Robert Ludlum's the Treadstone Exile

by Joshua Hood

  He tried clearing his throat and then faked a few deep-chested coughs, but with the engines droning like a pair of swamp fans Hayes realized that he could fire a howitzer in the cockpit and she probably wouldn’t hear it.

  Guess I’m just going to have to take it up a notch, he thought.

  He hauled back on the yoke, let the Provider’s nose climb skyward for a few seconds before shoving the controls forward.

  Compared to the roller-coaster ride he’d taken across southern Burkina Faso, the maneuver was gentle as a summer breeze, with the only noticeable effects being the tickle in the pit of Hayes’s stomach that came during the few seconds of zero gravity.

  The same could not be said for his passenger.

  Hayes wasn’t sure if Zoe had nodded off or if she simply wasn’t accustomed to flying, but whatever the case, she jumped so hard that if she hadn’t been wearing the harness, he was pretty sure she would have blasted right through the windscreen.

  “What in the hell was that?” she screamed, her blue eyes wide as saucers.

  Knowing that Zoe would be furious if she even suspected he’d done it on purpose, Hayes spent a few seconds making a big show of regaining control of the aircraft, waiting until he’d leveled out before pointing to the headset over his ears.

  “Can’t hear you.”

  Zoe took a few ragged breaths and, seeing that he was in control of the plane, nodded, pulled her headset over her ears, and repeated the question.

  “What was that?”

  “Must have hit a thermal,” Hayes said. “These older planes don’t have the engines to climb above the weather.”

  “You think it will happen again?”

  “Not sure, but if it does, the only way I can talk to you is if you keep your headset on.”

  “Okay . . . okay . . .” she panted over the radio.

  “Just take a few deep breaths, in through your nose, out through your mouth,” Hayes said.

  Zoe followed his instructions, matching him breath for breath until she’d regained her composure.

  “How old is this plane?” she asked, studying the interior as if seeing it for the first time.

  “She was built in the late sixties, but her last official flight was in 1986.”

  “And it’s safe to fly something this old?”

  “Well, she wasn’t in the best shape when I found her, but it wasn’t anything a few months of hard work couldn’t fix. Did most of the repairs myself.”

  “So, you’re a mechanic?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you’ve worked on planes before . . . right?”

  “Uh, maybe we should talk about something else,” he said, not liking where the conversation was going.

  “Fine . . . so how long have you been a drug smuggler?” she asked.

  The question caught him off guard and left him stammering for a reply.

  “Drug smuggler . . . ? Who told you that I was a drug smuggler?”

  “Mallory did,” Zoe shrugged. “She said that’s why you have such a big plane. But if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool.”

  Hayes was desperate to keep the conversation going and threw out a number at random, “It’s been . . . let me see . . . five years.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Uh . . . you know, pick up the drugs here, smuggling them there . . .”

  “You’re full of shit,” she grinned.

  So far the conversation was not going as planned and Hayes found himself wishing that he’d paid more attention during the asset recruitment class he’d attended at Harvey Point—the Agency’s covert training facility located near Hertford, North Carolina.

  Recruiting foreign nationals, gaining their trust, and then getting them to turn on their government was a CIA case officer’s bread and butter. It was a subtle and long-studied art that revolved around MICE: an acronym that stood for Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego.

  Knuckle draggers like Hayes, on the other hand, got a three-hour CliffsNotes version: a down-and-dirty how-to that ended with the cadre saying, “The best way to get a foreign national to not turn you over to the authorities is to give them something they need.”

  Back at Harvey Point, the concept had seemed straightforward enough, but sitting behind the controls while Zoe turned his cover story into Swiss cheese, Hayes realized it was time to change the subject—again.

  “So . . . you ever been to Grand-Bassam?” he asked.

  Real smooth. Why don’t you just ask her about the weather, dumbass?

  “Quite a few times, actually,” she said with a smile.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. In fact, my father taught me to surf in Grand-Bassam . . . but that was years ago. Back when he actually wanted to spend time with me.”

  Hayes watched her as she spoke and noticed the change in her eyes when she mentioned her father. He wasn’t sure if it was sadness or regret, but there was something there—a vulnerability to be exploited.

  Keep her talking.

  “You know, when I was a kid, I didn’t get to see much of my old man.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we didn’t have a lot of money growing up and when my mom got sick my dad had to pick up a second job. Sometimes if he got off early, I might see him at the breakfast table, but usually he came home and went right to bed. He was working his ass off to make sure we had everything we needed but I . . . I . . .”

  He trailed off, the emotions that came with the memories making him uncomfortable.

  Why the hell am I telling her all of this?

  The last time Hayes had talked about his childhood was with the shrink in Tacoma, and even then he’d done so grudgingly. He thought by keeping the details light and his responses to her questions vague, the doc might move on.

  But all his avoidance did was pique her curiosity and no matter how far he tried to steer the conversation away from those formidable years, she always found a way to steer it back.

