The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  His cell phone had been knocked out of his hand in the crash, so he was completely cut off from Bern. The only damn thing he had going for him in this whole sorry enterprise was that Mondragón thought he was dead.

  He knew from the GPS where Bern had been when he made his phone call. He knew the vantage point Sabella was speaking from. And he agreed with Bern that Sabella was probably in an upper-story room on the north end of the plaza.

  But he needed to have some idea where Mondragón was. He knew how the son of a bitch worked, and Quito, too. They were hanging back off the plaza, waiting for their boys on the street to shuffle the cards and stack the deck. And Quito’s boys were good at that, so it wouldn’t take too long. Vicente would be sitting in his beloved Mercedes, probably a block away from Jardin Morena. Kevern only hoped he wasn’t too late and that they hadn’t all moved on somewhere else.

  When they arrived in Santa Luisa, Kevern told the driver to keep a two-block distance from the plaza, approaching each perimeter block from one end so he could look the length of it for the Mercedes. He spotted it on the second turn. Holy shit.

  Taking no chances, he had the driver pull to the curb a block away.

  “Give me your keys,” he told the driver. He did. “Give me your cell phone,” he added. He did. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he explained. “I’m one of the good guys, but I’ve just got to have a car at my disposal in case I fuck this up.”

  He got out of the car in the driving rain and started back toward the Mercedes, hugging the walls of the buildings to try to ward off a drop or two. It didn’t work. The poor man’s architecture in Mexico City wasn’t big on overhangs. Every drop that fell went out of its way to land on him.

  But God loved him anyway. When he spotted the Mercedes again and saw where it was sitting, everything was perfect. It was in the middle of the block on the opposite side. On his side, cars lined the curb. He would have cover all the way, until he got even with the Mercedes. Then it would be just a sprint across the narrow calle and he’d be at the driver’s window.

  Or he could take his chances and shoot from cover. He thought about it. The only person he could be sure about was the driver. For whatever reason, Vicente always sat directly behind the driver. Susana would be on the other side. Vicente didn’t carry a gun, but there was one behind the driver for him. Big question: Was Quito on the passenger side? Or was he off helping the boys?

  Kevern decided that a long shot was too risky. If he missed the driver, and if Quito was there, he’d have three people shooting at him. If he got up close and fired fast shots point-blank through the driver’s window, he’d have a good chance of getting Quito, too, if he was there. No good going after Mondragón, as he might hit Susana in the process.

  Shit. Enough planning. Suddenly, his stomach rebelled. He didn’t vomit, but he spit up a ropy dark bile that burned his throat. He was sweating furiously.

  Wiping his mouth on his jacket sleeve, he crouched and ran through the rain, staying behind the cars along the curb until he was even with the Mercedes. And then there was more proof that God loved him. Two—not one, but two—cars came along the street from his left, slow cruisers, as if they were wading through the surf. Beautiful.

  He waited, soaked through and through, until the first one was even with him and then he started across the street. When the second one slipped past, he was two steps from the driver’s window. All he did was reach out and pull the trigger twice. He saw the splatter at the same time he jerked open the back door, all set to jam the barrel of his automatic into Mondragón’s chest.

  “Lex!! Oh! . . . Oh God . . . Lex! OhGodohGodohGod.”

  He crawled in beside Susana and slammed the door.

  “Where the hell are they?” he asked, digging for his pocketknife. He cut the plastic on her wrists, then reached down and swiped the blade through the one around her ankles.

  “Baida’s place.”

  “How many?”

  “Two. Quito. Mondragón.”

  “Four altogether, then?”

  “Yeah, yeah. One was killed . . . in the pharmacy, and then the other when they stormed into the apartment. They killed a woman with Baida. Bern’s shot in the leg, Baida, too.”

  “Then Quito and Mondragón went up?”

  “Yeah, yeah, they went up.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but they’re going to kill Baida. He wants to defect? Is that right . . . is that what Bern was saying?”

