The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Sabella raised his coffee and blew on it softly, his eyes remaining on Bern all the while. But he didn’t take a sip of the coffee.

  “I think you know Ghazi Baida . . . intimately, Judas,” Sabella said, “the smell of his breath, the way he understands the color of light, the way he tastes something . . . the way he hates. I think you know . . . every tiny thing about him. You have memorized him from dossiers. You know his shoe size. You know the women he’s slept with. You know the brand of cigarettes he smokes, and you know how many he smokes a day.”

  Bern sipped his coffee. He felt sweat popping out along his hairline. He saw faint shadows behind Sabella, clumps of fog prowling along the street. He felt not entirely within himself, as if he were pulling loose from his own personality, the discombobulated Dr. Jekyll.

  Sabella lifted his chin in a kind of acknowledgment and went on.

  “You know, too, that we have not been able to find out a damn thing about you, my friend. Nada. You appear, in fact, to be Judas Teller. An artist. A smuggler. A fucker of many women. A loner. A nobody much. Perhaps a bitter man.”

  Now Sabella sipped his own coffee. He swallowed, nodded to himself.

  “But . . . Baida smells you, Judas. He smells the shit on you. He doesn’t care what he can’t prove; he knows what he knows. Ghazi is not an idiot.”

  His face didn’t change. He didn’t blink. His voice was curiously pensive, with no edge to it, no urgency.

  “What is it?” Sabella asked. “They want to kill him? Is it you? Are you supposed to do it yourself? It’s not the right time yet? Not the right place? And Mexico makes it more difficult for you, doesn’t it? Maybe it has to look like something else. It wouldn’t do for the CIA to be involved in an assassination scandal in a country so close. So there has to be some elaborate planning. That takes time. Not easy, huh?”

  Bern watched Sabella’s face, and he knew what was happening. Sabella was giving him a polygraph test, his own version of that dubious examination. He had seen this kind of penetrating scrutiny too many times on Alice’s face, the impaling gaze that saw the unseen, that read the unreadable, the gaze that crawled inside the head, and even inside the heart, and sniffed out the lie. After more than twenty years of running and hiding with Baida, Sabella’s whole being had become a trembling sensor for the lie. It had kept them alive, this tremulous humming within him, attuned to deceit. Bern remembered reading the incisive interviews that Jude had had with Sabella before Baida even showed his face. Extraordinary.

  “I don’t know,” Bern said. “But I think there’s a big misunderstanding here.”

  Something changed in Sabella’s face, subtle, hardly there at all, Bern couldn’t even describe it, but he knew that Sabella had just gotten the answer that he knew was there all along.

  Sabella leaned forward, lowered his voice.

  “Ghazi Baida wants to make a deal,” Sabella said.

  Bern swallowed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to take a sip of coffee to cover it.

  “A deal,” Bern said. What did he do with this? He was numb. He couldn’t make his mind put together a response.

  “He wants you to kill him,” Sabella said. “He wants you to put him out of his misery. And in return, he will spare ten thousand American lives.”

  Chapter 36

  Jude would listen. Bern had no doubt of that. But he knew, as surely as Jude would have known, that there was a downside. If he listened, he would practically be admitting that he was who Sabella suspected him of being. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t listen, because he would know damn well that in this business, knowing too much would get you killed.

  Bern cursed himself for not being able to read Sabella’s face. Though he had made his living studying faces, his recent experiences with Alice had taught him that despite his experience, he had never really penetrated the face’s deeper dimensions. He knew bones. He knew tissue and muscle. He knew the mechanics of tension and structure and elasticity. But he had never gone beyond that; he had never seen the unseen like Alice, like Sabella himself. At this moment, he could see only that Sabella’s face had softened, that it had changed, but that was all. He couldn’t explain the inner landscape, or decipher the hidden story.

  Whatever this man was about to say on Ghazi Baida’s behalf, it would have been a surprise to Jude. No one—not Kevern, not Mondragón, not anyone in Washington—would have expected Ghazi Baida to turn around and face his enemy—and appeal to him for help.

