The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Grabbing the car keys from a red clay bowl on the countertop, he went through the doorway and descended a shallow flight of curving stairs to the garage. He got into the old Triumph TR3, a black relic from his London years in the seventies, and cranked it up. The driveway ascended from the garage in a long, rising curve that was cut into the hillside and emerged from the tunnel of overhanging cedars onto Camino Cabo.

  It was a seven-minute drive to the Far Point Grill. He sat at a favorite small table in a window alcove and watched the comings and goings in the marina below while he ate a platter of grilled shrimp drizzled with lime juice.

  He thought about Becca Haber. She had a hell of a story, and if the remnant sitting on his coffee table turned out to be her husband, her story was only beginning. That is, if her story was true. Some of it had to be true, he supposed, but how much? Maybe it didn’t matter. She had a skull, and whatever its story, it deserved to have its face back, to be freed from the limbo of anonymity.

  He had always had a kind of quixotic zeal for his work. The world was awash in anonymous skulls scattered across continents by wars, pogroms, massacres, slaughters, and murder. Somehow he felt he had a genuine mission to turn the wasteland of trivialized death into individual moments of significance, face by face by face. It was a small thing in the grander scheme of things, he knew.

  On the other hand, it was no small thing at all to give an identity, a history, and a kind of redemption to what had been only a lost and empty bone before he touched it.

  He finished the last shrimp, took one more sip of iced tea, and dug into his pocket for a ten and a five, which he left on the table. That covered the meal and a generous tip. He waved at Katie, who was behind the bar, and she smiled, blew him a kiss, and he was gone. The routine didn’t vary much, two or three times a week.

  Back at the studio, he put on three CDs, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Ellington and Strayhorn’s Jazz ’Round Midnight, and a Dexter Gordon collection. With the first strains of Davis’s horn, he set to work.

  One of the worktables was already set up for these preliminary procedures. He put the skull on a cork ring and proceeded to glue the mandible to the cranium, using a specialized glue that dried quickly. While the glue was setting, he began cutting the tissue-depth markers, using the cylindrical refills for machine erasers. He had the depths memorized for the twenty-one various points on the skull of an American Caucasoid, and by the time these were cut, numbered on one end, and lined up on the bench, the skull was ready to go.

  The adjustable skull stand was already mounted on one end of the workbench, and now Bern slipped the armature into the base of the skull and secured it. He put the armature on its own base, which was bolted to the bench, and firmly mounted the skull.

  With this done, he began gluing the different lengths of numbered eraser pieces to the skull at specified points, each marking the approximate flesh depth according to long-used anthropological specifications. It was a delicate procedure, but experience had taught him to adjust the placement of the markers slightly this way or that, at variance with the traditional marking sites, depending on the particular peculiarities of each skull.

  After the markers were in place, Bern carefully leveled the skull. He loaded the camera that was fixed on a stand at the other end of the bench—its distance and angle predetermined to avoid perspective distortion—and adjusted the lighting by using reflectors. Then he proceeded to photograph lateral and frontal views of the skull.

  Turning up the CD player, he went into the darkroom to develop the film. Joe Thomas’s trumpet was slipping into “Black Butterfly” by the time he came out. While the prints were drying, he set up his two drawing boards side by side, one for the frontal view, one for the lateral. The mounted skull with its markers in place was still in front of him.

  The afternoon shadows lengthened out into the lake as he sketched on the two transparent vellum sheets that covered the frontal and lateral photographs of the skull with its tissue markers. Moving back and forth between the two views, he worked steadily and quickly, his years of experience guiding his judgments when judgments had to be made. He emphasized those features that were most dominant in the skull’s structure, and left intentional ambiguities where no bony architecture was available to guide him. Eyelids and eyebrows were two areas where he often drew the frontal view with each eye having different characteristics, leaving a final judgment until he had more information and was actually in the process of reconstructing the skull.

