The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “I’ve got to tell you, though,” Gordon said. “You have to rein in Mondragón. The group’s more indulgent these days about the contractors we deal with, but I’d say that Mondragón pushes the limit of their indulgence.”

  Kevern strung out a long grunt under his breath, as if he were straining at something.

  “And I’m really going to worry about the limit of their indulgence,” he said.

  “Listen to me.” Gordon lowered his voice and leaned forward. “These people sit on the NSC, for Christ’s sake. You do something stupid, you bring them blowback, and they’ll hang you out to dry so fast, your nuts will shrivel up like they were freeze-dried.”

  Kevern’s thick neck seemed to swell even thicker when he was holding in his temper.

  “Cobalt-sixty,” he grunted slowly. “Cesium-one-thirty-seven. Plutonium. And that’s just the little stuff. But I doubt if Baida’s even bothering to put anything together at that level. We’ve been through this . . . shit”—he shook his head—“how many times? Intel points to something bigger. We think he’s been at it—what, nearly two years? That points to a significant scheme, something complex. Complex means big.

  “I’d piss off a whole army of NSCs to get Paul Bern next to Ghazi Baida, because the alternative is just too fucking freaky. And if Mondragón can help me do that, I don’t much care who he shits on in the process, and I care even less about some Washington fatties’ limits of indulgence.”

  This was precisely the kind of situation that drove Gordon mad. The intelligence about Ghazi Baida was grim and scary, like the rumors of a beast lumbering through the night in your direction. If you don’t act on the rumor and it turns out to be a reality, then you’re screwed and people will die in numbers so large that it will change the way historians will write about the century.

  But if you do act, you do so with the full knowledge that the only way to stop the beast coming after you is to send your own beast out into the night to meet him. And your beast has to be fed and nurtured and indulged and treated in the same way you’d treat a friend or someone you respected. You have to collude with him, and abet. You have to get close enough to him to feel his warmth and smell his breath. And you have to do all of that knowing full well that he isn’t any different from or any better than the beast you are sending him out to meet. Except that your beast doesn’t want to eat you, and the other one does.

  “Look,” Gordon said, “all I’m saying is that you’ve got a reputation, Lex. Reputations have a way of gaining weight. When you get too heavy for those guys to carry, when it’s just not worth the effort to them anymore, they’ll cut you loose.” He paused. “Just don’t let Mondragón take it too far. There are limits.”

  “Not for Ghazi Baida,” Kevern said evenly.

  Gordon said nothing more. They’d been in this circle too many times to count, each taking his respective side and pushing it as far as he could. It made for constant tension. Maybe some people would call it balance, neither side giving anything to the other, but both of them keeping the other from indulging in extremes. It was exhausting, unrelenting, never ending.

  He shifted his weight, and the subject.

  “Tell me something,” Gordon said. “Just for my own curiosity: How in the hell did you get Jude’s skull?”

  “One of the Koreans,” Kevern said. “Before he got killed in the drug raid, we had the opportunity to put him through a little questioning. Turns out he’d dumped the bodies himself. Him and his buds. He took us out to a garbage dump in Nezahualcóyotl.”

  Kevern hesitated a beat, just enough for you to notice something if you were perceptive, but he kept it tough.

  “There he was”—he shrugged—“all crumpled up under an old truck radiator and some other shit. The feral dogs had been at him. And the possums and cats. He was kind of scattered around. We got what we could. At first, we didn’t believe the damn slope, didn’t think it was him. And then we found his head. Rats had cleaned it slick, but they hadn’t chewed on it. It was weird. Clean as a lab specimen. I knew the key dental markers, so . . .

  “We shot the slope right there and left him where Jude had been. Kind of a swap. Made the rats happy.”

  “Shit,” Gordon said. He took another drink. “And the woman who took the skull to Bern?”

  “Paid and gone.”

