The Rule of Nine (13 page)

I
have been chasing Zeb Thorpe at FBI headquarters in Washington by phone all morning. Three separate phone calls so far. The number he gave me for emergencies several months ago rings through to a secretary near his office. I get the sense when I talk to her that I am now old news.

“What was your name again?”

“Paul Madriani. He gave me this number in case there was a problem.”

“I know. I think I told you before, Mr. Thorpe is in a meeting. I believe he already received your earlier message.”

“But he didn't call.”

“No, he's busy. I'm sure he'll call you back as soon as he can.”

I have already left the information about Jenny's murder, and the fear that it may have been Liquida sending me another message and that he may be targeting my daughter. Herman and I are unable to get any further information, as the police have dropped a curtain around everything at Jenny's house. What news there is, and there are local reports every few minutes on cable, is offering less than we already know.

“I'll get the message to him that you called again, just as soon as he gets out.”

“Listen, it may be a matter of personal safety, we just don't know,” I tell her.

“If there's an emergency, you should call the local police,” she tells me.

“I don't know if there's an emergency. We don't have enough information to know. If I have to, I will. But I don't think Mr. Thorpe would want me to call the local authorities.”

“Why not?”

“If I call them, I'm going to have to tell them why. If I have to tell them the details, your boss is going to be very upset.”

“What is this regarding?” she says.

“The attack on the Coronado naval base.”

“Oh!” she says. “Just a moment.” She puts me on hold.

I wait. Herman is grousing around out in the living room, where he slept last night. I see him scratching his chest through his tank-top undershirt, yawning as he ambles barefoot for the bathroom at this end of the hall.

“Who you callin'?”

“Thorpe.”

“He didn't call you back?”

“Not yet.”

He steps into the bathroom and closes the door. Herman spent the night with a pistol stashed under the cushion of the couch where his head rested. While upstairs I kept watch with my unzipped fanny pack and the loaded .45 next to my pillow.

Every few minutes I would look in on Sarah. She didn't sleep much. Each time I opened the door to her room, she was lying there wide awake. The information I gave her about Liquida, the FBI's warning, has shaken her. She understands now why it was necessary to stay away from home for so long. Worse, she is now beginning to labor under the burden of guilt for her dead friend. She told me yesterday that if she had known about the threat from
Liquida, she would never have allowed Jenny to come anywhere near our house.

I told her that for all we knew, Jenny's death may have nothing to do with Liquida. But to Sarah it didn't matter. The thought that she may have been putting others at risk was enough. In other words, I should have told her. I will have to live with it.

“Hello.” She's back on the line. “Mr. Thorpe will take your call in his office. It'll be just a moment.”

I wait on the line. I've begun to sense how a mobster must feel when he's being squeezed by prosecutors with the less than subtle hint that his life is in danger. It's the reason I have been scrupulous in keeping quiet about the nuke at Coronado. It has less to do with the threat of criminal prosecution, the fear that the government might drop the hammer on me if I talked, and more to do with the knowledge that Liquida is out there. I can't afford to alienate Thorpe. Regarding Liquida, he is my only source of information, and if push comes to shove, to protect Sarah there is nowhere else I can go.

A second later Thorpe comes on the line. “Mr. Madriani.”

“Yes. I'm here.”

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. “We've got a major crisis going on. I couldn't get away. It's terrible news about your daughter's friend. I'm sorry to hear it. I take it your daughter was not a witness to any of this?”

“No. But they were out together that night. My investigator and I tried to provide some cover. We tried to follow them from a discreet distance. Apparently we didn't do a very good job.”

“You shouldn't blame yourself. First of all, you're making a lot of assumptions. I take it you didn't tell your daughter about Liquida,” he says.

“I have now. I know you didn't want me to.”

“Only because it would raise questions about what happened at Coronado. Did she ask you about that?”

“No. Right now she's too upset to think about anything.”

“I understand,” he says. “You did what you thought was best. You said you followed the two girls that night?”

“We did.”

“Did you see anything? Anyone who looked suspicious? Might have been following them?”

“No. Nothing. Not that I noticed. Of course, I'm no pro. My investigator has a better eye for this stuff than I do and he didn't see anything either. And we were a fair distance away. We didn't want the girls to know.”

“I understand.”

“They went to a restaurant and a club; both places were crowded. It's possible he could have been close and we just couldn't see him.”

“Do you have the names of these places?”

“I do.”

I give them to him over the phone. Thorpe tells me he'll have some of his agents from the San Diego field office check it out to see if anyone who works there might have seen or heard something.

“Assuming it was him, do you think he could have made you?” says Thorpe.

“What do you mean?”

“If it was Liquida, do you think he might have seen you or your investigator and kept his distance until later?” asks Thorpe.

“The thought never entered my mind. You seemed to think it wasn't him.”

