The Rule of Nine (4 page)

B
art Snyder sat staring at the half-packed cardboard transfer box resting in the middle of his desk. One of his fleet of meaningless mementos was sticking out of the top like the prow of a sinking ship. The wall of respect behind his executive leather chair now stood stripped nude except for the patchwork quilt of nail holes and little brass hooks.

It seemed that this was all Snyder had to show for forty years of labor in the trenches of the law. He had resigned his position as managing partner with Todd, Foster, and Williams, a firm with more than three hundred partners and associates and with offices in five cities. Snyder was waiting for the man who might be able to give him at least some clue as to why the stars, moon, and sun had caved in on him. Certainly the Washington Metropolitan Police were no help. They would call if they had any further information. That was three weeks ago, and Snyder hadn't heard a word. Bart Snyder wanted to know who had killed his son, Jimmie, and why. And he wasn't taking no for an answer.

The phone rang on Snyder's desk. He punched the com line on the speaker. “Yes.”

“Your two o'clock is here,” said the receptionist.

“Show him in.”

A few seconds later the door to his office opened and a tall young man with dark, closely cropped hair wearing a blue serge suit with broad shoulders entered his office. He was carrying a light leather briefcase and all of the expression was in his eyes; he had a serious face that looked a lot like the actor Russell Crowe's.

“Mr. Snyder, I'm Special Agent Joseph Wallace.”

Snyder got up from his chair. “Yes, of course, please come in. Can we offer you anything—coffee?”

“No, thanks. Your secretary already offered.”

“Please have a seat.”

The agent took one of the client chairs on the other side of the desk and Snyder picked the half-packed box up and put it on the credenza behind him. “You have to excuse me. I'm in the process of moving to another office down the hall. I'm going to be taking some time off for a while.”

“I understand,” said the agent. “First let me express my condolences and those of the entire bureau for the loss of your son. I know it's difficult, and I'm sorry for the intrusion at a time like this. But it's necessary that we gather as much information as quickly as we can.”

Snyder settled into his chair. “I understand. And I want to help in any way I can.”

“Good,” said Wallace. He reached down and pulled a notepad out of his briefcase, then drew a pen from the inside coat pocket of his suit with the dexterity he probably used to draw a gun.

Snyder couldn't help but notice that the agent was probably no more than a few years older than Jimmie, but in terms of force of character and focus there was a galaxy of time between the two. It was a painful thing for Snyder to accept.

“First let me say that some of my questions may be difficult for you, and I apologize for any pain they might cause, but they are necessary.”

“Please, ask away.”

“To your knowledge did your son ever use narcotics or any other form of illicit or illegal drugs?”

“No!” Snyder said it emphatically, then leaned forward and planted both hands flat out on the desk as if to punctuate the point. “Jimmie never used drugs. I know that to be a fact.”

“No pot, no pills?”

“Nothing,” said Snyder.

This was the conclusion the FBI was leaning toward as well, as the result of a thorough postmortem and interviews with most of James Snyder's friends. The victim possessed no apparent history of drug use. For his first experiment in the recreational world of narcotics to be a full-blown hit of heroin was unlikely.

The agent then covered the usual questions, whether Snyder knew anyone who might want to harm his son, and whether Jimmie had been depressed or may have wanted to hurt himself.

“No. Jimmie was a good boy. He was never in any trouble, even when he was young. He was an easy child to raise,” said Snyder. “Sometimes a little too easy, if you know what I mean.”

“No, why don't you tell me?”

“Well, there were times when I wished that he might have been a little more headstrong. You could say he was easygoing, but Jimmie never seemed to argue with anyone, over anything. He seemed to have very few personal boundaries that others couldn't invade. You didn't have to push him. All you had to do was touch him and he'd move in any direction you wanted. I'm not saying he was weak,” said Snyder. “Please understand. I know he had a solid sense of values, and I'm sure there were limits beyond which he would not go. But I have to say, I couldn't tell you what they were.”

