“When did you say you got this?” Gordon asked.
“’Bout a month ago,” Kevern said without a hint of apology.
Jude had been missing six weeks.
Gordon was trembling. The CD had been damned gruesome, but anger had more to do with the way he was feeling.
“You’ve had it a month,” Gordon said, and the two men stared at each other. “You’d better have a fucking good explanation,” Gordon said.
“Two thousand miles of Mexican border, Gordy,” Kevern rasped. He always sounded like he had a raw throat. “Five thousand five hundred miles of Canadian border. Two million railcars and eleven million trucks come into the country every year. Eight thousand ships make fifty-one thousand port calls every year. Five hundred million people come into our airports and seaports every year, over eight million of them illegal immigrants.” He paused for emphasis. “That’s my explanation.
“It took Jude nearly seven months to get in there, gain their confidence, meet Baida, gain his confidence—marginally,” Kevern went on. “Best guy we had, and it took damn near a year to put him in place. Hellacious effort. We don’t want to lose track of these people, Gordy. You know what’s coming out of the Triple Border area. Those guys are on the move; they’re scattering—to São Paulo, to Isla de Margarita in Venezuela, to Panama, to Iquique in Chile. Shit. And from those places, they’ll scatter again. The cyst is festering and pus is seeping out. We don’t have much time.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gordon said. “This was always a long shot—and it almost worked. But it was a one-off operation. Jude was the operation.” He held up the CD. “And you just showed me the end of it.”
Kevern sat very still, and Gordon saw the look in his eye, a too-still look, which put Gordon on instant alert. The son of a bitch had already done something extreme. And he had taken a month to set it up and do it.
“Get to the goddamned point, Lex.”
“Ghazi Baida’s about to get a little jolt of enlightenment,” Kevern said, grunting under his breath. “He’s about to find out that Jude’s not dead after all.”
Chapter 8
Lex Kevern was still holding the remote control for the CD player. After the television screen had gone dark, the room had returned to its cool blue glow.
But now Richard Gordon wanted to see Kevern’s face clearly. He was sitting next to a table lamp, and he reached up and turned it on. Instantly, the weak incandescent bulb threw a sallow cast over everything. Kevern’s suntan turned dark and leathery.
Heavy Rain, like many clandestine operations, was straightforward in its concept but complex in its execution. The objective was to put someone very near the inner circle of Ghazi Baida, a much-feared Hezbollah terrorist who U.S. intelligence was now placing in and out of South America’s Triple Border region. This territory, a dense jungle no-man’s-land where the Iguaçú and Paraná rivers meet at the converging borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, had become a lawless sanctuary for international criminals and terrorists. It was feared that Baida had targeted the United States and was laying the groundwork in the Triple Border region for operations that would be launched from bases in Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico.
A CIA operations officer, Jude Lerner, was put into play, posing as an artist from Texas and using the alias Jude Teller. He became a fixture in Mexico City’s large arts community. He began to hang out at a lap-dancing club in the Zona Rosa that was frequented by Ahmad Rahal, one of two principals in a cell that had been tied to Baida. Over time, the two men became friends, and eventually Jude let Rahal in on his little sideline: trafficking in stolen pre-Columbian artifacts.
Gordon’s people in Washington had backstopped an entire smuggling operation set up by Kevern’s people over a period of six months. They had created routes, contacts, covers, informants, buyers, everything needed to support a smuggling network that stretched from the jungles of Guatemala’s Petén, where Jude bought artifacts from Mayan Indians who raided archaeological sites, to Houston, the destination of the merchandise and its distribution point.
When Ahmad expressed an eager curiosity about Jude’s operation, Jude invited him along on a couple of trips, and Ahmad got a firsthand look at Jude’s entire system. Shortly after the second trip, Ahmad introduced Jude to the cell’s leader, Khalil Saleh. After another month of wary association, Khalil was also shown the smuggling route, and very soon afterward, it was mentioned to Jude that they were looking for a safe conduit into Texas for certain items. Would Jude be interested? The Texan was always interested in making a tax-free dollar.
