  Hayes tugged the pistol from his holster and looked at Waters over the top of his sunglasses. “You remember when you volunteered for this and I told you that I had a pilot’s license?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Well, I don’t need another pilot, so you can either stop asking questions or you can get the fuck out of my plane.”

  Waters turned his attention to the instrument panel and punched some numbers into the GPS. “Flight time to Chicago is two hours,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “That’s more like it.” Hayes smiled, getting to his feet and walking back to the main cabin and the open laptop on a table.

  Hayes logged in to Skype and typed a number from memory and waited for the connection to be established. When the screen blinked to life, it showed a blond-haired man with green eyes sitting inside a swank corner office.

  “Hey, hey, if it isn’t my old pal Hayes,” the man said.

  “JT, how are you, man?”

  “Just grinding it out in corporate hell, living amongst the lettuce eaters, you know how it is.”

  “You up for a little action?” Hayes asked.

  “Hold on a second,” JT said, getting up from his chair and disappearing from view.

  Hayes heard the sound of the man’s shoes over the carpet and the click of the door being eased shut, and a moment later JT was back in the frame, with an apostrophe of a smile at the edge of his lips.

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked, leaning closer to the camera.

  “I’ve got an op in Venezuela, need a guy who is handy with the steel and knows how to find people who don’t want to be found.”

  “Sounds like my kind of gig. What’s the timeline?”

  “Chicago Executive in, uh”—Hayes glanced down at his watch—“two hours.” He shrugged.

  “Hell yeah, anything else?”

  “Just bring your hunting gear,” Hayes said, moving the cursor over the end call button.

  They caught the jet stream on the way to Illinois and landed in Chicago ten minutes ahead of schedule. Waters taxied over toward the cluster of hangars on the east side of the field.

  “There he is,” Hayes said, pointing to the man with the black ball cap, a black Pelican case at his feet.

  Hayes and JT met in Iraq when Hayes was working with Task Force 121 and JT was providing intel. JT had never hesitated to jump into action then, and clearly some things had never changed.

  “So what do we have?” he asked, after climbing aboard.

  “I need you to find a guy—well, two guys, actually,” Hayes said, bringing JT up to speed.

  “Just tell me who’s first,” he said, pulling his computer from the hard case.

  “First we find Cole Boggs,” Hayes said.

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Are you serious?” Hayes frowned at him.

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “If I knew how to find him, I wouldn’t have flown three hours out of my way to pick up a self-proclaimed intel weenie.”

  Every target that Hayes had ever tracked down had a center point. It was just the way people were made. Everyone from the thug on the street to the most hardened terrorist had someplace or someone that was the center of their universe.

  For Hayes it was his family, and that gave him an idea.

  “JT, you have kids, right?” Hayes asked.

  The shift in the man’s eyes was like a wall going up. His lips tightened and his fingers curled into a fist. A defensive posture. Nonverbal clues that were designed to tell the right eyes that they were getting close to a line.

  It was the reaction he’d been hoping for.

  JT finally spoke. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  It was a polite question, one he’d asked hundreds of times since Jack was born. Ask a civilian out on the street and you got a straight answer. A yes or a no. But ask a cop or a soldier, men who had seen behind the shiny veneer draped over the so-called civilized world, and you got a totally different answer.<
br />
  “Could you go two years without talking to them?” Hayes asked.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Didn’t think so. Boggs has a daughter,” he said, pulling the file he’d gotten from Shaw out of the bag and turning to the beneficiary page. “Cassidy Boggs, sixteen, a senior at Highland Park High School.”

  “That’s a good in,” JT said.

  “Do you want her Social?” Hayes asked.

  “Dude, she’s sixteen, what good is her Social Security number going to do? You have her digits?” JT asked.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, after reading off the phone number listed in the file.

  “Kids these days live on their phones, man. See, look at all these texts,” JT said, pointing at the screen.

  But a quick scroll-through failed to identify any numbers outside of the Highland Park 469 area code.