  “Ghazi and I have worked together for a long time, Judas,” Sabella began. “Almost from the beginning. I met him shortly after Rima Hani was killed, and he was like a man on fire. Hatred emanated from him like a molten aura.”

  Sabella’s assumption that Bern would know who Rima Hani was demonstrated how sure he was of Jude’s real role.

  “We were young warriors together. Of course, I recognized immediately that I had none of Ghazi’s brilliance. Ghazi was exceptional—his ability to innovate, to see things that others couldn’t see, to imagine things others could not imagine. Those are Ghazi’s gifts, and he has used them well and selflessly in the service of Allah for these twenty years.”

  He had lowered his voice yet again. They might be alone, but for Sabella, alone was never alone enough.

  “My talents were more humble,” he continued, “but they were necessary to Ghazi’s success. Hundreds of us have happily served his vision, working in our own small ways to make it a living reality.

  “But everyone has enemies, and men like Ghazi have more than most. Not only do leaders of Western governments want to see him dead but so do some in rival factions of Islam’s armies. Life has become very difficult, almost impossible. Like an old lion, Ghazi is having to devote more and more of his energy to just staying alive.”

  Sabella paused to sip his coffee, but his eyes never left Bern; their intensity never subsided.

  “But from great trials come great opportunities,” Sabella said. “Let me explain. There are plans,” he said tentatively, carefully testing the water, “that your government should know about. There are developments going on even now that it would be fatal for your country to overlook. Ghazi has a sensitivity to such things, having lived as both American and Arab; he sees many sides to both worlds. He knows how both sides think.

  “In the months following the events of September eleventh, he saw a country that most Arabs didn’t see. He told me that it was like watching someone and being able to see his skeleton. Ghazi has always said that in revolution, as in life, success depends upon one’s ability to see beyond the obvious. The obvious is reality’s whore. Anybody can have her, but only fools believe it’s love.”

  The two men had been watching each other closely, but it was just beginning to dawn on Bern that Sabella was under a lot of pressure. His controlled demeanor was only a disguise. Being Ghazi Baida’s lieutenant and intermediary was a punishing role.

  “I can give you an example,” Sabella went on. “By the end of the first year following the crashing towers, while many jihadis were still rejoicing, Baida told me that he saw something quite different happening. It didn’t even take a year, he said, not even a year, for most of your country to return to its old rhythms of living, to its old preoccupations, to its old business of being busy.

  “In New York and Washington, D.C., of course, that was not the case perhaps. And maybe even in other large cities the population was skittish, if not vigilant. But everywhere else—for example, in that beloved ‘heartland’ that American politicians love to speak of—life returned to normal almost immediately. After all, they had little to fear themselves. There were no buildings in the heartland that were considered symbols of American power and domination, targets to the symbol-loving terrorists. There were no subways to trap people in, no density of population to gas or blast or spray with germs. The patterns of life didn’t change in the heartland because there was nothing there that offered itself to the imaginations of the terrorists, who love the ide
a of spectacle.”

  Sabella glanced at his military watch. The gesture was fleeting—if Bern had blinked at that instant, he would have missed it.

  “So, what do I fear if I live in a small town in Kansas? What do I need to be afraid of in Maryville, Ohio? Or in San Angelo, Texas? Or Tempe, Arizona? Terrorists? No, they want the Sears Tower. They want the White House. They want the Golden Gate Bridge. They want symbols. If it happens again, hell, they know they can watch it on television.

  “What Baida saw, just one year later, was that America hadn’t really been terrorized at all,” Sabella continued. “Even the people in New York and Washington, D.C.,were afraid only occasionally—when they saw something that reminded them of what had happened, when they recalled a sound, a smell, tasted a particular thing that brought it back again. But that was only an occasional thing. It didn’t preoccupy them anymore.”

  Sabella paused and shook his head. “That’s not terror, Ghazi says. That is shock, a temporary thing. Terror is something altogether different. You do not have to recall terror, nor be reminded of it, because it never leaves you. It creates a perpetual foreboding, a constant dread, which suffocates your peace of mind.”

