The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “There’s got to be a better way,” Bern said.

  “No. This is the best way. It’s . . . an unbelievable opportunity. Jude had an identical twin! And the CIA had the good sense to keep it a secret from the very moment they discovered it. Even from Jude himself.”

  Bern mentally lunged at this revealing slip.

  “He didn’t know?”

  Mondragón tried to cover his hesitation by responding in a slow, calmer voice. “That’s what it says in the piece of the file they gave me. He didn’t know.”

  “‘Piece’ of the file.”

  “This is the CIA, Paul. ‘Need to know’ is a mantra with these people. Everyone accepts it.”

  “How the hell did he not know?”

  Silence. This time, Bern sensed the stark eyeballs staring back at him from the impenetrable shadow. He felt another change in the energy in this room of faces, and he didn’t like what he felt.

  “Look,” Bern said, and he sat forward in his armchair, “this isn’t for me. You’re going to have to find another way to do your business.”

  “You need to reconsider, Paul.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not Jude. Nobody’s paying me to do this shit.”

  “Oh, if money is a factor—”

  “No. It’s not. I wouldn’t do it for any amount of money. I appreciate the fact that this guy’s a terrorist and needs to be stopped, but you’re talking about something that requires special training, special skills. And I don’t have either of those.”

  “Your face,” Mondragón said. “Your DNA. These are the things that no other man on earth can bring to us. How much more specialized could you be?”

  Bern was shaking his head. “This is CIA business, for Christ’s sake. This is way past dicey. This feels suicidal, and I don’t want any part of it.”

  He stood.

  “Just a minute, Paul,” Mondragón said with chilling equanimity. The young woman appeared, handed a folder to him, then waited. “I have another file,” he said.

  Bern hesitated.

  “Sit down,” Mondragón said politely. “Please.”

  Bern remained standing.

  Mondragón opened the file folder. “This pertains to Dana and Philip Lau,” Mondragón said. “And their daughter, Alice.”

  Bern must have been expected to respond at that moment, because Mondragón paused, as if waiting for a reply. But Bern was struck speechless. He was afraid. He didn’t know why yet, but he knew instinctively that he should be. He sat down.

  “Here’s the way it will work,” Mondragón said. “During Alice’s visits to you, she often swims. She changes clothes in the lower bedroom of your home, the one nearest to the terrace door that leads down to the cove. Alice is a healthy young girl with a vivid imagination. She . . . fantasizes and sometimes she . . . caresses and . . . gratifies herself in that bedroom when she changes clothes. The pictures we have are very clear . . . and explicit.”

  Bern was paralyzed. Mondragón went on.

  “Over the years, Jude had occasional disciplinary problems. A couple of years ago, he had a mistress. As insurance for us, she was able to collect a quantity of semen for our safekeeping. That semen, of course, shares your identical DNA.

  “You will remember that a few weeks ago, Alice misplaced a swimsuit. Her mother was frustrated, but she has lost them before. They bought another. Never gave it another thought.”

  Bern’s ears were ringing, his mind frozen.

  “These are the components that comprise the story of the end of your life, Paul,” Mondragón said, and then he fell silent, letting it soak in.

  Bern reeled, his mind flickered, and his thoughts lurched into the past, into the imagined future, into a nightmare.

  “Something like this,” Mondragón went on, “has no satisfactory resolution. It isn’t possible. Statutory rape, and the death of a disturbed girl’s innocence. Devastated parents. The betrayal and destruction of a long and close friendship. The end of your anonymity and reputation. Our people are very good, and the evidence would be incontrovertible.

  “But even if, somehow by some miracle, you were able to escape the facts,” Mondragón elaborated, “the media coverage and the imagination of the public would condemn you. Maybe his lawyers got him off, they would say, but we know that he did something terrible to that poor girl.” Mondragón sat perfectly still. “The birth of suspicion, Paul, leaves an indelible stain. Nothing cleans it.”

  Silence.

  Mondragón held out the folder. “Would you like to see the pictures of Alice?”

  The young woman took the folder from Mondragón and handed it to Bern, then disappeared.

  Bern had to look. At least he had to identify Alice. He would be an idiot if he simply took Mondragón’s word for something like this.

  With unsteady hands, he slid the photos out of the envelope and looked. They were of Alice, of course.

  They were stills from a video recording. Video. The sons of bitches.

  He couldn’t look at more than a couple of them, and then he dropped the envelope and the pictures on the floor beside his chair.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. Mondragón cruelly remained silent, and Bern felt as if he had fallen into hell.

  Finally, Mondragón spoke.

  “But, as they say, it doesn’t have to end like this. Those photographs never have to be seen by anyone. What I’m asking you to do, after all, is not an impossibility. Think about it. If these pictures were ever to get out, what wouldn’t you give to have the chance to make this choice all over again? Pretending to be your brother would seem like a godsend, and a small price to pay to make it all go away.”

  Chapter 17

  Bern sat on the edge of his bed in his underwear and stared out the window of his darkened hotel room. It was 2:40 in the morning, and the traffic on West Loop South was sparse. The night sky was hazy with moisture, and the lights that stretched eastward toward downtown receded into the misty distance. He was nowhere near sleep.

