The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “Baida and Bern have their hands tied,” he said.

  “Where are they?”

  “As you go in the door, there’s the body of the dead woman on the floor in front of you. Behind her, across the room, Bern is tied in an armchair on the left. Baida is tied in another chair on the right.”

  “And Vicente?”

  “I don’t know.” Quito swallowed. “But he’s not armed.”

  “What’s happening in there?”

  Quito swallowed again. “I don’t know, but it’s not good.”

  Susana stood and, being careful not to slip on the blood and brains on the floor, moved to the doorway that opened out into the patio outside Baida’s apartment. It was still raining, but not driving like before. It had slackened a little.

  She stepped on the other side of Quito to get away from the guard’s body.

  “We’re going to walk across the patio to— Are there any windows on this side?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then we’re going to walk across the patio to the front door. Are the lock and latch broken from your guys going in?”

  Quito nodded.

  “Then we can just push it open?”

  Quito nodded.

  “Okay. Then we’re going to stop just outside the door. No talking. You in front of me. When I tap you on the shoulder with this”—she waggled the silenced pistol again—“I want you to hit that door and charge into the room. I want you to charge Mondragón and take him to the floor. If you don’t do that the second we clear the door, I’ll kill you.”

  Quito nodded. “And then what?”

  “Get your hands into the air so I don’t have to think about them. Let’s go.”

  Quito stepped over the body of the guard, and Susana followed him out into the rain. They crossed the patio in the drizzle. By now, Susana had been soaked through and through several times, but she didn’t even know it. She was concentrating on the precise movements she would make as she entered the room.

  At the front door, Quito paused as instructed. Susana looked over his shoulders at the door latch. It was splintered apart, as he had said, and she could tell the door was slightly ajar. Good.

  She tapped Quito on the shoulder.

  His arms went up, and he burst though the door, slamming it back against the wall as Susana followed him in, as close behind him as she could get.

  After what seemed an eternity of muted and pitiful squealing, Baida had finally passed out, and for the last quarter hour Bern had alternately watched and turned away from Mondragón cutting away at Baida’s face. About half of it was gone. And Mondragón hadn’t spared the lips.

  At the moment Quito burst in, Mondragón was beginning a new flay line under the left side of Baida’s jaw. He spun around just in time to catch the full impact of Quito’s body, which took both of them off their feet and sent them crashing into the dining table behind Baida’s armchair.

  Susana snatched the butcher knife off the floor and swung around and swiped the blade through the plastic ties around Bern’s feet and hands. She thrust the Sig Sauer into his hands, then swung around again as she leveled her pistol at Quito and Mondragón, who were scrambling to their feet near the overturned table.

  Bern quickly ripped off his gag and blurted, “Guns on the table!”

  Susana knew instantly what the calculating Quito had done, and she yelled at him: “Don’t do it! No! No!”

  But Quito stepped out from behind Mondragón, swinging up the pistol that Baida had given Bern.

  Again, Bern heard the same smacking sound that he had heard when Quito’s men shot Carleta de León, and Quito slammed back against the dining room wall with only half his head.

  Susana then turned her pistol on Mondragón, who froze.

  It was only then that Bern looked again at Baida. He was aghast to see blood spurting out of the side of Baida’s throat. Quito had burst in at exactly the wrong moment, and Mondragón’s knife hand had flinched . . . or had he had the presence of mind to be deliberate about it?

  Bern lunged over to Baida and slapped his hand over the wound and held it there, reminding himself not to choke him to death trying to stanch the hemorrhage. By now, both pieces of the sheet that had been wrapped around Baida’s shoulder and leg were thoroughly saturated and were seeping blood. And, of course, his face was gored with blood from Mondragón’s hacking lacerations.

  Bern couldn’t believe it. He was frantic, glancing around the room, not even knowing what he was looking for, just some answer . . . some answer.

