The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Chapter 45

  “Listen, Mazen,” Bern said, turning his back to the plaza again. He hunched over the phone box as if protecting a private conversation, then carefully pulled Kevern’s phone out of his inside coat pocket.

  “I’ve got a secure cell phone to my people, and I’m opening it right now,” he said, running his thumb down the three digits as Lupe had showed him. “Okay?”

  “Yes, okay,” Sabella said.

  Bern waited, listening to the hum, the click, the connection.

  “I’m here,” Kevern said.

  “Now . . . I’m talking to both of you,” Bern said into both phones. “You’re both hearing what I’m saying at this moment. Okay, Mazen?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Lex?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” Kevern’s voice had slipped into the smooth monotone of operational dispassion. Be cool, it said to Bern. Be careful. Don’t let the juice confuse your thinking.

  “Lex, let me bring you up to—”

  “We know,” Kevern said quickly. “Your phone’s been live all this time. We’re up to speed.”

  Bern was stunned and pissed, but there was no time for that.

  “Well, shit, then,” he snapped, “are you sending someone?”

  “We’re on the way,” Kevern said.

  Move on, move on, Bern kept telling himself.

  “Mazen, I know you’re at a vantage point where you can see this side of the plaza. Are you in rooms above Farmacia Pedras?”

  “Hurry,” Mazen said.

  Flustered, Bern went on. “Okay, these men in the plaza are Vicente Mondragón’s. He’s got Susana, and he said he’d kill her if I told you, or contacted my people. He’s expecting me to lead him to you. I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s planning, but we’ve tried to stop him. Now he’s broken communication with us.”

  Bern was talking fast, cramming everything in.

  “Mazen, listen, you said that we had only a small window of opportunity here and after that it would be too late. Were you referring to information that you have that’s time-critical? Do you need to tell us something now? Do we need to do something?”

  The ensuing lack of response was the most unnerving silence Bern had ever experienced. Weirdly, he began to experience an alteration in perception, not of sight or sound or touch, but of the flow of time. Sabella’s silence extended through the afternoon and into dusk.

  “Mondragón,” Sabella said. His voice, too, was accommodating the numbing stress of their situation. “Yes, that was a good choice, Judas. A good choice, because we didn’t even know that he was still alive.” His voice had lost its tension, and he seemed composed. Or was it the serenity of resignation?

  “Where’s Vicente now?” Sabella asked.

  Bern told him about Mondragón catching up to him on his way to Jardin Morena, about the phone, the conversation they’d had, the threats.

  “So I don’t know where he is,” he added. “I guess he’s in the area somewhere.”

  “Yes, hanging back,” Sabella agreed.

  “But Kevern is on the way with people.”

  “Four of us,” Kevern interjected.

  “Four,” Bern said to Sabella.

  “We don’t have any people here,” Sabella said, and this time Bern could clearly hear the resignation in his voice. And yet it wasn’t quite resignation, either, it was more like an intimacy with fate, as if he held no rancor for the inevitable. It was a philosophical acceptance of the inevitable.

  “We come to Plaza Morena twice a week, if we can. We’ve done it for over a year now. But we come alone. We have a very elaborate process that we go through that allows us to come here—safely, alone. When we enter Plaza Morena, we’re just two more anonymous capitalinos, nothing more.”

  “Twice a week?”

  “Ghazi has a woman here,” Sabella explained.

  Oh shit. “He’s with her now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no bodyguards?” Bern couldn’t believe it. Despite what Kevern had told him, he thought Sabella and Baida would have someone to help them.

  This explained why Sabella seemed to know the plaza so well. He must have spent hours sitting by the window, wherever the window was, gazing down at the plaza. When you are familiar with the daily rhythms of life on a street or in a neighborhood, you acquire a sense of what normal is in that place. A new face or a change in routine is like an alarm going off.

  Bern related Baida’s situation to Kevern and then asked, “Where the hell are you?”

  “We’re about halfway there.”