  Nothing.

  “Just because he isn’t using a cell doesn’t mean he isn’t talking to her,” JT said. “You ever heard of Instagram?”

  “What is that, like Echelon or something?” Hayes asked, referring to the NSA’s signal intelligence collection and analysis program that had come to light in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked highly classified information to the world.

  “No, man, it is a social media app,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You are aware that we have something called the Internet, right?”

  “Funny.”

  “Kids don’t talk on the phone anymore. They text and then they become teenagers and all of a sudden it’s like they work for the CIA. Crazy opsec. Let me show you my daughter’s page,” he said, logging in to Instagram and typing in @kielyBunny02. The page changed to selfies of a cute blond girl playing with a puppy.

  “Ah, that nice.”

  “That’s what I said, little Kiely out there playing with the dog, all wholesome and shit. I would have never thought anything about it, but then Kiely turns fifteen and all these dudes are all over her shit . . .”

  “You okay?” Hayes asked, seeing the man’s face turning red.

  “These punks, man. Once boys start showing up, everything changes. So my wife tells her that we need to have access to her account.”

  “Seems fair,” Hayes said.

  “You’d have thought we were asking to put her diary on CNN, man, she totally flipped out. So we block her from the computer, and she is jonesing like a junkie at a methadone clinic. Comes back to the old lady and says, ‘Here’s all my passwords.’”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “I think so, but my wife smells a rat, starts poking around and finds this.” He clicked on a picture that showed a New Mexico State hooded sweatshirt: @NMhoodieFinsta.

  “What the hell is this crap?”

  “This is my daughter’s Finstagram account. Her fake account . . .”

  “You think Cassidy has one?”

  “Let’s see.” He typed Cassidy Boggs into the search bar.

  “That’s her,” Hayes said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” Hayes said, holding up the picture of Boggs he’d taken from the file. “Same nose and chin as her old man.”

  “Just going to drop this logic bomb right here,” JT said to himself, his fingers clattering over the keyboard like a machine gun on full auto.

  Beside him, Hayes watched the lines of numbers that represented the code appear on the screen. “Now I break through this little firewall and . . . boom, here we go,” he said, indicating a name on the screen. “@CowboyCounty1,” JT said, pointing at the list of direct messages that started with “Daddy, when are you coming home from Colombia?”

  Got him.

  33

  CÚCUTA, COLOMBIA

  When Cole Boggs woke up, the girl was gone, but the hangover had just arrived. He sat up in bed, mouth tasting like a three-day-old ashtray, and waited for the room to stop spinning before grunting to his feet.

  “Fucker.” He cursed the empty bottle of Wild Turkey on the nightstand.

  Boggs staggered to the bathroom, the acid churn in his guts directing him to the toilet, where he vomited until he tasted bile.

  “Mother of God,” he said and groaned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Proud of yourself?” a female voice asked.

  Boggs flushed the toilet and cast bloodshot eyes at the woman standing in the doorway.

  Physically, Isabel Vargas was typical of the women he’d met in Colombia: strikingly beautiful in a gray tank top and faded jeans, with cream-white skin and black hair. But a glance at the almond eyes, judging him over the rim of her coffee cup, was enough to tell Boggs that if he was looking for sympathy, he’d come to the wrong place.

  “Do me a favor,” he croaked, standing up and moving to the sink.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Pull out your pistol,” he answered, nodding to the Glock 19 holstered next to the badge that identified her as a police officer, “and shoot me in the head.”

  “Let’s start with a shower,” she said. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  Boggs stepped into the shower and turned the hot water all the way up, adjusted the nozzle so it sprayed against the wall, and sat on the wooden bench in the corner. He lowered his head into his hands and let the steam roll over his body.

  Boggs hadn’t been looking for a woman when he came to Cúcuta six months ago. In fact, he wasn’t looking for anything in Colombia. Everything he wanted was on the east side of the Río Táchira in Venezuela’s Apure region, and the Puente Internacional Francisco de Paula Santander was the only bridge in the area that spanned the river.