“Have you told the police any of this?” he says.

“What's to tell? We didn't see anything.”

“Of course.” There's a long pause at the other end. “I don't know what to tell you. As soon as I got your first message, I had one of our agents contact San Diego homicide. He didn't find out much.”

“Then am I safe to assume that the killer didn't leave a calling card this time?”

“Not that they found. At least not yet. We checked. We told them to pay particular attention to prints. Of course, they'd already dusted the place. They'll go back and take a second look. We told them anything they couldn't identify to run it through our computers. We'll authorize it to be expedited. We told them so.”

“Did they ask you what your interest was?” I say.

“They did. We told them we couldn't discuss it unless there was evidence linking it to a couple of cases we have open. For the time being, unless they find something else, I'm afraid that's all I can do. Unless we can make some connection, we'd be hard pressed to say it's him.”

“What about the MO, the knife and the wounds?”

“How did you know about that?” he asks.

“Local sources,” I tell him.

“I see.” Thorpe is wondering if I've talked to the cops and if so whether I've lied to him. “There's nothing there to connect it either to Afundi or to the kid in the apartment in D.C.,” he says. “Liquida, if he exists at all, may use a knife, but we have no record of it.”

Now, suddenly, it seems Liquida doesn't exist at all, but is a figment of my imagination.

“I didn't dream this guy up,” I tell him. “You're the one who warned us about him. Remember?”

“Well, but we just don't know,” said Thorpe.

“You have two matching thumbprints at two separate crime scenes, one of them on the back of one of my business cards. What is it exactly that you don't know?”

“Who those prints belong to for starters,” says Thorpe.

“You can be sure of one thing. It's not a coincidence,” I tell him.

“Of course not,” he says.

“And according to my investigator—he talked to the paramedics—Jenny's death looked like a professional hit. This wasn't a girl who ran with drug dealers or gangbangers any more than Jimmie Snyder did,” I tell him. “You can trust me on that one.”

“I don't doubt you,” says Thorpe. “But without more we can't
connect your daughter's friend to the other two cases or to the prints.”

“Do you know if the local police have any other suspects? Anybody of interest?” I ask him.

“According to our agent, at this time the answer's no. The detective in charge told him it was too early to know.”

“So what do I do?” I ask.

I can hear him take a deep breath on the other end. “I really don't know what to tell you,” he says.

T
he old tarmac seemed to have more cracks than solid surface. With weeds sprouting up through the fissures, it looked like the prairie. Some of the taller grass came up to his hips. From a distance, as he drove in off the highway, Thorn could swear that he was looking at a farmer's fallow field instead of what it was: one of a score of abandoned army airfields left over from World War II. These dotted the island of Puerto Rico like the measles, as they were used to guard the entrance to the Panama Canal. Anyone with a map who wanted to take the time could find them.

Thorn spent the better part of two days surveying four of the old airfields. Two of them had landing strips that looked good on paper but were too short for the plane and its final cargo when he measured them. Some farmer had cut a trench across one of them before he realized that the old oil-soaked tar macadam and the three-foot gravel bed underneath it weren't exactly the best soil for growing crops.

The third field was long enough, with a good surface. It was well maintained. But there were too many prying eyes. The airstrip was a hangout for the local general aviation crowd. There was a small fleet,
maybe a dozen single and twin-engine props. If he landed the big bird there, the amateur pilots would be crawling over it in minutes, asking him what he was doing and if they could watch.

This one, the prairie field, seemed to have everything Thorn needed. The oil surface looked as if it hadn't been sealed since the fifties. But the runway was long enough, and it would only have to take the heavy load twice, once coming in and once going out.

Thorn paced it off, taking nearly two hours to make sure there were no surprises. There were no buildings, just some footings and a large concrete slab, probably what was left of an old hangar. After a thorough inspection, Thorn decided that, all in all, it was in good shape.

Best of all was the location. It was isolated. The runway lay in a narrow valley between low-lying hills along a rugged stretch of coast about a mile in from the ocean.

If there was a place on the island where a large plane on a single approach might not attract much attention, this was it.

Thorn turned and looked out toward the sea. He planned it all out in his mind. If he dropped down, say, a hundred miles out, and skimmed the waves coming in, he could slip in under the radar from the airport in Mercedita ten miles to the south. The airport presented problems, but it also gave him cover. Anyone seeing the plane come in over the water would assume that he was either on an approach to the airport or was circling around for another shot.

His biggest concern was the AWAC flights manned by the U.S. military. These were large four-engine jets or prop jobs with radar domes on top. They flew regular missions over the Caribbean, mostly for drug interdiction. They were a problem for Thorn because he couldn't get under their radar. If they picked him up coming in, they would notify drug enforcement. Within minutes Thorn could expect a flyover from an unmanned drone or a helicopter doing followup surveillance. An hour later he'd be up to his hips in DEA agents with their dogs sniffing his crotch.