Eventually, Khalil took Jude to Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, located in the Triple Border region, and introduced him to Baida. Suddenly, security backstop flutters were rippling all the way back to the second level of Jude’s layered legend. Baida was looking into him in a serious way. When that didn’t throw up any flags, Baida called Jude back to Paraguay. At the third meeting, Baida agreed to move some contraband in a trial run through Jude’s underground system.
But when Jude returned to Mexico City from his last trip to Ciudad del Este, he disappeared. Now here was confirmation of what had happened to him, but for some reason, Kevern had withheld this information from Langley for four weeks. Now Gordon was waiting for an explanation.
After his last enigmatic statement, Kevern was silent. He leaned forward, resting one elbow on the arm of his chair. Gordon could hear him softly grunting under his breath, a big animal, forced to make nice in an environment that constrained and frustrated him. But he was calm. When Kevern was getting close to something he wanted, he became very placid. Achieving proximity to his prey was like putting him on ice. His metabolism dropped to the level of a scorpion’s.
Finally, Kevern nodded. “Turn off that light,” he said. “You need to see something else.”
Again the screen came alive in a fluorescent haze of static. The images were indistinct at first, and this time the dateline indicated a period twenty-four hours after the first recording.
The opening images are murky and then a door is flung open to a lighted room—the same room as in the first recording, but this time the camera is being held by someone coming into the room. Khalil, the bald man, and the two Koreans wheel around in stunned surprise. The camera hurtles into the room behind the intruders, who are clad in black balaclavas. They begin firing their automatic weapons immediately, and then receive a few bursts of fire from two of Khalil’s men, who rush into the room through another door. The intruders spray the room with more automatic-weapons fire, and everyone in the room is down in less than fifteen seconds. The black-hooded intruders then methodically go to each of the victims and finish them off with short bursts at point-blank range.
The bald man, still dying, is recorded up close, black-gloved hands lifting his head off the floor and holding his face straight so that he can be identified. The dead Khalil is also recorded up close for identification, as are each of the three Koreans and the two other men. Three times, a shirt is lifted and pants are pulled down to record tattoos or scars to corroborate the ID.
Someone gathers up piles of money on the table around which the men had been gathered, as well as a dozen kilo packages of drugs stacked beside the money. Then the handheld camera records the removal of the ceiling-high surveillance camera that had been secretly mounted in the corner by the Agencia Federal de Investigaciónes, and which had captured the previous recording. One last pan of the silenced room, and the images end.
Kevern snicked off the CD player and the television.
Gordon sat in stunned silence. The entire cell they had spent nearly a year to penetrate was gone in less than five minutes.
He suspected he knew what he had just seen, but he stopped himself from saying so. He had to hear this out. He had to wait and take it as it came, and he had to read very closely between the lines. He wanted Kevern to explain every step of this, everything, especially the stuff Gordon thought he had already figured out.
He reac
hed up and flipped on the lamp again. This time, he wanted to see everything Kevern’s face had to offer, though it seldom offered much.
Kevern, grunting, sat up in his chair and leaned forward a little.
“Unlike his Muslim buds, Baida’s never been squirmy about the ethics of drug trafficking to finance his operations.” He nodded toward the television. “That’s what Khalil was doing here. Hezbollah’s accelerating its initiatives in South America. Those crumbling economies down there are like fertilizer to organized crime, and Hezbollah’s sucking into that.
“My guess is that Baida’s turning some of the people from those criminal organizations into surrogate soldiers. They’ve got the infrastructure he needs for transborder operations. They’ve got no national or religious loyalties. They’re greedy, so their services go to the highest bidder, and with the drug money, Baida can bid high. They’re ideal terrorist mercenaries.”
