The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “When Fox came into office, he made a big deal out of ‘reforming’ CISEN, and one of the ways he did that was to kick out some of the agency’s most notorious figures. Mondragón was one of them. But nothing ever changes much in Mexico. CISEN is still a PRI tool. Mondragón still has contacts inside. He’s Kevern’s back door to their vast files. And he even uses some of their tech people. Off the record, of course. They moonlight for him.”

  She turned her face to watch the rain, her profile floating like a ghostly mask in the pale light.

  “He’ll find her,” Susana said. “And he’ll find her tonight.”

  “You seem to be a little sobered by that,” Bern observed.

  “We’re in a hurry here. Mondragón’s people . . . they’ll find out what she knows. We just have to concentrate on what we’re going to do with the information. How they get it—you don’t let yourself think about that.”

  Chapter 32

  The battered panel truck clattered off the Periferico on the far northern edge of the city and made its way into a grid of featureless straight streets that stretched out across the plain of the former lakebed of the Valley of Mexico. This part of the city had missed most of the rain showers that had hammered the heart of the city earlier in the night, and the panel truck threw up a spume of gritty dust that drifted lazily over the cinder-block houses that clung to the ancient lakebed like crustaceans.

  Soon the hovels gave way to a vast hinterland of warehouses interspersed with an occasional street of more dark cinder-block houses. Some of the warehouse compounds were brightly lighted by the coppery glow from perimeter lights on high poles within an encirclement of high chain-link fences. There were guards and guard dogs. Some of the warehouses had loading docks that were still operating, but most of the district was quiet and deserted.

  The van kept going until the sharp, clean lines of the brighter modern warehouses gave way to the warehouses of another era, out of date, deteriorating, derelict, and abandoned. These buildings were less well kept, less well lighted, or entirely dark.

  The men in the van had been sending and receiving burst communications, so the van’s approach was well noted, and its secure status was well documented. It had been running a surveillance-detection route for the past half hour.

  Then the van slowed, turning into a side street that burrowed into a sector of densely packed buildings. Soon it turned again, moving into an alley and going past four long rusting warehouses before it pulled to the side, overgrown weeds scraping noisily against the undercarriage of the truck before it came to a stop and the driver cut its lights.

  Three men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders bailed out of the rear of the van and immediately spread out. Then the door on the passenger side of the van opened slowly and Mazen Sabella stepped out. While his bodyguards spoke into their headsets, Sabella walked to the edge of the nearest building, unzipped his pants, and pissed against the rusty metal siding.

  He smelled the staleness of his surroundings. Dereliction had an odor all its own, like none other in the world. He was intimate with that odor, having smelled it in a dozen countries, and aboard rusting, creaking ships in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. He had smelled it on the breath of women in all those ports, and on the clothes of their children. He had even smelled it on the moonlight, when there was a moon, and when there wasn’t, he had smelled it on the dust of the stars.

  He shook himself off and zipped his pants. One of his guards had walked 150 feet ahead, where a warehouse door opened and two armed men stepped outside to greet the bodyguard. Sabella came along the rutted alley with his other guards and approached the men waiting for him.

  The darkness outside receded as they went through the door into the warehouse. The vast open space was dark except for an isolated lighted area about fifty yards away and roughly in the center of the gloomy cavern. This spot was lighted by hooded lamps that hung down from trusses hidden high up in the dark recesses of the warehouse.

  Half a dozen men were busy carrying personal items in duffel bags, cardboard boxes, and a few suitcases, emptying tents that sat in the shadows beyond the lighted work area. The isolated pocket of activity in the vast space of the warehouses reminded Sabella of coming upon a busy guerrilla base in a hidden desert wadi. But the bustle of activity here had to do with breaking camp. The bivouac had served its purpose, and now the mission was moving into another phase.

  As Sabella and his armed guards arrived, three men broke away from the others and came out to meet them. Empty buckets were turned upside down and a few plastic chairs were brought over to form a small gathering place, and Sabella sat down with the three men.

  “Okay,” Sabella said, addressing a short, stocky man with prematurely thinning hair and a black mustache, “Ghazi says that this is the final check. It’s the last time we meet. Where is the product?”

  The man jerked his head toward one of the dark corners of the room as he lighted a cigarette. “Over there,” he said. “El Samy will take it away within the half hour.”

  “How many did you finally get?”

  “A case. Twelve cans with labels exactly like the real ones. They’re boxed and sealed.”

  “Perfect,” Sabella said, studying the man in front of him. The flesh around the man’s eyes was dark, marked by months of too little sleep, the pressure of managing a clandestine operation, too many cigarettes.

  “And our friends,” Sabella asked, “where are they now?”

  “I paid them off with the money you sent, and all of them are on their way. I have a man with each of them to make sure they are out of Mexico by this time tomorrow.” He gave a long pull on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke at Sabella. “And what about the six guys?”

  “They’re across now. All of them. The last one had arrived last night. No problems. Everything’s fine.”

  Sabella turned his eyes to another man, a small, wiry man with a beaked nose and watery eyes that protruded slightly. “What about your information?”

