Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

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.

Mid-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.