The Rule of Nine by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online Page A

next of kin now stood in his son’s legal shoes. It looked like a dead end.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI wonder if I could look at those one more time,” said Snyder.
    â€œSure.”
    Wallace handed them to him and Snyder looked at the pictures one at a time, very closely, for almost a minute.
    â€œJimmie 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?”
    â€œIt’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?”
    â€œOf 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.

SEVEN
    H e 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 whowould 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