The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  This had been a good contract for Mondragón. Lex Kevern always paid well, gave Mondragón and his men a lot of leeway, and still believed that the law of spoils was a justified concept. As long as the operation was done well, Mondragón was welcome to pick up the debris that inevitably followed in its wake.

  But the downside of working with the Americans was having to put up with their arrogance. Their superiority in everything was so automatically taken for granted that they fell into it as naturally as shitting. They thought that the people they hired knew only the things that the Americans told them, that the hirelings had no real creative abilities of their own. It was hard for those who came from a powerful country to believe that they could be outsmarted, that they could be manipulated just as easily as they manipulated others. Although it would seem that in the age of terrorism, and in an age when the Colombian drug cartels, with whom the American’s had been “at war” for decades, were still earning more annual revenue than McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, and Microsoft combined, the Americans might get the hint that they were not always the smartest people in the world.

  But the truth was, there couldn’t be enough downsides in this operation to dampen his enthusiasm for finding Ghazi Baida. Sometimes maniacal fate handed you a gift, and Kevern calling Mondragón for this operation was one of those times, as rare and sweet as an angel’s breath. Mondragón had inhaled the opportunity with a vicious enthusiasm. Kevern did not know it, and Mondragón would not tell him, but hunting Ghazi Baida had been Mondragón’s obsession for nearly three years. Kevern had only provided Mondragón with a kind of legitimacy, and a face, to do the very thing that kept his heart beating.

  When the telephone rang, he picked it up.

  “I got the guy’s wallet,” Kevern said, “and I’ve given it to Quito. Name’s Domingo Huerta. Ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I need as much as I can get on him, and I need it as fast as I can get it.”

  “Sure,” Mondragón said. “Did Quito tell you about the pass?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where is Bern now?”

  “Don’t know. Susana had him ditch his cell phone, which was smart. She’s picking him up. I’m waiting to hear. I’ll tell you one thing: We weren’t the only ones putting up wires on that street tonight. Whoever did this had some investments to protect. We need to know if this guy was killed because of something else he was into, or whether it had to do with Jude. Let’s find out what the hell’s going on here.”

  That was it. Kevern broke the connection. Mondragón dialed his encrypted phone and told Quito that he was to check with him first about whatever they found at Mingo’s.

  Outside his windows the fog that was moving in was melting the city’s lights, creating a coppery glow, which was quickly enveloping the entire valley of lights.

  Mondragón fought depression. Having no face was a living hell. He turned his back to the windows and looked into the half-light of his room of floating faces, everything bathed in rose-gold luster.

  God, God, God, how he wanted a face.

  The Náhuatl poets—the Mexica philosophers—believed that the human face was the most intimate manifestation of the intrinsic nature of each individual. It was the physical representation of the spiritual self. The personality. Without a face, a man vanished. He was nothing.

  I cause sorrow to your face, to your heart.

  If he had a thousand lives to live, he would forfeit them all in exchange for just one with a face.

  A lover of darkness and corners . . . he takes things . . . a sorcerer, destroyer of faces, he causes others to lose their faces.

  If he had a thousand lives to live, he would hunt Ghazi Baida in all of them and destroy him over and over without ceasing.

  He stared with his never-closing eyes at the floating faces in the clear boxes. Even detached from their bodies, even separate from their selves, they were more than he was. Here was a man. Here was a woman. You see their faces, you see their lives. Here is the woman who is no more, gone to paradise. Here is the man who is no more, gone to hell.

  But he, Vicente Mondragón, was evanescent. He would be forgotten. He was desaparecido—disappeared—his self raided and stolen from him, his existence removed from him in strips of flesh, in strands of muscle, in shards of cartilage.

  Mondragón drew close to one of the faces in its clear acrylic cube and put his raw head close to it, closer to it than he could have done if he had had a nose. His lips breathed a wavering ghost on the acrylic. His eyeballs, no lids, no lashes, nearly touched the cube. It was a woman’s face, one of his favorites, for she was Asian, and he had grown to love the clean lines of the Asian race. This woman, Chinese.

  As he stared at her, his vision caressing her graceful contours as intimately as if he had been touching her with his fingers, Mondragón began to weep, keening softly so that his servants wouldn’t hear.

  Chapter 29

  Someone in the crowd took his arm even as Susana was still talking, and he turned around and saw a man his own age staring at him, still holding his arm.

  “Please, you need to come with us, Judas,” he said. He raised his eyebrow coaxingly, and his expression was not threatening.

  Bern turned to Susana, who was looking at him, too, and saw a man holding her arm, as well. Everyone exchanged looks, and then the man leaned close to Bern’s ear and said, “Mazen Sabella.”

  Bern caught Susana’s eye again and she nodded, or he thought she nodded, and then without anyone saying anything else, the four of them began moving slowly through the crowd.

