The Rule of Nine

SEVEN

He 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.