  “Jude,” Susana snapped, unaware of what she was calling him in the adrenaline rush of the moment, “has he talked?”

  “No!”

  “Nothing? You don’t know anything?”

  “No!” Bern released the pressure and the blood swelled through his fingers like a fresh spring. Baida seemed to be in shock, or in a coma. Shit, thought Bern. He couldn’t tell which, didn’t know how to tell. Ghazi hadn’t had the benefit of the anesthetizing drugs that Mondragón had mentioned having had during his ordeal. His right eye was closed, but the lidless one was motionless and gazed outward to infinity. If it saw anything at all, it saw an apocalyptic vision; Bern was sure of it.

  Again, irrationally, Bern eased up on his hand and was surprised to see that the flow of blood was subsiding.

  “Oh!” he said. “God.” Hopeful, he lifted his hand some more. The blood still came, but it was seeping, and even that was subsiding. “Shit! Good, good!”

  “Jude,” Susana said again, trying to get his attention, and then she caught herself, but before she spoke again, she saw that Bern already had begun to realize that Baida was dead.

  Remaining on his knees, Bern knelt there awhile—he didn’t know how long—and stared at Ghazi Baida. He looked at the half-flayed face of a terrorist and a drug trafficker, the face of hatred and fear. The face of hopelessness. The face of a man.

  Bern slowly got off his knees, turned around, and looked at Susana. She hadn’t moved an inch. She hadn’t—not even for a second—taken her eyes off Vicente Mondragón.

  “Stay right there,” Bern said to her.

  He walked out of the living room and into the kitchen, the way he had seen Mondragón go to get the knife. He went to the sink and washed his hands under the faucet and then bent down and washed the blood and brains of Carleta de León off his face and neck. Methodically, he soaped his hands, lathered them, and then soaped his face. Then he rinsed off his face and hands, and washed the woman and Ghazi Baida down the drain.

  He dried his hands and his face with a towel that he got off a hook on the side of the cabinet, and then he hung the towel back on the hook. He returned to the living room and picked up the Sig Sauer that was on the floor beside Baida’s chair.

  He gave the gun to Susana, who seemed to intuit everything perfectly, as if they were sharing the same mind. She held both pistols on Mondragón until Bern took the one with the sound suppressor from her. He walked over to Mondragón.

  The two men looked at each other. Bern remembered the first time he saw Mondragón, the sad, hideous spectacle of his disfigurement. He remembered how Mondragón had challenged him to look his fill, to get his morbid curiosity out of his system so that they could move on to more important things. More important things. God, if Bern had only known then.

  “Did you know what we were trying to do?” Bern asked. “Did you know what Ghazi Baida was going to give us?”

  Mondragón seemed to hesitate. It was strange, but even without a face, he seemed to convey a sense of defiance, an imperious attitude of self-absorption that swept aside everything that got in its way. Nothing was more important to Vicente Mondragón than his own outrageous suffering, suffering that he knew would not end until he drew his last breath, suffering that could never be revenged enough, not even at the price of ten thousand lives. His grief for himself was insatiable.

  “Ghazi Baida was a fucking liar,” Mondragón said.

  Bern raised the pistol and shot him
in the front of his head.

  Chapter 53

  The plan had been in the works for nearly a year, before Ghazi Baida was even brought into the mix. It had been an obsession for Ziad Khalife ever since he had accidentally come across a mother lode of death in Islamabad: two kilos of plutonium 240 that had been smuggled out of an Obninsk nuclear research laboratory in Russia.

  He scraped together the money and then began shipping the lode to India, where he knew a disgruntled nuclear research scientist in Madras who had, until a year earlier, worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. But the scientist was skeptical. Big risk. The aerosolizing of plutonium was a delicate process. It made the element more unstable than in its solid state. Not out of the question, but delicate. And it was costly. The equipment. It would take a small team of scientists. That was costly also.

