The Rule of Nine (18 page)

N
ine o'clock at night and Liquida was angry. He had a naturally short fuse, and Madriani and his buddies had taken nail clippers to it by sabotaging his eyes in the sky.

Liquida knew something was wrong when all four of the devices started moving at once. He was pretty sure the girl's Volkswagen bug was still in the garage at the house.

Then he received word from the satellite-monitoring company that clinched it. They told him that one of his GPS tracking devices was found on the trailer of a big rig when the driver went to deliver his load in Phoenix. The trucking company wanted to know who had put it there and why. Liquida typed an e-mail back, telling them he didn't know, that someone must have stolen it and was using it to play games. He knew that if Madriani found one of them, the others would be turning up soon.

Faster than snot on a kid with a cold, Liquida headed for Madriani's law office. He found the place dark and buttoned up tight, with a sign inside the glass on the front door saying
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
.

Obviously the lawyer, or somebody helping him, had thought
this thing through. Liquida began to wonder if the FBI was involved. Maybe killing the blonde was a mistake. He should have killed the daughter and taken his chances on Madriani going to ground. The lawyer would have had to hang around at least long enough to go to his daughter's funeral. Otherwise people would talk. Liquida could have popped an IED in the open grave. Some Simex and a detonator wired to a cell phone, one-button quick dial and they could have shoveled them all into the same hole as soon as they picked all the pieces out of the trees.

Liquida was furious. The two lawyers, the daughter, and the investigator were gone, and now he couldn't find anybody in the office to kill.

He checked the windows and the doors; the office was wired, and probably monitored by a security service from a central location. Through one of the windows he could see motion detectors, at least two of them on the ceiling in the reception area. He could toss a potted plant through the window. Security would call the police and then whatever number they were given for the client. If it was Madriani or his partner, they would tell security to have the window boarded up and to reset the alarm. They might even hire security to be posted inside. If security called one of the employees, it wasn't likely that they would show up at the office, not if Madriani had sent them home and told them why. Even if Liquida could get into the office, he weighed the prospects of finding anything useful there and decided it would be better to case Madriani's house before trying the office. What he wanted was some clue as to where they were hiding. There had to be something.

Liquida suspected that the two lawyers didn't get rid of the tracking devices immediately. The online data from the satellite company showed continuous travel of the two cars from the point of departure at the house for Madriani and the location in San Diego for the partner. He couldn't be certain regarding the partner's vehicle, but Liquida had seen Madriani and the investigator drive away from the house. The tracking data showed him going north
on I-5. The first time the vehicle stopped was a few miles south of Santa Ana. According to the tracking data, the vehicle was still traveling north on I-5, but was now somewhere near Medford, in Oregon. It was probably on the back of a truck. Liquida was guessing that they dumped the tracker at their first stop. And they could have been going north, just to throw him off. But there was a chance that if Madriani was going north, his destination was in that direction.

The other tracker was more problematic. Assuming it was still on the partner's vehicle when it left San Diego, the partner and Madriani's daughter were headed east. They took I-8 and didn't make any stops for more than a hundred miles, until they reached El Centro. That would be a long way to go just to throw somebody off your track.

By the time Liquida reached Madriani's house, it was almost ten o'clock. He parked his car down the block in front of the same old For Sale sign. The place was beginning to feel like home. He grabbed a small black day pack from the backseat, stepped out, and closed the car door. He didn't lock it in case he had to beat a hasty retreat. Then he casually strolled across the street and down the sidewalk. The neighborhood was dark except for interior house lights and the blue haze from a couple of television sets. Liquida reached into the bag and pulled out a black ski hood and a pair of gloves. By the time he arrived in front of the house, a half block down, he had the gloves on his hands and the hood rolled up on top of his head like a hat. He looked for security cameras, the big ones that cities sometimes mount on lampposts. He didn't see any. He walked slowly up the driveway toward the backyard, no furtive moves, very calm and deliberate, as if he owned the place. At the same time he rolled the hood down over his face and head. He checked the neighbor's windows to make sure nobody was looking out, and then stopped for a moment to glance toward the front porch. He was looking for any small security cameras that might be tucked up under the porch roof, not that he could see them
even if they were there. Some of the new cameras were not much bigger than an eraser on the end of a pencil. He wanted to flash his little pen-size Maglite up under the eaves for a better look, but the bright beam might draw attention.

