The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “This guy?”

  “Yeah, same phone. And I think you know who it is.”

  Kevern stared at her a moment. Bern watched them. He couldn’t see much on Kevern’s face, but he could see that Susana saw something, and she didn’t much like what she saw.

  “Lex, goddamn you,” she said, “what in the hell are you doing to me?”

  Kevern stood up and raised his beefy hands, palms out to her.

  “Now wait a second. Listen to this before you explode. Then if you think it’s not right, be my guest.”

  Susana was seething.

  Kevern looked at Bern. “This is classified. Could you just give us—”

  “No,” Susana snapped. “This is the way it’s going to be, Lex.”

  Kevern’s face registered something this time that even Bern could see: a flare of anger that he instantly suppressed, stopped cold.

  “In the next couple of days,” Susana said to Kevern, “I’m going to be telling him everything I know. Everything. No secrets. We’re a team. You wanted it; you got it. I’m not going to be put in a position of having to decide what I’ll hold back from him and what I won’t. He needs to know everything I can get into his head in order to stay alive. This is hard enough without adding another layer of secrecy.”

  Kevern’s eyes were fixed on her again. It seemed that Susana was telling Kevern that she was going to pull out all the stops and throw operations protocol out the window in favor of a survival regimen. Her attitude seemed to be, Thank you very much for pushing us off the cliff, but now that you have, we’re going to be in charge of the falling. And the landing. If Kevern and Washington didn’t like it, they could shove it.

  “Fair enough,” Kevern said, but it seemed that the words were hard for him to get out.

  “Here’s what I think’s going on,” Kevern began, “but I can’t be sure. I’ve gone over and over it. Just about the time your training for this was coming to a close at the Farm, Jude pulled me aside, wanted to talk, outside. We met at a bar, and he pitched his deal.”

  Susana’s face went stiff. Bern suspected that Kevern had just delivered a successful thrust in their little duel of nerves.

  “Jude didn’t think the smuggling story would sell without some kind of credible intelligence operation of his own in place. The way he saw it, a guy in his position couldn’t operate a top-notch smuggling op without some kind of security rig. He wanted permission—and the financing—to put together his own smuggling intel deal.”

  Kevern wiped a hand over his face and snorted. He stared at the floor and grunted, then crossed his arms again.

  “We went over the pros and cons,” he said, looking up. “He’d given it a lot of thought and had an answer for everything. He was afraid that if Baida’s people probed too deep when they were checking him out, they might catch him running counterintelligence measures. If they did, he could easily claim it was for the smuggling operation. Jude figured Baida would be satisfied with that explanation. It made sense.

  “And even if Baida was still suspicious, it would make it a hell of a lot harder for his people to dig up a secondary explanation. In a sense, Jude had come up with another form of backstopping. It was a lightning rod that would ground any suspicion of his actions firmly into the smuggling operation. It was smart.”

  Kevern paused and sat down on his desk again. He looked tired. It had been a long run for all of them and now, instead of arriving at a resolution to all their hard work, they were beginning a second round.

  “Jude had one caveat,” Kevern went on. “He didn’t want to tell you what he was doing. He reasoned, and he was right I think, that there was no need to add to the balancing act you were already handling. If your cover didn’t involve you in his smuggling operation, then why should you be burdened with having to keep track of the operation’s intelligence concerns? That would simply add to the stress on you.”

  He paused, raising an eyebrow, and looked up at her as if he were trying to read her real thoughts.

  “That’s the whole big secret,” Kevern said. “That’s all there is to it.” He hesitated. “Incidentally, Gordon doesn’t know about that little operation, either. Just me. And by God, I put it out of my mind.”

  In the silence that followed, Bern saw the hurt in Susana’s face. Or maybe he only imagined it. He knew the importance of trust between partners, especially partners who had learned to submit to the free fall of espionage, where the assumption was that the other partner was securing the lifeline that would prevent the plunge from being fatal. That kind of trust came with an emotional price, especially between partners who might have shared more than the secrets of state.

  Now she was learning that Jude had kept this secret from her the whole time. And she had never even suspected it. That was deception, and in the context of their world, it was akin to adultery.

  “Okay?” Kevern asked.

  Susana nodded. “It would’ve been a weak point in the continuity.” She nodded. “He was right to want to do it that way.”

  There was a flurry of conversation in the outer office, and both of them paused, listening, until it quieted down.

  “Okay,” she said, clearing her throat. “Give me something, anything. We’ve got to deal with this guy.”

  Kevern shook his head. “I told you. That day in the bar was the last time we talked about it. I always assumed he’d done it, but that was Jude’s thing. For me, it didn’t even exist. I didn’t know anything about it then, and I don’t want to know anything about it now.” He gave her a significant look. “Jude was on his own with this one. Even for the downside—if it came to that. And if you use this guy, it’ll be the same for you.”

  “You would’ve given him permission to dig his own grave if he’d wanted to, wouldn’t you?”