  “Right,” Kevern grunted, nodding.

  “Incredible. Incredible. Then we’ve got to hurry. We’ve got to stop it. . . . Where . . . are the others?”

  “Dead. It’s a flute. It’s a fluke I’m here, just a damn fluke.”

  Susana stared at him taking it in. “Then . . . they think you’re dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good good good,” she said. She had rammed the fingers of one hand into her thick hair, holding them there, thinking.

  Kevern grabbed Mondragón’s gun from its cradle in back of the driver’s seat, then reached over into the front seat with a strained groan and wrestled the driver’s pistol out of the holster at his waist.

  “Which one you want?”

  She took the driver’s big Sig Sauer because the magazine capacity was thirteen.

  “Okay, let’s think,” Kevern said, beginning to feel woozy again, worried that he had busted something inside. He was a little chilled, although sweating like a fool, which you couldn’t tell because he was soaked from the rain.

  “You okay?” She had checked the Sig and was looking at him now, frowning.

  “Yeah . . . you know, shit, it was a hell of a wreck. I’m just rattled. Listen, let’s just take it easy goin’ in. If they’re tending to business inside, somebody’s going to be looking out. . . .”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “They’re going to check in with this guy sooner or later, and then we’re screwed.”

  “Yeah, listen. I’ve got a sitio stranded over there, okay? A block away.” He pointed with his gun. “Just so you know . . .”

  Then they opened the doors and stepped out into the rain.

  Chapter 51

  Mondragón sat in silence for a few moments, his goggle eyes resting on the woman. Bern looked at Baida, whose eyes were fixed on Mondragón. Bern could hear him breathing. He knew Baida had been shot somewhere in the shoulder. He didn’t know how bad it was, but the piece of sheet they had wrapped around the wound was completely soaked in blood.

  Without speaking, Mondragón stood and walked out of the room, in the opposite direction from the bedroom. Bern could hear him opening drawers, hear things rattling. He was in the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying a butcher knife and a small paring knife. He sat down in the chair again and put the knives on the floor between his shoes.

  “You know, Ghazi, you were more a human being when you were a Mexican,” Mondragón said. “When you got mixed up in that Middle East shit, the real Ghazi died. Hezbollah. Muslim Brothers. That fundamentalist Great Satan shit. That wasn’t you anymore. So it didn’t bother me to steal the damn money from a radical Islamist. Stupid fuckers.” Mondragón shook his head. “But the Latin American game, the Colombian game, the Mexican game, you forgot what that was like. You forgot that it’s a different kind of chaos here.

  “You came back with this big badass reputation. Mr. Terrorism. The demonic genius. Yeah. And right away I fucked you out of four million dollars. Then Mr. Terrorism sends two little maggots from Bogotá to London. Now here we are, and I’m about to fuck you again. Only this time, it’s going to cost you everything.”

  Mondragón swiveled his eyeballs at Carleta de León’s body. Bern guessed that he was doing that only to taunt Baida, to ratchet up the anticipation of what he was going to do to her.

  Then Mondragón smiled and looked at Baida. It was the first time Bern had seen a smile on those lips, and it was shocking. Mondragón jerked his head toward Bern.

  “This guy here,” he
said to Baida, “Judas. This isn’t Judas. Judas really was killed in Tepito. This is his twin. No shit. Identical twin. Those dummies Khalil and Ahmad, somehow they learned that Judas was U.S. intelligence—I still don’t know how that happened—but they killed Judas before you could find out that they had brought a spy into your operation, and then they blamed it on a drug deal gone bad. And then a few nights later, my boys killed them. All of them. Then we put the word out on the street that it was drugs again and that Judas hadn’t been killed after all. Big, elaborate, complex operation, Ghazi. All dreamed up just to get you.”

  Mondragón shook his head, the lips sneering again.

