The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Nobody’s talking,” Kevern said. They could hear traffic in the background.

  “He’s listening,” Lupe said. “Bern is.”

  “Not on our phone, he isn’t,” Mattie insisted again. “Where’d he get another cell?”

  They exchanged looks.

  “Those were your people who took Susana?” Bern asked incredulously.

  Kevern was leaning his beefy forearms on the table, making it sag a little, staring hard at the receiver. Bern continued, asking the person on the other end what he was doing, what he wanted. Silence while Bern listened, and then he asked, “You’re still trying to find Baida?”

  “Oh shit,” Kevern said in dismay. “He’s talking to Vicente. It’s Mondragón.”

  “I was with Kevern when he called you, told you to hold off. . . . What’re you doing?”

  They listened to more expressions of Bern’s incredulity. And then: “Insurance? Insurance against what?” Bern asked.

  Silence ensued while Bern listened to Mondragón. And then Bern said, “Baida wants to defect.” Silence. “Yeah, that’s right.” Silence. “No, he doesn’t suspect anything.”

  “Well, there it is,” Mattie said. “Now Mondragón knows why you pulled him off the hunt.”

  Heated words from Bern followed as he insisted that Baida didn’t suspect anything, that he would know if Baida did, that he would sense it.

  Then Bern told Mondragón where he was going and what he was supposed to do when he got there.

  “We should’ve told him the phone was live,” Lupe said, shaking her head, looking at Kevern. “He could’ve worded all of this differently. He could’ve been more informative, passed a lot more to us.”

  Kevern shook his head resolutely. “It would’ve been a mistake. He would’ve tried to tell us too much, repeated things Mondragón was saying to let us know what was going on. Vicente would’ve been all over that. No, we’re fucking lucky we didn’t tell him.”

  “The paperboy,” Mattie said, still bothered by the sudden appearance of another cell phone. “He threw the phone in there. That’s what happened.”

  “Listen, listen.” Kevern leaned into the recorder. Nothing but traffic, horns, someone yelling, hawking something. The screech of brakes.

  “He’s giving him instructions,” Lupe conjectured. “Wants him to do something?”

  “And the third thing?” Bern asked.

  Silence. More traffic. A snippet of music. No more conversation.

  “He’s giving him a list of things to do,” Mattie said.

  Lupe had left off wth the snails. “Or not to do,” she said. “Vicente’s threatening him.”

  “That’s what picking up Susana was all about,” Mattie said. “Mondragón wants Bern to do something. And Susana’s screwed if he doesn’t do it.”

  Kevern began his subdued groan, seeming to hold it back. The two women looked at him.

  “What the hell is Mondragón planning?” Kevern asked no one in particular. “He wants to get to Baida anyway?”

  He stood up and looked at his watch. Grunting softly, he moved around the room, rubbing the back of his neck, his head down.

  “He’s not calling us,” Mattie said. “You’d think he’d call after he got off the phone with Mondragón.”

  Kevern shook his head. “Vicente threatened him, like Lupe said. Vicente didn’t want him to call us.”

  “So Bern’s holding on to our phone,” Mattie said, “and he’s sure as hell hanging on to Mondragón’s phone, too.” She listened to the transmissions. Again street sounds, but they were fading. “They’ve turned off Insurgentes,” she said. “He’s going to be at Jardin Morena pretty soon, Lex. What’re you going to do? Do we call Bern?”

  “No,” Kevern snapped, stopping his pacing and turning to them.

  “Call Mondragón,” Lupe said. “Tell him he’s about to screw up in a fucking big way.”

  “Then he’ll know Bern’s wired,” Kevern said. “He’ll work around it. This way, if he thinks the threat to Susana is going to buy Bern’s cooperation—and it looks like it will—he’ll think he can communicate with him. We’ll have a shot at it at least.”

  Kevern’s situation looked bad. Though he directed the operation and controlled the purse strings, he had to use Mondragón’s tech people, Mondragón’s intelligence, Mondragón’s muscle. Now it seemed that Mondragón suddenly had his own agenda, leaving Kevern toothless.