Kevern paused. Gordon could hear him breathing, as if his lungs and throat were laboring under the compression of secrecy.
“This is our situation: Until Jude, we’d never been able to make any headway getting inside one of Baida’s damn cells because of his obsession with three things: compartmentalization, decentralized organization, and fractured communication.” He paused for emphasis. “And those are exactly the things we’re going to use to bury him.”
Gordon wasn’t sure where this was going, but he was getting an edgy feeling that they were headed toward one of Kevern’s more creative enterprises. Kevern was famous in special operations for designing and executing impossible schemes that paid off beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. He had engineered some legendary operations. At the same time, when one of these things went awry, someone higher up always had his head handed to him on a platter for having authorized the scheme. But somehow, Kevern always survived.
The reality was that managers and administrators could always be replaced. They came and went with inevitable regularity, like the changing seasons. But a creative operations officer who was also meticulous was a rare commodity, and every intelligence agency had to have a few men like Kevern, men who didn’t mind playing the role of Satan in the complex moral drama of clandestine operations.
“We’d already documented everyone in the cell,” Kevern said. “Even the Korean guards they’d hired to provide them with protection and freedom of movement in Tepito.”
Kevern tossed a glance at the television, as if reminding Gordon of what he’d just seen.
“Those were Mondragón’s men who made the raid and shot the video. We got the whole fuckin’ cell, roots and all.”
Gordon couldn’t get his breath. Good God. Even in this new terrorist-harried environment that allowed more lenient uses of lethal force, it was a dumbfounding act of preemption for an American officer to arrange the slaughter of cell members who weren’t even remotely important enough to be on the Directorate of Operation’s high-value target list, along with a roomful of men who were nothing more than hired local gang members. And all of this done without any directive from the DO. It was a totally independent act.
Kevern must have seen the look on Gordon’s face.
“Just a second, Gordy. Listen to me here.”
Kevern was the only person on earth who called him Gordy. It was a shrewd mixture of good ol’ boy camaraderie and subtle derision, the difference at any given moment depending on Kevern’s nuanced manner.
“Now listen, okay?” Kevern repeated. “By killing these assholes and taking the money and the drugs, we made it look like one of Baida’s drug deals had gone sour. That’s what Baida heard from the security guy he sent up to Mexico City to find out why he wasn’t hearing anything from Khalil’s cell.
“Postmortem: Baida writes that cell off to the cost of doing business. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a total wash. And, because there’s no communication between Baida’s cells, each one locked down, totally independent except for communication to and from Baida himself, Baida never learned that Jude was a spy. Khalil sure as hell didn’t report it to him. He was trying to cover it up. So as far as Baida’s concerned, Jude’s still clean.
“But Baida’s worried: Where’s Jude? He hasn’t heard anything from Jude. Not a damn thing. Baida made four calls to Jude’s dedicated cell number in the five or six days following the Tepito massacre. He wants him. He wants Jude’s underground route north. The story on the street is mixed. Some say Jude was killed in the raid. Some say—a rumor we started ourselves—no, he’s laying low until he figures out what the hell happened that night. Baida’s investigator takes this mixed report back to him in the Triple Border.”
Kevern stopped and looked at Gordon like a challenging professor looks at his brightest student, waiting for him to see the answer ahead of the rest of the class.
“I don’t get it, Lex.”
Kevern smiled. “That’s the brilliant thing about this, Gordy. Neither will Baida.”
Kevern got to his feet and went to the battered suitcase lying on the bed. He lifted a pile of clothes and pulled out a folder, then went back and tossed it into Gordon’s lap.
Gordon saw the red border on the folder and the solid red pyramid next to the name tab. It was the coding emblem for a new category of CIA operations officer, one that was closely held by the CIA’s security system. Jude Lerner was one of the few officers whose 201 file bore the red pyramid and who also had a separate red-stripe file with a “Sequestered” limited-access classification.
But Gordon still didn’t see what was coming, and Kevern could see it on his face.
