The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  When he burst into the pastelería, it took him only an instant to realize that the astonished faces and frozen postures of the two women behind the pastry counter had nothing to do with his arrival. He looked in stunned disbelief at the overturned table and chairs next to the plate-glass window, the splattered coffee running down the glass. The two women were still frozen, eyes wide, expectant.

  Then he bolted out into the middle of the street, frantically scanning the rain-blurred sidewalks, looking everywhere at once. The downpour was deafening. But there were no cars. No people. Nothing. Just the rain.

  He stood in the middle of the street in the driving rain as if he had been clubbed. He just couldn’t think. And then when he could, all he could think of was Susana—what was happening to her right now, how she must feel, the fear, the panic, the wild confusion.

  And he thought of what might happen to her if he wasn’t ready when he needed to be ready, ready for whatever was going to come later, because he knew in his gut that something sure as hell was going to come later. They weren’t through with him. Nobody was through with him. Everybody wanted something more, and he had a feeling that Susana was going to be used somehow, and he was going to have to be ready . . . for something.

  All of this flashed through his mind in milliseconds, and then he started running toward Insurgentes.

  He grabbed the first taxi on Insurgentes and told the driver to get to the Glorieta Insurgentes at Avenida Chapultepec as fast as he could. Maybe hoping for a big tip for his efforts, the driver pushed his way through the dense traffic as if his life depended on it. But Bern was oblivious of the driver’s frantic efforts, his mind replaying what the two pastry shop clerks had described to him of Susana’s abduction. As soon as the two men who were with her bolted from the shop and crossed the street, Susana went to the window and looked up. She stayed there until she seemed to catch someone’s attention in the window of the hotel across the street, and then immediately two other men burst into the shop and went after her. There was a struggle during which she was slapped to the floor, and then the two men took her out into the rain and led her to a waiting car.

  That was all they saw, all they knew, and after telling him about it two times, they wouldn’t say any more. Bern played this scene over and over in his mind during the trip up Insurgentes. Just after the taxi driver crossed Alvaro Obregón, Bern told him to turn right on Durango, and suddenly the cab was at Plaza Rio de Janeiro. Bern grabbed everything he had in his pocket, flung it into the front seat, and jumped out of the taxi.

  He ran across the dark, empty plaza, past the statue of Michelangelo’s David, and bolted across the street and into the building on the corner. He was met at the foot of the stairwell by the man who had been smoking a cigarette outside the door when he and Susana had come here.

  “Hey-hey-hey!” the guy shouted at him as he crouched, his gun drawn and pointing at Bern, the other hand up, palm out.

  “I need to talk to Kevern,” Bern wheezed, sucking air. “Okay? I need to see him.”

  The guy produced his cell phone, pushed a button. “Bern’s here . . . in a hurry.” He slapped the phone closed and frisked Bern, then said, “Come on,” and they ran up the stairs together.

  Kevern and the two women were waiting as they pushed through the door, faces registering controlled alarm.

  “What’s the deal?” Kevern growled, his face hard, anticipating bad news. The two women’s eyes were devouring him.

  The rooms reeked of the leftovers of old take-out meals and lack of circulation. They got him a chair, but he wouldn’t sit down, couldn’t stop pacing.

  Suddenly, he was light-headed, too much running for an elevation stingy on oxygen, and he had burned more than was available. Dizzy, he must have swayed a little, because the guy behind him helped him into the chair, where he sat, heaving like an asthmatic. The Mexican woman stepped into the other room and came back with a plastic bottle of water. Twisting off the cap, she handed it to him. He nodded to her and then gulped a few mouthfuls from the bottle, staring at the floor. His thoughts were bouncing all over the place. He decided to go to the heart of it.

  “I’ve just finished a meeting with Mazen Sabella. Baida wants to defect . . . for protection.” He was looking at Kevern, whose mouth actually dropped open.

  “Jeee-susss,” Kevern said.

  “After the meeting, I crossed the street to a . . . uh, pastry shop, where Susana was waiting with two of Sabella’s men. The place had been wrecked. Two women there said that two men ran into the place, grabbed Susana, who put up a struggle, and left with her.”

  The strawberry blonde wheeled around and looked at the monitor.

  “Her GPS is dead,” she said to the others without looking at them.

  “Sabella said Baida wanted to defect?” Kevern rasped.

  Bern gulped another couple of mouthfuls of water and nodded.

  “How long’s it been?” Kevern snapped.

  Bern shook his head. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Without taking his eyes off Bern, Kevern reached out, dragged over a chair, and sat down.

  “Let’s hear the story.”

  Chapter 39

  “The hospital” was how they referred to this dirty building on a dark street in a forgotten colonia near the Benito Juarez Airport. It was a favorite interrogation location for Quito’s men, because at night everyone went inside and locked their doors against the things that happened in the dark. In the deep hours of the night, the featureless street, which always smelled of smoke from God knew where and constantly rumbled with low-flying jets that sprayed their spent lubricants over the colonia’s flat rooftops, became a wasteland.