  Normally in an emergency situation, he would automatically turn to the CIA station’s technical services. But of course this wasn’t a normal situation. If he did that, he would be blowing Heavy Rain, which was running off the books right under the Mexico City station’s nose. Not only would it cause a shit storm inside the Agency, but the resulting brawl within the Agency could very well boil over into the intelligence community’s gossip mills. Within hours, it would be in the press, and that would automatically trigger an international incident.

  But if his hunch was right, he just might have to take that risk anyway in order to save Baida from being assassinated by Mondragón. Jesus, talk about irony.

  Why Mondragón was hell-bent to do this, Kevern couldn’t imagine, and he didn’t have time to try to figure it out. But he was sure of it. He felt it in his gut—shit, he felt in his nuts, right down inside the core of him, so solid, so right, he had no doubt about it at all. No proof, but it was a fucking certainty.

  Lexington Kevern was scared.

  He looked up, unaware that he had had his head ducked, staring at the floor, until he saw the two women staring at him. Then suddenly, they heard another transmission. Bern was paying the taxi driver.

  Kevern had to decide. In for the bet, in for the pot.

  “Lupe, get the GPS monitor,” he snapped, going to his desk, taking his handgun out of the drawer, and clipping it onto his belt. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit a number. “Jack, get the car.”

  Chapter 43

  El Paso, Texas

  By eight o’clock the next morning, the Rivera van was pulling into another warehouse district, this one on the outer edges of El Paso. At a regional distribution center for refrigeration products and supplies, the twenty-four cases of aerosol V-belt lubricant were off-loaded in their usual section of the warehouse. The inventory foreman checked them in, and the van headed to the Cordova Bridge on the Rio Grande and back to Mexico.

  The floor foreman directed his three employees to move various stacks of inventory to new locations, a temporary reshuffling, he said. The jobs took them to the far side of the warehouse. When they were gone, he went to the waiting cases of Dempsey’s Best lubricant and found the one with a red dot on the lower right corner of each side.

  Opening the case, he removed four cans with red dots on their concave bottoms and substituted them for four regular cans in a second case. He resealed the second case, added red dots to each of its lower right sides, and labeled the case for pickup by the Rocky Mountain Refrigeration Supply van.

  He followed the same procedure with another four cans of the red dot lubricants, again opening an unmarked case of lubricant and substituting four red dot cans for regular cans and resealing the case, adding red dots to the lower right corner of its four sides, and labeling it for pickup by the Ames Midwest Air Conditioning Supplies van. He resealed the original red dot case, which now contained only four cans with red dots on their bottoms and eight cans without red dots, and relabeled the case for pickup by the American Industrial Refrigeration Supplies van.

  Within an hour, all three vans had picked up their cases of Dempsey’s Best aerosol V-belt lubricant. Hidden among these cases in each van was one containing four cans with red dots. These red dot cans were headed for a dozen different destinations in a dozen different states. Within forty-eight hours, every red dot aerosol can would be in the hands of the men who would use them.

  The El Paso warehouse foreman who enabled the distribution knew nothing about what he was doing e
xcept that he had agreed to shuffle cans with red dots and to keep his mouth shut about it. In exchange, he would receive twenty thousand dollars for his troubles.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, he received a telephone call from Juárez confirming that all the red dots were safely on their way. Mission completed. The money was his. He told his boss that he was coming down with a stomach virus, then took the rest of the afternoon off. He drove across the Cordova Bridge, headed to a motel in Juárez to collect his money.

  But he never returned.

  On the Mexican side of the border, murder went for 3,500 American dollars a pop. It was a bargain. Money well spent, from a security point of view.

  Chapter 44

  Jardin Morena in Colonia Santa Luisa was not on the tourist maps of Mexico City. It was just a neighborhood plaza, a small park shaded by laurels and jacarandas and a few palms. A fountain with a traditional stone basin anchored the center of the park. Broad sidewalks radiated out from the fountain to all sides of the plaza, with flower beds and patches of lawn in between.

