The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Though Bern was nearly as intimate with cadavers as a pathologist or a mortician, this display of faces struck him as ghoulish. Perhaps it was the motivation for the display, rather than the actual display itself, that was slightly creepy.

  “It’s remarkable,” Mondragón said, “how thoughtlessly we take our faces for granted.”

  He paused a moment, a break signaling a change of subject.

  “I don’t know who has involved you in this,” Mondragón began. “I don’t know who was responsible for sending you your brother’s skull.”

  “How did you know about it, then?”

  “Your brother was near the center of a complex intelligence operation,” Mondragón said. “Among the people who orbit around such an enterprise as this, everyone knows everything. And no one knows much. This isn’t a contradiction. It is, unfortunately, the reality of much of the intelligence world these days. This is why I know what has happened to you, but I don’t know who did it. Or why.”

  “Intelligence operation? What do you mean?”

  “Jude was an operations officer in the CIA,” Mondragón said. “A special kind of operations officer.”

  Bern was taken aback. This was a hell of a revelation. Suddenly, he was skeptical.

  “And how do you happen to know all this?”

  “I’m an asset to the U.S. intelligence community in . . . several enterprises.”

  Bern didn’t know what to say. So why was he here? What was going on here? Before he could speak, Mondragón did.

  “Tell me,” Mondragón said, “what do you intend to do about this?”

  “Do about it?”

  “Yes. Before you heard from me, where were you going to go with your knowledge, which will be confirmed by the DNA results tomorrow?”

  Bern noted the positive use of the future tense, and he answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”

  “I have a proposition, then,” Mondragón said. “Let me help you find out who did this.”

  “Why?”

  Mondragón hesitated. “Because I have suspicions, and if I’m right, then I have business with this person.”

  This sounded ominous, and Bern was getting the uneasy feeling that he should have declined the invitation to this meeting.

  “I don’t know that I care who did it.”

  “That’s difficult for me to believe,” Mondragón said, a hint of displeasure in his voice.

  Mondragón studied him. It was a little disturbing to see so much of the man’s eyeballs. With no eyelids, he couldn’t blink, and Bern realized that the spritzing was also intended to supply moisture to his eyes.

  “Your brother was involved in a part of that agency that didn’t even exist a year ago,” Mondragón said, reaching for his tall cocktail glass and bringing it to his lips. His eyeballs swiveled downward as he drank. Very deliberately, he set the glass on the short pedestal, and his eyeballs jerked back to Bern.

  “He used to be a case officer in South America, but in the recent reorganization of things, some people with special talents were shifted to new . . . clandestine operations. Have you ever heard of the Triple Border region of South America?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s that area where the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together. Jungle. Everything there is untamed—the animals, the vegetation, the people. Two cities have sprung up out of the jungle there, one on either side of the wide Paraná River: Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, and Foz do Iguaçú in Brazil. Ciudad del Este has been around for thirty years and has always been a retreat for smugglers and murderers and anyone seeking the comfort of a society of outcasts.

  “The area has prospered as a refuge for international terrorists and criminals. Today, commerce is flourish- ing there: There are over two hundred thousand peo- ple, shopping malls, apartment buildings. Everything. And everything is lawless. Chaos lives there, and she is thriving.”

  Mondragón stopped and spritzed his face, and again the mist dazzled momentarily in the angle of the dim lights, then disappeared.

  “The underworld there—if one can distinguish such a thing in such a place—is run by Asians and Middle Eastern criminals. There are tens of thousands of Muslims there, among them Hezbollah terrorists. But they are not alone. This lawless place is the refuge of Hamas, as well, and the Aryan Nations. And the IRA. And Colombian rebels. This place is the lair of the scourge of the earth. They fester there, breed there, give birth there.”

  Mondragón picked up his glass again, drank, and put it back. There was a moment when his head came into the dim light, and the horror of his butchered face was shocking in the surrounding elegance. His eyes and lips were startlingly out of place in the featureless mass of moist, decorticated flesh.

  “U.S. intelligence has known about this cesspool for a decade, but it wasn’t a primary concern. Just something they kept their eyes on. Now, of course, it seems more important to them. The Hezbollah element there being the most important of all.

  “Your brother was involved in an operation that was trying to locate a Hezbollah operative named Ghazi Baida. Baida is a terrorist strategist, and increasingly reliable intelligence has placed him in various cities throughout Latin America in the last ten months: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Asunción, and . . . Ciudad del Este.

  “The U.S. intelligence community was very alarmed about these reports, and they initiated an intense search for Baida. Your brother was at the heart of an operation to locate him. His work placed him in enormously risky situations. Six weeks ago, he disappeared.”

  “Six weeks? Only six weeks?”

  “Yes. That surprises you?”

  “A little. I was told—”

  “By this woman who brought the skull?”

  “Yes . . . that he’d disappeared four months ago.”

  “No,” Mondragón said curtly. “It was only six weeks ago.”

  All of this was coming fast. Bern’s curiosity was taking him further than he had imagined it would. Common sense should have kicked in long ago. It would have said: Go to your lawyer and tell him someone has brought you your twin brother’s skull in a box, a brother you never knew you had. Then ask him what in the hell you should do now.