  Making a tight turn at a narrow intersection of three streets, Mondragón’s driver pulled to the curb under a dying pirul tree and left the engine running. Mondragón stared through his mask at the grim warren of hovels that stretched into the darkness in every direction. He gazed at the dull jaundiced light in the windows of the building across the street while a jet lumbered low overhead, a prolonged whistling, throbbing explosion that made the raw flesh on the front of his head tingle with vibrations.

  When it was gone, Mondragón opened the door, got out of the car, and crossed the street to a murky doorway. One of Quito’s guards met him and silently led the way through a junky corridor littered with empty butane tanks, electrical parts, crumpled plastic bottles, and a pile of discarded car batteries that were leaking puddles of acid onto the gritty floor.

  They entered a bare room, where Quito and several men were standing around smoking and drinking beer. They were sweaty, taking a break. The only light was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a newspaper shade taped around the cord just above it. The yellow paper threw a stale light through the layers of cigarette smoke that hung in the stuffy air.

  Quito stepped aside with Mondragón and led him out another door. Quito’s men were well trained, and they ignored Mondragón as if he were the Invisible Man. They stepped into a kind of breezeway that led into another hallway. On either side of the hallway were two rooms, doors slightly ajar. The light in the rooms, though dim, was lighter than in the breezeway, and Mondragón could see people moving around.

  “We found the girl at Domingo Huerta’s,” Quito said. His tie was undone, and his expression was sober with the business of the evening.

  “What the hell was he doing?”

  “Jude had given Huerta’s girls copies of the pictures of Baida that he had drawn, and he had them asking if anyone had seen this man. These girls were doing this through their family connections, circling several particular families—”

  “The de Leóns, the Carballidos, the Marmols, the Zubietos . . . all the people we were in school with.”

  Quito nodded.

  “And then he gave this piece of paper to Bern.”

  Quito nodded again. “And it said, ‘Estele de León Pheres.’”

  They both paused while another jet lunged off the tarmac, the sound so deafening t
hat it made their hair vibrate. It seemed to go on forever. Quito dragged on the last of his cigarette and flicked it against a wall. Mondragón stepped over and peered past one of the slightly opened doors. In this room, they had been questioning the girl found at Mingo’s. He saw the naked legs and bare shoulders of the young woman tied to a straight-back wooden chair. Her head was thrown back, and she appeared to be unconscious, her long dark hair hanging down over the back of the chair. A guy with an ice pick was walking around, head down, talking to himself.

  As the roar began to subside, Quito lighted another cigarette, and Mondragón came back, glancing at the men in the room he had come through a moment ago. They were talking again, one of them tapping his leg with a beer bottle, his middle finger jammed into its long neck to hold it.

  Mondragón knew what the girl had been through. With these men, some things were inevitable during the questioning of a woman.

  “Estele?” Mondragón asked.

  Quito gestured with his cigarette to the other door.

  Mondragón stepped over and peered through the slight opening. He hadn’t seen Estele in six or seven years, hadn’t spoken to her in maybe ten. She was handsome, as she had always been. Being older hadn’t changed that.

  She was sitting on a wooden bench in the middle of the bare room. Above and just to one side of her dangled another single dingy lightbulb covered with another yellowing newspaper shade. She wore a dark cotton jersey-knit dress, belted at the waist, the tight sleeves pushed back slightly from her wrists. Her dark hair was not long, as if she thought that a woman of her age should not pretend to sexy locks cascading over her shoulders, but the manner in which she wore it was stylish, the sides swept back to accent the graying at her temples. She sat with her legs together and angled to one side, ankles crossed, hands folded in her lap.

  Mondragón put his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and went in, his emotions well cauterized in anticipation of her reaction. She turned around while Mondragón was still in the dark shadows at the edge of the room, and as he approached, she watched, her face changing from curiosity, to consternation, to shock, to repulsion, and then to fear, a sequence of changes that Mondragón had seen over and over during the past two years.

  He grabbed the only other chair in the room, a rusty chrome kitchen chair with a cherry red vinyl seat and back. He put it in front of her, but at the edge of the pool of jaundiced light. Then he sat down.

  She stared at him in horrified amazement, which even her rigid social correctness could not conceal.

  Crossing his legs and then crossing his arms in his lap, he looked at her and modulated his voice in the unlikely event that she might recognize it.

  “Do you know why you are here?” he asked.

  “Apparently, I’ve been kidnapped,” she said, her voice a mixture of uncertainty and defiance.

  Mondragón could almost see her gather her resolve to look directly at him, willfully resisting the natural repulsion she felt. But he saw, too, that her curiosity compelled her to try to figure out what exactly it was that she was seeing in the shadows at the edge of the pool of light.

  “Do you remember last week, or the week before, that a young woman visited you and showed you a picture, a drawing, of a man that she was trying to locate?”

  There was no hesitation. “Yes, I do.”

  “You recognized him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  She hesitated. “Why?”

  “You may not ask me questions,” he said. He knew precisely the right tone to use, and saw its effect in her rigid reaction, as if he had slapped her. Mexico City’s culture of violence made intimidation easy for men like him. People were quick to believe that their luck had finally run out and that they had at last been caught up in the city’s notorious grotesquerie of crime.