He headed toward the back of the house and, like a cat, settled on the top step at the back door. Four days earlier Liquida had seen Madriani and the man called Diggs, the big, bald, black investigator, go out this way. The bald head and the man's mountainous size were engraved on Liquida's memory from their first encounter down in Costa Rica almost a year ago. They had never come face-to-face, but Liquida had gotten a good look at him from inside as Diggs tried to pick the lock on the front door. As far as Liquida was concerned, that was close enough. If and when he had to deal with the man, he would want to make sure that he had a considerable edge, preferably long and sharp, and a good deal of surprise.

Liquida had a set of lock picks in his bag. The problem was, if he opened the door, it would trip the alarm. He could see the small control panel on the wall in the kitchen with its flashing red light. The alarm was set. Cutting power to the house wouldn't disable it, at least not immediately. Most of the systems had battery backups and would shoot off a signal over a dedicated phone line the second he opened the door.

He didn't see any infrared motion sensors. These were usually housed in tiny plastic units up near the ceiling and sometimes showed a small flashing red light when they were on. This was good. It meant that if he could somehow get inside the house without triggering the alarm, he would be able to move around freely and presumably leave the same way he'd gotten in. Liquida decided to scope out the rest of the house.

It was bungalow style, probably built before the war and remodeled several times since. Older bungalows, especially those in Southern California, often had a soft spot in terms of entry. Unlike the newer ranch homes that were built on concrete slabs, the old bungalows sat on cement piers with short posts holding up the
floor joists. There was a dirt crawl space under the house. And because the bungalows were small, with limited storage, in many of the originals, not having a garage, contractors would often excavate a small eight-by-ten-foot hole under the house somewhere, line it with concrete walls, and advertise the house as having a cellar. You couldn't always tell because many of these small concrete cellars had no exterior exit or entrance. The only way in or out was a trapdoor, usually in a closet floor with a built-in wooden ladder going down to the cellar.

Liquida poked around the outside of the house for several minutes before he found what he was looking for. It was a small lattice panel, two and a half by three feet wide, held in place by two hook-and-eye hasps, the kind you might use to latch a gate. He popped the hooks out of the eyes and lifted the lattice panel away from the siding, then reached into his bag and found the Maglite. He flashed it into the crawl space under the house; peers and posts, and twenty feet away a rough edge of concrete. Shazam! Liquida could see a set of wooden steps disappearing below the top of the concrete wall, spanning the gap between the crawl space and the floor above.

He didn't have any coveralls. Liquida would have to crawl through the dirt under the house in his street clothes. He shimmied through the opening, crossed the span of dirt on his belly like a snake, and lowered himself over the wall and into the cellar. Holding the Maglite in his teeth, he dusted his clothes off with both hands, then quickly climbed the ladder.

He pushed on the overhead trapdoor. It rattled along the right side but wouldn't budge on the left. Liquida realized it was hinged on the left and locked on the right. He focused the Maglite into the slender crack along the right edge and saw the reflection of a yellow glint. Liquida smiled. Ten thousand dollars in home security equipment, and a two-dollar sliding brass latch.

Liquida reached into his bag and found the cordless quarter-inch minidrill and fitted it with a long metal cutting bit. He checked
with the Maglite to line it up so that the tip of the drill bit was centered in the crack directly under the sliding latch on the lock. Holding the light in his teeth, he pulled the trigger on the drill and pushed the bit through the wood and into the soft brass of the lock. He reversed the drill, pulled the bit out, repositioned it, and drilled again. On the third attempt he severed the slide on the lock, dropped the drill in his bag, and pushed up on the trapdoor. It lifted.

Liquida climbed up and found himself in a closet off the downstairs hallway. He stepped out and moved cautiously from one end of the hall to the other, checking the ceiling in each room for motion sensors. There were none. There was a small windowless study off the kitchen, a desk with a computer and a monitor against one wall, a file cabinet, and some shelves. He could ransack the file cabinet, but it wasn't likely Madriani would have left a trail there. Instead he fished through the wastebasket near the desk looking for any last-minute handwritten notes or printouts that might provide a clue. He found nothing. He turned on the computer and checked the browser history to see if the last few searches the lawyer or his daughter had done might reveal travel plans, hotels, or flight arrangements. There was nothing. He tried to get into the e-mail and data files and found they were locked behind a password.

Liquida turned his attention to the trash can in the kitchen under the sink. It was empty. They must have dumped it before they left. He could see the large rolling trash container outside in the yard, against the garage. He would have to check it on his way out.