  His thoughts cycled over and over and over variations of the same three concerns: his fear of the exposure of the photographs (the storm of emotions that this would unleash for the Laus was almost unbearable to consider), his anger and frustration at being extorted without any recourse, and his inability to imagine or prepare for what he was going to have to do to for Mondragón.

  He wasn’t a total innocent. He had heard and read about the contractors that U.S. intelligence used all over the world with increasing regularity. He knew nothing of their legal standing, but he knew enough to understand that they were proxies for a reason. Somehow they managed to squeeze between the threads of the legal fabric to do things for the CIA that the CIA didn’t want to get caught doing themselves.

  He had no doubt that an end-run effort around Mondragón’s extortion would trigger the anonymous release of the photographs, and then he could kiss his old life good-bye. Essentially, he had no choice.

  And he grieved for Alice. Just knowing that those pictures were out there somewhere and that someone could look at them as much as they wanted made him ache for her. She would be so ashamed. And Dana and Phil. Goddamn Mondragón.

  It was a spooky feeling, too, that someone had been in his house and installed digital video-surveillance cameras in the lower bedroom, and he hadn’t even had a clue. This was scary stuff.

  Midmorning the next day, Bern picked up a printout of his own DNA string at the private laboratory off North Loop West. From there, he went to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center, where the skull’s DNA was being sorted out. After last night, the result of the DNA reading had even more importance for him than it had before.

  He sat in a small sterile room with a humming fluorescent light while a molecular geneticist with a pallid complexion and round eyeglasses of pinkish plastic examined and compared the two strings. Bern noticed that the pocket of the doctor’s crisp white lab coat was still starched closed.<
br />
  “Monozygotic twins. Yeah.” The doctor looked up. “Identical. Yeah.”

  The flight back to Austin occupied a time zone all its own, and the fifteen-mile drive from the airport to his house on the lake was completely lost to him.

  As soon as he got back to the house, he parked the TR3 in the garage and went up and checked his messages in the kitchen. He took a flashlight out of the drawer under the telephone and went down the steps to the guest bedroom that opened out onto the terrace. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at the wall opposite the French doors. The garage was on the other side of the wall. That was the likeliest spot. Near the ceiling.

  He dragged a chair over to the wall and stood on it. Starting at the left corner of the room, near the ceiling, he shined the flashlight flat against the wall and carefully followed every inch. And then there it was. A little smooth spot about the size of his thumbnail. Color was the same, but the texture was too smooth. Drywall texturing was hard to duplicate in a patch.

  With his arms, he measured the distance from the intersecting wall to his left, and then he went upstairs and then down again to the garage. He climbed up on the workbench that was built against the bedroom wall and measured from the front of the garage. And there it was. The bastards hadn’t even bothered to patch the hole in the garage. A hole the size of the diameter of his thumb, and next to it a shelf with cans of paint pushed to one side, where they had set something.

  He looked out the garage door to the rock wall and the lake beyond. It wouldn’t have been that hard at all. Easy, in fact. Shit.

  Back in the kitchen, he opened a bottle of Shiner beer and made a ham sandwich. He went outside to the ter- race and sat at the table under the arbor while he ate. He gazed at the lake sparkling in the summer light and thought about what he was going to have to do.

  After he finished, he put the dishes into the dishwasher and walked over to the studio. As he stepped inside and breathed in the familiar odors, his eyes fell on the partially dismantled skull of his brother.

  His brother.

  Would this ever seem real to him? Monozygotic. Who in the hell had their mother been? What in God’s name had happened to her that scattered them in those critical days of their infancy?

  He walked over to the workbench. The weird suspicion that had gripped him last time he saw this skull—that he had some mysterious connection to it—had now been replaced with a scientific certainty. Now there a total reorientation regarding himself and this incredible relic, and he could hardly bring himself to touch it.

  But more than that, he didn’t want it to wear his by-the-numbers reconstruction when he knew that it should have his own face. And then an astounding thought hit him: If fate had been otherwise, if he had had the opportunity six weeks ago to reach out and touch this same human bone, he would have touched the living face of his identical twin.

  It was approaching dusk by the time Bern finished thoroughly cleaning off the clay face and reattaching the jaw to the skull. Now he retrieved an old ebony box that he had bought in Paris when he was a student studying anatomy. The box smelled richly of oil paints and seemed an appropriate resting place for Jude’s skull.

  He dragged some old green velvet scraps out of a storage cabinet and cut a piece to fit in the bottom of the box. Then he set the skull inside and loosely wadded more velvet around it for protection. He put the box on a bookshelf among his art books.

  He deliberately had avoided drinking while he was doing all of this, because he was thinking about what he was going to do, and he wanted to be lucid. But now he poured a gin and tonic from the cabinet in the studio, tossed in some ice and a fat wedge of lime, and took his cell phone to the sofa. He turned out all the lights so he could watch the clean arrival of night and dialed the sterile number Vicente Mondragón had given him.