  Pushing through a clutch of people standing at the edge of the dance floor and against the wall adjacent to the orchestra, the man holding Susana’s arm opened a door and they stepped into a narrow, musty hallway stacked with cases of empty liquor bottles and worn-out brooms and mops. At that moment, another door opened just ahead of them, blocking their way, and a woman stepped out of the rest room with her hands under the raised skirt of her dress as she finished adjusting her underwear. Surprised, she dropped her skirt, gave them a quick sheepish smile, and then with a “So what?” flick of her head, she squeezed past them in the tiny hallway.

  “Did you say Mazen Sabella?” Bern asked, to let Susana know where they were going.

  “Yes,” the man said curtly.

  They turned a corner and were at the back door of the club. The man with Susana opened the door, but then he let go of her arm and held his own arm out, blocking her.

  “Alone,” the man with Bern said.

  “Hey, wait a second.” Bern shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “You must be alone.”

  In a tense moment, everyone assessed the situation. Then the second man held both hands up in a placating gesture.

  “It’s better for her if she doesn’t come,” he said.

  “It’s okay.” Susana reached out and touched Bern’s chest with the flat of her hand, as if to convey the sincerity of her words. “It’s okay. You heard what I said?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You remember it?”

  “Yeah?”

  “No problem, then, okay?”

  He was adjusting, reading between the lines of every gesture, imagining the communication in every tick of her expression.

  She looked at the man with Bern. “I’ll see him later, right?”

  “Yeah, sure, no problem.”

  “It’s okay, then,” she said to Bern, and she backed away slowly. They waited until she turned around and disappeared around the corner, heading back the way they had come.

  He sat alone in the backseat of the car, a Lincoln, like the many sitios in the city. There was no effort to conceal their route, and his grim first thought was that he wouldn’t be coming back, so it didn’t matter. But he pushed it aside. Maybe Sabella was only going to be at this location for this one meeting. Or maybe at some point along the way, he would be blindfolded, maybe switched to another vehicle.


  For a while, he stared out the windows, letting the image of Susana walking away play across his mind. God, how final that seemed now. At that moment, he was very close to accepting the fact that he simply couldn’t do this. Very close. The fact was, he just didn’t have the kind of guts that this was going to take. The best he could do was just fake it. Hell, he could fake it; he could do that. Play an audacious con game, a grand charade. At least until something unraveled that he couldn’t control.

  They entered the dark wood of Chapultepec Park, the headlights of the cars searching through the mist and fog that enshrouded the dense forest of giant ahuehuetes. The traffic was heavy, and people waited for transit connections along the broad sidewalks flanking the boulevard.

  Staying on Paseo de la Reforma, they continued into the elegant neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec, moving higher into the hills, until the streets grew smaller and became serpentine. This was Bosques de las Lomas, a rarefied part of the city, where business magnates and wealthy politicians with dubious connections lived. It was also where most of the foreign ambassadors in the city had their homes.

  They entered a section of ascending turns, the narrow street doubling back on itself again and again. Even on such a foggy night, he could make out the phenomenon for which this area was famous. Here the hills were so steep and close upon one another that girded pillars of concrete rose three, four, five stories up the hillsides in order to support plush gardens for the expensive homes that perched on the ridges. Trees and sprawling gardens, tennis courts and swimming pools—all were suspended above the city on superstructures massive enough to support whole buildings.

  The mist grew heavier and the car took a sharp turn into a steep incline, passing through two wrought-iron gates. They turned yet again, the car’s tires spinning in jerks on a pavement slick with the moist breath of fog. The headlights picked up a sheer cliff very close on the right, covered with hanging vines. On the other side, the hillside fell away and the coppery night sky of the city spread out across the valley far below.

  They stopped in the circular courtyard of a two-story Spanish Colonial home. A window here and there glowed with amber light, but the exterior of the home was visible only because of the coppery glow from the valley.

  As he got out of the car, Bern saw the dark silhouettes of palmettos against the building’s facade, and now, too, the armed guards were visible, milling about the courtyard. Looking through a porte cochere that led into a second walled courtyard, he could see other cars and men carrying armloads of boxes out of the house and putting them into the cars.

  He was escorted through the front door and into an unfurnished entry hall where voices echoed off the stucco walls and marble floors, making it impossible to tell the direction they were coming from.

  They ascended a wide staircase, his two escorts having to move to one side as three men started down with armloads of laptops. Armed guards appeared in the empty entry below, speaking occasionally into wire mikes dangling from earpieces. Bern noticed that the painted plaster walls were peeling.

  Turning into a barrel-vaulted hallway, they followed it to double wooden doors on the left, which swung open just as they approached. They entered a long room that looked as if it might have been a grand sala at one time. Here, too, men were busily working, breaking down electronic equipment and loading it into boxes that were then being carted away. French doors opened off the opposite long wall, revealing a terrace.

  He was quickly marched through the room and out onto the terrace, where a waiting bodyguard motioned to Bern, who followed him to a trellis-covered alcove. Three men were sitting in patio chairs in the gloamy light, and as Bern approached, one of them stood and walked out of the arbor, heading in the opposite direction.