  Sabella’s soft manner of speaking combined with his now-visible difficulty in containing his agitation presented an eerie, frightening context. It was discordant, like laughter at a funeral.

  He reached out and put his coffee on the edge of the nightstand.

  “Listen to me,” he said, his voice so soft that Bern found himself leaning forward on the bed and concentrating on Sabella’s mouth in order to decipher the words; “America will be in a hell of a lot of trouble when terrorists finally realize that the heartland is the ideal target. The captains of counterterrorism are watching the great American symbols that reside in the nation’s metropolitan centers. That’s where your government has put its funding. But security in the heartland? Nonexistent. Office buildings in Des Moines? No security. The crowded stadium at a regional football playoff in Oklahoma City? No security. A statewide basketball tournament in Indianapolis? Nothing. A school, a restaurant, a movie theater . . . in any heartland town?”

  Suddenly, the small room seemed claustrophobically intimate to Bern. The fog outside was so heavy now that it even dampened the sounds of the city. Calle Pasado seemed isolated, a foreign country all its own, a place far away, on the borders of the imagination.

  Sabella stared stoically at Bern. “Who could be more deluded about their safety than heartlanders? When you really get down to it, their belief that they don’t have anything to fear, that something like that really can’t happen to them, is pathetic. And that makes them the perfect targets.”

  Bern was horrified at the implications of Sabella’s monologue, and he was horrified that he had been placed in this position, with so little understanding of what he should do. It didn’t do him any good to imagine what Jude would do. This was way beyond that kind of simple role-playing. And it was far too important to be left to the inexplicable currents of intuition.

  Bern put his own coffee beside Sabella’s on the nightstand and stood. He stepped to the windows and looked down at the pastelería. Susana was sitting at a table with the bodyguard. They weren’t talking. She was staring out into the gray morning light through the plate-glass window of the shop.

  He turned to Sabella.

  “Explain it to me very simply,” he said. “Exactly. Precisely. No innuendo. No implications. I have to know exactly what you want and what you are offering in return.”

  Sabella looked down at his hands. His fingers were interlocked, the thumb of his right hand kneading the base of the thumb of his left hand. It wasn’t much of a gesture, but Bern was stunned to see it. This was forbidden body language, a small but profound blunder, one that gave away Sabella’s state of mind. He was under some kind of crushing pressure.

  He lifted his head and looked at Bern.

  “You can get this to the right people?”

  Bern’s heart pummeled away at his chest. This was wild. He had no authority to answer this. He had no way of knowing even if he should answer it. It was a wild, out-of-control feeling, a mad, plunging ride, where absolutely everything was at stake.

  “Yes.”

  Sabella nodded, regarding him. “I thought so.”

  Without warning, rain started falling, a sudden deluge. Bern looked across the street. He could still see Susana’s dress through the smear of rain.

  As he watched her, wishing desperately that he could see her face, he realized that he had just given away everything. Without any effort at all, Sabella had learned that Jude was connected to American intelligence. A warm, damp fear washed over him. He was suddenly nauseated, and he could almost feel the barrel against his temple. Slowly, he turned to Sabella.

  But Sabella wasn’t holding a gun. With sagging shoulders, he sat gazing at Bern, his deeply wrinkled white shirt profusely stained with sweat. The sound of the rain almost drowned out his soft voice.

  “Ghazi wants you to stage his assassination,” he said. “Then he wants you to prove to Mossad that he is dead. And prove it to all the others, too. Then he wants you to hide him somewhere and protect him.”

  Bern saw him swallow.

  “In exchange, he will give you everything: names, dates, relationships, strategies . . . a thousand reasons never to sleep again. He will take you into the wilderness of killing where we have lived together for so many years.”

  Chapter 37

  The case of a dozen items that left the burning warehouse in the industrial zone in the northern colonias of Mexico City was driven to Benito Juarez International Airport on the city’s east side. Within an hour the case was airborne, traveling on a mixed cargo commercial jet headed for Chihuahua City, the capital of one of Mexico’s northernmost states.