  By dusk, he had most of it done, and two views of a generic version of John Doe sat on his drawing board. But Bern was uncomfortable with them. Something didn’t seem right, though he had no way of knowing what it was. He looked at the two drawings in one of the three mirrors that he moved around the benches when he was sculpting or drawing in order to see what he was doing from a slightly different perspective. But in this case, it really wasn’t much help at all. There was still something about the drawings that left him dissatisfied. In fact, he was oddly uncomfortable with them.

  But he had worked long enough.

  He turned out the lights, and blue flooded the studio as he walked over to the large glass wall and stood looking out over the lake. Across the water, lights were coming on all along the shoreline, and the hills above them were momentarily purple before nightfall. He pushed on a section of the wall, which swung open on a center-post hinge, and stepped outside. He could smell the water and the cedars on the hills. A waft of cedar-wood smoke came by and was gone, and the sound of a launch way off in a distant cove grumbled across the water.

  He didn’t much think of the skiing accident anymore, but after having mentioned it to Becca Haber, it was on his mind again. A year was not enough time for any of the details to have melted away. Every hour of that day was still vivid, too easy to recall.

  It had been late August, and Alice and a couple of her girlfriends had talked Dana and Tess into taking them skiing one last time before the summer vacation was over. Neither he nor Philip had been able to go. The sky was bright and blistering as they pulled the Laus’ boat out of its slip at Oyster Landing in midafternoon and headed up the long green avenue of Lake Austin.

  The lake was calm, a perfect ski day, and there was a lot of activity on the water. The third girl had just gotten up on her skis when four college-age guys came up behind them in a spanking new powerboat. They had passed them a couple of times, going in the opposite direction, but the kids had noticed one another and some light flirting was going on. Then the guys were behind them, cutting back and forth in the wake of the third girl’s skis.

  Before anyone had time to realize that it was about to get out of hand, the powerboat throttled wildly and roared past the girl on skis and then up beside Dana, who was driving. The guys were waving beer bottles and shouting, when suddenly their boat swerved recklessly and slammed into the side of the Laus’ boat.

  Tess and Alice were sitting on the side that the powerboat rammed. Tess was thrown headfirst into the other boat’s hull, and Alice was pitched into its stern. Both boats came to a dead rest in the water, the powerboat piercing the other boat’s hull. Tess and Alice were both unconscious in the water.

  Tess died on the way to the hospital. Alice was in a coma for three months. When she finally recovered, she was an enigma to the world.

  In the aftermath of the funeral, Bern had thought he would sell the house. He had thought he would grow to hate the lake and all the things associated with it that he and Tess had loved so much. Those things, like the sunsets over the water, the night swims, the stars in the still waters that doubled the great expanse of the night sky, had become their things, like a song became your song because the two of you fell in love with it together.

  He stayed on, waiting for the dissonance that shared things took on when the one you had shared them with was gone. He waited, sorry for it in advance of its coming.

  But Tess’s death didn’t affect his life the way he had imagined it would. The familiar thing
s they had shared, the house they both had worked so hard to build over the years, the lake, with its sounds and light and smells, that was so much a part of them both—all of that didn’t go hollow for him. They didn’t haunt him. Instead, he loved them all the more because they reminded him of her, and rather than making him lonely, they gave him comfort.

  Even Alice had been a comfort to him. Her survival did not remind him of his own loss. Instead, it only reminded him that everything changes, that nothing is guaranteed, that there are degrees of loss, and of hope, too. It wasn’t a trade-off, Tess’s life for Alice’s. It didn’t have to be either one of them.

  It just was what it was. There was no fate involved; there was no grand dark scheme. It simply happened, like the changing breeze, like that waft of smoke he had smelled just once and then was gone and would not come again.

  Chapter 7

  Washington, D.C.

