The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  No one said anything, as if the vision’s departure had carried their thoughts away with it. Then Gordon sat up in his chair.

  “They could’ve been lying,” he said.

  “What would’ve been his reasons for that?” Bern asked.

  Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “I keep thinking about it,” Bern said, shifting his leg to relieve a sharp spike of pain. He had replayed his conversations with Baida and Sabella over and over, had seen their faces in his mind’s eye and even in his dreams. He had gone over every crease and wrinkle, every perspiring pore, and had to see the whole of the message in the assembly of their features.

  He winced and put both hands around his thigh and massaged it.

  “I think they were telling the truth,” he said simply.

  Susana suddenly got up from the sofa as if she couldn’t get enough air to breathe and walked over to the windows. She put one hand on her hip, wrist in, and thrust the other into the front of her thick hair and held it there. Both men looked at her, waiting. She was easy to look at.

  Gordon folded his reading glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. He picked up his notebook and stood, punching a single button on his cell phone before putting it away.

  He walked over to Bern and handed him a piece of paper.

  “Here’s the address you wanted,” he said. “She knows pretty much everything. Not classified stuff, of course, but in general.”

  He reached down and shook Bern’s hand.

  “Thank you both,” he said. He glanced at Susana, who remained with her back to him, looking out at the lake.

  One of the security guards came in off the terrace, and the other came in the front door of the studio. Richard Gordon walked out of the studio with them.

  Bern looked at Susana. Beyond her, far out on the lake, he could see the visionary sailboat, its shimmering sails gleaming like a daystar against the wooded cliffs.

  Chapter 55

  In the United States, money continued to grease the wheels for Ghazi Baida’s heartland operation. Because these men were not zealous in their fundamentalism, they were not compelled to separate themselves from society; these were not the tight, isolated little cells that intelligence officials quickly recognized as typical of the September 11 terrorists. That profile of the terrorist agent simply melted away in Baida’s heartland operation. Instead, it was the open and gregarious nature of the huge Latino communities in the United States that provided great cover for Ghazi Baida’s new kind of sleeper agents. It was easy for them to disappear in plain sight.

  Each of the twelve men had a single contact to get in touch with when they reached their designated cities. The wisdom of reducing the terrorist cells to two was obvious. These single contacts, known as mentors, were a little higher up on the evolutionary scale of Islamic fundamentalism. They all had been instructed in the Wahhabi strain of Islam, and they knew who Ibn Taimiyah was and what he meant to their faith. Their devotion to jihad was absolute.

  After the red dot cans of Dempsey’s Best aerosol V-belt lubricant departed El Paso in three separate vans, they were soon scattered across the American heartland, each group of cans ultimately dividing two more times at ever more distant locations. When each can finally arrived at one of twelve different destinations, it was the mentors who retrieved them and made sure, one way or the other, that the men from Mexico City had a means of accessing their targets.

  The objective was to gain access to the heating, ventilation, and cooling systems of a variety of buildings in twelve different cities scattered throughout the country. The buildings had been picked because of their particular types of self-contained air systems and because of their high population density within a specific time frame. The specific window of opportunity was no greater than fifteen hours, beginning on Saturday night and extending into midmorning Sunday—a difficult time for headline news to spread very fast if something should go wrong.

  By the time the men from Mexico City arrived in the United States, the mentors had already been in place a year or more. Time enough to make the necessary access possible. There was no single way that this could be done, or should be done. After all, twelve targeted buildings, the locations of which spanned the distance from North Carolina to Nevada, allowed for some flexibility.

  Each mentor was left to his own devices. Some made friends with the engineers in charge of the Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning systems in a given building, thereby gaining access to those systems without arousing suspicion. Some cased the HVAC systems of their target buildings as if they were casing a bank. A break-in was a piece of cake in most instances, and this became the preferred method of access. Two mentors had actually gotten jobs as HVAC engineers in their target buildings.

  By the end of the second week following Richard Gordon’s return to Tyson’s Corner from Paul Bern’s house on Lake Austin, everything in Ghazi Baida’s heartland operation was in place and ready to go. The mentors patiently awaited the go-ahead sign from Ghazi Baida.

  Each target facility awaited a very simple application of aerosol spray, delivered from a common aerosol can found in every HVAC equipment room and on every HVAC repair truck. When the time came, a full can of Dempsey’s Best V-belt lubricant would be sprayed into the air-handler vents of the HVAC systems. Each can contained five ounces of finely aerosolized plutonium 240 with an average micron size of three. In less than two minutes, everyone in the target buildings would receive a lethal dose of plutonium radiation.

  No one in any of the buildings would even be aware of what had happened to them. Within a few days, people would begin dying, and it would take a few days more for epidemiologists to see the pattern.

  The targets had been well chosen. The Starlight Grand Music City on the famous 76 Strip in Branson, Missouri, held an average Friday-night crowd of about 850 country music fans. The Marion Seely Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama, usually had a weekend-night occupancy of around 650. Other locations included a convention center in Denver; a country-and-western dance club in Lubbock, Texas; a retirement center in Phoenix; a music venue in Nashville; and a midsize casino in Las Vegas.

