The Treadstone Resurrection

by Joshua Hood

  “It is the only reason he’s still breathing,” Hayes said.

  If Blair was taken aback by the statement, he didn’t show it. In fact, for a moment neither man said anything.

  Hayes had recognized something in the man the first time they met and knew the feeling was mutual. They both shared common values and respected the natural silence. Avoiding the need to talk just to fill the void that naturally occurred in conversation.

  Both men followed the old code of the West, the rule that said a man’s past was his own affair—until it wasn’t. Hayes had never asked Blair how a Texas boy had ended up on the West Coast and the lieutenant had returned the favor.

  But Hayes knew that was about to change.

  Blair turned his attention to the shooter on the floor, let out a long whistle, and pushed the Stetson back on his head. “You fucked ’em up. That’s for damn sure.”

  Hayes watched him pull a pen from his pocket and move to the dead man lying on the floor. Using the pen, Blair turned the man’s head and got a better look at the hole and then looked over at the air hammer.

  “First time for everything,” he said, already moving to the second body.

  “They didn’t give me a choice,” Hayes replied.

  “What a mess,” Blair said.

  “What about me?”

  “Self-defense, but I’m going to need you to go with Powell to the station and give a statement.”

  “The guy who almost blew my face off?”

  “Hey, it’s a small department,” Blair said with a shrug.

  Hayes wasn’t thinking about the size of the department. He was thinking about who had sent the men to kill him and why.

  6

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Levi Shaw was unremarkable in every way. It was a skill that he’d cultivated over three decades in the intelligence field. One that had allowed him to slip unnoticed into some of the darkest corners of the globe, conduct his government business, and vanish without a trace.

  Shaw stepped off the Metro at Pentagon station and disappeared into the scrum of flag-grades in their ribboned Class A’s.

  He rode the escalator to the landing, pulled his badge from around his neck, and nodded to the man at the security checkpoint.

  “Morning, Johnny,” he said, as he swiped his badge over the reader, laid his attaché case on the belt, and dumped the contents of his pockets into the white basket between the metal detectors.

  “Good morning, Mr. Shaw,” the man said, and smiled.

  “Your Nats looked good last night,” Levi said, stepping through the metal detector.

  “Wish I could say the same for your Mets.” The guard grinned.

  “Don’t start,” Levi said, shaking his head.

  He filled his pockets, retrieved his attaché case, and followed the hall to the left.

  Shaw first came to the Pentagon in the mid-nineties as a GS-13. A grade that gave him the equivalent rank of a major. The first lesson he learned was that at the Pentagon, just like in the military, everything from parking spots to office space was based on rank. Which was why Shaw was not surprised when he was assigned a windowless office in the basement of the innermost ring.

  “Look at it this way,” the custodian said when he handed him the keys, “you can only go up from here.”

  “Why is that?” Shaw asked.

  “Because you’re at the bottom of the building. Ain’t nothing below this floor but the foundation.” He smiled.

  It would take almost thirty years for Shaw to learn that the man was full of shit.

  There was in fact an area below the basement, and the reason it wasn’t listed on any blueprint or map was because it was a Black Site. An off-the-books area funded by the National Intelligence Program’s Black Budget and known simply as the Boneyard.

  Located deep in the Pentagon’s purgatorial bowels, the Boneyard was where nonessential Black programs were sent to die. To linger in limbo until their source funding ran out.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Shaw swiped his card over the reader and waited for the magnetic lock to disengage before pulling the door open.

  While the rest of the Pentagon had been modernized in 2011, the Boneyard looked exactly the way it had back in 1943, the year the building was completed. Shaw followed the exposed pipes and bundles of wire that crisscrossed the ceiling, his footsteps echoing off the dingy gray walls that still bore the original coat of Federal Standard No. 50 paint, and turned the corner.

  He was almost to his office when a door to his left opened and the hall was filled with the roar of the sump pump installed to hold back the constant seep of the water table.

  A facility worker stepped out, the badge on his blue jumpsuit marked with the red chevrons that gave him access to even the most secured offices in the Pentagon. The man shut the door behind him, and silence returned to the hall.

  Shaw watched the man tug the red earmuffs from his head and then jump when he heard the footsteps coming toward him.

  “Whoa, buddy, how’d you get down here?” the man demanded.

  Shaw held up his keys and gave them a jingle.

  “You got keys, good for you. Still doesn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s classified.” Shaw smiled, stopping in front of the door with SB1-T-71 inscribed on the nameplate.

  He opened the door and flipped on the lights. The fluorescent bulbs buzzed in their ancient baffles and slowly blinked to life, revealing a broom closet of an office with three desks, a row of scarred filing cabinets, and a water cooler that gurgled when Shaw walked in.

  He was just closing the door when he heard the man’s voice through the crack in the door. “Holy shit, you work down here? Who the hell did you piss off?”