  “Look, when you get to the Jardin Morena,” Bern said, “I’m—”

  “There’s GPS on your cell, Paul. We know exactly where you are.”

  “He’s taking too long,” Quito said, referring to Bern talking on the pay phone. He was sitting in Mondragón’s Mercedes, around the block from Jardin Morena. Susana was in the backseat with Mondragón, and Quito was sitting beside the driver, working the radio equipment that was keeping him in touch with his men on the plaza. “He’s talking to Kevern or Baida, telling them what’s happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Mondragón said. “Baida’s plan will be very elaborate, complex. He will want to give himself plenty of room to check and cross-check.”

  “He’s not writing anything down,” Quito said.

  “Baida wouldn’t let him do that,” Mondragón replied. “Bern could be memorizing the route, the time sequence. Maybe repeating it back to Baida, rehearsing it.”

  “Or he could be spilling his guts,” Quito insisted.

  “You know,” Mondragón said, “Jude might have done that. He was just crazy enough to take the risk that we wouldn’t shoot her. But Bern’s not that tough, doesn’t have that kind of discipline.”

  “But he’s taking too long,” Quito warned.

  In truth, Mondragón was uneasy about the amount of time Bern was spending on the phone, too. Quito was probably right, damn it.

  “Where’s Kevern now?” Mondragón asked, spritzing the front of his head.

  “They’ve just passed Parque Hundido.”

  “Perfecto,” Mondragón said. “Wait until they are approaching the on-ramp to the circuito and do it there.”

  “Judas,” Sabella said, breaking the silence. “Stay where you are. I’m going to be off the phone for a few minutes, but I’ll be back.”

  “What? Wait!”

  “Just stay where you are. Stay on the phone. Talk to your man. I’ll be back. Do it.”

  Bern couldn’t believe it. “He just left the phone,” Bern said to Kevern.

  “Left the phone? Whatta you mean?”

  “He left the goddamned phone. Said for me to stay on the phone. Not to leave the phone.”

  “Shit, he’s running,” Kevern said. “He’s running, goddamn it!”

  Mondragón’s man inside the pharmacy could see Bern through the front window. He kept one eye on him as he milled around the rows of shelves in the small shop. There was no one there at first, and then a young woman came in with a child, one of those children who simply stared at you in sober silence and could not be charmed into any kind of reaction at all. And yet she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Gave him the creeps.

  The store was L-shaped, so he went around the corner into another row of shelves to get away from the kid, although still keeping Bern in sight. Good, magazines. He looked for some sexy covers and picked up one of them just as another woman entered from the back door of the shop, which opened into a typical courtyard.

  The woman was nice-looking, late thirties, her dark hair done up quickly. She wore a blue shirtwaist dress that buttoned up the front. The top button was undone, exposing a very nice set of chichis. He glanced at Bern.

  The woman came right at him, apparently interested in the magazines, too. But she seemed to want to see the ones on the other side of him. Gathering her skirt delicately, she begged his pardon, and he stepped back to let her by. For one sweet moment, they were fa
ce-to-face as she slipped past him, her eyes modestly averted as her bosom wafted by right under his nose. On the other side now, she turned her back to the front of the store, Bern behind her, and bent down to search through the magazines on the bottom shelf.

  Her position couldn’t have been better for him. His eyes only had to move a slight flick to switch from Bern to her bosom, where gravity swelled her breasts to the spilling point.

  Then suddenly, the little girl was in the picture again, appearing squarely in the center of the aisle behind the woman, her moronic stare fixed on him once more, her head poking up just above the woman’s hips, as if it were balanced on top of them.

  Tits, child, Bern. Tits, child, Bern. The kid was irritating the shit out of him. The woman moved a few magazines, looking under them, her movements causing her breasts to shift and roll. The kid stared at him. Bern talked. With all the bending, the woman had to adjust herself, slipping a pretty hand inside—

  The kid’s moronic eyes shifted slightly to a position over the man’s right shoulder, her expression still as dumb as a rock.