  “Let’s go back to how you felt about you father not being around,” she’d say. “Did you resent his absences?”

  “Shit, lady, that was twenty-four years ago,” he finally snapped. “How the hell am I supposed to remember how I felt when I was ten years old?”

  It was a lie. Hayes remembered exactly how he’d felt, because unlike bullet holes and broken bones, the wounds passed from father to son never healed.

  “But you what?” Zoe asked, her face showing real interest in his words.

  “Well, I treated him like a real asshole,” Hayes said. “Swore that if I ever had a kid, I’d never be like him.”

  “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He nodded.

  “And?”

  “Let’s just say the apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  Zoe frowned, but before she could follow up on his answer a tiny beep drew her attention to her waistband.

  “Oh, crap,” she said, inching up her shirt, revealing a black box the size of a deck of cards.

  “Everything okay?” Hayes asked.

  “Yeah, it’s . . . my insulin pump. I’ve got to change the cartridge.”

  “Oh . . . uh . . . do you need some . . . some privacy?” Hayes asked, face coloring at the sight of her bare flesh.

  “Why, Mr. Hayes, who knew that you were such a gentleman?” she said, grinning coyly at his obvious discomfort.

  “Just saying that if you do, I can turn on the autopilot and . . . you know . . . step out.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said, taking a black case from her bag.

  Zoe deftly made the switch, ejecting the empty ampule and exchanging it for the fresh one she took from the case.


  “Before I got this, every day it was needles, needles, needles—always checking my sugar levels and injecting myself with insulin—but this takes care of it for me,” she said, sliding the loaded ampule into the tray and snapping it shut. “See, all done. No more shots and no more doctors.”

  “Yeah, I’m not a fan of doctors myself,” Hayes deadpanned. “Bunch of bloodsuckers, if you ask me.”

  * * *

  —

  Mallory was true to her word and the landing at Félix Houphouët-Boigny International Airport was without incident. The tower instructed Hayes to taxi to the cargo ramp on the south side of the field, where he shut down the aircraft.

  “Well, we made it,” he said after helping Zoe off the plane.

  “And I’ve never been so grateful,” she said, turning, the ocean breeze touseling her hair as she pulled herself into a languid stretch. “Now to find a bathroom.”

  “I’m sure they have one in the office,” he said, pointing to the low-slung building to their front. “Let me finish up here and we’ll go check.”

  “No, I have to go now,” she said with a grimace that told Hayes waiting around wasn’t an option.

  “All right,” he said, “but come straight back.”

  “Yeees, Dad,” Zoe grinned.

  Hayes watched her go, waiting until she stepped through the door before climbing inside the plane, retrieving the drip pans and chock blocks from their spot next to the door and tossing them out.

  He set the drip pans below the engines and after kicking the chocks into place, was securing the troop door when the sound of approaching engines drew his attention to the flight line and the army-green Hilux and a Toyota Pathfinder racing toward the plane.

  With the door locked, Hayes started toward the nose and was moving around the landing gear when Zoe stepped out of the building.

  She crossed toward the plane, head down, eyes locked on the phone in her hand—oblivious to the vehicles until they skidded to a halt in front of her.

  Zoe barely had time to react before the soldiers were leaping from the bed of the pickup and moving to block her path. She dodged around the hood and was stepping out into the road when an officer grabbed her by the shoulder.

  “Get your hands off me!” she shouted.

  “Be quiet!” the man snapped.

  But Zoe wasn’t having it.

  She kicked him hard in the shin, cursing in French as she tried to twist free of his grip.

  “I said, be quiet!” the officer ordered.

  He raised his hand into the air and was about to slap Zoe across the face, when Hayes stepped in behind him.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, pressing the Beretta into the back of the officer’s skull.

  “You must be Adam Hayes,” the officer sneered.

  “And you’re a dead man if you don’t take your hands off her right now.”

  “Very well,” he said, releasing his grip.

  “Zoe, get in the truck,” Hayes ordered, waiting for her to move before shoving the officer toward the Hilux.

  The officer turned and studied Hayes, eyes cold as a viper’s.

  “You got something you want to say?” Hayes glared at him.

  “A message from General Dábo,” he said.

  “Well, spill it, then get the hell out of here, before I revoke your birth certificate.”

  “The general says, ‘Be careful, the streets of Grand-Bassam can be quite dangerous.’”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Take it as you wish,” the man said, pulling down his sunglasses, “but it would be a shame if something happened to Ms. Cabot.” The soldier grinned, turned, and strutted back to the Hilux.

  Hayes watched the soldier climb into the backseat, the name bouncing around inside his skull like a flaming pinball. But he held his anger in check and waited until the truck had pulled away before he climbed inside the Pathfinder and slammed the door behind him.

  “I-is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Zoe Cabot, is that your name?”

  “What? Who told you that?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No, that is not my name,” she said defiantly.

  But Hayes wasn’t buying it.