  Richard Gordon walked down the long hall on the third and top floor of a motel on one of the commercial thoroughfares in Fairfax, Virginia. The place was generic in spades, like a blank piece of paper, or the surface of the moon. But you knew people had been there. The management had tried to cover up that fact by soaking the blue-green carpet in untold gallons of antiseptic air freshener, the spoor of their compliance with governmental health regulations.

  He stopped at the door with the right number on it and knocked. The bare walls of the corridor converged in the fluorescent distance in both directions. These motel room rendezvous grew increasingly depressing with the passing years. They typified the whole shabby business he and his colleagues toiled in, as if mocking the high ideals that had launched their careers but which, over the years, they often lost sight of and sometimes even forgot entirely.

  When the door opened, he walked into a room lighted only by the cool bluish halogen illumination from the streetlamp on an overpass just outside the window.

  “Richard,” a strangled voice said. “Good, good,” and Lex Kevern walked away from the door, leaving Gordon to close it himself, the back of Kevern’s bearish shoulders presenting a bulky silhouette.

  They didn’t shake hands, even though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. Despite the fact that they didn’t much like each other they were working together on an operation with a “Sequestered” classification. This was a new and rarefied sensitive compartmented information designation that indicated that the operation was clandestine, rather than covert. That is, apart from it being known to a handful of men, a few in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a few in the National Security Council, the operation did not exist.

  Gordon looked around. No one else was there. The light sifted through open venetian blinds in horizontal bars, revealing furnishings that were wholesale warehouse decor, 1975. The air was stale and heavy, suggestive of rampant flatulence. A small suitcase lay open on the bed, its contents rifled, as if something had been roughly pulled from underneath the carefully packed contents.

  Kevern picked up something off an end table and fell heavily into an armchair against the wall, under the window of blue light.

  “It’s been awhile,” Gordon said. “Montevideo.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Montevideo,” Kevern grunted. With the light coming in from above him, he was more shadow than man. He stretched out his beefy arm, and the television screen flickered. He was already watching it.

  Gordon looked at Kevern’s profile in the pale, grainy light from the television. His body was thicker with age, but still in operational condition. The military haircut was gone, but his hair was still neat, trimmed. He was wearing street clothes, not the jeans and muscle-revealing T-shirt of former years, but there was no mistaking the condition of the body underneath the clothes. Lex had been in intelligence and special operations a long time. It would never wear off.

  “So what is it?” Gordon asked, taking a vinyl-covered chair. There was a sofa, but he didn’t want to sit on the damn thing. He imagined the fibers caked with the effluvium of an endless parade of transient lodgers with piggish habits.

  Kevern had called him on their secure line from Mexico City early that morning and said he wanted a meeting and that he would be there that evening. No explanation. But Gordon didn’t need one. For the last six weeks, the small cadre of people involved in Operation Heavy Rain had all been obsessed with only one thing. Kevern had to be bringing something of extreme importance.

  “Got it a month ago,” Kevern said, not answering the question.

  “It what?”

  “You’d better watch it.”

  The CD began playing.

  Surveillance camera: Three men sitting at a table. The camera is situated high and behind a balding man whose face is not visible, the image slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens. The two men whose faces are visible seem to be of Middle Eastern descent. Voices outside. A Korean comes into view from the right side, carrying an automatic weapon and followed by an Anglo and another Korean.

  Gordon froze but said nothing. He eased to the front of his chair, forearms on his knees as he leaned toward the television screen.

  There is an awkward exchange among three of the men; then suddenly the bald man jumps to his feet, upsetting the cups and saucers on the small table, and spits at the Anglo as one of the Koreans grabs the Anglo’s arms from behind and wrenches them behind his back with an audible snap as the Anglo screams in pain. His hands are tied behind him and his legs are taped to the chair legs. “Jasus! Jasus!” the bald man screams as he leans across the table.

  “Spy! Spy!” Kevern translated in a low, raspy voice.