“Except for the use of drugs?” said the agent.

“Well, there you go. You're right,” said Snyder. “There's one right there. The things a father never sees.”

“Did you know that your son was in some difficulty at work?”

Snyder looked up at him. “No. What kind of trouble?”

The agent told him about the breach of security, the fact that authorities were looking into it, and the discovery that James Snyder had been informed of this by a coworker, something the FBI turned up in their preliminary interviews.

“Was it serious? I mean, was he going to lose his job?”

“I don't know,” said the agent. “But it's one of the threads we're checking out.”

“Did it have anything to do with Jimmie's death?” said Snyder.

“We don't know. As I said, we're still investigating. There are a couple of other items,” said the agent. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out three glossy color photos, five-by-sevens. “I'd like you to take a look at these pictures and tell me if you recognize the other man walking next to your son.”

The photos were freeze-frames from the surveillance video in the building the day James Snyder had violated security with an unidentified man.

Bart Snyder looked at them closely. Two of the pictures showed his son in various strides walking with another man down a stark white hallway. There was nothing on the walls except a single sign over Jimmie's shoulder in the distance in one of the shots. The other man looked as if he was late middle age, overweight, heavy jowled, and, from what Snyder could see, he possessed a fair-size gut hanging over his belt. He was perhaps an inch shorter than Jimmie and was wearing a baseball cap, so it was difficult to make out the features of his face in two of the pictures. The third shot looked like an enlargement taken earlier in the sequence, because the sign on the wall was larger and he could actually make out some of the lettering. When he read the few words that were visible, Snyder knew instantly where the pictures had been taken. He had often heard about it, but he'd never seen it. It was off-limits, like the holy of holies, one of those insider places in D.C. that the active set among the power elite talked about, like playing the back nine at Spyglass in Carmel. It had been in the news recently
because the president wanted to use it. He didn't have one like it. The picture showed only the head and shoulders of the man in the baseball cap. Here his face was a little clearer, but the angle of the shot was still bad, so the bill of the cap continued to obstruct a clear view of one eye and put a shadow across his face.

“Have you ever seen that man before?” said the agent.

Snyder started to shake his head.

“Perhaps a friend of the family or a relative, someone your son might have known?”

“He's no relation. I know that.” Snyder studied the photographs a few seconds longer, then shook his head again. “I've never seen him before.”

“You're sure?” said the agent.

“Yes.” He handed the pictures back to the agent.

“Just one more thing,” said Wallace. “Do you know whether your son might have taken a trip recently to the area around San Diego in California?”

Snyder thought about it, and then shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“Do you know whether he recently conferred with a lawyer regarding any legal matters?”

“If he needed a lawyer, I assume he would have called me.”

“I see. But you say he didn't tell you about the problem at work, the security breach.”

“No. Was it that serious?”

“We don't know. Did he ever mention a name to you, a lawyer named Paul Madriani?” asked Wallace.

“How is that spelled?” said Snyder.

The agent spelled the last name for him as Snyder wrote it down on a pad on his desk and looked at it. “It sounds a little familiar, but not off the top of my head. Do you know where he practices?”

“The area around San Diego,” said the agent.

“I see. Do you know what field of law?”

“Did your son ever mention that name, Mr. Snyder, or could you have referred him to someone by that name?”

“No,” said Snyder. “And I can't recall my son ever mentioning him. What makes you think my son talked with this lawyer?”

“I'm sorry, but I can't discuss that.” Thorpe and the FBI were reasonably certain that Madriani's business card had been planted on James Snyder's body by whoever killed him. Still, they were crossing all the
t
's and dotting all the
i
's. There was always the long shot that Madriani wasn't telling them everything he knew. He could be involved with whoever killed Snyder. Then again he could be hiding something that wasn't necessarily criminal but which fell into the dark hole of lawyer/client confidence. It anyone knew, it was likely to be Snyder's father, who as next of kin now stood in his son's legal shoes. It looked like a dead end.