He headed down the hall toward the stairs at the front of the house. Just as he got to the foot of the steps he saw several pages of newsprint scattered on the floor of the entry, what looked like pages from a throwaway advertiser. It had been pushed through the mail slot in the door and missed the box underneath. Staying away from the windows, Liquida made his way to the front door and looked in the box. There were three envelopes. He plucked
them out, pieces of junk mail, one from a furniture company, another from a financial consultant looking for business, and a business reply envelope from the postal service. The last envelope had a cutout for the recipient's name and address. It was sent to “Sarah Madriani.” Liquida recognized the envelope format immediately. He ripped it open. Sure enough, it was a form letter, what the postal service calls a “Move Validation Letter.” The post office was confirming that Sarah Madriani had used the postal online services to forward her mail to a new address. The purpose of the form was to make sure that someone hadn't done this without her knowledge. It was one of the tactics used to steal mail as well as identities. The letter didn't reveal the daughter's new address. The postal service had learned not to do this for reasons of privacy and security. For one thing, it wasn't terribly healthy for abused women on the run.

But Liquida didn't care. He no longer needed to scrounge around upstairs. The postal form told him everything he needed to know. Sarah Madriani had forwarded her mail, and Liquida could pick up right where he'd left off.

M
id-September, the clock was running, and for once everything seemed to be coming together nicely.

Thorn had struck a deal with the property owner in Puerto Rico, slipped the man ten grand in cash and taken a six-month lease on a hundred and fifty acres of worthless scrubland including the old airfield. Happy to have the cash for the worthless ground, the man didn't ask any questions.

Thorn brought in his crew and readied the airfield. They knocked down the grass with a harvester and put up the camo netting.

While the crew was finishing up in Puerto Rico, Thorn had gone to work lining up the plane and all the equipment at the boneyard. He found the old 727-100C online, and gathered all the documentation, including maintenance records, long distance, having the paperwork sent to a commercial mailbox in Tampa. Thorn didn't want to spend any more time than necessary dealing face-to-face.

The plane's airframe was old, dating to the early seventies, but the engines showed less than a thousand hours since the last overhaul. He checked the records and found that none of the engine work had been outsourced to any of the overseas repair stations
where skill levels were sometimes questionable and parts could be unreliable. The avionics were dated, but for the single flight he had in mind it didn't matter. There were no passenger seats to remove since the plane had last been used for hauling freight.

The seller was a regional bank in Texas. Thorn could tell by the tone of the e-mails coming back from the boneyard that the bank was wetting its pants trying to unload the plane and get it off their books. Passenger volume had imploded along with the economy. Airline leasing companies were holding fire sales on new planes that made the old 727 look like something out of the Wright brothers' bicycle shop. It was probably no more than a few months from being parted out and cut up for scrap.

Thorn made them squirm while he negotiated long distance on the extra equipment he needed. This included a good-size generator and a new mode C transponder unit. The boneyard agreed to throw in the transponder for free if the deal on the plane went through.

Thorn knocked the price down to rock bottom in a series of e-mails and made the final purchase subject to approval by the buyer's representative, one Jorge Michelli of Bogotá, Colombia.

When Thorn arrived at the boneyard as Jorge “George” Michelli, an expat commercial pilot out of California, the pump was already primed and ready to go. He kicked the wheels and checked the critical onboard components. He had them start up the engines and reverse the thrust for braking to make sure it would work when he got to the airfield. Then they checked the hydraulics and looked for leaks. The two items he checked carefully were the landing lights and the altimeter. He had one of the service attendants at the yard make sure the altimeter was perfectly calibrated and then checked the external pitot tubes to make certain they weren't plugged with debris. Except for two breaker switches that needed replacing, the plane was in good shape for its age.

Thorn had the title put in the name of a Colombian corporation, Gallo Air, SA, and paid for everything, the equipment, the
plane, and a full load of fuel, with a certified check. He told the boneyard that the plane was destined for overseas service, a small regional freight carrier in Latin America. Nobody seemed to notice that the word “gallo” in Spanish meant rooster, and that roosters don't fly.

The yard crew loaded the extra equipment on board and in less than two hours Thorn was taxiing down the runway headed for Puerto Rico.