  Khalife flew to Riyadh and took his case to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was then that Ghazi Baida was first mentioned, and that sealed the deal. If Baida would agree to do the American end of it, then Khalife would get his financing.

  Khalife flew back to Madras with enough money to put the scientist in business, and then he put the word out to the kind of people who would know such things, saying that he would like to talk with Ghazi Baida.

  Three months later he walked into a café in Doha, Qatar, and sat down with Baida to talk business. Khalife explained everything. The necessary ingredients would be smuggled into Mexico City in six months’ time. Also, following the scientist’s specifications, Khalife was arranging for the purchase of Benning Technologies AeroTight propellant-filling equipment to be purchased by a dummy company in Mexico City. The equipment would be set up in a warehouse, and the scientist from Madras would provide the personnel to process and package the aerosolized plutonium. Khalife was personally arranging all of that. The logistics were complex, so it would be several months before the equipment would sail for Veracruz. From there, it would be trucked to Mexico City.

  Baida agreed to take the job of building a cell to distribute the plutonium.

  It took Baida several months to select his men. He wanted English and Spanish speakers, not an easy combination to come by in the Middle East. But then, he wasn’t going to look for them in the Middle East. As soon as he could make the arrangements, he flew to the Triple Border region. There was a huge Muslim population there and, among them, a significant Lebanese presence. He had been there before, and he knew plenty of sympathetic Latin American Muslims who could speak Spanish and could easily pass for Mexicans.

  Within a month, Baida was set up in Ciudad del Este and began recruiting his men. At the same time, he began planning the best way to distribute the aerosolized plutonium. He had already developed his theory about the vulnerability of the American heartland. All he had to do was to decide the best way to exploit it.

  And, always the entrepreneur, Ghazi began building a drug-smuggling operation. The profits he made from drugs would be used to help finance other operations that he had in the works but which he had temporarily set aside when he agreed to contract with Khalife. If he was going to be in and out of Mexico City, he figured he might as well take advantage of a booming market. It wouldn’t be difficult. He had contacts both there and in the Colombian territories that were controlled by that country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

  Within two months, Ghazi Baida had fine-tuned his plan and had his men. It hadn’t been difficult. If their Muslim zeal wasn’t enough to carry the day for them, it didn’t matter. Baida was paying them well and promising them even more. And, he told them, there was no personal risk. Baida hired an out-of-work Brazilian chemical engineer to pose as a scientist and give the men a “safety” lecture. Just wear a simple hospital mask and everything would be okay, he told them.

  Soon, Baida moved his operation to Mexico City and stepped up the level of training. The men received a full six-week course in refrigeration servicing and even received certificates—from a bogus refrigeration-training school in Houston, Texas.

  To make sure the men followed through with their task and didn’t just take advantage of a free ride to the United States, the lion’s share of what they were to be paid was payable only after they had dispensed the aerosol plutonium at their targets. This, they were told, would be confirmed by instrumentation that had been installed by a team that had preceded them. As soon as they dispensed the aerosol, they were to go to a certain address, where the confirmation would have already been made, and they would be paid.

  Bueno. That seemed fair enough. Everyone was happy. Baida was always amazed that the more convoluted the lie, the more likely people were to believe it.

  In another sixty days, Baida had each man’s documentation in order and began sending them into the United States in pairs. Twelve good men. Seven fewer than Al Qaeda had used on September 11.

  Chapter 54

  Austin, Texas

  Susana sat on the sofa, and Bern and Richard Gordon sat in the two armchairs that were gathered around the big mesquite coffee table in Bern’s studio. Bern’s bandaged leg was propped on an ottoman, and beyond the glass wall to his left the sun glittered off the rippling surface of the lake in laser shatters. And, as always in the long Texas summers, the lake was scattered with sailboats tacking in the southern breezes.

  Gordon had arrived shortly after lunch, accompanied by two athletic-looking young men wearing dress pants and polo shirts and carrying side arms. The two men stayed away from the studio, and occasionally Bern would see one them on the terrace outside the dining room, looking out across the lake.