“I think that's everything, Mr. Snyder. I want to thank you.” The agent picked up the photographs and started to put them back in his briefcase.

“I wonder if I could look at those one more time,” said Snyder.

“Sure.”

Wallace handed them to him and Snyder looked at the pictures one at a time, very closely, for almost a minute.

“Jimmie had a lot of friends, people I didn't know. It's possible this man is somebody that Jimmie knew from right here in Chicago. If I could have a copy of these I could show them to some of his friends and see if anybody recognizes him. Would that be possible?”

“It's possible,” said the agent. “At least for the time being. We've got copies. You can keep those, for now. You will call us if you get any information?”

“Of course.”

The agent gave Snyder a card with his name and phone number on it, thanked him for his time, and left.

Snyder immediately turned to his computer and hit one of the icons on the desktop. The page popped up on the screen. Martindale-
Hubbell is a directory of lawyers with detailed profiles by name, location, fields of practice, education, and experience, whatever you want to know. Snyder typed in the name Madriani and the location, San Diego, California. A few seconds later the computer coughed up a note indicating no hits. Snyder tried again, this time with only the name. This time he hit pay dirt. Paul Madriani's office was located in Coronado, not San Diego, and his field of practice was criminal law.

H
e had used so many names over the years that it was hard to remember some of them. Whether he called himself Dean Belden, Harold McAvoy, James Regal, or cloaked himself in the persona of Warren Humphreys, the amiable lawyer from Santa Rosa, the people who hired him knew him by only one name, Thorn. There was no first name. Most of his clients couldn't be sure if it was a surname or a code name. Thorn liked it that way. The less they knew the better.

This morning he sat hunched over one of the hotel's computers in an office just off the lobby of the Hostal Conde de Villanueva, a nineteenth-century mansion turned boutique hotel in Old Havana. Thorn had slipped the staff a few American dollars to use the computer for a few minutes. There was no Internet connection in his room and no Internet cafés that he knew of. He was busy scanning the online edition of the
Washington Times
for a news article someone told him was there. It was the perfect location, close to the States but beyond their governmental grasp. He could relax, send out e-mails, do some recruiting, and refine the plan with the confidence that no one was looking over his shoulder, at least not anyone who
would care. Thorn had flown to Cuba from Mexico on a Canadian passport two days earlier.

There was a time years ago when he favored travel documents from South Africa. They were easy to get because of connections he had with apartheid security forces in the country. But those days were gone.

Ten years ago if he needed an article in a foreign newspaper he would have called their morgue or a clipping service and had it copied and mailed or faxed. True, it was slow. The Internet was faster and more convenient, but it came at a cost. Technology was closing in, laying nets and throwing bands around the chaotic, free-wheeling world in which Thorn had once thrived. They were closing the frontier, reining it all in so that it could be digitized, watched, and regulated.

The use of embedded holograms and the encryption of personal data in bar codes on passports made it increasingly difficult to find anyone who could make a credible forgery any longer. If your life depended on it, as Thorn's did, a good one could cost you almost seven thousand euros, ten grand in the United States.

He now had more than forty thousand dollars tied up in false passports that had a limited shelf life and could probably be used only once. After that the instinct for survival kicked in and sound judgment told you to toss it.

Once they started implanting biometric chips into the passport covers, passport fraud would be a thing of the past. It would no longer be possible. Thorn estimated that for most of the countries where he did business this might be no more than three to five years away. As the new high-tech passports came online and the old ones expired, so would Thorn's career.

If he couldn't alter his identity to some disposable facade and slip into a country with ease, he couldn't work. The notion of trying to cross a border with a herd of illegals didn't appeal to him, especially if, when the job was done, he couldn't get out quickly.

As far as Thorn was concerned, change sucked, and passport
security wasn't the only thing that was changing. For years he had used numbered accounts in banking havens around the world to salt away cash. In Thorn's line of work, you didn't take checks. Money was wired into numbered accounts in Swiss banks, or on the Isle of Man, sometimes in the Caymans or Belize. These were places where you paid the bank to hold your money and where the marketing brochures read like Mafia primers on secrecy.