  Girdling the park on all four sides was a wide paseo where old men haunted the wrought-iron benches in silent fear of the noonday demons and where couples and families strolled in the cool of the evenings. But on market days, sidewalk vendors laid out displays of their wares on the paseo and the whole place turned into a bazaar.

  Bern didn’t have the presence of mind to tell the cabdriver to drop him on the north side of the plaza, and he had never been quite straight about where any of the compass directions were in this Babylon of oblique streets. So when he stepped onto the paseo and confronted the phalanx of vendors, who seemed undaunted by the threatening rain, he didn’t have the slightest idea where the seller of comic books might be.

  Without any plan whatsoever, he started walking, eager to get on with it, driven by a sense of urgency inspired by the multiplicity of disastrous possibilities before him. He imagined Mondragón’s men spreading out, hiding in plain sight among the casual shoppers drifting by the vendors who surrounded the plaza.

  An organ-grinder’s faint piping drifted to him through the crowd and the trees of the plaza as he walked past an old woman wearing two straw hats, one on top of the other, and selling brilliant magenta flowers. A man with a potpourri of socks spread out in a creative sunburst design on a piece of blue plastic offered them with an elegant sweep of his arm. A middle-aged Indian woman with pigtails crouched on her knees on a rush mat, perfecting her pyramid of chili red chapulines, tiny fried grasshoppers stacked as high as her waist. On the other side of her, a man sat glumly on a bright yellow blanket, his wild assortment of offerings scattered out in front of him: old crazed fountain pens, a stack of 78-rpm records in their original brown paper covers, a fanned display of rusty bottle openers, three small identical plaster statues of a laughing white-aproned waiter, and a pink plastic Buddha wedged in between two human skulls.

  The array of weird wares only added to Bern’s sense of being caught up in a time warp, an alien strata of someone else’s imagination. As he wondered where Mondragón’s men were, he couldn’t help remembering what they had done to Khalil’s cell in Tepito the night after Jude’s death. Was something like that even possible in buildings surrounding this pleasant plaza?

  He turned a corner in the plaza and started up another side, when he spotted the pharmacy. But when he got parallel with it, there was no seller of comic books. He searched for the phone box. There it was. He crossed the street and walked slowly by, pausing, pretending to look into the window of the pharmacy. There was no red dot beside the number six.

  Wait. Wait. He looked up at the name of the pharmacy: Farmacia Morena. Shit. Why the hell hadn’t the woman warned him that there were two pharmacies? She could’ve said that. He moved on, this time staying on the street side, watching the plaza from there.

  Had he imagined it, or had there been men moving along with him in the midst of the crowd in the park? What did it matter? He knew Mondragón’s men were there.

  He crossed the street and turned along the third side of the plaza. The music from the organ-grinder was still remote. Children laughed, and a man selling balloons on the paseo hawked them in a sing-song litany, which one of the children began to mimic.

  He almost stumbled on the comic book vendor. There, spread out in front of him on an old blanket on the front of the sidewalk, was a gaudy collection of horror comics. All of them were battered old copies of Fantomas, La Amenaza Elegante, the covers portraying a handsome dark villain with a cape menacing a variety of heroines with scant clothing, large breasts, and long thighs provocatively spread in vulnerable poses of distress.

  And to his left: Farmacia Pedras.

  He turned and approached the telephone, saw the red dot, put the required coins into the slot, and punched in the number. Two rings.

  “Judas, you’re being followed,” Sabella said.

  “Shit.” It was a stupid response. Stupid.

  Sabella asked, “Do you know who it is?”

  Bern thought of Alice. He thought of Susana. “No,” he said. “Don’t have a clue. I thought I was okay.”

  “You need to face the plaza, Judas. Careful, don’t be obvious. I’m going to describe things to you.”

  Bern shifted his weight, rested an arm on the phone box, shifted again as he turned.

