by Phil Klay
It snowed the next week, barely enough to dust the ground, but still enough to qualify as a state of emergency in Florida’s Panhandle. All the schools were closed, and there were forty-three road accidents in their county alone by 11:00 a.m. Natalia and Mason’s father took the kids mud-and-slush sledding, and instead of resting while they were gone, Mason put on work gloves and earmuffs and went out to the tree-line at the back edge of his property, where Inez’s face cord was sitting under a green tarp, waiting for the spring and summer to dry it out and make it ideal firewood, the kind of thing that saves you a damn bit of money getting through winters in Pennsylvania but is two hairs shy of useless in northern Florida.
Above him was a midsize black locust. He circled the tree, eyed the branches. There’s a way of seeing when you’re felling a tree that’s different than just sitting out in nature admiring the view. You judge the lean of the bole, the tangles in the upper branches, the side most weighted with limbs. The looking feels not so different from the doing, when you set the choke, yank the starter rope, tap the throttle trigger, hear the scream of the saw, and as you sink it into the meat of the tree, turn the screaming saw to a satisfied purr. Yellow heartwood spat out from the whirring teeth. Mason circled the bole, cut above the gap to make a hinge. The tree, severed from the earth, began to sway. He shut down the saw, rushed from the sounds now snapping through the air, felt the displacement of air, and then, with a crash, the tree hitting earth.
The cruel thing about the path Mason had chosen was that he no longer got to do the real work of his job, the work of the hands and the body. He sat in meetings. He wrote white papers. He discussed the economics of the drug trade, the adaptations of guerrilla units to high value targeting, the differing interpretations of human and signals intelligence. He watched the slow, amorphous cultural changes within military units, police forces, civilian populations long exhausted by violence. He used graphs and figures and papers by political scientists filled with statistics and mathematical squiggles, giving the veneer of hard knowledge, though he knew in his heart that everything he did was at best an art, if not educated guesswork. It made you wish for the simplicity of the teams in Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan was not exactly an advertisement for the simple, physical approach. So he understood why it was important to his father to take Inez, who Natalia insists in no uncertain terms will be going to college, and teach her how to fell a tree.
Nine months later, sitting in the EAC meeting on the kidnapped journalist at the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, listening to David Matíz, the predictably squirrelly CIA chief of station, giving the ambassador predictably squirrelly answers about the Mil Jesúses and whether or not the U.S. has had visibility on them, he pictured that tree, lying on the earth, bare branches veining the sky. He thought about the satisfactions of a job well done, and the calm such a job brings.
All day, all around him, chaos. There were more military and intelligence guys running around embassies these days than diplomats, and when something like this happened, an AmCit held captive, ripe for potential to turn into the kind of news story that brings political pressure to bear, they went crazy. Just walking into the building he could feel the hum of mad energy, like walking inside a kicked beehive. And that mad energy delighted him.
A hostage story is a simple story. Beginning, middle, end. Beginning: AmCit gets kidnapped, the military and intelligence services spring into action. Middle: AmCit suffers brutal treatment, the military doggedly pursues intel on the captors. And then, one of two endings. End one: AmCit dies. End two: Everybody is a fucking hero.
At the EAC, most of the people at the table had nothing. Defense attaché gave a generic rundown on the situation in Norte de Santander. The Legat had a little bit on the Mil Jesúses, or “the MJs,” as everybody was calling them, which conjured images of a group of Michael Jackson clones moonwalking cocaine across the border. The Legat cast the group as some lightweight narcos capitalizing on the peace and on Agamemnon, the police operation against the Urabeños. The RSO and the head of MILGROUP had little more. And then there was David Matíz, who harped on the MJs’ connections to the Venezuelan military.
“Think of them as an independent contractor,” he said, explaining that the parts of the Venezuelan military that ran drug trafficking were as rife with corruption and nepotism and mismanagement as the rest of the country, and so essential functions were often subcontracted out to entrepreneurs like Jefferson—ruthless and competent former paramilitaries with experience on both sides of the border.