  “Take off your sunglasses,” he ordered.

  “What . . . why?”

  “Because I want to see your eyes.”

  Zoe recoiled, her face pale, lips quivering when she finally spoke.

  “Y-you are sc-scaring me, Mr. Hayes.”

  “I’m going to do a lot worse than that if you don’t do what I tell you,” he said, voice cold as ice.

  Zoe was shaking, but she complied, and when she pulled the sunglasses from her face, the fear in her blue eyes was palpable.

  But Hayes was too pissed to care. He was tired of the lies, fed up with being moved around the board like a pawn.

  This isn’t a game, it’s my life.

  “I want you to listen very carefully, because I am only going to ask you this once. Either you tell me the truth or you’re on your own. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said in a tiny voice.

  “Good. Now tell me, is your father Andre Cabot?”

  30

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Ten hours after leaving Site Tango, Mike Carpenter was in his office, the six a.m. meeting he’d had with Senator Miles replaying in his head.

  “I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but I want Shaw dead by the end of the week. The man is a liability.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carpenter had said, nodding, his head fogged in from lack of sleep.

  “Now I realize that going after one of your own isn’t an easy ask,” Miles had added, his early aggressive tone softening. “But if you make this happen, I promise that by the end of the year, you’ll be sitting in the director’s chair.”

  “Consider it done, sir.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  Contrary to the senator’s presumptions, Carpenter didn’t have any qualms about killing Shaw. For him the man was just another speed bump—a minor obstacle to be hurdled on his way to the top of the CIA.

  But while the acceptance of the order had been easy, the execution was proving to be a different story.

  When he first came to the Directorate of Operations in the early ’80s, Carpenter had a Rolodex full of former Cold Warriors. Meat eaters who’d mastered their dark arts in the back alleys and shadowy streets of Soviet Europe.

  Back then he could have revoked Shaw’s birth certificate with a single phone call.

  But September 11 had fundamentally changed the way America prosecuted a war. If Shaw had been a Muslim extremist hiding out in the windswept mountains of Yemen, or a cave in Afghanistan, Carpenter could have sent a Hellfire down his chimney. Or sent a JSOC kill team to blow down his door and smoke him in his bed. But this was the United States and killing a man like Levi Shaw was going to require a deft touch.

  The only problem was the CIA wasn’t exactly known for its finesse.

  It’s got to look like an accident.

  The first option was to hit him at home. Carpenter wondered how difficult it would be to hack into the smart meter outside of Shaw’s Alexandria residence and fill the house full of gas—blow his ass up while he was sleeping in his La-Z-Boy.

  But he abandoned the idea, knowing that no matter how skilled the hacker, it was impossible not to leave fingerprints.

  No, he needed to do it the old-fashioned way. In public, with plenty of witnesses to describe the scene to the local police.

  But how?

  Sitting in the back of the Suburban at five-thirty that night, Carpenter still didn’t have an answer.

  The hell with it, he thought, turning his attention to the line of brake lights he saw through the windshield.
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  “What’s going on?” he asked his driver.

  “Damn DDOT, tearing up the beltway again,” he said, double-checking the sideview mirror in preparation for merging to the outside lane.

  As the SUV shifted left, Carpenter found himself instinctively looking over his shoulder, and he was about to tell his driver that he was clear to come over when a Porsche came racing up from behind, its driver rapidly blinking the headlights as he cut across two lanes of traffic.

  “Surely this asshole isn’t about to—” he began.

  But before the words were out of his mouth, the German sports car was slashing past the Suburban, narrowly missing the bumper.

  “Damn, that was close,” he said, turning back to the front.

  “It was safer driving in Iraq,” his driver said, flashing him a smile in the rearview. “At least over there you could actually shoot back.”

  How did I not see it before?

  Carpenter didn’t know, but he immediately pulled the Moleskine notebook from his coat pocket and got to work.

  He spent the rest of the ride in silence—nurturing the ember of the plan forming in the dark recesses of his mind—working out the logistics: the time of day, how many men he would need, and where to set the kill zone.

  Carpenter was firing on all cylinders, and by the time he climbed out of the Suburban and started for his front door, he knew that Shaw was as good as dead.

  31

  GRAND-BASSAM

  While there were many villages along Ivory Coast’s southeastern shore with access to the ocean, it was Grand-Bassam’s strategic location at the mouth of the Comoé river that led the French to choose it as their colonial capital.

  Within weeks of settling the area, French engineers were busy constructing the docks. Months later, the first merchant ships begun to arrive from Europe. The goods packed into their bulging hulls were immediately transferred into canoes and transported upriver.

  This never-ending flow of goods going out and cash coming in soon transformed this once sleepy fishing village into the crown jewel of French colonial Africa.

  Hayes had seen the pictures of the town in its prime—the white stucco villas the merchant princes built for themselves, the stately French Colonial government buildings, and the cobblestone promenades that lead to the town square.