He turned and looked back at the runway. Somebody would
have to knock down the weeds. Otherwise the friction from the wheels or the blast from the engines would start a fire. A man with a harvester could do it in a day, crop it all down close enough that it wouldn't matter. Thorn could rent a small combine harvester on the island, and one of his men could operate it.

He surveyed the trees at the far end of the field, mostly scrub brush with a small grove of tall palms casting long shadows in the late-afternoon sun. Some steel cable, a couple of come-alongs, and enough camouflage netting and they could fashion their own hangar. Taxi the plane under the trees, drop the netting, and no one would see it.

With the right equipment, supplies, and a little labor, they could kick the plane into shape in two weeks. Thorn would do a title search, find out who owned the land, and lease it from them for six months.

He made a mental list of what they would need. At the top of the list was a wheeled electric starter motor for the engines, unless he could find his dream plane, an airliner that didn't require one. Most large commercial jets, once the engines were shut down, could not be restarted again without an external power source.

A good-size front-end loader rigged with a tow bar could push the plane around to maneuver it, that is, if they lined it up empty on the runway for takeoff before they fueled it. Some paint, welding equipment, and a load of Jet A fuel, and they were in business. Oh, yes. And one big mother of a bomb.

With the calculator running in his brain like the tape from an adding machine, Thorn already knew that the costs were going to climb faster and higher than the plane could fly. It was little wonder that no one had ever tried this before. Thorn hoped his employer's pockets were deep enough, because the good old days of hijacking somebody else's plane and flying it into a building were over.

Thorn headed for his car knowing that he'd done a good day's work. Halfway there, the new BlackBerry on his belt began to vibrate. The new phone was becoming a pain in the ass. He had pur
chased it along with a data service plan under a two-year contract using a phony name, a bad billing address, and a stolen credit card. All he wanted to do was see how the thing worked.

It vibrated again. He knew it wasn't a phone call. Those rang. It was either an e-mail or something from the World Wide Web. Probably another ad from the phone company. It was reaching the point that Thorn wasn't sure if he would even wait until the end of the thirty-day billing cycle to drop the thing in a Dumpster. He couldn't sleep at night because it kept vibrating all over the nightstand next to him. And if he turned off the vibrator, it would beep instead. How to turn that off, he wasn't sure. The phone required an advanced degree in computer engineering before you could operate it. It was no joke that they'd offered him a two-day course over a weekend, and Thorn had just laughed. That was before he started losing sleep.

It vibrated again. He ripped the thing from the holster and tried to work the tiny roller ball with his big thumb. Thorn was spitting four-letter expletives, looking at the screen as he tried not to trip over the weeds.

It was an e-mail from Soyev. He was on his way back from North Korea, holding over in Hong Kong: “Big brother in the bag.” What it meant was that the Russian had closed the deal on a replacement for the mammoth blockbuster they'd lost in Thailand. This one would ship by sea and not from North Korea, where the Americans would be watching. Other arrangements were being made.

There was a postscript: “You will be interested in the attached.”

He almost put the phone away, figuring he would read it later. Then curiosity got the better of him. He stopped in the field for a moment and worked the trackball to call up the attachment.

It was a news article, something from the
Washington Post.
The moment he saw her name, he knew it was trouble. Thorn had been watching Joselyn Cole from the sidelines for years, ever since he'd tangled with her in Seattle.

She had very nearly run him into a hole in East Africa, exhorting the feds to hunt him down. Not that they needed much encouragement. Now she was causing problems again. Cole was a busybody. She was testifying before a Senate committee. But it was her words quoted in the story that sent a chill up Thorn's spine, the reason the Russian had sent it to him.

She was talking about precision-guided weapons. It made the hair on the back of Thorn's neck stand up.

He should have killed her in Seattle, thought Thorn.

It was intended to get their attention, and it did. Standing in the empty field, rolling the little trackball, Thorn devoured the rest of the story. She took a few shots from the right, members who
asked if she was equating Al Qaeda to leaders of recognized political states.

She told them they were missing the point.

For the most part the committee got the message. They wanted to know what they could do to ensure that this wouldn't happen, that someone wouldn't get their hands on these weapons and target their sorry asses.

Without even realizing it, Cole was directing the spotlight just where Thorn didn't need it, and at the worst possible time.

Of course, the bitch had a long list of recommendations, all of them designed to tighten the screws on the tools of Thorn's trade. To make it more difficult to get the weapons he needed. Not that she would ever be able to shut down the market. But she could surely make it expensive.

If she continued to whip this horse, he would have to find a way to shut her up. It would be just Thorn's luck if she stumbled into his party and somehow unraveled it all before he could move.