  The man nodded. “Every mentor has his instructions for the timing and sequence. The prime contact has the code for Ghazi’s ‘go’ signal. When he receives that, the rest will follow in rapid sequence.”

  “Bueno.” Sabella nodded. “Good job.” His gaze fell on a third man. “Alfredo?”

  “We’ve been alternating through the same three crossings for six weeks now. The bribes are in, and all of them have been completely reliable. The product never travels with drugs, so there is no chance of an accidental discovery.”

  Alfredo was waving a rolled harina tortilla as he talked. There was nothing in it. He paused and took a big bite of the diminishing snack, which he held in the stubby dark fingers of one hand. He was sitting on a plastic bucket, his heavy legs spread. Not finished chewing, he went on, talking around the food.

  “In Chihuahua our cans will be slipped into a shipment of the real product from the maquiladora,” he mumbled. “When they reach the warehouse in El Paso, our case will be divided into three groups of four, and our cans will be mixed in with cases of the real thing. Each group will be transported by a wholesale distributor, remaining in plain sight all the way. Eventually each can will reach a different city where it will be picked up by the mentors who will hold them until they receive the signal from Baida.”

  During the conversation, the language had been a garble of Spanish, English, and Arabic. Sometimes one of the men would throw in a couple of words of French. The bustle behind them had begun to die down. The personal effects of the men who had lived here for just over a month had been carried out to cars in the cool of night, and a few men stood around, looking here and there at what was left, as if making sure they hadn’t forgotten something.

  “Any problems with the money?” Sabella asked. “Only one more payment, right?”

  Alfredo nodded, almost unconcerned. His job was to handle all of the negotiations with the Mexican narcos, whose routes they were paying to
use. He was used to lies and violence and pressure. Nature had provided him with a high threshold for excitement. Only imminent death changed his heart rate.

  “What about the machine?” the first man asked, looking across the lighted area to the assembly line of supply tanks, transfer pumps, pressure fillers, a heat exchanger, exhaust system, and hot-water supply, all connected by a network of pipes lying on the concrete floor and suspended by wires and cables from the high trusses.

  “Everything goes,” Sabella said.

  Still looking at the equipment, the man shook his head at the shame of it. The expensive equipment had cost them a fortune, and a hell of a lot of trouble to acquire. And they had gotten only twelve “items” with it. Still, he knew it was worth it. It just seemed a waste to get rid of it this way.

  “They’ll be able to reconstruct it,” the second man said. “They’ll know what it is.”

  “They could,” Sabella said, “if they knew what was here. But nobody is looking for anything. And there’s all the other stuff stored in here. It will just be a warehouse of stuff. Who will give a shit? Just bulldoze it away.” He glanced at the equipment. “Besides, it will all be too late then. It really won’t matter what they reconstruct. They’ll already know what we had to have to do it.”

  They all pondered that a moment as Alfredo jammed the last of his tortilla into his mouth.

  Sabella looked at each of them. “Anything else?”

  They shrugged and shook their heads.

  “Ghazi sends his congratulations and sincere gratitude to each of you,” Sabella said. “Everyone has been paid?”

  Nods all around.

  Out of habit and without even arranging it, the men drifted away from the warehouse one at a time over the next half hour. A few more loads of personal items disappeared as well, and soon everyone was gone except Sabella and his driver and bodyguards.

  Each of them retreated into the dark reaches of the warehouse and returned with five-gallon plastic containers of diesel fuel. They kept retrieving containers until twenty of them stood around. They did not want an explosion, but they needed a fire that would be very destructive. Because diesel fuel burned hot, this would be guaranteed. They began emptying the fuel over everything under the wash of lights, working quickly to prevent fumes from accumulating and building to an explosive density.

  The fire was burning along a trail headed into the warehouse as they got into the van and sped out of the maze of old buildings. Despite their plans, there was a concussive whump! an almost lazy, muffled explosion, as the warehouse was engulfed in flames. They felt the shudder of the concussion even inside the van, which was now many streets away.

  As the van rattled back into the heart of the city, Sabella gazed out of the window, the sporadic bursts of secure communication playing softly in the background. His thoughts turned to what he had to do next.

  Jude had been a puzzle to him from the beginning, when he first met him in Ciudad del Este. At first, Sabella had been sure that Jude was somehow connected to U.S. intelligence. He had come within a hair of having him killed, along with that impetuous idiot Ahmad, who had brought Jude into the picture. But something had made him hold off.

  Sabella had watched Jude carefully on a video feed from the lobby of the shabby waterfront hotel. Jude had handled being dragged through the maze of his initial vetting with an accepting equanimity. It seemed that he knew what was happening, and he endured it the way a donkey endures a hailstorm, with wincing patience, with resignation and the understanding that it wouldn’t last forever. If he was nervous at being put through the scrubbing process, he didn’t let it show.