  Someone appears in a jogging suit and jabs electrical wires into either side of the Anglo’s neck, convulsing his body. Suddenly, the other two men jump up, something is shouted, one man’s arm flies up, and he fires a gun at the man across the table from him, blowing out the back of his head. Once again, the electrical wires are applied to the Anglo, and he is again convulsed. Then the bald man produces a knife, and while someone holds the stunned Anglo’s head, he quickly cuts out his tongue.

  “Oh shit!” Gordon blurted.

  The bald man hits the Anglo repeatedly in the face with his own tongue, then tosses the tongue to a dog, who immediately eats it.

  “Oh! Oh! Jesus!” Gordon fell back in his chair.

  The Anglo slowly chokes to death on his own blood while everyone watches. The bald man says something inaudible. Someone else speaks. When it finally looks as if the Anglo is dead, the bald man suddenly plunges his knife into the Anglo’s chest and leaves it there as everyone walks out of the room. The video runs for a few minutes, recording nothing but the silence and the still bodies of the two dead men. Then the screen goes blank.

  Kevern flicked off the CD player.

  Gordon’s face was burning. They had reluctantly accepted the probability that Jude Lerner was dead, but this was a brutal way to have it confirmed. He stood and went over to the CD player, took out the disk, and then returned to his chair.

  “Where the hell did this come from, Lex? What’s going on here?”

  “Agencia Federal de Investigaciónes,” Kevern said. “They’d been watching these Lebanese for the better part of a month. Didn’t even know what they had. I was down there running traps. Anything new? Anything off-the-wall? Any interesting hits? Agent said, ‘Pues, tenemos éste.’ I said, ‘Lemme see.’” Kevern gestured toward the television. “This is what the little shit showed me.”

  Gordon just shook his head. Good God Almighty.

  Kevern rolled his head to the side, grunting softly. God only knew what inspired such a pantomime, or what it was supposed to convey to people.

  “Mexico’s got half a million Lebanese,” Gordon said. “Why were they watching these guys?”

  “Drugs, my man said.”

  “Just drugs?”

  “S’what he said.”

  “They didn’t know about their ties to Hezbollah?”

  “I don’t think they did.”

  “So who did they think
the gringo was?”

  Kevern shrugged. “Some guy trying to make a buck. They were puzzled by the ‘Spy! Spy!’ thing. They had run it by the DEA, which couldn’t ID the gringo.”

  Lebanese had begun immigrating to Mexico during the nineteenth century, and today they were a culturally significant force there, representing some of the country’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. As an ethnic subgroup, they were thoroughly integrated into the Mexican social fabric. They were as invisible as the Irish are in the United States, and they presented the same problems to the intelligence community in Mexico as the Irish would in the United States if the IRA suddenly decided it was their moral and religious obligation to kill as many Americans as possible by any means possible. Although 99.9 percent of the Irish would find the idea abhorrent, that .1 percent who sympathized would be a hell of a problem for Homeland Security. It was the same with the Lebanese in Mexico. Those affiliated with Hezbollah were finding it easy to hide in plain sight. Racial profiling sure as hell wasn’t an issue.

  Gordon said nothing. His officer was dead, and a crack Mexican intelligence team trained by the DEA and the French National Police had a digital recording of it. The problem was that Heavy Rain was operating under the radar of all foreign intelligence agencies, including that of the Mexican government. Even more serious than that, it wasn’t even known to the U.S. embassy or the CIA’s own station chief in Mexico City. This was too damned close for comfort.

  “Has Mejía seen this?”

  Kevern shook his head.

  Well, it was all over, finally. But there was one bleak question. He looked at Kevern. “How did Khalil and Ahmad get onto Jude?”

  “Don’t have a clue.”

  “The bald guy?”

  “Not a clue. Look, this came out of nowhere. You can see by the video that Jude didn’t have a clue when he walked in there, either. He was too good for that. If he’d smelled something, he’d never have shown up in Tepito.”