Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

Liquida found himself bundled onto the last evening flight out of Columbus, Ohio, the seven o’clock headed for Dulles, in D.C. He’d received the e-mail that afternoon that his services were needed on another job and he wasn’t happy about it.

He had spent the last three days and a chunk of his own change watching the small farm outside Groveport where Madriani’s daughter and his law partner were holed up. The little GPS tracker that Liquida had mailed to the girl had done its job. The device was so sensitive that at times he was able to follow it in transit, even in the package. The second she opened the box, the tiny tracker gave Liquida a readout including latitude, longitude, and street address, and then plotted it all on a map. And if she had swallowed the thing, Liquida was sure that it would have performed an upper GI series.

He believed firmly that technology was a wonderful thing, as long as he didn’t have to use it. It was why he didn’t carry a cell phone, and why he changed his e-mail address more often than his underwear. Anything science could make, government could abuse.

He had staked out the farmhouse and identified the girl’s daily schedule. She never left the place. And the old man who owned the farm had friends. Half the time the driveway out in front of the house looked like a police convention. If Liquida had a dime for every car with a set of light bars on top that visited the house, he could have retired.

If that wasn’t enough, there were dogs, and not just any kind. The farmer raised Doberman pinschers. Liquida wasn’t a “dog kind of guy,” and he hated any breed that was German. You could poison most junkyard hounds. But a forty-dollar hunk of Chateaubriand salted with enough Ambien to put an elephant down wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on a good Doberman. And if you were stupid enough to cross the line and try to hand-feed him, you’d better be wearing a Kevlar body stocking.

The last time Liquida had tangled with a pinscher he’d ended up with his head in the dog’s jaws, being humped and thrashed like a stuffed bunny. Until the dog finally let go of his head, Liquida thought he was engaged, well on his way to becoming Muerte Liquida-Doberman. And he wasn’t anxious for a rematch.

But these dogs were confined by an invisible fence. A wire circled the property and was buried just inches under the ground. It emitted a signal that was picked up by a diode on the dog’s collar whenever it got within a few feet of the wire. If the dog tried to cross the wire, the animal would get a severe jolt of low-amperage electricity. The dogs had been trained and conditioned to stay inside the fence.

By now Liquida knew the precise boundaries of the invisible fence. He watched the property from a tree in an empty field across the road.

For the last two days, Madriani’s daughter had slipped into a pattern. Each morning around eight she would come out of the house carrying a colander to pick berries from some wild bushes that ran along the front of the property.

Madriani’s law partner would come out with her carrying a shotgun. But he usually sat on a chair on the front porch and kept an eye on her from a distance. And each day, as the berries became sparser, the girl wandered farther. She was already within the warning zone of the invisible fence. The dogs no longer followed her. By tomorrow she would be outside the fence and fair game for a needle-sharp stiletto hiding in the brush.

Liquida had been called away, but at least he knew where she was, and from all appearances, she wasn’t going to leave. He could only hope and pray that the berries would hold out until he got back.

Thorn approached the U.S. Capitol Building from the north, walking toward what many tourists called the back of the immense, sprawling structure, the steps on the east side.

He had spent Saturday finishing up the logos on the 727 and arranging for the delivery of a truckload of Jet A fuel from the airport on the east side of Vieques Island. After pumping the tanks full and paying for the fuel, Thorn hitched a ride with the driver of the tanker back to the airport, where he caught a flight to San Juan, and from there to Washington.

It was now late Sunday night. The area around the Capitol was quiet, but well lit. Thorn was carrying an attaché case. He had lied to the two Saudi pilots on board the plane back in Vieques about many things, including their ultimate objective. As far as he was concerned, they didn’t need to know. And as long as he was packing the item in the briefcase, Thorn was in control.

At Capitol Street he turned left, away from the domed monolith, and headed instead toward the intersection of First Street. He ended up kitty-corner from the Library of Congress and stopped at the traffic light. Standing at the curb waiting for the light to change he had to keep himself from looking up.

Thorn knew that he was being watched and, no doubt, recorded by at least three or four, and maybe as many as half a dozen, surveillance cameras.

He was standing in the middle of Government Square. Except for the area around the White House and parts of North Korea, it was probably the most heavily watched patch of ground on earth.

The feds had installed cameras, night-vision equipment, and God knows what else under the cornice of every building. Rumor had it that there were antimissile missiles deployed around the Capitol as well as the White House. During the daytime, tourists could stand on the steps of the Supreme Court and look across to see snipers in their black garb as they milled around with their rifles on the roof of the Capitol Building.

On his last visit Thorn had seen metal domes on the roof of the Capitol that looked suspiciously like the housing for the MK-15 Phalanx installed on naval war ships. The Phalanx was a twenty-millimeter chain gun, radar directed and capable of rapid fire to take down incoming missiles or planes if they penetrated the outer defenses around Washington. None of this particularly bothered him.

When the light changed he crossed at the intersection and continued straight on, along the south side of the Supreme Court Building. Across the street was the Library of Congress with its Beaux-Arts architecture and shallow dome topped by an ornate windowed cupola and capped by the Torch of Learning. This and the light from the windows in the cupola lit up the night sky with the old-fashioned feel of the nineteenth century.

The dome and the cupola were clad in copper that had long since acquired the brown patina of a dirty penny. Half a block down he stepped off the sidewalk and through the gate of a low, iron picket fence bordering the front yard of one of the old Victorian houses that lined the block. Most of the stately old homes along the street now housed lobbying groups and other organizations with regular business before Congress.

It was Sunday and late enough at night that the lights in the old Victorian were out. Only the streetlamps provided illumination, and Thorn avoided these by huddling in the shadows under a tree in the front yard. Quickly he went down on one knee, opened the attaché case, and removed the little brown bat.

His hands were trembling. Thorn knew that this was perhaps the riskiest part of the entire venture. He would either succeed or fail within the next three or four minutes, and he would be likely to get only one shot. Damage or loss of the bat and his only backup was virtual suicide. He would have to take the large laser designator and find a way to get up into the building. Given the tight security, this was virtually impossible; chances were he would be either caught or killed. If Thorn had to make a choice, it would be the latter.

He pulled out the laptop and turned it on. A few seconds later there was a slight vibration and a gentle whirring sound from the little bat as Thorn tossed it into the air. A second later the sound disappeared. Thorn watched the computer screen as he piloted the little brown bat with the small joystick using the mounted camera as his eyes.