“You know what’s in his file, don’t you?” Kevern asked.
“I know my people, Lex.”
Kevern returned to his chair and fell into it with a grunt. He watched Gordon as he opened the folder and numbly began paging through it. It didn’t take him long. Kevern had red-flagged the relevant document and had paper-clipped a sheet of handwritten notes to it. Gordon didn’t even have to read the notes.
He looked up at Kevern, who wore a deadpan expression.
“You’re out of your skull,” Gordon said.
“Nice choice of words,” Kevern grunted.
“What the fuck have you done?” Gordon asked.
“I want two things from you,” Kevern said. “I want you to hold with the story that Baida’s cell went down in a drug hit.” His eyes were leveled on Gordon. “And I want you to get me clearance for the Bern operation. I’m already way down the road on this one, and we’re just about ready to jump. I want you to make it okay.”
Chapter 9
By seven o’clock the next morning, Bern was sweating heavily. Wearing only shorts and tennis shoes, he climbed over the rocks on the shoreline below the house, lugging heavy stones into a growing pile where he was preparing the foundation for a concrete quay at the water’s edge. He had been toiling on the project every morning for two months, getting up at dawn to work for a couple of hours before showering and having breakfast.
By eight o’clock, he was at his drawing board, laying down the first contour lines of a sketch of what Becca Haber hoped would prove to be a picture of her husband’s face. A little after ten o’clock, Alice and her mother arrived.
“Hey, Paul,” Dana said from the head of the stairs in the studio as the two of them came in.
“Morning!” Alice said brightly, leaving her mother and taking the stairs two at a time as she breezed past Bern on her way to the glass wall overlooking the lake. She stepped outside and leaned her elbows on the railing of the deck to watch a couple of sailboats just emerging from around the point as they left the marina.
Bern met Dana at the bottom of the steps and kissed her on the cheek.
“Wow, you smell good,” he said.
“New stuff.” She smiled.
“It gets my thumbs up,” he said. “Cup of coffee?”
“No thanks. I just wanted to say hello. The last couple of times I’ve dropped Alice off, I’ve just waved from the car. We haven’t talked all week. Y
ou doing okay?”
“Sure, fine. Listen, yesterday when you picked up Alice, did she seem a little out of sorts?”
“Yeah, I noticed that. But gosh, Paul, you know, I’ve gotten so that I take most of the surprises from her in my stride. The abnormal has become normal around our house.” She smiled ruefully, looking at Alice outside on the deck. Then she shifted her attention back to Bern. “Why, something happen?”
He told her about Alice’s exasperation with Becca Haber, and they both laughed about it.
Dana Lau was a handsome woman, the only Chinese news anchor in the South when she met Philip in Atlanta. Bern and Tess got to know her while she and Philip were still dating, and it was the beginning of a friendship that never looked back. When Alice came, it was like having their own daughter, and it even seemed to bring them all closer together.
As Alice reached middle school, she and her friends began having slumber parties at Bern’s house. Tess would take them to movies, grill burgers in the evenings on the terrace, and cook popcorn for their all-night gigglefests. They swam and played around on the little sailboat that Bern bought for them and kept in the cove. Tess adored the girls and always got a kick out of watching them stumbling through adolescence. And they all loved Aunt Tess.
After a few more minutes of visiting, Dana called bye to Alice and left, and Bern walked back to his drawing board, where Alice had already pulled up her stool and was looking at the two views of the face that had emerged from the paper in the past two hours. She was intent.
“It’s a single, very purple mix,” Alice said with some concern in her voice. She looked at Bern, frowning. “Why walk under a seen sky?”
“What’s the matter?” he asked. He was standing in front of the drawing, while Alice sat on the stool beside him. She smelled of morning freshness and a douse of perfume.
“You’re taking a lot more than a pencil would make,” she said slowly, and maybe with a tinge of agitation.
The Face of the Assassin Page 5