  “Who is he?” Mondragón repeated.

  “Daniel Spota.”

  “And . . .”

  “He is the man seeing my sister Carleta.”

  “How long has she been seeing him?”

  “Off and on for maybe a year.”

  “He lives here?”

  “He lives in Bogotá.”

  “You’ve met him? Talked to him?”

  “Three or four times.”

  Mondragón regarded her a moment. Had she actually been around Ghazi Baida with his new face and not recognized something familiar about him? Had she really been duped? Or was she covering for him? Would she not recognize Mondragón, then? She would have no reason to. After all, Baida thought Mondragón was dead, so if she was indeed collaborating with him, she would have no reason to think of Mondragón. The old days were just that, old and gone, never to return. Ever.

  “I need to talk to this Spota,” Mondragón said. “How can I get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused. “He dates my sister when he is in the city. That’s all I know.” Another pause. “Really, I don’t know,” she protested.

  “What is your sister’s address?”

  Estele was looking at him, eyes wide. She swallowed. Mondragón could see her thinking, running through her options. If Estele was completely innocent, she would give this Spota over immediately if she could. If not, she would try to play this out in some elaborate way.

  “I need to see Spota as soon as possible,” Mondragón said.

  For once, the haughty Estele de León Pheres was bewildered, incapable of uttering a sentence.

  “Ah, the Lebanese stick together, don’t they, Estele?”

  Suddenly, even through her fear, her eyes narrowed.

  “Yes,” Mondragón said. “I know all about the Lebanese. Are you going to help me?”

  She gaped at him, unable to decide on her best course of action.

  “I’m going to have my men come in here, take off your clothes, and take turns with you,” he said. “And then I’ll have them bring Carleta in here and take turns with her. And then I’ll have your little sister, Juana, brought in here. Ah! Yes, of course,” he said, noting her surprised reaction, “I know about her, too. And so many other things. Anyway, sooner or later one of you is going to tell me how I can find Señor . . . Spota.”

  He stood up and started toward the door, skirting the edge of the light as she followed him with her eyes. Suddenly, she stood, too.

  “Wait.” She was kneading her hands. “What—how do I know you will protect us?”

  “Protect you?”

  “You have to promise this can’t be traced back to me.”

  He turned to her and took a step toward her. “I’m here to get information, Estele, not to offer protection, not to make promises. You have to give me what I want. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit what happens to you.”

  She stared at him, appalled at his crude response and at the stark hopelessness of her situation.

  He walked out of the room, leaving her standing under the bleak light, alone.

  Chapter 40

  Kevern didn’t waste any time moving on the information Bern had given him. First, he introduced Bern to the other three people in his unit. The whole tenor of the operation had changed on a dime, and now Bern needed to start feeling as if he could depend on these people, that he was tied to them, that he was no longer out there working alone.

  Then Kevern immediately called Mondragón and told him to stand down. “Just hold off doing anything until I get in touch with you again,” Kevern said. “I’ll explain everything later.”

  Kevern was pumped way past any operational high that he had ever experienced, except in a life-threatening situation. But he had his enthusiasm well under control. It wasn’t hard to do. Things weren’t rosy by any means. Bern’s account of the events of the last twelve hours revealed the best and the worst thing that could have happened. A defection by someone of Ghazi Baida’s stature would be the crowning achievement of a career. A huge, huge coup, one that would wash over a lot of past sins.

  On the other hand, Susana’s disappearance was a
potential disaster. If she was killed, the blowback could create a shit storm in any number of different directions. Baida’s defection would have to be judged in light of the loss of a highly trained clandestine operative. Somebody would have to pay for a loss like that.

  In Kevern’s mind, however, Baida’s defection, if Kevern could pull it off, would wash away the other disasters, if they didn’t develop into anything monstrous. But if he couldn’t make it work, this was the end of his life. So, in for the bet, in for the pot: He decided not to call Richard Gordon about any of this. He would play it out a little way first, see where it was going, see what his chances were for redemption.

  A lot would depend on the continuing success of the long-shot role of Paul Bern. Kevern had passed along to Gordon that Bern had successfully encountered Mazen Sabella and Ghazi Baida and was now waiting for a confirmation for a second meeting. Like Kevern, Gordon was stunned by Bern’s ballsy drive. Mondragón’s harebrained long shot had succeeded—so far.

  But now Bern was going to have to keep it up, and it would be Kevern’s responsibility to keep him focused. Right now, he could tell that Bern was distracted, and he knew why.

  He grabbed a soft drink from a Styrofoam cooler sitting on the floor by his desk, pulled a chair over in front of Bern, and sat down. Bern was still sitting in the chair they had given him when he rushed into the room. He had just about emptied his water bottle after almost an hour’s debriefing. Kevern knew that the stress of Bern’s situation had to be weighing heavily on him.

  Jack Petersen had gone back down to his post in the building’s foyer, while Mattie and Lupe were busy with chores that Kevern had barked out to them earlier. Mattie was sitting at a makeshift table, poring over a computer screen, while Lupe was on the other side of the room, her back turned to them, talking into her cell phone, her voice a discreet murmur.