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

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 passportsecurity 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.
    Maybe it was just that he was getting older. But the world was changing, and the shadows he used to hide in were fast disappearing. For Thorn the writing was on the wall. It was well past time to retire. If it hadn’t been for the meddling woman from Washington State and her dead friend from Holland, he would have been out of the business long ago. Instead Thorn had been forced to hide out in Mexico and go on the lam along the horn of Africa, living in Somalia and other hellholes for almost four years while the CIA and the U.S. military tried to hunt him down. When the twin towers went down, their focus changed to Bin Laden. It was the only thing that had saved him. It allowed him to go back to work, but with a much lower profile, and for a fraction of what he had once been paid. After 9/11 it was a whole new world, with much tougher rules.
    It was the reason he took the contract. Ten years ago he would never have even looked at it. If anyone had approached him with such a wild idea, he would have run screaming.
    He felt safe in taking the job because it was brought to him by someone he knew and trusted, another soldier of fortune who at one time had been with Delta Force, the American special ops unit that, according to the U.S. government, didn’t exist.
    From this contact Thorn was handed a sealed envelope with a single folded page inside. It spelled out the details of the job, the target, the time frame, and the terms of payment. Thorn was to be paid in two installments, half up front for planning, acquisition of materials, equipment, and training. The other half was to be wired into his account twenty-four hours before the operation was launched. If Thorn didn’t receive confirmation from his bank in Lucerne that the final payment was there, it was understood that the mission would be scrubbed.
    After opening the sealed document and reading it, Thorn was instructed by the former Delta contact to burn it there and then, which he did. The contact then told Thorn that he didn’t want to know what the document said, only whether Thorn was willing to take the job on the terms stated. He told Thorn that those making the offer were well funded and possessed first-rate intel to provide him with vital information.
    Thorn