  This was Bern and Susana’s second debriefing since their return from Mexico City a week earlier. A team from Tyson’s Corner had come down the day after they arrived in Austin and stayed three days. It was a thorough and intense debriefing, which included Bern and Susana being questioned separately and then together. There was hardly a minute of Bern’s four days in Mexico City that the team didn’t know about when they flew back to Tyson’s Corner.

  Now, two days later, Gordon had come for a conversation. It seemed that mostly he just wanted to hear the story from them in their own words, but he also had a lot of questions that Bern assumed had been provoked by digesting the debriefing transcripts. As the afternoon progressed, the questions moved from the specific to the general. He wanted to know about impressions, about their “sense” of things. He asked about suspicions and hunches, and he started a lot of questions with “Did you have the feeling that . . .”

  Bern was already trying to wean himself off the painkillers, so his leg was a constant irritant, although not exactly a distraction. The pistol shot to the outside of his upper left leg had plowed right through the tissue, blowing out a good chunk of his leg but missing the bone. He had lain awake a portion of every night since their return wondering how in the hell he had gotten through it all with only this much damage. The whole ordeal had been unbelievable, right up to this very moment.

  Gordon took off his reading glasses and laid them on the fat arm of his chair. He studied the grain of the mesquite table for a bit, then looked at Susana. He had seemed particularly careful with her all day, respectful. He picked up his reading glasses and fiddled with them.

  “I had some luck in Mexico City,” he said. “We had a guy in El Salvador who flew in the same night and quickly pulled together a team of his own people, a totally different crowd from the one Kevern usually worked with. Luckily, the bodies in the car were charred too badly to tell that they were even gringos. That gave our man time to pull the strings to get them out of the morgue.”

  Gordon cleared his throat. “There was a hell of a lot of cleaning up. A couple of the members in the group wanted to call in people from the Mexico City station to help, but we argued them down. The guy from El Salvador worked his ass off, cleaned up the safe house in Plaza Rio de Janeiro, Jude’s apartment, Mondragón’s penthouse in Residencial del Bosque, Mingo’s place. Good disinformation leaked to the media.

  �
��This guy was something, did it all without the station knowing anything at all. I don’t know how he did it. Even got the bodies back into the States. Anyway, miracle of miracles, we didn’t lose it. The whole thing stayed black. The whole thing. A damned miracle.”

  He shook his head, sighed, and slumped back into his chair.

  “But everyone’s discussing what you two came out of there with. They’re going over your debriefing transcripts. They’re combing through other intel out of the Triple Border region and Mexico. They’re overlaying matrices. Shit, they’re looking at everything. They’re taking it seriously, I have to say.”

  “But . . .” Susana said, wanting him to get to the point.

  “But we’re afraid it’s too little, too fragmented, too vague, too subjective . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “We knew that,” Susana said quickly.

  Bern guessed she wanted to cut off any kind of commiserating. The failure to salvage Baida’s defection haunted both of them, but in addition to that, Susana was still trying to cope with having invested more than two years in an operation that had completely reversed its mission in its final hours, only to have the original mission accomplished by an accident of great misfortune. Despite elaborate preparations by some of the very best people in the intelligence business, operation Heavy Rain had failed because they had been blindsided by reversals, the unforeseeable twists of fate that every intelligence officer lives in fear of.

  And to add to the surprises, the wild flier they took with Bern had been successful. And no one but the psychotic Mondragón had had any faith in it at all.

  Suddenly, a huge sailboat emerged from behind the point, coming from the direction of the marina. They all turned to look at it as it came close in, clearly visible from the right side of the glass wall. It glided serenely by the little inlet below Bern’s walls, and for a few brief moments its massive white sails caught the sun’s brilliance, igniting the canvas like billowing sheets of phosphorus against the cobalt sky. And then it was gone.