  The phone rang several times, and Bern tried to imagine why it wasn’t answered right away. What did a man like Mondragón do at dusk, without a face?

  “Hello, Paul,” Mondragón said.

  “Okay,” Bern said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” Mondragón said quickly, although without seeming eager. “Then you can leave immediately?”

  “No. I’ve got to make arrangements for someone to look after the house. Maybe by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try to book a flight.”

  “Not necessary. I’ll fly you down. It’s important that you arrive at Jude’s place at night. We don’t want anyone to see you for several days, until you’ve had some time to be briefed.”

  “How does that happen?”

  “We have someone who knew Jude very well. That person will have everything you will need to be briefed. Be ready by seven o’clock in the evening. Someone will pick you up and take you to a charter plane. It’s a two-hour flight. In Mexico City, someone will meet you and take you to Jude’s place in Condesa.”

  “I hope to hell this is something I can handle.”

  “We are well aware that you are not a professional, Paul. We’ll do everything we can to make this work for you. Everyone is working toward the same goal.”

  “You want this guy to think Jude’s still alive,” Bern said. “You’ve got to know that this kind of thing can’t be taken too far.”

  “Yes, we do know that. But we are going to take it as far as we can.”

  And without another word, Mondragón ended the call.

  Chapter 18

  Mexico City

  The Dessault Falcon settled down through the clouds and floated into the light field of Mexico City’s dusk. From this distance, the ancient city’s lights were a dull coppery glow, a hue that added to the mystery of the six-hundred-year-old metropolis.

  Bern sat forward in the cabin, ignored by two men who had entered at the last moment, walked past him without acknowledging him, and sat together at the back of the small aircraft. As the Falcon banked and descended toward Toluca, forty-two miles west of Mexico City—private and charter jets were not allowed at Benito Juarez International—the grid of Mexico City’s avenues and boulevards emerged out of the light shimmer as the city became three-dimensional.

  The Falcon whispered onto the tarmac at Toluca and came to rest at the dark end of a runway far from the terminals. Bern glanced back at the two men, who were now silent and staring straight at him without expression. He left the aircraft and descended the steps to a waiting Mercedes, where a door was being held open for him by a young Mexican man with a snappy suit and a ready smile.

  “Mr. Bern?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome to Mexico.”

  The young man sat on the passenger side as the driver maneuvered into the traffic, heading to Mexico City. There was no conversation during the hour’s drive, but occasionally the young man spoke softly into a cell phone when it blinked at him, or when he placed a call by punching a single number.

  Once they were in Mexico City, Bern gazed out his window at the famous city of contrasts. The summer-evening rains had left the streets washed and glistening, but the grime remained in the shadows, and this was a city of shadows. Beauty was a queen here, but a dying queen. This city of the twenty-first century owed much of its undeniable charm to the nearly seven hundred years of its past. The allurements and the enchantments remained, but they were dressed in melancholy.

  Condesa was the gentrified neighborhood of Mexico’s elite when it flourished during the l920s and l930s. It was rich in fine examples of Art Deco architecture. During the latter half of the twentieth century, it had fallen on hard times, but it was now something of a cause célèbre with young artists, writers, and foreigners who had moved into the area and had begun a serious movement to save the exquisite architecture. Now the neighborhood was booming with sidewalk cafés and hip new restaurants springing up everywhere.

  The heart of Condesa was the lush and beautiful Parque México, which had been built on the site of a nineteenth-century racetrack. The park was oval and was surrounded by two concentric oval avenues, the innermost o
f which was Avenida México, into which the Mercedes now turned. The car cruised slowly under the jacarandas that were planted on the outermost ring of the park and formed a canopy over the encircling sidewalk and street.

  After they had gone nearly half the distance of the park’s length, the driver pulled to the curb on the park side of the street. He cut the motor.

  The young man who had held the door open for him now turned and put his arm on the back of his seat and looked over it at Bern.

  “He lived right here”—he jerked his head toward the building across the narrow street—“the one with the leaded-glass doors.”

  Bern looked out the car window at the building’s entryway, where a slightly amber light came through the frosted-glass panels, throwing the Deco design of the leading into clean relief. The building was narrow, three stories, its Deco facade different from its neighbors on either side.

  “Second and third floors. There’s no one there now,” the young man said, speaking softly. He reached over the seat and handed Bern a ring with two keys on it. “Hang on to them. They are a special kind, and it’ll be hell to replace them if you lose them. The fat one is for the outside door. The other is for the front door of the apartment.”

  “So I go in there. Then what?”

  “Someone will contact you. Don’t answer the door. Not yet. People will see the lights and think that he’s returned.”

  “They’ll wonder why I’m not answering.”

  He shrugged. “Let them wonder.”

  “That’s it?”

  “This is all we’re supposed to do, bring you here, give you the key, tell you not to answer the door, tell you someone will contact you.”

  Bern nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

  He opened the back door of the car and got out. Avenida México was little more than a narrow lane. He crossed it in a few steps, and when his feet hit the sidewalk on the other side, he heard the Mercedes start up. He didn’t look back as he heard it pull into the street and drive away.