  Gordon was going over all of it in his head again. Hell, he hadn’t stopped going over it from the moment he first heard the plan from Kevern. When he presented it to the group the first time, they were dumbfounded; then the more they thought about it, the more it began to seem like a crazy kind of possibility to them. Especially in light of the potential horrors of the alternatives.

  One of the deciding factors in favor of letting Kevern go ahead with it had been his successes in the past. He had that much of a reputation. He also had another kind of reputation. These were the things the group had weighed, and in the end, they went with the devil they knew, as wild as he was, because the devil they didn’t know was just too appalling to imagine.

  “And the idea . . . of doing it this way?” Gordon asked. “Sending him his brother’s skull—”

  “I told you,” Kevern said. “The idea was to get the guy emotionally invested before we approached him. He’s a forensic artist, Gordy. We wanted him to puzzle it out, rev up his curiosity. We wanted him motivated and steaming under his own momentum before we approached him.”

  “I know, I know, I remember that, but what if it just scares the hell out of him instead?”

  Kevern shook his head. “No. Won’t happen. We think he’s too much like his brother. What if you’d done that to Jude? You have any doubt about what would’ve happened?”

  “But let’s just ask ourselves this: What if he isn’t convinced?” Gordon said.

  Kevern leveled his eyes at Gordon. “Mondragón will convince him.”

  And that was exactly what Gordon had warned Kevern about. Jesus H. Christ, putting a psycho in charge of psy ops. Gordon looked across the table and held his tongue. With a sense of resignation, he decided to let Kevern go with it. In twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most, they would know. He would let it go that far.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “What about Jude’s partner? Mejía’s going to have to prep Bern, right? I’m guessing this is creating a little stress.”

  “Mejía’s got guts. That’s why we went through the big ordeal in the beginning, remember? These were two of the best people that ever went through training at the Farm. There’re damn few like them. Mejía will do what’s got to be done, and what’s got to be done comes from me. Mejía’s on board.”

  Where did these people come from? Gordon had monitored the five-month training ordeal that these two officers had gone through in preparation for Heavy Rain. At the time, it had seemed over-the-top, and Gordon had chalked that up to the overzealous, gung ho types at the Farm. That was their deal; he left it up to them.

  But now it seemed that the extreme psychological preparations had been right on target. He didn’t want to think what was waiting for Mejía and Bern as they tried to salvage the operation in the wake of Jude Lerner’s death.

  “One last thing, Lex.” Gordon lifted his scotch and finished it off. He put down the empty glass and then slowly shoved it across the table until it touched Kevern’s beefy hand, and left it there.

  “By wiping out Khalil’s cell, you may have kept Baida from finding out that Jude was a spy, but it seems to me you’ve also created a big problem for yourself. How the hell are you going to find out who exposed Jude in the first place?”

  He thought he saw a beat of hesitation in Kevern’s eyes, but then maybe he only imagined it. Maybe he had wanted to see it just so he’d know that the guy had something left in him that could still be scared.

  “We’re working on that,” Kevern said.

  Chapter 14

  The windows of the large Mercedes were dark-tinted, so Bern couldn’t see where they were going. The driver, efficient, polite, and clearly a
lso a bodyguard, explained that it was for Mr. Mondragón’s security, and he even apologized for it, as if it were an impolite inconvenience for Bern.

  As best as Bern could tell, they drove roughly in the direction of the posh River Oaks section of West Houston, and after about ten to fifteen minutes stopped at what seemed to be a security gate, and then went down a slope into what must have been an underground garage. They descended several floors, then entered an elevator and ascended thirty-four floors, where the elevator doors opened into a private entry hall. Mondragón had the whole floor, wherever they were.

  The lighting was subtle here, and the furnishings were uncluttered, sleek, and elegant, with a predominant color scheme that seemed to favor dun and deep chocolate. A young Mexican woman who wore a simple black cocktail dress and was just as sleek as the decor ushered Bern into a living room situated on the corner of the building. Houston spilled out before him, glittering into the distant darkness.

  The woman offered to get him something to drink, but Bern declined. She said Mr. Mondragón would be with him in a moment, and then she left.