  “The guy coming down the sidewalk from the same direction you came,” Sabella said, “he’s following you. He’s probably going to go right by you into the pharmacy. They’re going to try to wrap you up.”

  “Okay,” Bern said, and the man walked past him, nearly brushing his shoulder, and went into the pharmacy.

  “I’ve got him,” Sabella said.

  Bern wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “Was he wearing an ear mike?” Sabella asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Shit. Okay, now across the paseo, buying the balloon.”

  Bern wiped his forehead on the arm of his coat and spotted the guy.

  “Okay.”

  “To your left,” Sabella went on. “The guy who just sat down at the sidewalk café.”

  “Mustache?” Bern asked.

  “Yeah. And just now crossing the paseo by the woman selling lottery tickets.”

  “Dark suit,” Bern confirmed. “Sideburns. Smoking.”

  “Yes,” Sabella said.

  Across on the paseo, the guy who had bought the balloon was giving it to a little girl, who was glancing at her mother to see if this was okay. Then the guy strolled over to a fruit vendor and bought a couple of slices of mango wrapped in a piece of paper and stood by a trash container to eat them.

  Sabella had fallen silent.

  Bern checked the others. They were staying in place. He made a mental note: So Sabella was there, somewhere on the plaza, running interference for the reclusive Baida, as always. Probably they were in one of the buildings on the north side, since that’s where all the action was right now and they were seeing all of it.

  Still nothing else from Sabella. Bern waited.

  Somewhere lurking on the perimeter of the plaza, Vicente Mondragón was waiting, too, peering out through the smoky windows of his Mercedes. With Susana.

  There was no use in pretending what was going on here. Bern knew, somehow, that Mondragón, for whatever abominable reasons, was going to kill Ghazi Baida despite Kevern’s order to stand down. That meant that as far as Lex Kevern was concerned, Mondragón had turned rogue. And that meant that Bern had become the pivotal player right smack in the middle of a dilemma.

  “What’s the word from your people?” Sabella asked suddenly. His voice was hushed, as if he had to speak softly to keep from being discovered. Where the hell was he?

  “It’s a deal,” Bern said. He had been so preoccupied trying to figure out all the angles of what was happening to him that he was unaware of the physical effects of the stress he was under. When he spoke, there was hardly enough air to push out the words. “They need to know . . . have you got a plan�
��”

  “Yes. There’s a plan.” Sabella was curt; an edgy impatience had slipped into his voice now. “But first, Judas, I have to know what’s going on here. Who the hell are these people?”

  Bern was sweating, his hand massaging the telephone as he tried to keep a grip on it. Something was changing. What was Sabella seeing? Bern saw nothing. None of the men had moved. They were waiting. Everyone was waiting.

  A ray of sun pierced the clouds, sending a thin bar of laser-bright light transiting the plaza.

  God, thought Bern. All of his options were risky, and he was taking too long to make up his mind. Each person involved here was dangling by his own slender strand; each was betting on Bern to do the thing he wanted him to do.

  Mondragón was waiting for him to lead him to Baida, and Mondragón was betting that he would do this because of Susana. Sabella was betting that he would deliver Baida and him from twenty-two years of killing and fear and hiding and sleeplessness. Kevern was betting that Bern could live his lie just a few more hours and bring about the richest intelligence coup of the terrorism wars.

  And Susana. Bern guessed that for all her training and professionalism, for all her personal bravery, she was, at this moment, simply thinking like a terrified woman. She knew what Mondragón was capable of, and deep within her she must be weak with fear, knowing that the only thing standing between her and Mondragón’s violence was the judgment of an equally petrified Paul Bern.

  But ultimately, Bern’s decision came down to the husk of a memory that might well have blown away in the gale of intervening events. But it, too, had waited on Bern, suspended and latent in his subconscious.

  The last thing Sabella had said to him before leaving the room in Hotel Palomari was that there were pressures on Baida that made this window of opportunity very small. “When it closes, it cannot be opened again,” he’d said.

  “Judas,” Sabella said, speaking slowly, as if his suspicion had reached critical mass, “what have you done?”