  The hand coming over his shoulder and covering his mouth hardly registered on him before the knife did its work on his throat. He knew he was dying. The woman straightened up and walked past him as if he weren’t there. Then he felt himself being dragged backward.

  The last thing his eyes registered was the mute, imbecilic stare of the little girl, who did not run or blink or react to what she was seeing. She seemed to think that watching a murder in the back aisle of a pharmacy was no extraordinary thing.

  Chapter 46

  Bern gripped the phone and kept his head ducked next to the phone box as if listening intently. In fact, nothing was happening. Silence on both ends. What all of this was leading to was beyond him, beyond his imagining, almost beyond belief. But it kept going on and on.

  Suddenly, Kevern was screaming, “Jack! Jack! Look out! Lookout! Lookout!” And then a woman screamed and there was a thunderous crash.

  The old junker car slammed into them out of nowhere, flying at highway speed from a side street and ramming into the driver’s side like a torpedo. The two cars, twisted together, left the main street in a cloud of burned rubber and sparks, then careened off of two other cars before coming to rest just a few yards outside the window of a restaurant on the cross street.

  Jack Petersen was killed instantly. Lupe was in the backseat on the same side, dying, a piece of chrome the length of a yardstick driven through her rib cage, pinning her to the rear seat. Mattie was dying, too, a fist-size lump of something lodged in her left temple.

  Kevern had all the luck in the world.

  He was dazed, his collarbone broken, a cut on his forehead bleeding freely, but he was conscious and fighting his seat belt even before the noise stopped. He knew what had happened, and he knew what was going to happen next. His door had been ripped off, and while the car filled with thick acrid smoke, he got free of his seat belt and simply rolled to the side and fell out of the car, hitting the ground in the narrow space between the twisted cars and the restaurant wall.

  While the entire restaurant clientele stood back from the windows and watched the smoldering cars in stunned silence, Kevern crawled unobserved against the building’s wall, pulling himself along as fast as he could to the corner and then around to the other side. Just out of sight, he stopped to get his breath. He thought he was all right, but his guts felt as if they were swollen all out of proportion. His head was still throbbing from the impact, his hearing almost gone.

  Within seconds, two helmeted motorcyclists roared up to the smoking cars. The driver of the junker, also helmeted, staggered out of his car on wobbly legs and crawled onto the back of one of the motorcycles, while the other cyclist goosed his machine right up to Kevern’s smoke- engulfed car. Instantly, he opened fire with a stubby automatic weapon, sending the horrified diners onto the floor of the restaurant. He emptied a full magazine into the car, and then he reloaded and did it again.

  Then the shooter reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a hand grenade and lobbed it into the backseat of the junker. Both cyclists roared away, and by the time the grenade exploded, setting off a second and third explosion as the gas tanks blew, the two cyclists had hit the on-ramp onto the circuito, and they were gone.

  The whole incident lasted less than a minute.

  “Judas.” Sabella was back on the line. “Put down the phone and walk into the pharmacy. When you get inside, hurry straight to the back of the shop and go out the door into the courtyard.”

  “Wait—”

  “Mondragón’s man inside is gone.”

  “But I just heard—”

  “Do it!”

  Bern slammed the phone down in its cradle, pocketed the cell phone, and went through the pharmacy door, a few steps away. Inside, he quickly oriented himself, then headed around a corner into an aisle, suddenly confronting four people gathered around something on the floor.

  They all looked up in puzzled disbelief as he approached. At a glance, Bern sized them up as the white-jacketed pharmacist, his wife perhaps, also wearing a white jacket, a child, and a woman who appeared to be her mother. He didn’t stop to figure it out, just pushed through them, nearly slipping on the stuff that they were looking at.

  By the time that he realized that he had walked through a pool of blood and then realized how it had gotten there, he was opening the door to the courtyard. A woman grabbed him.

  “¡Andale!” she said, already turning to lead the way, her blue dress swirling around her legs as she took him around the courtyard, through a door on the far side and into another courtyard, and then immediately up a flight of stone stairs that led to the second floor. They turned into a corridor and came face-to-face with Mazen Sabella.