  Bern’s attention was at first pulled to the dazzling view of the city laid out against the night as if for an exhibition, the lights shimmering in a single iridescent color spectrum of white and aquamarine and powder blue and beryl. But very quickly, his eyes caught sight of something more fascinating. Scattered about in the twilit room were a dozen or so clear acrylic cubes sitting on glistening black pedestals about chest-high. The cubes were slightly more illuminated than the rest of the room, so that they seemed to hover and float in the dusk. Displayed in each cube was a human face.

  More fascinated than startled, Bern moved toward the first face and leaned in close to the acrylic case. The face, which appeared to be that of a man in his mid-twenties and of Chinese descent, stood on a pedestal of its own inside the box. The face was complete up to the hairline, including the ears, but the back half of the head was replaced by a smooth, black, and slightly concave surface upon which the face was mounted. It looked rather like the theatrical masks of Comedy and Tragedy.

  But the reality of detail was extraordinary, and the face was the most lifelike creation Bern had ever seen. He could even see the pores in the flesh, and moisture in the caruncula lacrimalis, the pinkish tissue in the corners of the eyes. This was striking and gave Bern an uneasy feeling. The reality was . . . shocking. How in the hell could the artist have done this?

  He moved to another face. A young woman, a Mayan Indian, he thought. A stunning creation. The subtle colors and texture of the tissue as it changed from one part of the face to the other, from cheek to lip to eyelid, were exceptional.

  He moved to a third, a blond woman, of German descent perhaps. The same subtle changes in flesh tissue were far superior to any sculpture he had ever seen.

  “A marvelous thing, isn’t it?” a voice behind him said, and Bern turned, to find a tall, thin man standing in a web of shadows about twenty feet away. His face was hidden, but Bern recognized the sophisticated voice and its odd impediment. Mondragón was dressed in a dark, elegantly cut suit. He wore a crisp white shirt that luminesced in the low, warm light of the room. His silk tie was a deep amethyst color.

  “Yes,” Bern said. “Someone has an extraordinary talent.”

  “Indeed.” Mondragón paused. And then as he took another step toward Bern, he said, “Mr. Bern, I should have prepared you. As I move into the light, you will see that unlike these unfortunate people you see here”—he indicated the display cases with a gentle sweep of his arm—“who have a face but no body”—he took another step, which slowly brought him out of the shadows—“I suffer just the opposite misfortune . . . of having a body but no face.”

  Mondragón stepped into the pool of light between them, and Bern almost staggered. Nearly all of the epidermis had been removed from Mondragón’s face, as well as much of the muscle tissue and cartilage. The place where his face had been was a nearly flat, raw, glistening plane. His eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, an illusion due to the absence of eyelids and surrounding tissue. His nose was gone and the triangular nasal aperture that remained was covered with a translucent film that allowed a visual hint of the nasal spine. His cheeks were missing and much of the jaw tissue. His lips remained, but the cartilage where his chin had been was gone, so that the sharp lines of the jawbone immediately presented the framework of the skull.

  He was standing directly under one of the hidden lights, and Bern could not make himself turn his gaze away from the truly hideous sight.

  In comparison to his stripped-away face, Mondragón’s lips appeared abnormally protuberant, though this, too, was an illusion, resulting from the absence of so much facial tissue. The reality was that Mondragón had no features except eyeballs and lips. Without these, Bern would not have known that this raw, glistening mass that he was looking at was the remains of a man’s face.

  “Get a good look, Mr. Bern. Accept your curiosity for what it is and satisfy yourself. I have accepted the fact that I am a spectacle, and the sooner you accept it, too, the sooner we can talk about far more important things.”

  Mondragón moved closer to Bern, who resisted an impulse to step back. Mondragón raised his hand and spritzed his face with a small mister he carried in his palm. The beads of moisture glittered momentarily in the shaft of light before dissipating.