  “You going to give me a lecture on letting him stick his neck out?” Kevern asked. “Come on, Ana. That’s why all three of us got pulled into this one. We all know the story. It’s an old story.” He glanced at Bern again, then back at Susana. “They want Ghazi Baida. Whatever it takes.”

  Susana looked at Bern. “It’s like announcing a job opening for people who like adventure,” she explained. “When the applications come in, you throw them all out except for those few who are addicted to Russian roulette. Then you send them into a Chinese gambling den to find a guy who’s selling a revolver with only one shell in it. Odds are, your agents will eventually find your man for you, but you’re not really surprised when you lose a few of your people in the process. You figure that into your overhead in advance.”

  Kevern looked hard at her. Bern thought he was trying to see inside her head to see if she was changing on him.

  She turned to Kevern. “You don’t know if this guy knows about Baida?”

  Kevern shook his head. “But I’m guessing that he does.”

  Silence.

  Susana walked over near Bern and looked down onto the street. It was a quiet, densely populated residential area, and looking between the branches of the trees, he could see a couple of maids sloshing soapy water onto the sidewalk and sweeping it off into the street.

  “Jude liked to juggle,” Susana said, watching the maids take a few moments to chat, looking up and down the street to see what life could show them. “He liked having a lot of limes in the air at once, having complete control of a complex situation.” She nodded. “Yeah, I’m guessing Mingo knows about Baida, too.”

  She turned around. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to do. How’s Gordon?”

  “Good,” Kevern said. “He’s good.”

  Susana nodded. “Okay.”

  So much for the tight family thing.

  “We’re going to bury ourselves in background,” she said. “We’ll be in touch when we get a grip on the best way to handle it.”

  “Good,” Kevern said. “I’ve got a cell upgrade for you.” He stood from edge of his desk again, went to a table jumbled with electronic gear, and picked up a cell phone and its charger. He we
nt over and gave them to her.

  “Give me your other one,” he said.

  Susana went to her purse, retrieved the other cell phone, and gave it to him.

  “Okay,” Kevern said, “this one has everything built into it. We’ll know where you are every moment. We want updates as often as you can send them or need to send them. Punch oh six oh and start talking. It’s as secure as an electronic signal is capable of being. We monitor it live around the clock. We’ll respond immediately. Everything else is the same.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  “I guess you’d better assume that Baida could get wind of this within hours. Maybe already knows. If this guy Mingo knows that Jude’s alive, we’ve got to assume everyone knows. Just be ready to handle that.”

  “We’ll push as fast as we can,” she said.

  She put the cell phone and the charger in her purse, and they left.

  Chapter 24

  They took a taxi to Paseo de la Reforma, where they got another taxi to a pastelería on the fashionable Avenida Masaryk in Polanco. Susana had said nothing during the ride, gazing out her window in thought. At the pastelería, they ordered coffee and found a small table in a corner. Susana began talking immediately.

  “What I did was way out of line,” she said, referring to their trip to see Kevern. “They’d just moved the operations to a new location, and I risked exposing it by doing that. Kevern was furious.”

  Her face was weary, serious.

  “But I had to do two things. I needed to find out what the Mingo business was all about. I wasn’t expecting what Lex told me, but then I didn’t know what to expect, so I guess I’m no worse for wear. And I wanted you two to meet.”

  “I wouldn’t have met him if you hadn’t done that?”

  “Probably not. If he could’ve kept his distance from you, he would’ve done it. Lex and Jude were a mutual- respect society. They weren’t friends. Neither of them had friends. They had informants, sources, targets, agents, superiors, subordinates, mistresses, but no friends. But Kevern took Jude’s death hard. Especially because of what he had to do. Or thought he had to do.”

  She told him about Jude’s death, about the Agencia Federal de Investigacionés’ surveillance images, what had happened to the remaining members of the cell, how they had found Jude’s body, Kevern’s plan to use Bern as a stand-in, the device of using Jude’s skull to lure Bern into cooperation, and how he had initiated the plan before getting clearance from the group, the small circle of men who had initiated the operation in the first place.

  All of this was told to him in a quiet, calm fashion, and the enormity of the words were diminished by her controlled demeanor, so that the remarkable implications of what she was telling him followed her recitation by some moments. Still, when she was finished, Bern was floored by the audacity of Kevern’s actions. And it put into startling perspective the boldness of what he’d gotten himself into. Feeling like a man knocked off his feet by a sudden blow to the head, he was still trying to collect his thoughts. She was quiet for a moment, waiting for his reaction.

  “One question,” he said. “Will Mondragón use those pictures if I don’t do this? These people will let him do that to her?”

  “No, they can’t do that,” she said. “But then, they can’t let Ghazi Baida do what he wants to do, either. They make a choice. They make a chain.”

  “A chain.”

  “They create a chain between themselves and you. Each additional link is farther away from them, and because each link is its own independent entity, the less real control they can legitimately claim over it. And the less responsibility they feel. The more links they have, the more deniability they have.”

  “But the fact is,” Bern said, “when Washington yanks its end of the chain, the other end rattles.”

  She didn’t say anything. He studied her. “And so you’re telling me this . . . why?”