  Mondragón leaned forward slightly in his chair, nearly enough to expose his face. He seemed to want to speak carefully.

  “Mr. Bern,” he said, “your brother was . . . important in his secret world. It is a small world, one in which decisions are made and things are done that have ramifications in times and places far removed from him. The people he worked for knew more about him than he knew about himself. That is not uncommon in his profession. That is the way his world handles its business. He knew that, and he accepted it.”

  The implication was that Bern would be wise to do the same.

  “Look,” Bern said. “All this is a good story, but I don’t know who in the hell you really are. I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth about . . . my brother, about his being an intelligence officer, about the CIA . . . about anything. I don’t even know if I should be sitting here talking to you. This doesn’t exactly feel right to me.”

  “‘Feel right’?” Mondragón’s tone was laden with disdain. “I see. Well, Mr. Bern, tell me, what would you require to make you comfortable with talking to me and believing what I have to say?”

  “What would I require?” That was a good question, and it was like calling a raise in a poker game. Did Bern even want to stay in? He guessed so. Instead of walking away from this, here he was talking to a man without a face and allowing himself to be drawn, almost moment by moment, deeper and deeper into what any fool could see was a dangerously murky business.

  And yet, even as it was happening, he wondered if his willingness to continue with this had something to do with his newly discovered second self. Did the same elements in Jude’s DNA that had made him seek a life in this foggy world of espionage that Mondragón was describing now provide Bern the wherewithal to follow him . .
. a little way, at least? It was a gravitational pull that was difficult to resist.

  “I know a guy in the Houston Police Department’s Intelligence Division,” Bern heard himself say. “If he told me I was in good company, I’d believe him.”

  “What is his name?” Mondragón asked.

  “Mitchell Cooper.”

  Mondragón nodded. “I’m going to leave you for a little while and make a phone call. When I return, we can continue to talk.”

  He rose to his feet and walked away into the shadows, and almost immediately the young woman appeared again. This time, she actually seemed to see Bern and smiled.

  “I understand you may want something to drink,” she said.

  She was right about that. “Tanqueray and tonic,” he said. “And a good slice of lime, if you have it.”

  She nodded and left. Bern took a deep breath. This thing did not reach a point of correction. It just kept going and going further out into the unknown, breaking all bonds of gravity as it went. What was going to bring him back?

  The woman returned with his drink, and he sat alone, waiting, drinking. The gin was welcome. Several times, he turned and looked back toward the floating faces. Jesus. He stared at the city glittering in the darkness behind the chair where Mondragón had been sitting. This was an evening he wasn’t likely to forget very soon.

  He had almost finished his drink when the woman reappeared and approached him, handing him a cell phone.

  “Mr. Cooper,” she said.

  Bern took the phone, clearing his throat. “Mitchell?”

  “Yeah, Paul. You okay?”

  “I’m fine, sure. I appreciate the call.”

  “Well, look, I, uh, I guess you know what this is all about. I just got a call from a friend of mine, who’s going to have to remain nameless. He, uh, he’s CIA, Paul. Maybe you actually know more here than I do.”

  He paused, inviting a response, but Bern didn’t seize the opportunity. Cooper went on.

  “Anyway, I guess the point is that I’ve known this man a lot of years, in intelligence work, and he’s . . . reliable. I trust him. I understand you need to know that. I’d trust him with whatever I had to. He told me that you’re talking to a guy—wouldn’t give me his name—and my man says he’s to be trusted, too. You can believe him, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay, then.”

  “Now listen,” Cooper added. “That being said, I don’t know what’s going on there, but . . . well, those people, these are curious times. Lots of hocus-pocus going on in the intelligence world right now. Just be careful. Whatever. Anyway, I want you to know that all I’m vouching for is that I trust this guy who called me. I, personally, am not vouching for whoever you’re talking to. I mean, I can’t do that, obviously.” He hesitated. “You get what I’m saying here?”

  “I do. Sure. I appreciate it.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I guess that’s it, then. . . . You sure you’re okay? You sound kind of funny.”

  “No, I’m fine, Mitchell. I appreciate the help. Sorry that we had to bother you.”

  “Well, okay. No problem from this end. I hope it’s what you wanted to hear.”

  That was it. Bern handed the cell phone back to the woman, who had been waiting, and she went away.

  Chapter 16

  Mondragón appeared immediately after the woman’s departure and returned to his dark leather chair, resuming his position in the partial shadows. An inch or so of the white cuffs of his shirtsleeves glowed in the low light as they rested on the arms of the chair. Bern could just make out the whites of Mondragón’s lidless eyeballs through the slanting shadow.

  “That was impressive,” Bern admitted.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “I feel better. I can’t say I feel comfortable.”

  This elicited no response from Mondragón. They sat in silence a moment, and then Mondragón said, “You will find this interesting, Mr. Bern. Your brother was also an artist. It was his profession as well as his cover. He had what I think you would call classical training. He studied in London. I don’t remember where exactly. He was a very good draughtsman. His nudes were elegant, more than mere academic exercises. They were . . . human. But he excelled at portraiture. His portraits were exceptionally fine, I think. He got behind the eyes of his subjects, into their minds. I think it was his ability to see . . . underneath a face that enabled him to excel as an intelligence officer.”