  “I dragged the guy under a stairwell down there,” he said to the woman. He looked at Bern, and there was an awkward moment in which Bern felt as if something was happening but he was missing it. He saw blood on Sabella’s clothes. He was sweating and out of breath.

  Sabella broke eye contact with him and looked at the woman.

  “I’m going down to get the car ready. I’ll be waiting for you across the street. You know where.”

  Suddenly, he was gone, and the woman pushed Bern through a doorway and out into an open-air patio. They crossed the patio and then burst into an apartment.

  Baida turned to them. He was standing by a pair of open windows that overlooked the plaza. They were above the Farmacia Pedras. He had an automatic pistol in one hand and with his other hand he held a tiny headset to his ear.

  “Your man’s not coming,” Baida said. “They’re dead. All of them.”

  Bern gaped at him, stupefied.

  Baida held up the headset and the automatic.

  “Sabella got these from the guy downstairs in the pharmacy. I heard the report to Mondragón that it was done.”

  Bern knew it was true. There was no doubt at all.

  “Mondragón’s boys saw you go into the pharmacy,” Baida said. “They tried to contact this guy, and when he didn’t answer, they switched frequencies. It’s no good now,” he said, flinging the tiny headset across the room. “And down there,” he added, jerking his head toward the plaza, “they’ve all disappeared.”

  Baida was talking fast, his celebrated composure showing signs of fraying.

  “I’ve called my people,” he said, lunging across the room to an armchair where a gray nylon bag lay open. He jammed the gun inside. “I have to go.”

  The woman, who still hadn’t said a word, was pulling things out of an open drawer in a chest near the entrance to another room. She brought a packet of something wrapped in clear plastic—it looked like documents—to Baida, who jammed it into the bag. He was sweating profusely.

  “I’m going to give you a number,” Baida said. “You won’t remember it . . . with all this. . . . I’ll show you where to hide it. Pull down your pants. Carleta, un bolígrafo!”

  The woman grabbed a
ballpoint pen from the top of the chest and gave it to Bern, who unbuckled his pants.

  “Write it high on the inside of your thigh. If they strip you, they won’t see it there.”

  “Who—”

  “Anybody! Hurry!”

  Bern bent over and with a trembling hand wrote on the inside of his thigh the number Baida recited to him. Baida repeated it, and Bern nervously traced over the numbers. Hell, someone would figure it out later.

  “When you get to our people, use the number,” Baida said. “Time is running out.”

  Time was running out. Bern pulled up his pants and buckled his belt. In fact, he was damned convinced that it was gone entirely, and that the numbers he had just written on his skin were useless.

  Baida started to zip the bag, then stopped suddenly. He looked up at Bern. Then he pulled the gun out of the bag and handed it to him.

  “My advice,” Baida said. “If you get a chance to kill Vicente, do it.”

  The pistol was lighter than Bern expected. He didn’t even know the caliber. He found the safety above his thumb on the grip. He checked the magazine and was surprised to see that it was loaded. Jesus. He shoved it back into the grip.

  Baida quickly zipped the bag, and all Bern could think about was Baida walking out of there with his terrible secret. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed Baida’s shirt.

  “Wait! Listen—”

  In a move that Bern didn’t even see, Baida ripped Bern’s hand off his shirt and was holding another pistol to Bern’s forehead before Bern could even recoil.

  “Listen to me, my friend.” Baida’s voice was tight. The barrel of Baida’s automatic was cutting Bern’s forehead. His face was inches away from Bern’s, and every pore was moist, every nerve taut.

  “The deal for my cooperation was my guaranteed safety,” Baida panted. “That isn’t happening, is it? And it doesn’t look like it’s going to. In fact, it looks like Vicente is in the process of wiping out your whole operation. I think you need protection as much as I do.” He was trembling. “But . . . if there is a miracle anytime soon, you know how to reach me—the numbers are warming your balls.”