Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

“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.

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.