  But when he had had enough, when he thought they’d taken it too far, he told them to fuck off. And he meant it. He had made the judgment that whatever good they might be for each other, it wasn’t worth the price of admission. But then when Baida finally arrived, Jude held no grudges and quickly got down to business. That was when the conversations got interesting, and Sabella grew to like the Texan, who kept his own smuggling operation very close to the vest.

  And then there was the discovery of commonalities. Sabella remembered having to drag these bits of information out of him when he interviewed him in Ciudad del Este. Jude grudgingly revealed his background, and the behavior that gave Sabella some relief from his suspicions. Often a mole would too readily reveal mutual interests with his target, trying too hard to establish a common ground in an effort to make the target identify with him and feel comfortable.

  Not Jude. His world was his world, and he wanted to keep it that way. If Sabella didn’t ask, Jude didn’t tell, and even when he did, he didn’t tell very much. Jude never volunteered anything. He was more interested in how he could make money moving anything they wanted him to move. Anything but drugs, that is. No drugs. Which was okay with Sabella, who already had that covered anyway.

  So eventually they had gotten around to their pasts, and Sabella finally managed to get Jude to reveal that he had attended the University of Texas, too. One thing led to another, and as time passed, Sabella found himself liking the guy. Which was a mistake. You could trust people (up to a point, of course, never absolutely), you could rely on them and give them responsibility, but you could never allow yourself to like them.

  And maybe that was the only problem with Jude, and nothing more than that. Sabella just liked the guy, and that in itself set off the infinitesimal tremors of suspicion. Maybe, after all these years, it had come down to that: Circumstances were more meaningful than the people who populated them. Situation overrode character and personality. The extraordinary efforts that Sabella had to employ simply to stay alive had become what it meant to be alive. He had become the process to the extent that he was now little more than the process.

  But now he had to move on to the next phase of his plan. And Jude was either exactly the right man to make it work for him or exactly the wrong man. It was time to find out which of the two he was.

  Chapter 33

  From her place at the edge of the light, Susana called Kevern on her encrypted cell phone. Bern gathered from her side of the conversation that they were in a safe house, and that Kevern was as stunned as they were that Bern’s impersonation had actually worked. Susana also passed on the name of Estele de León Pheres, and then she explained the situation with Baida and said he was waiting for a response from Bern. There was some conversation about that, during which Susana said very little.

  Bern watched her profile as she listened; she was shifting her weight, her movement nearly imperceptible at the edge of the shadow. He sensed that she was weighing her options. She must do that a thousand times a day, he thought, weighing the consequences of speaking or not speaking, of revealing or not revealing, of finessing a phrase this way or that. It was a life of calculation, of factoring in, of making choices.

  It was, he guessed, a life of never really knowing if you had done the right thing or not, because the ramifications of having made a different choice were too complex to play out to a logical end. He wasn’t even sure there were any logical ends in the life she lived.

  Finally, the conversation ended, and she snapped the phone closed.

  “Okay,” she said, “Mondragón’s boys are at Mingo’s place now. Kevern’s going to pass on the information about Estele de León.

  “In the meantime, we need to come up with a plan for you to meet with Baida again, something to drag this out a little. There’s a possibility that Quito’s people will come up with something useful from Mingo’s girls. Or if they find Estele de León in time, maybe she’ll come up with some information that will help us in arranging this next meeting. If they do, that could change things. But for right now, we have to play this as if those possibilities don’t exist. Kevern and his team are going to put their heads together, and then we’ll get back in touch and see what we’ve got.”

  The rain continued off and on.

  “Every hour, a quarter past the hour,” Susana said, confirming Baida’s instructio
ns.

  “Yeah,” Bern said. All he could think of was that this was impossible. How were the two of them going to contrive a convincing plan? And what in the hell was he going to do when the meeting actually took place? Like so much else about this madness, it seemed to be over-the-top. He couldn’t believe that people actually did these sorts of things, and that whether they lived or died depended upon success or failure in these endeavors.

  The rainy night was breathless now, and the curtains hung as limp as old promises.

  Bern turned on the bed and bent over and pulled off his shoes and socks. Then he shed his shirt, draping it over his suit coat on the chair.

  Susana didn’t say anything. In the dusky light, he couldn’t see the finer points of her features—the little wrinkle between her eyebrows that showed she was worried or thoughtful, the pull at the corner of her mouth that foretold a change of mind. She was staring toward the window again.

  With a sigh, she turned to the window, unbuttoned her dress all the way down to her stomach, and then fanned the sides for air. After a little while, she turned and came back to the bed and sat down, leaning against the headboard like Bern. She seemed oddly reluctant to begin the planning.

  “What happened to Mondragón’s face?” Bern asked.

  “Somebody took it off for him,” she said. “No one knows the real story. There are only outrageous rumors, everything from brujo curses to a sexual fantasy gone wrong. I don’t think anyone really knows. No one’s talking anyway.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “A couple of years ago. Maybe a little more.”

  “Here in Mexico City?”

  “Who knows.” Susana pulled her legs up, her feet flat on the bed, the skirt of her dress pooling into her lap. She rammed the fingers of both hands into the front of her thick hair and held them there as she leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. She stared into the mirror on the armoire.