  “The point is, Ghazi, I have been circling you for a long time, getting closer. If you pissed on a bush, I’d piss on top of that. If you left your scent on a tree, I would rub mine over it. Your life has been getting shorter and shorter all the time because I had grabbed your future in both my hands, and I was tearing pieces off of it as fast as I could. When I couldn’t take a lot, I’d take a little, whatever I could get.”

  For the first time since Mondragón had come through the door, something began to stir in Baida’s eyes. Bern was fascinated by the animation that he saw awakening there. It was fear, yes, but it was something more than fear, too. Baida wanted to say something; Bern could see that. Baida even began to make noises, wordless sounds uttered from behind his gag. An outpouring of inflections and modulations issued from him, a desperate effort to communicate.

  Mondragón was oblivious. He turned around in his chair and leaned close to Baida, his goggle eyes and fleshy lips looking more eerie than ever as he jutted his head forward in a menacing posture.

  “You see this, Ghazi?” Mondragón asked, his words coming slowly now, his voice strained by a scarcely contained rage. “You wanted to do the worst that you could do to me, to obliterate my face, the heart and center of my self, my visible soul. Killing me would have been merciful. But you wanted me to die not once, but every day. And so I have.”

  Mondragón paused, and Baida ceased his furious effort to convey an urgent plea or explanation. Now Bern could hear them both breathing, as if the breath that left one of them was sucked in by the other, the hatred passing back and forth between them.

  “But your desecraton has given birth to a paradox, Ghazi. By taking away my face, you have created another one in its place. Look well at this,” Mondragón said, leaning in even closer and slowly turning his head slightly this way and that so Baida could see into his flesh. “This is the face of your own death.”

  God loved Lex Kevern. His luck held out.

  As soon as he and Susana entered the corridor that opened off the street, they huddled together to catch their breath and settle their nerves. But they didn’t take long. With Kevern going first, they eased forward to the lighter end of the corridor to check the courtyard. Luckily, it took Kevern only a few seconds to locate the guy who had been sent down to ground level to keep an eye on the courtyard entrances.

  Smoking a cigarette, he was leaning against the wall under the arch of the corridor that led out to the street around the corner from the plaza. He was hardly visible, just an elbow, and now and then a puff of smoke.

  Kevern stepped back and leaned toward Susana, his lips close to her ear for a few moments. Then they both returned the way they had come, and at the corridor’s entrance, they turned in opposite directions, walking out into the rain again.

  Susana made her way around the block to the entrance on the opposite side of the courtyard from the guard smoking in the doorway. The moment she entered, she began searching for a prop, something to give her a reason to be going out into the courtyard. She found it halfway down the corridor. Two wash buckets sat in the empty hallway, a mop leaning against the wall between them.

  She hid the Sig Sauer under her dress, wedging it beneath the waistband. The rest of it she would do out in the open. Picking up the two buckets, she walked to the entrance of the corridor and eased up to look across the courtyard. The guard was still there.

  On the other side of the building, Kevern eased up to the corridor entrance and looked around the corner. The guard was still leaning on the wall at the far end; nothing had gotten his attention yet. Kevern jabbed Mondragón’s pistol into the small of his back, pushed off his shoes, dug the pocketknife out of his pants, and opened it.

  On the other side of the courtyard, Susana stepped out into the portico and walked over to one of the cascading gutters, which was spewing a stream of rainwater out onto the flagstones. Setting down the buckets, she kicked off her shoes and began gathering the hem of her skirt, pulling it up high, exposing as much of her legs as she could as she tucked it into the waist of her dress. Then she picked up one of the buckets and placed it under the gutter, her back to the guard. Pretending to adjust the bucket, she bent over, giving him a chance to have a good long look at her butt through her rain-soaked panties.

  When Kevern looked around the corner the second time, he could see that the guard’s body language had changed. He was standing up straight now, his attention fully engaged by something across the way. Kevern eased around the corner, grateful for the roaring rain, which drowned out the little sounds that could spell disaster.