  But the easiest targets didn’t come available until Sunday morning. By eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the HVAC systems of five large midtown and suburban churches and synagogues in Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Little Rock, Charleston, and Raleigh would be sprayed with Dempsey’s V-belt radiation.

  By noon on the designated Sunday, over seven thousand people would have received lethal doses of aerosolized plutonium. All of them would die.

  It would take just one phone call. But the sleeper mentor who was responsible for disseminating the signal once he had received it waited in vain for the message.

  Still, he waited. Like all the other mentors, he had been selected for this operation because of particular attributes he possessed. Patience was among them.

  Chapter 56

  Determined that no one would see any change in his life, Bern immediately accepted several jobs that had been waiting for him when he returned. To the few people who asked where he had been for a couple of days, he mentioned something about a spur-of-the-moment minivacation, a break from a hectic schedule. His leg injury he explained away as a fall on the rocks while working on his quay. Susana was introduced as an old friend from Cuernavaca. Eventually, of course, a better explanation would be made to Dana and Philip Lau, but time and friendship would take care of that.

  Bern began working on the quay again as soon as he was able to support himself on his leg. It was tricky business, negotiating the lakeside rocks on a muscle-ripped leg, and at first he did little more than piddle. He and Susana would get up around sunrise, have coffee on the terrace, then put on their swimsuits and go down to the water’s edge and begin hauling rocks to the pile that he would eventually cover with concrete. After the sun cleared the point, they would quit and go for a late-morning swim in the cove.

  Alice resumed
her visits to the studio as well and, much to Bern’s surprise and relief, she accepted Susana’s presence with equanimity. He had feared, at the very least, an awkward period of adjustment, but, in fact, Alice treated her as if she were a very interesting object that had turned up at Bern’s studio—an exotic seashell or a wonderfully smooth river stone that Bern had brought home. Alice liked looking at her, and she liked being around her.

  For her part, Susana was comfortable with Alice’s quirky, lively behavior from the beginning. She seemed to intuit even better than he the jumbled meanings in Alice’s symbolist gabbling. She was completely at ease responding to Alice’s verbal nonsense in a kind of pigeon palaver of her own, sometimes peppering it with Spanish, which delighted Alice, often making her laugh uproariously for no apparent reason.

  On the mornings when Alice came, they all went to the studio, where Bern worked while Alice and Susana read and listened to music. In the afternoon, Alice and Susana would swim in the cove while Bern continued to work. Sometimes when Dana arrived to pick up Alice, she would bring her suit and join them for a swim and then stay for a glass of wine.

  But the late afternoons belonged to Bern and Susana. Often he cooked on the terrace around sunset, and then they would swim in the cove once again as night fell across the lake. Afterward, they would sit in lounge chairs with drinks and watch the night boats move across the water against a backdrop of scattered lights on the far shoreline.

  It was during these hours that they talked about what they had been through. Gradually, they disclosed their lives to each other by an intricate progression of small revelations, as if they were providing each other with a mosaic of themselves that could only be assembled slowly, over time, piece by piece with the mortar of insight and understanding. It was an unconscious process, which in its unfolding brought them closer together than either of them had anticipated.

  But for Bern, the nights were troublesome. He never slept for more than a couple of hours at a time before waking up with nightmares, sweating. Over and over, he jolted awake at the very instant that Mondragón’s blood exploded across his face. Time and time again, Carleta de León’s brains splattered into his eyes, and Jude’s face—his own face—appeared on Kevern’s body, or on Mondragón’s, or on Baida’s. Over and over, Mondragón’s flayed head stared back at him when he looked into dream mirrors. This happened so often and with such vivid effect that Bern began to dread looking into mirrors even when he was awake.

  But with time, the nightmares began to subside. As the heat of late summer slowly retreated and the harsh light of August softened into September, Bern began to assemble a perspective of what had happened in Mexico City that allowed him a rough peace with those events. He couldn’t have done that without Susana. She had become the Angel of Solace for his restless discontent.

  At the end of the second week in September, Dana Lau’s mother underwent heart surgery in Chicago, and Phil and Dana flew up to be with her for a few days. Alice stayed with Bern and Susana for the weekend. The weather had been sultry and heavy as a seasonal tropical storm roiled westward along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, pushing wet, heavy clouds inland. It had drizzled for several days, and then a little cool front came down across the plains and pushed the low-pressure system back out into the Gulf. The temperatures dropped to the high eighties, and the sky cleared to a clean, brilliant azure. It was the first real break in the oppressive weather of the season, and it gave everyone hope that the withering summer heat was not, after all, interminable.

  Bern spent all of Friday morning interviewing the sole survivor and witness of an armed robbery that had ended in a triple homicide. He had promised the homicide detectives who had flown from Dallas with the woman that he would work up a series of drawings of each of the two assailants over the weekend and have them ready by Monday. He planned to work all weekend.

  Around seven o’clock, when the shadows covered the terrace and the water’s edge, Bern grilled fresh vegetables and, following Susana’s directions, prepared camarones al ajillo, shrimp grilled with garlic and chilies. They ate while watching the sun set on the far shore. After clearing the dishes, they returned to the studio, where Bern continued working while the girls played a card game that Alice loved, and they listened to a CD of serene Duke Ellington selections.