  How much time you got? he thought, gently closing the door.

  Shaw hung his hat and coat on the rack by the door, his eyes on the calendar tacked to the wall. Three more days and then Treadstone is done, he thought.

  Shaw wasn’t a sentimental man. Three decades in the intelligence world had cured him of that. But when he turned to survey the office, there was a part of him that still couldn’t believe how far Treadstone had fallen in the past year.

  Officially the reason for Treadstone 71’s relegation to the Boneyard was simple: It was outdated.

  This was the digital age, and no matter how much the Treadstone doctors boosted their operatives’ capabilities, they could never compete with drones, satellites, or computers. The powers that be are always looking for a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem. They will never learn, Shaw thought, carrying his attaché case to his office in the back of the tiny room.

  He sat down heavily at his desk and typed his password into the computer. When the mainframe loaded, he typed the commands directly into the prompt.

  >>>>CIA Remote Portal

  Login: Shaw, L.

  _Access Granted

  >>>>Connection Established_

  Status: Online

  A moment later a satellite map popped up on the screen that brought him back to April of 2002 and his first week as Treadstone director.

  * * *

  —

  He was on a guided tour of the Tactical Operations Center located in one of the offsite facilities, trying to get a handle on the scope of the operation he’d inherited. The TOC was smaller than the ones at the National Counterterrorism Center, but just as modern, with a floor-to-ceiling LCD screen and the floor of intel specialists sitting at their workstations, faces backlit by the blue glow of their computer screens.

  “This is where we track the missions,” the officer in charge of the TOC said. “Not as impressive as the lab, but it is all state of the art.”

  “How many operatives do we have in the field right now?” Shaw asked.

  The man squinted up at the board. “We have three on the ground in Afg
hanistan and one in Iraq,” he answered.

  “What about the rest?”

  “Well, sir, we have fifteen Gen 3’s—those are the operatives put in service following the September 11 attacks—and seven Gen—”

  “I know how many we have; I want to know where they are.”

  “Sorry, sir, but I’m not following—”

  “Son, what exactly do you do here?” Shaw asked.

  “My job is to track the operatives that are on mission or assigned to mission status.”

  “How do you track them if you don’t know where they are?”

  “They radio in their locations—”

  “Got it, thank you,” Shaw said.

  Later that afternoon, he called every department head into his office.

  “I’m not big on micromanaging, and usually when I take over a program I like to sit back and watch how things run for a few months before making any adjustments,” he began, looking at the men and women arrayed around the conference table. “However, I believe we have a serious security risk.”

  “Security risk, sir?” Don Jacobs, the bald-headed chief of operations, asked. “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  “Okay, let’s open this up to the table,” Shaw said. “How do we select applicants for Treadstone?”

  “Since the majority of our operatives are former military, we mine the DoD’s psychological evaluations, looking for patterns that match our criteria,” a dark-haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses answered.

  “And what criteria are we looking for?”

  “Certain behavioral traits, such as the candidate’s ability to withstand stress, extreme competitiveness, self-reliance, lack of empathy and remorse . . .”

  “And then we send those people over to the doctors and they run them through behavior modification and genetic reprogramming to get rid of basic morality and turn them into killers, right?”

  “Clinically speaking, what we—” a second doctor began.

  “Obviously, this is a generalization. The point is we turn these men and women into apex predators and then we just let them roam free until we need them. Does anyone else think we might want to know where these guys are when they aren’t on mission?”

  Immediately after that meeting, every operative was unknowingly implanted with a subdermal tracking chip.

  * * *

  —

  Back in his office, Shaw typed location ping into the task bar, and a moment later the surface of the map was covered in a handful of blinking blue dots that marked the locations of the remaining Gen 3’s.

  Shaw had begun to scan the map, conducting a quick roll call in his head, when the screen went black and a box popped up on the screen. SIGNAL LOST—PLEASE CONTACT PROVIDER.

  “You have got to be shitting me.”

  7

  LA CONNER, WASHINGTON

  Deputy Powell was the picture of professionalism when Blair informed him that he would be transporting Hayes to the station.

  “What about my truck?” Hayes asked Blair.

  “I’ll have someone bring it to the station.”

  Hayes didn’t like it, but it was obvious that he didn’t have a choice.

  “Fine,” he said, tossing the keys to the lieutenant.

  “Now, you two play nice.”

  “Roger that, boss,” Powell said, opening the rear hatch and typing his code into the vault in the back. When the lock disengaged, the deputy turned to Hayes.

  “What are you looking at?” Hayes demanded.

  “Your weapon,” Powell said, holding out his hand.

  Hayes looked at Blair. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s department policy,” the lieutenant said.

  This is bullshit.

  He pulled the Springfield from his holster, dropped the mag, and ejected the round from the chamber before handing them over.

