The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  In the silence of the moment, an incredible sound seeped into the room through the windows overlooking the plaza: the gentle, serene whisper of a slow rain. Bern concentrated on it. In fact, he clung to it as if that sound alone could redeem him to reality, to sanity, offer him deliverance from this nightmare.

  Baida lowered his pistol.

  “You’d better get the hell out of here,” he said.

  Chapter 47

  Kevern lay in a hedge of some kind at the far side of the restaurant and watched pedestrians craning their heads toward the sound of the collision on the other side of the building. He heard the unmistakable rivet-driving sound of an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol. He heard screams, saw the pedestrians retreating, heard the pause to reload. He heard the ripping of the second magazine. He saw people running away now, heard the screaming of the motorcycles as the riders full-throttled them onto the expressway. Then the grenade blast and the immediate explosion of the first gas tank, and then the second one.

  People yelling. The pedestrian flow stopping now, reversing itself, and surging in the other direction as people headed toward the explosions and the billowing smoke.

  That was the anatomy of a killing. People reacted the way people always did, terrified, then horrified, then, as the assassins fled, curious as hell.

  He had checked all of them as he was fighting his seat belt. He had seen a lot of people die. He had seen a lot of people dying. It was creepy how you knew instantly. You didn’t have to check the vital signs; you just threw them a look, and you either saw death looking back at you or you saw death crawling onto them like a little monkey, impatient to get inside at the first chance. When you saw that, you didn’t wait around.

  He looked at the street again. He was on the back side of the restaurant, looking around the next corner, where sitios sometimes waited for customers. There were a couple of them, the drivers out of their cars, craning their heads toward the direction of the disaster.

  When a small group of people fled the restaurant and took the first sitio, Kevern knew he couldn’t wait. Grimacing with pain, the pressure in his stomach intensifying, he crawled out of the hedge and staggered toward the second sitio. The driver, seeing a second group of people fleeing the restaurant, was getting ready to take them, when Kevern ran up to him and showed his automatic. The deal was done.

  They got into the black Lincoln and drove away.

  Mazen Sabella left through the courtyard of the building and made his way to the street. At every corner, he waited, scanning the cars parked along the street, scanning the windows in the buildings opposite, taking a moment longer to consider every darkened doorway.

  In some ways, it was more difficult to escape surveillance in the rain. People running surveillance were taking cover from the rain, hiding from the weather as well as from their targets, and therefore doing a better job of concealing themselves. And for the target, the rain itself was a distraction from detecting surveillance.

  But in other ways, the rain offered possible advantages. In hiding from the rain, the surveillers often sacrificed a wider field of vision to stay dry, sometimes opting to squint through a narrow space or peer through a foggy window.

  Either way, Sabella took it all into consideration without even thinking about it, these small adjustments having become second nature to him. Every compensation made to adjust to the environment was only a reflex now, embedded long ago into his unconscious.

  The car was only a few doorways away, but it wasn’t parked on the street. It was behind a closed garage door that opened right onto the street.

  The rain had been coming in waves, a hard, driving downpour, followed by a momentary letup, and then another hard, driving deluge. Sabella waited in the corridor doorway for the downpour, waiting the way a dancer waits for his body to get into the stride of the music before he moves into the stream of dancers.

  And then it came, a roaring, thunderous downpour. He stepped out into it and ran, ignoring the rain and the swollen gutters. He was concentrating on timing and on what his eyes picked up along the street. Did a parked car suddenly turn on its wipers? Did he see a hand wiping the fog from the inside of a window?

  He punched the button on the garage-door opener and darted into the garage without even breaking stride. The keys were in his hand as he opened the car door, and he was already turning the ignition by the time the garage door hit its stopping position above the car. He backed out into the street and drove away in the rain.

  With one hand on the wheel, his eyes darting to pick up any movement outside the windows, his right hand flipped on a radio receiver sitting on the passenger seat. The reception was strong.

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

  “Wait! Listen—” Bern’s voice was frantic.

  “Listen to me, my friend,” Baida said, his voice taut, urgent, impatient. “The deal for my cooperation was my guaranteed safety. That isn’t happening, is it? And it doesn’t look like it’s going . . .”

  Sabella continued listening to the tense situation in the apartment above the pharmacy overlooking the plaza at Jardin Morena. It was a riveting exchange, and the farther he got away from it, the better he felt.

  But he wouldn’t be able to relax just yet. Learning that Mondragón was alive and in pursuit had been a stunning surprise. It had almost panicked him. But then, through the fog of sudden dread, Sabella had had a revelation: This new development was actually a hell of a piece of luck, an opportunity to turn the fast-moving and unstable events to his advantage.

  Now, as he leaned toward the windshield to peer through the sweeping rain, he listened closely to the transmission from Jardin Morena. If he knew anything about human psychology, about hatred and revenge, then he knew that he would soon be hearing a familiar voice. When he did, then he would know that all of his meticulous planning was about to pay off. It would soon be over. Finally.