  “Judas.” One of the remaining figures stood, came around the table, and extended his hand, his face now visible out of the arbor’s shadow. Bern recognized Mazen Sabella from Jude’s sketches. “Bienvenidas,” Sabella said. He was unremarkable in either size or height, maybe thinner than Jude’s drawing had led him to expect. He wore a dress shirt, sleeves rolled nearly to the elbow. He needed a shave.

  Bern shook his hand, but his eyes immediately sought the other man, who was still sitting at the table.

  “Judas,” the other man said, and he stood also, but remained where he was. “It’s good to see you again.”

  Though he didn’t step out of the arbor, Ghazi Baida’s face was visible in the reflected copper glow from the valley, and Bern looked into the face of Jude’s portraits. He look into the face of a murderer, an assassin, a terrorist. He looked into the face of the man that the CIA very much wanted to kill.

  “Hello,” Bern said. What the hell else should he say? He reached over the table and they shook hands.

  Baida was a nice-looking man. The light was poor, but it was good enough for Bern to see that Baida needed a shave, too, that his white dress shirt was badly wrinkled, the cuffs rolled back from his forearms with rough indifference, the front unbuttoned nearly to midchest.

  After hours of concentrating on Jude’s portraits and studies of this man, the real thing was fascinating. Even in the coppery light, he could see how fine a job Jude had done. Still, the flesh-and-blood face of Ghazi Baida was more complicated, his features more interesting, than Jude had been able to portray. He was at once more rugged and more refined than Bern had expected.

  “Please sit down with us,” Baida said. There was a loud crash as something fell somewhere in the echoing rooms of the house. “We’ll be gone from here shortly,” Baida said, referring to the noise. “We have to make the most of our time.”

  Baida paused, but Bern had nothing to say. Jude would have had something to say, he knew, never having been at a loss for words. Baida considered him a moment from across the table. Games. He sat in his chair with a relaxed authority, unperturbed.

  “I’ve been trying to make contact with you,” Baida said. “But that hasn’t been easy to do . . . at least not if we wanted to avoid being discovered. In the panic that followed the shooting, we lost you. But we also had someone watching Susana. When she ran out of your apartment on Avenida México, we guessed that if we stayed with her, we would have a good chance of finding you.”

  Bern heard car doors slamming down in the courtyard, engines starting, tires rolling over gravel, and then engines accelerating as the vehicles hit the paved drive and started down the hill. The place was emptying rapidly, but Baida didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He was completely unruffled and sat in his chair as if he had the entire night to talk, as if he knew just the moment when he needed to move to avoid whatever misfortune it was that all the others were hurrying away from.

  Chapter 30

  In the silence, Bern rehearsed his role as Jude. He had just come out of hiding. He had met with his intelligence man, who had discovered that he was still alive, and then someone had shot him. A couple of kids. What would Jude have been thinking? What would Mingo’s death have told him? What would Jude have seen in all of this? Would he have been thinking of anything except what he could do to save his skin?

  Baida sat slumped in his chair, his right elbow on the arm of the chair while his face rested in the fingers of his hand, two fingers folded across the right side of his mouth, two fingers vertically bracing his temple. Bern noticed a black military-style watch on his left wrist. As he stared at Bern, watching him closely—did he sense something, suspect that this wasn’t Jude sitting in front of him?—Baida gave off a sense of animal masculinity, which was probably one of the first things anyone would notice about him.

  “Tell me,” Baida said finally, straightening up in his chair, “why you were at that place in Tepito the night of the shooting.”

  “Khalil called me and told me to meet him there. Didn’t say why. I nearly stumbled right into it.”

  “And how did you manage to avoid that?”

  “Dumb luck.”

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “No.”

 
“You heard the shooting.”

  “Yeah, and I ran. Ran like hell.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “I heard . . . on the street, like everybody else.”

  Baida nodded pensively. “And why have you been hiding all this time?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened in Tepito that night. I just wanted to make damn sure that the word on the street had that straight before I showed my face again.”

  There were raised voices in the courtyard below, and then someone was running somewhere on the second floor. Baida seemed oblivious of this, and his eyes remained fixed, boring into Bern. He appeared to have something on his mind, maybe a decision to make, and Bern could only assume it had something to do with Jude. He tried to follow the logic of it, follow it the way he thought that Jude would have, play it the way he thought Jude would have played it.

  “What was Domingo Huerta doing for you?” The question came from Sabella, who had been sitting quietly, watching Bern. He had sipped once from a white demitasse cup. Coffee, Bern guessed.

  “You know what he does,” Bern said. “I went over that with you when we talked in Ciudad del Este.”

  “And you weren’t in communication with him . . . while you were waiting during these past weeks?”

  “I think you know damn well we haven’t been in touch.” Bern focused on Sabella. “You’ve been all over him, I’d guess.”

  “Who else does he work for?”

  “He doesn’t tell me.”

  “He works only for you.”

  “No. I can’t afford that.”