  Around 9:40, Susana brought their attention to the nearly full moon rising above the hills across the lake. Using the remote he kept in his pocket, Bern turned off the lights in the studio, and they moved to the sofa to watch one of the lake’s loveliest spectacles. After a little while, Bern noticed that Alice was nodding off in her corner of the sofa.

  Susana got up and poured a Glenfiddich for herself and one for Bern, and then she wandered over to the glass wall, leaned on the window frame, and stared out at the palely luminous landscape. Bern lost track of time, but Charlie Haden’s sax was only a few bars into “Passion Flower” when he sensed the mood in the room change, and he looked at Susana, who had turned her head to look at him, the right side of her face illuminated by the moonlight.

  Instantly, a warm flush of alarm washed over him.

  “There’s a boat in the cove,” she said. There was almost a hint of the incredulous in her voice.

  Alice, so sensitive to voice tone, stirred awake, and in the moon glow flooding the room, Bern could see her face as she looked at Susana.

  “In the cove?” he asked. “Not on the point?”

  “In the cove,” she answered, and the incredulity was gone and something harder had taken its place.

  Alice, sensing their concern, sat up. Bern reached for the remote control and snapped off the music as he stood. Alice got up from the sofa, too.

  “You don’t see anybody?” he asked as Susana reflexively moved back along the wall.

  “No, just the boat. A powerboat.”

  Bern and Alice joined her at the window, where the moonlight created the illusion that the boat was floating in the air about a foot above the water.

  “You recognize it?” Susana asked.

  “No.”

  “If ever there was a blue tree, I wouldn’t know myself, either,” Alice whispered, taking Susana’s arm.

  “What about the doors?” Susana asked.

  But Bern was already heading toward the front. He heard a noise behind him: A drawer was opened and closed in the cabinet that stood a few feet from the studio door that led out to the terrace.

  “We shouldn’t . . . we shouldn’t open our eyes for the singers to be scared,” he heard Alice say in a dramatic stage whisper.

  He had cleared the steps and was crossing to the front door that opened into the courtyard corridor at the same moment that Susana was approaching the door that led to the terrace. Just as Bern reached out to put his hand on the dead bolt, Susana hissed, “Paul—”

  Suddenly, both doors flew open, knocking them back into the room. Bern staggered backward, falling on the steps and tumbling down to the floor in front of his drawing tables. Alice screamed as Susana was hurled into her, sending both women reeling, overturning chairs and a side table and smashing a lamp.

  A man yelled something in Spanish. Alice screamed back something unintelligible, which was followed by a second sharp bark of Spanish.

  Silence.

  Chapter 57

  Bern’s head hit the concrete floor at the bottom of the steps, making him dizzy momentarily, but he was already recovering as someone roughly pulled him to his feet. By the time he was dragged across the room and shoved into one of the armchairs, Susana and Alice were already sitting on the sofa. In the pale light coming through the glass wall, he could see that Susana had been cut on the forehead. Alice was helping her stanch the bleeding with bunches of tissues from the box sitting on the coffee table.

  “I’m okay,” Susana said, her voice a little shaky. “The edge of the door—”

  “¡Las luces!” someone commanded.

  “They want the lights,” Susana said.

  “The remote’s on my drawing ta
ble,” Bern said.

  “Shit,” another voice said. “Get it, then.”

  Suddenly, Bern was alert, his mind scrambling to place the familiar tone and inflection.

  As Bern stood, a man came up to him and followed him around to the drawing table. Bern knew where he had left the cell phone, and as he pretended to feel around for the remote, he hoped he would be able to feel the right buttons fast enough in the dark. Nine-one-one-send. Nine-one-one—

  But the instant he touched the keypad, it lighted up, and the guy beside him swung his arm down like a sledgehammer, smashing the phone and sending shattered pieces pinging all over the dark room.

  “That was brilliant, Judas,” the familiar voice said from across the room. “Just turn on the damn lights.”

  Bern felt the remote in his pocket and punched on the lights, pretending to leave the remote on the drawing table. As the lights came up, he was stunned to see two Mexicans with MAC-10s and . . . Mazen Sabella.

  “Jesus,” Bern said, glancing at Susana, who merely looked at Sabella in silence. Alice’s eyes were huge, but she was controlled, helping Susana but throwing nervous glances at the two men with the MAC-10s.

  Bern returned to his chair by the sofa, hiding the small remote in his hand as he walked past Sabella, who was wearing jeans, a pair of scruffy loafers, and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows as before. Bern noticed that the black military watch was still there, and that his shirt was just as wrinkled as the one he’d been wearing in Mexico City.

  “This isn’t going to take long,” Sabella said to Bern, “but I just had to know if what Vicente had said to Ghazi was true.”

  He picked up the overturned end table, put it down near Bern’s chair, and sat down on it. He studied Bern.

  Bern didn’t say anything. A two-day stubble covered Sabella’s face, and he had begun growing a Vandyke, which looked to be a couple of weeks old.