  In Chihuahua City, it was off-loaded, along with several crates of brass, fiberglass, and plastic stamp plates used in the manufacture of thermostat components for refrigeration units in one of the scores of maquiladoras on the edge of the city. At the maquiladora, everything was loaded onto a warehouse dock. The raw materials used for the thermostat components were eventually taken into the warehouse to be distributed, while the box of counterfeit product waited alone at one end of the dock.

  Within fifteen minutes, a panel truck pulled up to the dock. A man got out of the passenger side of the truck and loaded the box through the rear door, stacking it alongside twenty-three other boxes with identical markings. The truck drove away, and in another ten minutes its headlights picked up the highway sign the driver was looking for: Chihuahua State Highway 16. The truck turned and headed for the Mexican border town of Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas.

  The foreman on the loading dock at the Chihuahua City maquiladora pocketed five hundred U.S. dollars for ignoring the cardboard box on the side of his dock for fifteen minutes.

  It was a three-hour drive through the dark Mexican desert to the Ojinaga border-crossing station, and the van arrived at the tollbooth at 6:30 A.M. The guards on the Mexican side were used to seeing the Rivera Materiales Refrigeración van that came through the border station twice a week from the maquiladora in Chihuahua City, and they waved the van through.

  On the U.S. side, it was another matter. One guard, a sour gringo who had the reputation of being one of the strictest inspectors at the station, was, in fact, on the smugglers’ payroll. He could be bought off on any particular shipment so long as the contraband wasn’t drugs. He wouldn’t do drugs because he never knew when a drug-sniffing dog would be brought to the station on a deliberately unscheduled visit.

  Now, in fact, there was a drug-sniffing dog on duty in these early-morning hours, and the guard expertly covered his anxiety as the animal and its trainer did their business, going over the twenty-four cases of sixteen-ounce cans of V-belt aerosol lubricant for commercial refrigeration compressors. The Rivera truck brought through a variety of products twice a week. When the dog lost interest, his traine
r called him off, and the guard waved the van on. Then he poured another cup of coffee from his thermos and looked across the empty bridge to Mexico, satisfied that the serious sweat that he had expended during the last ten minutes had been worth the thousand dollars a minute that he had been paid.

  Chapter 38

  Mazen Sabella left Hotel Palomari as abruptly as he had arrived, and in the midst of a downpour. The knock on the door didn’t seem to surprise him, and when the door swung open and his men stood there soaking wet, it was time to leave.

  “Wait a second,” Bern said. “What . . . what . . .”

  Sabella said something in Arabic, and his men stepped back out into the narrow, dreary hallway and closed the door. He turned to Bern.

  “Just find out if they will do it,” Sabella said. “We can work out the details later. And the sooner the better. There are . . . pressures on Baida that make this window of opportunity very small. When it closes, it cannot be opened again.”

  “And to get back with you?”

  “The hospital. Same instructions.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Stay here five minutes. Susana will stay in the pastelería.” Sabella took a step toward Bern, put his left hand on Bern’s right shoulder, and gripped it. He was going to say something else, then changed his mind and turned and walked out of the room.

  Bern turned to the window and looked down to the front door, over which hung the Palomari’s anemic blue neon sign. Nothing. After a couple of minutes, they still hadn’t stepped out into the thundering rain. But he knew they were gone.

  He looked across the street through the screen of driv-ing rain and saw Susana standing close to the plate-glass window, looking up at him. He motioned to her that he was coming over. He saw her nod, and then he turned and headed for the door. Screw the five minutes—he wanted out of that hotel room.

  He banged against the wall in the narrow stairwell, making the turn without even seeing his own feet. Suddenly in the foyer, he hardly registered that there was more to the astonished expression on the old man’s face than merely being surprised by Bern. In a breath, he was across the white tile floor and out the Palomari’s doorway. The rain was sweeping across the street at an angle, and he was completely soaked before he hit the sidewalk on the other side.