The flight was uneventful, but for Thorn the approach for the landing was white-knuckle time. Flying in at wave-top altitude in the dark, in the middle of the night, required either a kind of sixth sense or a twisted death wish. He slipped in under the radar, over the line of white water splashing on the beach ten miles south of Ponce and the airport at Mercedita. Thorn's crew had put out the portable beacons so that the perimeter of the field was outlined, at least enough for Thorn to see it. Depth perception was tricky, as Thorn waited until almost the very last second to turn on his landing lights. The wheels smoked as they hit the grass stubble over the crumbling macadam and Thorn threw the engines into reverse. In less than three minutes he taxied to the end of the runway and with the help of his crew salted the plane away under the camouflage netting. They buttoned it, and all of them disappeared into the darkness.

Thorn watched the airfield and the plane for four hours from a distance with field glasses to make sure no one came by to investigate. When they didn't, he knew he was home free. The plane wouldn't have to move again until the day of the operation.

The ducks were aligned. He now had both of the fuel-air devices, Fat Man and Little Boy, in hand. One of them had arrived by sea in the port at San Juan two days earlier. It was in a box labeled
INDUSTRIAL TOOLS
. U.S. Customs opened and inspected it only to find exactly what the label said, a large industrial compressor with an air tank almost nine feet long. Customs had one of the dogs sniff around it for drugs, then nailed the crate closed and tagged it as
inspected. The crate was loaded onto a rental truck driven by one of Thorn's crew members.

Little Boy now rested quietly, still in its wooden crate under the camo netting, no more than thirty feet from the plane.

With all of the ordnance now in his possession, Thorn started thinking about cutting his overhead. He no longer needed Victor Soyev.

The Russian arms merchant had screwed up and nearly cost him the job when the plane carrying Fat Man was forced down in Thailand. Thorn wondered if Soyev might not have planned it that way so he could hold him up and make Thorn pay twice. He wouldn't put it past the Russian to cut a side deal for a kickback with his North Korean hosts. As far as Thorn was concerned, they all played in the same sandbox, where the name of the game was “screw over the buyer.”

The Russian had served his purpose. Now it was time for him to serve another. Besides, there was the cost factor to consider. Thorn had paid Soyev half up front for the two devices, with the balance due on delivery. If Soyev wasn't around to collect, Thorn could put the second half of the payment in his own pocket and Thorn's client would never be the wiser.

Three days later and seventeen hundred miles to the north, Thorn was now busy in upstate New York. He was scrambling to finish work on the delivery vehicle for Fat Man.

The place where they were working was a large commercial garage rented from a boarded-up GM truck dealership just outside Albany. As far as Thorn was concerned, it was great having the U.S. economy in the dumps. Not only were commercial airliners cheap as dirt, it seemed whatever he needed was readily available, and at cut-rate prices. Now if he could only figure out some way to pad his bills and make sure the country didn't blow away and disappear before he could destroy it, everything would be just peachy.

There were only three of them, a welder from Thorn's crew, a
Muslim taxi driver from Manhattan who'd quit his job two days earlier to join them, and Thorn. For muscle they were using a three-ton electrical chain hoist on rollers suspended from an overhead I beam. The welder had been working for nearly a week on a giant steel barrel that now encased Fat Man.

The barrel was slung under the chain hoist using heavy nylon tow straps and rolled along the overhead beam until it was centered over the open frame of the truck. Carefully they lowered it into place.

“Once I do this it ain't gonna turn anymore. You sure you want me to do it? You want I could make it so it could turn? Might take two, maybe three extra days,” said the welder.

“Don't worry about it,” said Thorn. “Time's running out. Get it done.”

“Your call.” The welder had already made a small fortune. The job had taken the better part of a week. Five days earlier he had removed the large metal paddles from the inside of the barrel. Using a torch the welder then cut the huge steel barrel in half.

Working alone with nothing but the hoist, the welder had lifted the rear half of the barrel away with the chain hoist and spent three hours of backbreaking labor maneuvering the bomb into the remaining front half of the barrel. Another two days was spent cutting angle iron and welding the bomb in place. He kept reminding himself to keep the hot end of the arc welder away from the area that housed Fat Man's initiating charge. Otherwise the authorities would be searching for his identity from the spray of DNA taken from air samples in the stratosphere.

Now that the two halves of the barrel were back together, Thorn wanted it welded to the frame of the truck where it wouldn't move, giving the bomb a stable platform. As the welder worked, throwing sparks of hot metal around the truck, Thorn spent his time assembling the parts for the detonator.