Thorn had used a small Swiss bank in Lucerne for years. Now Uncle Sam was knocking on the door trying to bring down the curtain on private banking all over Europe. They needed more money to feed the swirling black hole the politicians had punched in the American budget. So now they were turning the screws on other countries, looking for taxes in numbered accounts.

Maybe it was just that he was getting older. But the world was changing, and the shadows he used to hide in were fast disappearing. For Thorn the writing was on the wall. It was well past time to retire. If it hadn't been for the meddling woman from Washington State and her dead friend from Holland, he would have been out of the business long ago. Instead Thorn had been forced to hide out in Mexico and go on the lam along the horn of Africa, living in Somalia and other hellholes for almost four years while the CIA and the U.S. military tried to hunt him down. When the twin towers went down, their focus changed to Bin Laden. It was the only thing that had saved him. It allowed him to go back to work, but with a much lower profile, and for a fraction of what he had once been paid. After 9/11 it was a whole new world, with much tougher rules.

It was the reason he took the contract. Ten years ago he would never have even looked at it. If anyone had approached him with such a wild idea, he would have run screaming.

He felt safe in taking the job because it was brought to him by someone he knew and trusted, another soldier of fortune who at one time had been with Delta Force, the American special ops unit that, according to the U.S. government, didn't exist.

From this contact Thorn was handed a sealed envelope with a single folded page inside. It spelled out the details of the job, the target, the time frame, and the terms of payment. Thorn was to be paid in two installments, half up front for planning, acquisition of materials, equipment, and training. The other half was to be wired into his account twenty-four hours before the operation was launched. If Thorn didn't receive confirmation from his bank in Lucerne that the final payment was there, it was understood that the mission would be scrubbed.

After opening the sealed document and reading it, Thorn was instructed by the former Delta contact to burn it there and then, which he did. The contact then told Thorn that he didn't want to know what the document said, only whether Thorn was willing to take the job on the terms stated. He told Thorn that those making the offer were well funded and possessed first-rate intel to provide him with vital information.

Thorn agreed to do the job. But he wondered whether his old friend from Delta might have been commissioned to kill him if he had said no. If the people behind it were as serious as the man said, it would be absolutely essential to keep the contents of the then-destroyed document secret until they had a chance to find another operator to carry it out.

Thorn was then given a second sealed envelope. This one contained a long list of telephone numbers with area codes from all over the country. Each one had a separate date next to it. In order to communicate with his employers and to receive instructions or critical intelligence, he was to call each of the numbers listed on the dates printed next to them. From the time he'd started, about five weeks ago, there were a total of forty-five numbers, one for every other day, for a period of ninety days. By then the job was to be completed.

When Thorn called the first number, he found himself listening to instructions from a digitized voice synthesizer. He was told to repeat several lines of the verse “Mary had a little lamb…” and
so on. Finally the instructions on the machine told him that in the future it would not be necessary to identify himself by name or in any other way, but that he should call one of the listed numbers every two days for further updates and information.

Thorn guessed that they were using voice-recognition software to identify him, a digitized voiceprint that could not be replicated by anyone else. Any other person calling in and the machine would shut down. The phone numbers on the list were no doubt patched through to wherever the voice-mail and message machine was located. The equipment could be sitting in the middle of an empty room anywhere in the world. If they cleared all messages and instructions each day, anyone seizing the box would get almost nothing by way of information. And they couldn't tap the phone line because it changed every other day. Because of the voice synthesizer, there was no way for Thorn or anyone else to pick up on an accent.

It was a onetime venture. Whoever did it would never work again. The risks were enormous, but so were the rewards. The initial offer was two and a half million dollars. That was his fee, but with the proviso that money was no object. The success of the mission was everything. Who else but the Middle Eastern merchants of terror would have that kind of money?