  Chapter 48

  Again, Bern had the sensation of the moment stretching out into the long, rainy afternoon. Killing Baida was possible now. He was right there in front of him, stuffing one last thing into his bag, and all Bern had to do was flick the safety off, raise the gun, and fire. The terrorist whom a secret U.S. operation had been trying to hunt down and kill for over a year would be dead.

  But the game had changed. Even if Bern could actually muster the guts to kill a man up close like that, to murder him, he couldn’t be sure that he was doing the right thing. Ghazi Baida had put his defection on the table, and suddenly there was a hell of a lot of incentive not to kill him, but to keep him alive at just about any cost. And Baida had even increased the stakes—and the tension—by implying that there was an imminent terrorist action in progress that would kill thousands of people . . . and he was the only one who could stop it.

  And now Mondragón’s betrayal had changed the game yet again. The options had shifted. The odds had shifted. Bern was no longer sure of anything.

  When the door burst open, all three of them spun around at the same time. The woman was between Bern and the door. There was a loud smack, and her head flew apart in a liquidy red spray, drenching him in the living warmth of her last moment.

  Baida shot the man, flinging him back, as Bern fired wildly into the empty doorway.

  Then Baida went down for no reason at all, falling awkwardly on his own arm.

  A soundless bolt of fire blew through the outside of Bern’s left thigh, spinning him around as two men barreled through the door.

  The gentle rain of a few minutes earlier had become a drumming downpour now, hammering on the roof of the Mercedes like the roar of a train. When Quito’s phone rang, it was almost drowned out by the noise. He answered it and listened. Glancing over the backseat at Mondragón, he nodded.

  “There was a woman with Baida, and they killed her. Cochi is dead. Baida was shot in one leg and one arm. Bern was shot in the leg.”

  “I want to go up there,” Mondragón said.

  �
��The boys used silencers,” Quito said, “but Baida got off two shots and Bern three. So there has been gunfire. People may have heard that, even in this flood.”

  “I want to see him right where he was knocked down,” Mondragón said. “I want him to see me with the body of Carleta.”

  He picked up his mask and gently began putting it in place while Quito told his men that they were coming up, then closed the phone. He looked at the driver and told him to stay with Susana, and then he got out of the car with the umbrella and went round to open the door for Mondragón.

  When Mondragón had his mask in place, he glanced at Susana. He hadn’t spoken a word to her, acting as if she didn’t exist. He glanced at her hands, which were bound with a plastic security band, and then his door opened.

  The two men made their way across the street in the downpour and entered a doorway that took them into a corridor that opened out into a courtyard. The gutters in the courtyard were throwing water out onto the flagstones in loud waterfalls as the two men continued around the covered walkway to the stone stairs that led up to the second floor.

  Quito went through the door first. They had dragged the woman and Cochi out of the way, off to one side of the room, behind a sofa. Bern and Baida were both sitting in armchairs that roughly framed the windows that overlooked the plaza. They were gagged, their hands bound with plastic bands. The men’s wounds had been wrapped in pieces of a bedsheet that had been ripped up for the purpose.

  On the dining room table, behind Baida’s armchair, were Bern’s and Baida’s pistols and the gray bag with all of its contents dumped out, the passports and documents displayed in neat order.

  The lights were out in the apartment, and the room was washed in the gray light of the noonday rain. The windows were open, and a little spray was glistening on the windowsills.

  Chapter 49

  When Mondragón came into the room, he glanced at Bern, but immediately his masked head turned to Baida and stayed there. He approached Baida and stood in front of him, saying nothing, his tall, lean frame immaculately clad, as always. Even with his trousers rain-soaked up to his knees, he was elegant.

  Bern’s leg was killing him, but his only fear was bleeding to death. He didn’t know what kind of ammunition they were using, but he still had the woman’s blood and brain tissue all over him to prove what it must have done to his leg. But even that worry took a backseat to watching Vicente Mondragón.

  The room was silent, save for the sound of the rain. Everyone waited.

  Mondragón reached up and carefully removed his mask and stood before Baida, looking down at him, the mask dangling from his hand. Baida’s eyes showed nothing, not fear, not defiance, not shock. Nothing.

  Mondragón turned to Quito. “Drag the woman over here.”

  Quito raised his chin at the other two men, and they went over behind the sofa and pulled Cochi off the woman. Then they grabbed her feet and pulled her around, dragging her through her own blood. Her dress came up as they dragged her, and her bare flesh squeaked on the polished wood floor. They left her between Bern and Baida, off to the side a little, nearer the doorway.

  “Get out,” Mondragón said to the men. They glanced at Quito, who nodded at them, and they headed for a bedroom. “No, outside,” Mondragón said. Again they got a nod from Quito. “You, too,” Mondragón said to Quito.

  Quito turned and followed them out and closed the door.

  Mondragón stepped over to the woman and looked at her. Her dress was bunched up around her waist now. Mondragón turned back to Baida. “No underwear? You know, I spoke with her sister Estele just a few hours ago. She would be surprised by this.” He looked at her again. “Carleta. It would be difficult to tell, with not much of a face to speak of.” He hissed. “Not much of a head, even.” He extended an elegant bespoke shoe and nudged the woman’s bare hip. “But I recognize her panocha.” He nudged her again, as if to confirm her lifeless condition.