“The MJs play it cautious, though,” Matíz said. “They haven’t turned up a lot of bodies. They somehow took over urabeño territory without starting a turf war. They’re low profile, so a kidnapping like this, of an American, is out of character. That means something significant has changed or perhaps it wasn’t them.”
And then it was Mason’s turn to speak, and he went over the assets they had in country ready to assist in the search. He didn’t mention Diego, or his suspicion that the AmCit was the “girlfriend” Diego had told him about. He hadn’t been able to reach Diego at all that morning, he couldn’t be sure this Lisette Marigny was in Norte de Santander because of him, so what good would it do bringing it up? He hadn’t shared any classified intelligence. Merely suggested a geographic region, and a particular group, to look into. Plus, there was something weird going on with the Colombians and the Jesúses that was more consequential, more worthy of the ambassador’s time.
“One other thing,” Mason said. “A few months after the El Alemán raid I had an odd discussion with Lieutenant Colonel Pulido. He told me he had a source in the MJs.”
“And you didn’t mention this to me?” Matíz said.
“I did, actually,” Mason said. Matíz had told him, at the time, that he didn’t care about penny-ante narco groups in Bumfucksville. “You weren’t interested.”
The ambassador raised a hand, made a “cut it out” gesture. Mason shrugged. It was the truth. And besides, it was pretty rich of the CIA to be bitching about him not sharing critical intel.
“The MJs have been pretty low on the priorities list, that’s true,” Matíz said. “I’ll see what the Colombians come up with.”
CIA guys were odd. In some ways, they were very similar to army guys. Same drive, mission-orientation, susceptibility to tunnel vision. But they had absolutely no sense of teamwork. You make your bones as a young case officer flipping people, getting foreign nationals to betray their home country in exchange for money or ideological satisfaction or a million other things that case officers learn to exploit. Perhaps that ruins the belief in team spirit.
As Mason left the meeting, he collected his phone from security and stepped into the Idaho room, which was covered with maps of the Gem State. He pressed the power button, the little screen turned on, connected to the network. He waited. He scrolled through and opened WhatsApp and refreshed. And, sure enough, up popped a message from Diego. It read, “We have to talk.”
“Oh,” he thought. “Great.”
* * *
—
At lunch with the lawyer, his increasingly troublesome contact with the Mil Jesúses, Juan Pablo debated telling the man that his daughter was in Jesúses territory. It was a quick, lopsided internal debate, in which a small voice suggested he threaten the lawyer and demand the Jesúses guarantee her safety, while a much louder voice screamed that you cannot give these kinds of men any leverage at all. And so, before the meeting, he texted his daughter, “I love you, be safe,” hoping she’d have time to stop at an internet café to get the message, but he did nothing else. Until he knew more, there was nothing to be done, and for her sake it was important to stay disciplined.
It was at moments like these that he wished he could pray the way his father had, with the firm conviction that there was a saint out there listening, offering help. But prayer was a hole to bury hopes in, there was no reason to think that his daughter was in an
y more danger than anyone else, and there were decisions to be made.
The restaurant was one of the most expensive in Bogotá, and everything from the view to the china to the paintings on the wall was beautiful. Everything except for his dining companion, a round, mutton-chopped man whose weathered face and red-veined nose were so ugly it seemed like a provocation, as if he were deliberately insulting the world with his ugliness.
The lawyer ordered for both of them, choosing a tasting menu in which each item was followed by a description of where in Colombia the dish came from—four varieties of fish from the coast, lemongrass-scented rainforest ants from the Amazon, delicate wild rodent meat from the semitropical forest, and so on.
“I can’t believe rich people eat this garbage,” Juan Pablo said. Circumstances, he thought, merited the rudeness. He wanted to signal where things stood.
“That man you asked me to look into,” the lawyer said, smiling. “What was his name?”
“Jefferson Paúl López Quesada. The head of—”
“He’s a businessman now,” the lawyer said. “Confessed in the demobilization, served time for his crimes. But—and you may find this interesting—he’s old friends with General Baute, from his days back in Cesar. And the rodent meat? It’s delicious.”