  His first order of business was to find a safe house. Boggs needed a place that gave him a clear line of sight on the bridge—a place where he could monitor the narcos crossing into Colombia.

  The condominiums at Prados del Este provided everything he needed. They were located a rifle shot from the bridge, and from the balcony of his third-floor condo, he could see both the bridge and Ureña on the other side.

  Meeting Detective Isabel Vargas was a bonus, but Boggs wasn’t sure how much longer she’d put up with his drinking.

  After the shower he took a handful of aspirin, dressed, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Isabel was already at the table, an extra plate of bacon and eggs beside her. “I’m sorry,” Boggs said in Spanish.

  “Um-hmm,” she hummed through a mouthful of eggs.

  Boggs crossed to the coffeepot, poured a cup, and watched her. Any thought that he knew women because he’d been married before went out the window when he met Izzy. Being married to an American had not prepared him for what he would find in Colombia. South American women, much like their European counterparts, had pouting down to a science, and since they’d moved in together, he learned the difference between an angry pout, a playful pout, and the current disgusted pout.

  Isabel finished chewing, took a sip of coffee, and swallowed.

  “You were dreaming about Ford again,” Isabella said. “You shouted his name.”

  Boggs watched as her hand slipped to the sterling silver locket that hung from her neck and knew where this was going. The locket was her prized possession, and Boggs knew that inside was the last picture of her family, before Colonel Vega murdered them.

  “He . . .” she began, eyes filling with tears. “He would be alive if . . . if it wasn’t for me,” she said.

  “Izzy, stop,” Boggs said, reaching for her hand. “Ford’s death, it had nothing to do with you,” he lied.

  Boggs hadn’t always been a liar. In fact, the first week of ethics training at the DEA Training Academy in Quantico centered on truthfulness. Boggs remembered the instructor’s words: “The moment you graduate and become a special agent, there is only one thing that matters. Does anyone know what that is?”

  “Good casework,” a woman i
n the first row said.

  “No,” the instructor said and nodded.

  “Proper evidence handling,” a man in the second row answered.

  “No, c’mon, people, this is day-one stuff.”

  “The truth,” Boggs answered.

  “That’s right.” She smiled. “The truth. No matter how good your case is or what kind of evidence you have, a lie will destroy a case faster than a bullet to the heart.”

  It was a lesson that lined up with what he’d learned in the Corps—a place where honor and loyalty were everything. But being undercover was an entirely different animal. In Boggs’s world, the truth would kill, and he’d been under so long that the lies came easily. He wanted to give up undercover work, but then his daughter, Cassidy, went on the college tour down to Florida State and decided she had to be a Seminole. One problem: There was no way to swing the out-of-state tuition, even with overtime.

  CET changed that. Not only did he get travel- and hazard-duty pay when the team deployed overseas, but since he wasn’t in the U.S. it was all tax-free.

  “I feel responsible,” she said, “and I want to make it right. I want to help.”

  “You are helping,” Boggs said, eager to change the subject. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and nodded to the file open in front of her. “What are you working on?”

  “The narcos killed one of our officers at the border yesterday. My boss wants me to look into it.”

  Just as with Boggs, it was the bridge that brought Detective Isabel Vargas to Cúcuta. Her command in the Metropolitan Police, a regional arm of the Policía Nacional de Colombia, had one primary responsibility: keeping the violence on the Venezuelan side of the river from spreading into Colombia.

  “I am doing everything I can,” Boggs said.

  “I know you are going over there today,” she said, nodding to the east. “Let me go with you.”

  “No, Izzy,” he said, cutting her off.

  “Why? Why can’t I go?”

  “First and foremost, it’s out of your jurisdiction. Second, it’s dangerous, and third, and most important, if Colonel Vega finds you in Venezuela, he will kill you,” Boggs replied.