  “It’s a personal thing with me,” she said. “I told you before, and I told Kevern, we’re joined at the hip on this one. We’ve got to commit to each other, and you’ve got to have as much of the picture as I can give you to be able to do that. It’s a matter of survival.”

  Yeah, Bern thought, and he’d just gotten through seeing how difficult it was for even Susana to have the whole picture. He remembered the surprised look on her face when she found out about Jude and Mingo.

  Jesus. He was nearly a basket case of scrambled emotions. He was scared. He was recklessly curious about what he would discover about Jude’s life. And he was horrified that those pictures of Alice would surface somewhere, and that Dana and Phil would never, ever, no matter what, be able to look at him the same way again.

  Hell, there was no way to turn back the clock. Yeah, he was committed, the same way he was committed to the coming of night, to the passage of time, to the surety of death.

  In the afternoon, Bern went on reading the files. He moved the laptop to the sofa in the studio and kept plowing through the pages and pages of data. When he had questions, Susana explored every detail with him. They were both determined that Bern would grab as much information as possible in the short time they had.

  They plunged into Ghazi Baida’s life.

  “Maybe the main thing about Baida,” Susana said, “is that he’s not your typical Hezbollah terrorist. For one thing, he’s not an angry young man. He was born in 1954 in Beirut, the only child of a couple whose backgrounds seem to begin with the birth of their son. We don’t know anything at all about where they were from or who their families were. The father was a textile merchant, and when Ghazi was eight, his father moved the family to Mexico City, where there was already a large Lebanese community. Ghazi attended private American schools here and became fluent in English and Spanish.

  “When it came time for him to go to university, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. He had a hell of a time there, went nuts over the freewheeling life of a well-to-do university student. He totally bought into the American collegiate idea. Ball games, parties. Even a spell in a fraternity. Women. He was good-looking, and charming. In short, he had a blast.”

  Susana went on to outline his graduation, his unhappy return to Mexico, his falling-out with his father after a year in the family business, his rebellious move back to Beirut while the country was in the throes of a civil war. Then he seemed to have fallen into a black hole. For the next decade, information about him was scarce, except for a few key facts: The war politicized him, as did his love affair with Rima Hani, a young Lebanese woman who was educated at the Sorbonne and was also from a wealthy Beirut family. In April of 1981, the two married.

  In September of 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalange units swept into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla and massacred some eight hundred civilians. Israeli forces who were responsible for the camps’ safety stood by and let it happen. Rima, who was working as a medical volunteer in the camps, was killed in the massacre.

  “When Ghazi surfaced again,” Susana said, “he was Hezbollah’s most skilled operational designer.” She nodded at the laptop. “You’ve got them there, the list of horrors that bear his trademark—bombings, kidnappings, assassinations throughout the Middle East and Latin America.

  “But after 2002, Baida dropped off the intelligence radar screens again. Rumors placed him in Latin America. And rumors were all they had, until Jude spoke to him in Ciudad del Este a little more than two months ago.”

  They spent the rest of the day and into the night studying Jude’s smuggling route from Guatemala to Houston. Names. Names. Names. Places. Places. Places. Code words. Contacts. Whom he paid for what. What he paid to whom. Names. Places.

  The next morning, they began with Jude’s notes on his meetings with Mazen Sabella and Ghazi Baida. Names. Places. Jude’s impressions. Susana told him little bits of details that Jude had shared with her during their long conversations, feelings and hunches, the sorts of things that didn’t make their way into his official reports. Not facts, just feeling
s, the way Jude felt at the third meeting in Ciudad del Este when the stranger walked into the ratty hotel and introduced himself as Ghazi Baida. What Jude thought of Baida’s facial surgery, how it had dramatically changed his appearance, and how Jude imagined that it must have affected his personality as well.

  By late in the afternoon of the second day, Bern was beginning to get a good feel for the way his brother had been trying to ferret out the pieces of the puzzle. The sun was coming through the studio windows at an acute angle, just clearing the trees and the cityscape. The sharp contrast of light and shadow would not last long. In a few minutes, the sun’s rays would hit the densest layer of the city’s notorious smog shroud. The light would soften, and then the clouds would move in, gathering for the summer afternoon’s rain showers.

  Bern stood stiffly from where he had been grounded for hours on the sofa. His muscles needed stretching; his body yearned for a swim in the cove. But his mind was electrically charged, and his new knowledge was generating an intense energy, which made him as antsy as a cat.

  He walked over to the windows, where the sun was streaming in, and looked out over Parque México. The windows were open, and he could feel the cool, soft late-afternoon breeze that carried the burble of pigeons and, occasionally, the lilt of children’s voices from the park. He leaned on the windowsill and marveled at the strange and alien feeling of the moment. He might as well have been in Bangkok or Samarkand.

  “Jude used to stand that way,” Susana said. “Just like that. Right there in that window.”

  When he turned around, she was standing, too, looking at him with an expression of haunted memory.

  “I’ve got to have a drink,” she said. “I’ve waited long enough.”