Baute. Of course. Cesar. Of course. There was a little town in Cesar that had been held captive by the paramilitaries for a full four days. They raped women in the streets. Dragged a mother through the dirt, tied her, naked and bleeding, in a pigsty. They executed fourteen townsmen they accused of being guerrilla supporters—shooting some, taking a chainsaw to others, and in one case forcing a man to drink acid that tore through his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, killing him from the inside. It was one of the cases the left like to yowl about, since some para boss had later said the army was involved. Baute, specifically.
“I read Jefferson’s file from the demobilization,” Juan Pablo said. “General Baute should get better friends.”
“Would you like me to pass that on to him?”
“If the general wants to share useful information about his friend, he doesn’t need to pass the message through you.”
The lawyer laughed, and a runner appeared with the first of their dishes. The ants. Even though he knew they were on the menu, it surprised Juan Pablo to see them, sitting there. They weren’t dressed up or mixed with vegetables or anything. They were just ants. On a plate. The lawyer reached over and waved his hand, wafting the odor into Juan Pablo’s nostrils. Lemongrass.
“It smells good, yes? In Bucaramanga, they say eating queen ants puts steel in your dick.”
The lawyer grabbed one of them and popped it into his mouth, cracking into the shell with his teeth and then slurping up the protruding legs, finishing the performance off with a smile and a sip of wine.
“Listen to me,” he said. “The Jesúses have no need, no reason to kidnap a reporter. This is the truth.”
“So who did?”
“Who knows. There are so many problems out there. Especially outside the main towns.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Elenos. Crazy cocaleros. They have these little unions up there now, filled with ex-guerrillas. Remember when they shut down all the roads? The coca price has gone down, so the countryside is very angry.”
“Who, specifically, do you suspect?”
“I only know who didn’t do it.” The lawyer plucked another ant from his plate, flourished it in the air, and dropped it in his mouth. “Has Representative de Salva contacted you?”
Juan Pablo laughed. Of course her name would come up. Honestly, he should have thought of her before. “It’s none of your business who I’ve spoken with.”
“Don’t trust her.”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Juan Pablo said. He decided that de Salva would be the first person he called as soon as he left this dinner. Then he picked up an ant with his fingers, inspected its crisped, lemongrass-scented head, fought down his disgust, and popped it in his mouth. As he bit down, the flavor flooded in, not just of lemongrass but of other, subtler textures, a slight acidity tinged with sour notes but also some creaminess from the insides of the abdomen. It was revolting, yes, but that was mainly because of the idea of it.
“This is much better than I thought it would be,” he admitted.
“Rich people don’t eat garbage,” the lawyer said a bit testily. “Rich people know how to live.” He picked up another ant and held it up for inspection. “If life isn’t about hunting down every strange pleasure and tasting it, then what is it about?”
* * *
• • •
As it happened, Juan Pablo didn’t have to call Representative de Salva. There was a request waiting for him. This time, the meeting happened in her office, and was straight to the point.
“Have you heard?” de Salva asked. “The Americans want the Jesúses to be moved up to a Class A.”
Juan Pablo sat back in his chair. He hadn’t heard that. Categorizing the Jesúses as a Class A Organized Armed Group meant the military could target them with everything from raids to aerial bombardments.
“That’s fast.”
“No,” de Salva said. “I don’t think it’s fast at all. I think it needs to happen, and as a member of the Second Commission I can assure you that there would be support.”
“I see,” Juan Pablo said. “We don’t even know if they’re involved.”
“The classification doesn’t mean you have to target them. It simply removes bureaucratic obstacles if you need to act quickly. That’s all it means.”
“True,” Juan Pablo said. But it was also false. The classification merely changed the rules of engagement, yes. But his unit was a machine designed to gather actionable intelligence, match it to the current rules of engagement, and produce dead bodies. In practice, de Salva was asking for a death sentence.
