His hope was that this gig would lead to something bigger and better. Which it had, but as he challenged his supervisor with that repeatedly uttered “no,” it was becoming obvious that, as per usual, Jared was starting to piss everyone off.
This particular debacle had started a year earlier, in late 2007. After a few dull years on the passport line, Jared had been given the opportunity to try to find people smuggling drugs into the United States. Catching drug smugglers sounded like fun and sexy work, but not with the kind of drugs that Jared had been tasked with finding. His quest was to catch people who were sneaking a speedlike substance called khat into America. Unlike similar drugs, such as cocaine, which were processed in a lab or jungle somewhere, khat was a leafy green plant and therefore more difficult to identify than large bricks of white powder. Since it was so mild, more akin to drinking some intense coffee than snorting a line of blow, khat was also the least important drug for anyone in government to go after.
But Jared assumed the task of finding khat with the same fanatical compulsion as someone assigned to capture the world’s most evil terrorists. He printed out hundreds of flight logs of people who had been caught with khat in the past, laid all the documents out on his living room floor as if he were Carrie Mathison on Homeland, and searched for similarities among known smugglers. He scrutinized every detail of each arrest until he found a pattern.
The first clue: all of the smugglers had booked reservations the day before a flight. Second, the couriers used only Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail accounts. And third, they had (obviously fake) phone numbers that used a shared formula. With these hints, and others, he searched through the list of incoming passengers arriving at O’Hare who fit his profile. Eventually he identified an inbound passenger who he believed would be smuggling the drug.
The following day customs officials pulled that man off an incoming flight, opened his suitcase, and discovered it was lined with khat. (Holy shit! It worked.) The same thing happened each subsequent time Jared ran his search on the incoming Chicago passenger database: they pulled khat out of the bag.
Jared’s profiling worked so well that he started to search through the national databases, experimenting with his theory on other U.S. airports. And sure enough, it worked every time. Customs officials at JFK would be told about a target, at which point they would open the suitcases of the passenger Jared had identified and subsequently find bags of the drug hidden in socks, shirts, and other crevices of the luggage.
But there were a couple of snags, not the least of which was that JFK agents believed that khat was a pointless drug to go after in the first place. There were no nightly news briefings about officials finding a pound of khat on a flight from the United Kingdom and no awards being handed out to customs officers for these arrests. To make matters worse, Jared’s success made other agents look ineffective by comparison. Not getting credit on a bust meant you couldn’t climb the bureaucratic ladder to increase your pay and vacation time. And after enough unofficial complaints had come in, Jared was called into his supervisor’s office.
“You have to play by the rules if you want to be successful here,” Jared’s supervisor said. “You’re pissing off people all over the place and—”
“No,” Jared interrupted.
Again? Another no? What the fuck was wrong with this guy?
“Look, I’m just doing my job,” Jared tried to reason. “I’m following the trends and—”
“Yes, but you’re doing your job out of your jurisdiction,” the boss barked. “You’re assigned to Chicago, and that’s all you’re supposed to do: find shit in Chicago.”
Jared didn’t do well when he was told what to do, and his temper was starting to flare. He had been given an assignment that he had pulled off in spades, but because of typical government bullshit, he was being told he was doing a less effective job. Shouldn’t he be getting praise and applause?
“You see this?” Jared said, pointing to the gold and black Customs and Border Protection (CBP) badge clipped to his shirt. “The last time I looked, it said, ‘the United States of America’ on it, and I’m pretty sure that JFK airport is in the United States of America.”
The supervisor looked back at Jared in shock. But the peon kept going.
“I won’t talk to you about this in person anymore,” Jared said as he stood up and walked toward the door. “If you want to discuss this again, please put it in writing.” And in one brief moment the supervisor had just learned a lesson that everyone who met Jared eventually learned: he didn’t play well with others. A trait of Jared’s that would soon prove to be his biggest asset, and his most antagonistic hindrance.
Chapter 6
THE BONFIRE
Ross swerved his truck through the hills and away from Austin. The sun was setting over the wide Texas sky and Julia sat to his right, staring out the window at the seemingly unending rows of trees.
“Cedars,” Ross said.
“Huh?” she replied, turning toward him.
“The trees; they’re cedars.” She looked back at the masses of green foliage that lined the edge of the curvy road. “Texans hate them,” Ross added. “They can’t get rid of them. They’ve tried all of these different approaches, but nothing works.” A few moments later he finished the thought: “Nature always wins.”
Julia listened and contemplated today’s lesson about Texas. Ross was constantly offering new tidbits of information about her new home state. He was happy to be her on-call historian and twenty-four-hour tour guide, taking her to his favorite coffee shops, burger joints, and parks. He had shown her Pace Bend Lake, one of the best spots to cliff jump. And he’d cited innumerable facts about local buildings and sights.
Ross had introduced her to his family, and she had started to grow close to his sister, Cally (though their mother was somewhat cold to Ross’s new girlfriend). Ross had even trusted Julia enough to show her his secret collection of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, which he kept hidden in his old bedroom at his parents’ house. One afternoon he had nervously laid out the dozens of intricately painted fantasy statuettes that had been wrapped safely in boxes and tucked away under his bed.
Ross appreciated that Julia was so supportive of his ideas, even if some of them didn’t work out so well, like Retracement Capital Management, an investment fund that Ross had tried to start recently, which had gone bust before it had even had a chance to go boom.
“So these are all your friends from high school?” Julia asked as she turned away from the cedar trees.