“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.
SEVEN
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 cafes 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.
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 agreed to do the job. But he wondered whether his old friend from Delta might have been commissioned to kill him if he had said no. If the people behind it were as serious as the man said, it would be absolutely essential to keep the contents of the then-destroyed document secret until they had a chance to find another operator to carry it out.