“With an American missing,” de Salva continued, “and the support of the special forces, there will be no problem issuing the classification.”
“And we do this because . . .”
“It is the right thing to do. And will earn you a friend. And as word gets out that the Jesúses are being taken seriously, I suspect you’ll find new sources of information willing to talk.”
All this was true, and even reasonable. But after agreeing to de Salva’s request, and passing that information up to Colonel Carlosama, Juan Pablo found himself wondering why the haste. He understood, from the U.S. embassy point of view, why they’d want administrative hurdles to targeting the Jesúses removed in the event that a violent solution became necessary. But why would de Salva have been so keen? He could think of one possible answer. And that was this—the Jesúses didn’t have the journalist, but de Salva wanted them administratively placed on the chopping block before the army found out.
* * *
—
The thing about Colombia was that it was always easy to get a job. Contractors outnumbered soldiers five to one, last time Diego had checked. It allowed the U.S. government to claim a low footprint in Colombia, when, in fact, its fingers were everywhere, doing police and military training, crop eradication, logistics and maintenance. And Diego’s specialty, electronic surveillance.
The trick wasn’t getting a job. It was getting the job. Diego wanted to be there, in Norte de Santander. On the ground or, at least, in a plane, finding Liz. And that meant calling in favors not just within the contractor community but within the military as well.
“You owe me,” he told Mason at a bar in the Zona T. “You’re the reason she’s there. Does the embassy know that?”
Mason wasn’t ruffled. “They know that I met with you and told you the situation in Norte de Santander was interesting and underreported. I didn’t suggest she head out to coca country, wouldn’t have suggested it, and if she’d checked in with the embassy like reporters are supposed t
o we would have told her not to do it.”
But Mason helped. He helped quite a bit, which meant that perhaps he was lying about what he’d told the embassy. And within a few days Diego was seated behind a Colombian pilot in a single-engine AT-802U Air Tractor stuffed with radios, forward-looking infrared cameras, and other surveillance equipment. Air Tractors were agricultural planes usually used for coca eradication, so the thinking was that this particular plane would cause less suspicion than a King Air.
“The only problem is the guerrilla like to shoot at these,” the pilot told him as they taxied down the runway on Tolemaida, “so maybe we try to avoid coca fields.”
They touched down in Tibú, where soldiers from Counter-Guerrilla Battalion 46 helped them refuel on a makeshift dirt runway, and then, with ten hours’ worth of flight time filling their tanks, headed for La Vigia.
They flew at treetop level, deep green below them and clouds above, the shifts and turns of the plane felt immediately in the stomach. Headwinds, crosswinds. Diego didn’t like being helpless, didn’t like being just a passenger, so he focused on his equipment, the video feed from the thermal cam showing the occasional person, family, or even a microwave. Microwaves meant narcos.
The clouds ahead of them clustered and darkened, a storm front moving across the Catatumbo. They skirted it, the weight of the plane rolling, the nose dipping, the big, fuel-filled nose of the Air Tractor obstructing Diego’s view, making the cockpit feel a bit smaller, more cramped. The motors roared, they climbed over a ridge and then dipped down below and the motors quieted, or maybe that was just Diego’s imagination, and the flight felt calmer as holes poked through the cloud deck, light piercing down.
Then they were above La Vigia, doing long, slow loops, listening, taking photographs, looking for anything useful. From the air, a city or town is a simple thing. The heart of La Vigia was a small, neat grid of streets and buildings, with one central park that was roughly half the size of a football field. With the supposedly God’s-eye view of the airplane, it might seem there was nothing much to this town, and certainly nothing mysterious. But down below, on the streets and in the buildings over the past six months, something strange had happened. A reordering of the connections between people. How they moved. Who they talked to. Who they feared. In a normal operation, Diego’s job would be to help map that dynamic. To learn the rhythms of the town. To understand what would happen if a thread in the social fabric were tugged here, or a hole punched there. But this was not a normal operation. The lives of the people below him only mattered if they could help him find Liz.