  He had to slash the short blade across the guard’s throat twice to do the job and then he held him while he lost consciousness. As Kevern eased him down on the floor, he looked across at Susana, who had just gone back under the portico and was turning around. Kevern waved her toward the plaza side of the courtyard.

  Before they even started up the stairs, they discussed what they might find. When they had played out the most probable variables, Kevern handed Susana the silenced pistol he had taken from the guard. She had the most experience with sound-suppressed weapons, and accuracy was going to be critical.

  They were surprised to find that Quito and the other guard weren’t directly outside the apartment door. There was a small open-air courtyard with plants and a few pieces of patio furniture outside the door. It was maybe fifty feet across the courtyard to the short hallway where Quito and the guard were biding their time. The landing where the stairwell surfaced on the second floor was another fifty feet away from them.

  Another brief whispered discussion. Then Kevern backtracked, going all the way around to the other side of the courtyard to an identical stairwell. He removed his shoes and started up the stairs, hurrying as best he could, headed for the second floor, where he would circle around and be within a few feet of Quito and the other guard.

  But then it all began to catch up with him. The nausea hit him again like a slug to the stomach. He didn’t even have time to bend over before he started vomiting, repeated waves that shot burning liquid out of his mouth and knocked his legs out from under him. And then he saw the granular black vomitus, and he knew that he wasn’t going to get to the top of the stairs . . . ever. He felt as if he were sinking into warm liquid that was rapidly turning cold. He looked across the courtyard, but he couldn’t see her . . . and he couldn’t call her. The stairs began to fold back on him, rippling like a ribbon in the wind. He couldn’t believe it. Well, shit . . .

  Susana waited, counting out the seconds. At two minutes, she crept up the stairs until her head was even with the floor; then she eased up until her eyes cleared the landing. Looking through the wrought-iron railing, which helped conceal her, she looked for Kevern’s feet. Nothing. He should have been there by now, just an arm’s reach away.

  Carefully, she turned and looked around the landing, her eyes sweeping slowly at floor level. Kevern was nowhere in sight, and suddenly she had a bad feeling. She remembered his sweating, his nausea, his bent posture.

  Jesus. Her first impulse was to go back and find him, but then she checked herself. There was more risk to the operation in doing that, a chance that she would blow the slim margin she had now. Kevern had miraculously salvaged what had become a hopeless situation, but he had taken it as far as he could. Now she had to take it as far as she could.

&n
bsp; Turning slowly back to the men, she raised the pistol, its barrel extended by the addition of the silencer, and rested it on the floor, angling it up toward the two men. She would take the other guard. Quito was the more important one. She would need Quito.

  She eased back on the step where she was sitting, held the pistol in both hands at arm’s length, and steadied the barrel on the floor.

  She concentrated or modulating her breathing.

  She mellowed out.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 52

  Having someone’s head explode all over you while you are talking to them provides a jolt of astonishment that even a seasoned killer can’t instantly overcome. The few beats of disorientation can give the shooter the edge she needs, even if she has to spring up a couple of steps.

  Susana was within twenty feet of Quito, and already dropped down in a shooter’s crouch before he could even pull his pistol. He raised his hands shoulder-high. Her accuracy had already been proven.

  She waggled the long muzzle of the pistol at him.

  Quito could not believe what he was seeing, but he knew the drill. He was careful. This woman knew all the tricks of handing over a weapon, and he didn’t want to die. Buying time, no matter what that time might hold, was every man’s first thought when faced with the prospect of instant death.

  He carefully put his pistol on the floor and shoved it out of his reach without Susana even having to tell him.

  “What’s the story inside?” she asked.

  He didn’t bother about being clever. He had instantly calculated what it had taken for Susana to be crouching there, and he had a great deal of respect for a woman who could overcome those kinds of odds after he had just left her in the backseat of Mondragón’s Mercedes with her hands and feet tied. By his calculations, there was no one left but him and Mondragón. His other people were too far off, and not nearly as experienced at close work as the men who had already been killed.