Jax (Titan #9)(86)

An unfamiliar beep came from his phone, and Jared realized that must be Jax making a phone call. He pressed the green button on the screen and put his cell back against his ear to listen.

"Hey, Ryder. It's Jax."

"Oh, hey, Jax, hey."

"Yeah, last person you'd expect to be calling. I know. Victoria is doing better?"

Ryder chuckled quietly. "Relatively speaking. She's not bleeding all over the place anymore. Not threatening doctors to patch her up and let her loose. So, yeah, mate. Better."

Jared laughed along with Jax as he listened to their call.

"I've got a question for you," Jax continued. "Does Leyva mean anything to you?"

"No, not off the top of my head. I could ask Victoria, but I finally talked her into pain meds, and everything she's talking about sounds like unicorns and making video game gun noises."

"Leyva," Jax repeated.

"Why? What is that?"

"I don't know. You know Seven better than me—"

"But I guess that's changing. I heard congratulations are in order. Might even make us brothers from another mother, my friend."

Sounding uncomfortable, Jax changed the subject back to what he needed. "But real quick. Have you ever seen her crumble up a piece of paper?"

Ryder cackled. "Seven? That'd be a hell no."

"What if she did?"

"Trust me." Ryder snorted. "If you haven't realized this yet, you soon will. Things have to be folded. A certain way. But not crumbled up. Never."

"Ryder, man. What if I told you she left two pieces of paper crumbled up?" His voice was gravely serious, and Ryder's chuckling stopped.

"Jax, she wouldn't. Why did you ask me about Leyva?"

Jax paused for a long time. For so long, Jared pulled the phone away to see if the line was still live. It was.

"She's missing. The security footage looks like she left for a walk after leaving a note that said she was too stressed to sit in the room and wait. That she had to go think. But in the trash can, there were two balled-up notes where she started on the same thing but threw it out."

"No. No way. Seven wouldn't do that."

"She would have folded them up, right?"

"Yeah," Ryder agreed. "Or leave it flat. I'll ask Victoria about Leyva. She wrote it on the note?"

Jax let out a long breath into the phone. "Last week after breakfast, Bianca showed me a way to leave secret messages." He laughed sadly. "You draw a picture. Decide you don't like it. Cross it out. But when crossing out, you write your code word then scribble lightly over it."

Ryder asked what Jared was thinking. "Bianca can write codes?"

"No, it was letters and numbers and gibberish. You're missing the point. Seven knows how to spell, asshole. It says Leyva, but I have no idea what that means."

Ryder hummed in thought. "You need to talk to Boss Man."

Jax paused. "Yeah, good idea. I should've thought of that."

Jared dropped his head back, feeling like shit that one of his guys had actionable information and he'd driven him away with it. Jax had literally yelled at Jared to trust him, and Jared hadn't.

Jared called Parker, who answered on the first ring. "What do you know about Leyva?"

"Off the top of my head? Nothing. It's a vacation place in Colombia. Give me a couple seconds. Cross-referencing." Parker whistled. "Check that. Leyva is a known cartel vacation locale…" Parker's keyboard clacked. "There's a military stronghold…"

"I need more, Parker. Give me a reason Seven is leaving breadcrumbs."

"I know, I heard. Okay… This is what you're looking for. Leyva was the name given by locals to a compound and estate owned by Hernán and Esmeralda. It's also a military instillation and a proving ground for his militia trainees."

"Jesus fucking Christ." Jared cracked his knuckles. "The cartel has a training ground? What else you have on them? An armory? Commissary?"

"Actually, according to the notes that I'm reading here—yeah, almost, they do."

"Of course, they do," he grumbled.

"It's like the home base of a third-world army. A well-financed, highly-armed, well-trained militia. Two levels, with an inner guard and recruited ground forces."

"How big of a ground force are we talking?"

"Big, Boss Man," Parker muttered. "Like the kind of job we do when partnered with a government unit. We're going to need bodies."

"Fucking hell." Jared pinched the bridge of his nose. "Route in all the assholes."

"Titan and Delta are already in route. Their contracts were put on hold. Brock and I have mapped out supplier hookups for what we couldn't bring with us." Parker made a tapping noise. "We're assuming Seven and the kids are headed to Leyva instead of Bogotá?"

"Yeah."

"I'll get on the horn for midflight re-routing."

Jared's mind was going a hundred miles a minute. It had been a long time since he'd pulled something off like this. But it had been just as long since they had been potentially outnumbered like this without working directly with a government. He didn't have time to get that kind of approval, and to be honest, he likely wouldn't get that kind of approval, especially now that Deacon had turned up dead.