They agreed to cover the cost of the ordnance, all the transportation, and the crew. And Thorn was not above padding these to increase his take-home pay. He was already thinking along these lines when his eyes caught the headline near the left side of the screen. A single column about two inches long:

“Senate Staffer Found Dead”

Dateline: Alexandria, VA.

“Police are still investigating the death of a staff member for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who was found dead in his Alexandria apartment last month. The victim, James Snyder, 23, was found dead following an apparent drug overdose. Police are looking for anyone with information regarding the victim or
his whereabouts on the evening of August 2. They are asking anyone with information to call the Alexandria Police Department, Investigation Bureau.” The phone number followed.

Thorn had been following the little bits and pieces of news ever since the kid's murder. From the news stories it didn't sound as if the cops had any particular suspicions. It was standard procedure to look for witnesses who might have seen the person in the hours before he died, if for no other reason than to narrow down the time of death.

To the extent that Thorn was capable of such feelings, he had a fleeting pang of regret. It lasted a couple of seconds. He had nothing against the kid. It was the luck of the draw. Thorn picked him as the pigeon to gain access because he stood out.

Thorn had observed three young guides from a distance for more than an hour before settling on Snyder. The kid seemed lonely, as if he was desperate for a friend, but never seemed to mix or chat with the other two. He was the odd man out. The only person he talked to was the clerk behind the counter in the gift shop downstairs. That's how Thorn had found out Snyder went to Stanford and was trying to get into law school, by listening from behind a pillar as Jimmie chatted with the clerk during his break.

From that sparse information Thorn tailored the friendly lawyer Warren Humphreys. The rest was easy. The kid was so anxious to find a friend that Thorn didn't even have to ask him for a private tour. Snyder offered, and in less than forty minutes Thorn had every thing he needed.

Thorn found out that his unofficial tour of the building had been discovered and that Jimmie Snyder was about to be questioned. He was tipped off by his employer. Whoever they were, they had boots on the ground, and big ears.

The kid could no doubt identify Thorn even without the heavy makeup and the rubber gut glued to his stomach to create a paunch under his polo shirt. Thorn had used padding in his cheeks for
jowls and wore a broad-billed baseball cap that he kept pulled low over his eyes. All of these were intended to mask Thorn's appearance from the security cameras in the building. What was more threatening, however, was that Snyder could tell authorities exactly what it was that Thorn did as they went through the building, the fact that he had this rather strange-looking camera and that he kept using it to snap pictures from odd angles inside some of the rooms. Jimmie had even commented on it, wondering out loud how the camera had gotten through the metal detector without setting off the alarm. The reason was that the device contained no metal. Thorn had had it fabricated from plastic and carbon fiber using off-the-shelf hardware and parts.

Considering what the kid had seen and what he knew, Thorn had no choice. He hired the Mexican he had used several times before, and silenced Jimmie Snyder forever.

Thorn scrolled back to the first page and glanced at a few of the other headlines on the screen. He read the banner at the top: “Deficit Grows to Six Trillion.”

He scanned enough of the story to conclude, at least in his own mind, that the old superpower up north was going down fast, in one final orgy of spending. To Thorn the whole thing seemed comical. For a century and a half, it had sucked taxpayers dry, forcing them all to pay for Social Security and Medicare several times over while Congress refused to lock up the money and pissed it all away on other things, including the Congressional gold-plated pension plan. Now they wanted to give everybody health care so they could play the same tune over again, only louder this time.

Einstein was right; only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity.

Two thousand years since the Romans disappeared, government was still dealing in bread and circuses. Perks to the people in return for their votes, all of it to be paid for by the rich, if you believed the people pulling the levers. And all they wanted was
merely to serve, to maintain their death grip in the wheelhouse even as the ship went under.

Thorn would have to move fast if he was going to catch it before it sank; it would be like shooting fireworks off the deck of the
Titanic
. He would give them a light show they would never forget, just as the country slipped beneath a financial tsunami.