  “Well, at least you were screwing the middle one,” he said. “Estele was getting a little long in the tooth for a really good screw. Besides, we’d already worn her out in the old days, hadn’t we?”

  He turned and went to the dining room table, glanced at the passports, and got a chair, which he took over and set down in front of Baida, a little to one side. He sat in the chair, his back to the windows and the rain. He crossed his legs and then crossed his forearms over his lap, his long hands dangling open on either side.

  He took a small spritzer out of his coat pocket and misted the front of his head.

  “This is my constant companion now,” he said, holding up the spritzer. He held it up for a long time before he lowered it again.

  Mondragón looked at Baida in silence. Deliberate silence. He was relishing whatever was happening between the two men now. He owned the moment and, finally, he owned Ghazi Baida, too.

  “I know you appreciate irony, Ghazi,” Mondragón said. Even if he didn’t have a face to read, Mondragón’s body language—the angle of his head, the tilt of his shoulders, the occasional flip of a relaxed hand—clearly conveyed his satisfaction at being in control of the situation.

  “There’s a hell of a lot of irony in this moment right now,” he said, “that we meet here, to settle an old score after nearly three years, and neither of us has the face now that we had back then. I’m not looking at the face I’ve hated all that time since London. And you, Ghazi, well, you aren’t looking at a face at all, are you?”

  Mondragón shook his head slowly in feigned amusement, and his lips, even without the rest of a face, managed to communicate a disdainful sneer.

  “It was a good thing that it happened in London,” Mondragón said. “They have good doctors there. They saved my life.” He looked at Carleta de León, his lidless eyes darting over her. “I have plans for her,” he said. “But I want to wait awhile for that. I want to make sure you can’t shut your eyes when I do it.

  “You should have sent someone other than Colombians to do the job in London,” he said. “They have passion for their work, but sometimes they are so slapdash about it. Apart from being crazy, of course. They told me who had sent them, and they told me not to be afraid, because they had strict instructions not to kill me.” He paused. “Not . . . to kill me.” Another pause as he let the emphasis sink in.

  “Then they forced me to take drugs, all kinds of drugs, everything. They loaded me up on them because, they said, that would anesthetize my system, keep me from going into shock. They said they wanted me to have . . . a vivid experience. And then they tied me to my bed. They were taking drugs also. All kinds of stuff, I think. And then they just went to work on me.

  “It took hours,” he continued. “They drank my liquor and smoked bazuco and played music. They would cut awhile, look at me, play around with pieces of me. I remember that they had special fun with my nose, flicking it at one another on the ends of their knives, laughing like idiots when they managed to hit one another with it. Then they would smoke some more bazuco. Drink some more. Visit awhile. They talked about women, about sex. Then they would cut some more.”

  Mondragón spritzed his face. He looked at Carleta de León. The rain had slackened again, and now a fine mizzle was drifting across the plaza.

  “It was a miracle that they didn’t blind me,” Mondragón said. “And why they avoided my mouth, why they didn’t cut off my lips, that will always be a mystery. Then sometime during the early-morning hours, they just lost interest in what they were doing. Too much bazuco. Too much liquor. Not enough brains. They passed out.

  “Sometime around dawn, they left. I didn’t know it. I had passed out again, too. I think what happened was that when they finally came around the next morning and saw what they had done to me, saw how much blood there was—I almost bled to death—when they saw the pieces of me scattered around all over the place, I think they just assumed that they had gone too far with it and that I was dead. That’s understandable.”

  Mondragón looked at Carleta. “Just l
ike her. I’ll bet those boys out there didn’t even check her heart. They just assumed that she was dead. I assume she’s dead, too.”

  He spritzed his face and looked at Baida for a long time.

  “Four million dollars, Ghazi. That’s all I stole from you. And you sent those fucking Colombians to do this to me. And you wanted me to live . . . with this.”

  He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Again, you know, I was lucky it was London. The British understand the importance of being discreet. My business manager found me later that day. It was she who managed to pass out enough bribes—yes, even the British—to keep my situation quiet. At least out of the press.

  “I had heard that you thought those idiots had killed me. So I went along with that as best I could. I sold my place here and bought another one under a different name. I did my best—spent a fortune, really—to disappear. To be forgotten. Of course, I began to make plans for you from the beginning. This moment, right now, I’ve thought about it every single day for nearly three years.

  “I began to offer the same services that I had offered before, only under another name. I always worked through Quito and a whole line of intermediaries he provided. I became a nobody. A recluse. A night dweller. Through intermediaries and our old connections, I was able to follow you pretty well, but I could never get close. Then you turned up in Iguaçú Falls, in Ciudad del Este. Then, God bless you, Ghazi, you came back to Mexico City.”

  Chapter 50

  Kevern hung his handkerchief out the window of the sitio to get it wet, then cleaned his face with a trembling hand while his terrified driver headed for Colonia Santa Luisa. The driving rain gnarled traffic and slowed them down. Kevern had a huge lump on his forehead, and sometimes he felt nauseated and dizzy. His stomach felt gorged. Still, he was lucky. He had gotten out of the damned thing alive.