  “You will get them back,” Powell said, locking the vault and shutting the hatch. “No hard feelings, right?” he asked, after they had climbed into the front seat of the Explorer.

  Hayes grit his teeth so hard he was afraid they were going to crack but managed a curt nod.

  “We’re good.”

  Powell started the engine, pulled a U-turn in the street, and went back the way Hayes had come in. After crossing the bridge, the deputy turned right, heading for Highway 20.

  * * *

  —

  “The Army?” Annabelle had asked.

  They’d met in his freshman year at college and both of them knew it was special. By the end of the semester they shared a dorm room. They never talked about marriage; they didn’t have to. It was almost understood that they would spend the rest of their lives together.

  Then graduation came, and instead of the finance jobs Hayes had been offered, he decided to join the military.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Hayes tried to explain but realized he had only pieces of the answer.

  “There’s a war on.”

  “So?”

  A few months ago, he would have said the same thing, but that was before he went back to visit his parents in Tennessee, where he learned that two of the boys from the old neighborhood had been killed in Iraq and two more in Afghanistan.

  Hayes had been nineteen years old on September 11, too young and too distant to know anyone who died in the attacks. He saw the names of the dead on television, read about the casualties in the papers, but they were just names. It wasn’t until he went out to the veterans’ cemetery and saw his friends’ names carved into the white stones that the scales fell from his eyes.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked.

  “Is this about your friends?”

  Hayes didn’t have an answer, but he instinctively knew that if he didn’t do his part, he would forever regret it. So he joined up and spent his summer at the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course in Fort Benning, Georgia.

  * * *

  —

  They drove in silence, Powell behind the wheel grinning like a cat with a mouse and Hayes checking the mirrors, his attention bouncing between the fact that someone had just tried to kill him and the realization that his nest egg was now a crime scene.

  “Full disclosure,” he said aloud.

  “What was that?” Powell asked.

  “It’s a law that says I have to provide a potential buyer with all information needed to properly negotiate a price.”

  “You know, I was thinking about buying a house last year,” Powell began. “Figured I’ve been living with my folks long enough.”

  “You live with your parents?” Hayes asked.

  “Since I was born.” Powell smiled.

  “And how old are you?”

  “Thirty-two, but you wouldn’t know it by the way my mom acts when I bring a girl home,” Powell said, his face turning serious. “Did you know that I can’t have a lady friend stay past eleven-thirty?”

  “I did not know that, Powell.”

  “Yep, so I figured it was time to spread my wings, get out on my own. Now, I can’t afford anything like what they’ve got at Cliffside, but I found a nice place over on Whidbey. Almost made an offer, too.”

  Despite himself, Hayes realized he was intrigued. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Same thing you were talking about with the full disclosure.”

  “Someone was killed in the house?”

  “Worse.”

  “What’s worse than a homicide?”

  Powell paused and looked over at Hayes as if he were gauging the man’s trustworthiness, and when he finally spoke his voice was hushed, almost a whisper. “Realtor said the previous owner conducted animal sacrifices in the basement.”

  “Are you fucking with me?” Hayes demanded.

  “Hand to Jesus,” Powell said. “I told that lady I
didn’t want anything to do with a witchcraft house.”

  Hayes turned his head back to the mirror, barely able to contain his laughter.

  “I don’t think your mama would have liked that too much,” he managed to say.

  “Why, hell, no, she wouldn’t, being a Methodist and all.”

  Hayes was about to respond when he noticed a black Suburban tuck in behind a minivan two cars to the rear of the Explorer. He was still watching the truck when Powell hit the blinker and angled for the exit ramp.

  “Where are you going?” Hayes asked.

  “The ferry; it’s the fastest way to the office.”

  Hayes was about to protest, but when the Suburban didn’t follow them down the ramp he settled back and decided to enjoy the ride.

  It was a five-minute drive to the ferry station, and by the time they arrived the weather was starting to change. The clear blue sky that had greeted the day was gone. Replaced by charcoal-gray clouds and choppy, white-tipped waves that buffeted the gunwales of the ferry moored at the dock. Drenching the yellow-slickered Washington Department of Transportation employee standing on the deck.

  Powell pulled behind a truck at the ticket booth and checked his hair in the mirror. Satisfied that he looked presentable, he rolled down his window and let off the brake.

  Hayes guessed the blond-haired woman in the booth to be in her late thirties, and he noticed her pop the top button on her blouse when she saw Powell pull up.

  “Hey, Rhonda,” Powell said and grinned.

  “Deputy Powell,” she said, a conspiratorial smile spreading across her face. “How are you this morning?”

  “Just out enforcing the law,” Powell puffed. “It’s boring, but it is part of my life.”

  “Is he your prisoner?” she gushed.

  “Naw, just a witness.”

  “Well, you be careful, you hear,” Rhonda said, hitting the plunger that activated the traffic arm. “And I’ll see you later tonight.”