  An unfamiliar feeling surged through Bern, sending a pungent taste into his mouth. Jesus. Strangers in everything but the moment of birth, he and Jude had gravitated to an artistic medium that focused on the face, a human attribute that was famous for its infinite variety, except in rare cases such as his own.

  “You are, you know, remarkably like him,” Mondragón went on. “Aside from the obvious, there are things about you that are eerily evocative of your brother. Sometimes it’s . . . just a gesture, the way you turn your head, or . . .”

  Mondragón’s voice trailed off, and Bern was surprised to feel a sudden deep sorrow. It was a baffling but undeniable moment of yearning for something that could never be. If only he could have talked with Jude. The questions he would have asked flooded his thoughts, swelling and multiplying into an explosion of curiosity. And regret, regret that this extraordinary experience of having had a brother, of having been a twin, was completely beyond his reach by the time that he realized that it had even been a part of his life in the first place.

  Bern had always had the reputation of being something of a loner, and now this vague sense of isolation that he had lived with, and which he had simply accepted as being his own peculiar kind of individuality, was cast in an entirely different light. There was no way that he could have known that somehow, in some tragic and inexplicable way, he had been robbed, almost from the beginning, of his second self.

  “Mr. Bern.” Mondragón’s voice had a sterner tone now, which caught Bern’s attention. “Paul,” he said then, seeking to redefine their relationship. Then he paused to spritz his face and eyes. When the sparkling mist settled out of the slanting light, Bern felt a change in the tension in the room.

  “As you must surely see by now,” Mondragón continued, “you are in a unique position. All the more so when you consider your situation from the point of view of your brother and his role in the unfolding events in Mexico. And more to the point, what was left undone when he was killed.”

  Mondragón paused and slowly, calmly clasped his hands together in his lap. It seemed a gesture at once careful and preparatory.

  “Whether he was present or not, we don’t know,” Mondragón said, “but we are sure that Ghazi Baida was responsible for Jude’s death.”

  He raised a hand; the mist flew through the light.

  “I will tell you something, Paul, a critical truth about hunting men. War has a thousand faces. Behind the public face of war, behind the florid rhetoric of politicians who whip up the public will to move armies and navies in pursuit of other men, the truth is that a man like Ghazi Baida is eventually brought to ground because another man possesses a relentless desire to see him brought to ground. It has always come down to the fearful, sweaty efforts of one man against another man. It has always been, and always will be, personal.”

  He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice carried forcefully from the shadow and the faceless head, driven by more than breath and discipline.

  “Surely you see where this is going,” he said. “We need your help, the kind of help that only you can give us. We want to use your face to find Ghazi Baida. All you have to do is cooperate with our people, who will guide you. You will not be asked to be a soldier or an assassin. You will not be asked to perform heroic and fearsome feats. Just lend us Jude’s face and body. Help us finish what he began.”

  Bern couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The dismay must have showed on his face. Mondragón expanded.

  “We need to convince Baida that Jude is still alive,” Mondragón said. “Jude needs to be seen. He
and Baida had established a relationship. Jude had accomplished an astonishing thing, convincing Baida to reveal himself to him. But more than that, he had convinced Baida to trust him—at a certain level, of course, not unreservedly, not wholly, but at least enough to engage in an enterprise with him. We need to keep that connection alive.”

  “That’s impossible,” Bern said. “It’s . . . it wouldn’t work for ten minutes.”

  “It would.”

  “It couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “How could it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Several answers. One: the sheer improbability of it. Who would believe, at first blush, that a man who looks like Jude, talks like Jude, acts like Jude, has the same artistic talents as Jude—and, God, even has the same DNA as Jude—who would believe that he would not be Jude? The absurdity of such a thing provides us with our greatest advantage.”

  “At first blush?”

  “Yes! That’s the second answer: You will not be in a situation in which you will have to portray Jude in the sense that you will have to live as Jude, interact with others as Jude. No, we simply want you to present the physical Jude to observers. You need to be seen as Jude, and little more. It is not necessary that you be Jude for an extended length of time.”

  “What’s the objective? Exactly.”

  “For now, just reestablish contact with him. Help us buy time.”

  “You’re right about one thing,” Bern said, feeling more agitation than he was showing. “It’s an absurd idea.”

  “No,” Mondragón insisted. “It isn’t.”

  But Bern didn’t want to have anything to do with this. Why hadn’t an official officer of the CIA come to him to make this plea? Why this roundabout way of getting word to him that Mondragón was legitimate? He didn’t care whose asset Mondragón was; he knew that the further you got from the official business of anything, the closer you got to the kinds of things that never saw the light of day. He didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of darkness.

  He looked at the elegantly dressed Mondragón, this man decapitated by a shadow, and he saw the epitome of menace. This was the other side of the looking glass, but instead of encountering the Queen’s nonsense, he was looking at the devil’s creep show.