This was the one item he hadn't purchased. It was supplied and
delivered by his employer, a last-minute change in their agreement. As Thorn examined it closely, he realized why. It was clear that they didn't want any mistakes on this.

The truck's driver, the Muslim taxi man, was handpicked by Thorn based on references from some very nasty associates he'd met while hiding out in Somalia. Whether they were pirates or jihadists, Thorn trusted the Somalis because he knew they would go to their deaths either for their wants or for their beliefs.

The driver was to be well armed, both a handgun and two fully automatic AKs with half a dozen spare clips. He was to reach his target at all costs, driving through barricades and shooting his way in if he had to. It was without question a trip to paradise. Whether there would be virgins waiting at the other end, Thorn would leave to the driver. But he began to reassess his earlier assumptions as to the national origins of the people who had hired him. It wasn't oil money that was fueling the venture. He was now certain of that. They were not part of the jihad. The detonator had been made in Germany by a well-known industrial electronics manufacturer. It had come to Thorn by way of a circuitous route that took it through a buyer, an unnecessary middleman in Yemen. The detonator carried with it, like a neon sign, a paper trail of invoices and shipping labels. At first Thorn thought this was a bold and naked claim of accountability, until he looked more closely at the detonator itself. Thorn didn't ask any questions. It was what the client wanted, and he was paying the freight.

Time was now getting tight. By morning Thorn had to be headed back south and he couldn't wait to be gone. He had a mountain of work ahead of him in Puerto Rico.

He carefully soldered the two lead wires from the mercury trembler switch to the terminals on the electronic detonator. Then he climbed the metal ladder and crawled into the opening up high on the rear of the barrel. Once inside, Thorn wired the detonator to the initiating charge on Fat Man. Then he taped the detonator to a piece of metal angle iron using three rounds of electrical tape and
another round of duct tape to make sure that the detonator wouldn't be torn from the bomb by the impact of the fall, that is, if the driver reached his final target.

Thorn had to crawl on his back and squeeze his gut under the massive bomb in order to rig the final set of wires. These were about thirty feet in length. They had to be fed through a small hole drilled in the front end of the barrel and from there through a hole in the back of the truck's cab.

Inside the cab was a small metal box, and inside the box was a toggle switch. This was a manual trigger designed to detonate the bomb if all else failed.

It took him several minutes and a lot of sweat to drag his body under the bomb once more and climb out of the slippery steel barrel. By the time Thorn had his feet on the ground again, he was huffing and puffing. He was getting too old for this.

Time for a break. He grabbed a cold beer from an ice chest in the corner and sat down for a minute to check his e-mail. He used a small Netbook with a 3G connection.

Two minutes to boot it and Thorn opened his messages. There was one from Soyev asking why his money on delivery hadn't been wired to his overseas account, a couple pieces of junk mail from the 3G provider, and a news story from Thorn's customized Google news site.

The last item caught his attention. Thorn had set it up to provide regular searches for news items that turned up any of a number of names, the recent aliases he had used as well as the name Thorn itself. If the authorities were looking for him, it was one way to stay alert. He could discontinue the use of an alias the second he had any warning.

He opened the e-mail and started reading: “Chicago Lawyer Warns of D.C. Terror Plot.” The moment he saw the name Snyder it set off bells. Bart Snyder was accusing a man named Thorn of being involved in the murder of his son, James, in Washington, D.C. The old man had held a news conference. The story was brief, only
six short paragraphs, but it was enough to make the hair on the back of Thorn's neck stand up. “Mr. Snyder stated that the man he identified only as Thorn, also known as Dean Belden, is believed to have extensive ties to international terrorist organizations. He claims that his son, James Snyder, may have inadvertently discovered evidence of terrorist activities, and believes that he was killed for that reason. Mr. Snyder told reporters that he is conducting his own investigation and will be releasing further information early next week.

“A spokesman for the FBI confirmed that James Snyder was the victim of an apparent homicide in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer, but declined further comment, stating that the matter was under investigation by the Metropolitan Police. A spokesperson for the police department confirmed that Bart Snyder had been attempting to assist police in the investigation of his son's murder, but that at this time police have no credible information concerning any terrorist activities in connection with the case.”

Thorn's blood ran cold. How in the hell did Bart Snyder get his name? And what else did he know? This was trouble with a capital T. From the tone of the story it sounded as if the cops weren't taking Snyder seriously, unless they were playing it cool.