  “You can hardly see it,” Mondragón said, “but my . . . facade”—his tone shifted to sarcastic irony—“is covered by a sheer, transparent membrane. A marvel of modern medicine. It’s an antiseptic barrier. But it breathes and requires moisture. The spray also contains a necessarily potent analgesic.”

  He turned his head slightly, allowing Bern to get a look at him from a different angle. His naked eyes seemed to be operated by remote control. The facial flaying ran just below his hairline, in front of each ear, and dipped down just in front of his throat.

  Bern could see that his lips had been carved around and isolated from the rest of the mess in a very precise way. A bit of the philtrum remained in the upper lip, as well as a bit of the mentolabial furrow in the lower. But the surrounding flesh had been peeled away up to the corners of the mouth, causing it to seem to float, almost unattached, just above the surrounding raw tissue. Obviously, Mondragón had suffered extensive nerve and muscle damage in this area, and he must have gone through a great deal of therapy to be able to speak with only this small degree of impediment.

  “I am only weeks away from beginning a lifetime of surgeries and skin grafts,” Mondragón’s mouth said. He turned his walleyed stare toward Bern again. “I’ll never have anything that you could call a proper face, but I will have a . . . sheath of sorts, to dampen the repulsion that others feel at seeing . . . this.”

  Bern didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t repulsed, but his fascination did make him self-conscious. Still, he stared. In some places, the excising had been deep, gouging into the subcutaneous tissue and well into the muscle itself. Without skin or features, it was impossible to convey an expression.

  “Do you have any questions about . . . this?” Mondragón asked. He behaved almost as if he were in an anatomy class and the body in question had nothing to do with him at all. Except it did, which made his detachment seem abnormally cold, and his pretense that his flayed face was something they could get past in just a few moments of intense observation seemed, in itself, pathological.

  Bern said nothing.

  “Then we’re through with the anatomy lesson?” Mondragón stared at him and spritzed his face again. “Good. This way, then.”

  Chapter 15

  He turned and Bern followed him to a corner of the twilight near the windows that overlooked the city. In the near distance, downtown, one of the city’s several satellite clusters of skyscrapers rose in the night sky. They went down one step to a grouping of armchairs and sofas that went right up to the glass wall. Mondragón sat in an armchair, his head and feet in shadow, a band of soft light falling obliqu
ely across the middle of his elegantly attired body. Bern chose a chair at an angle to Mondragón.

  From the surrounding shadows, the young woman appeared and set a drink on a short black acrylic pedestal at Mondragón’s elbow. She bent down, her lovely face disappearing into the shadow with Mondragón’s wraith. Bern heard the hissing of sibilants as she whispered. It was an odd tableau, two beautifully attired bodies, their heads lost in lightless, silent communion.

  Then the young woman straightened up and walked out of the room.

  “It’s ironic,” Mondragón said, “that you are a forensic artist . . . considering.” He paused, then gestured toward the area behind Bern where the clear acrylic display boxes held their fine sculptures. “What do you think of my exhibition?”

  “Beautiful,” Bern said. “Extraordinarily well done.”

  “These are my favorites,” Mondragón said. “I have others, nearly fifty altogether.”

  “Who sculpted them?”

  “God.” A soft aspirated laugh came from the shadow. “Those are real faces,” Mondragón said.

  Real faces. Bern couldn’t help glancing toward the darkened space where the softly illuminated display cases floated in the murk. As he recalled the stippled texture of the skin and the delicate vermilion borders of the lips, a sense of the bizarre crept into the room.

  “Plastination,” Mondragón said. “Plastination.”

  “Gunther von Hagens?” Bern asked.

  “Exactly.” Mondragón was pleased that Bern knew who the man was. “He invented the process, replacing the water and fat in a specimen with a variety of polymers that render the tissue permanently preserved in a state of near reality. The process is rather complex. Von Hagens did not prepare these particular ones. They were done by someone with a more artistic sensitivity, a familiarity with aesthetics. She improved on the more crude medical specimens that are usually associated with von Hagens’s work.”