The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Sabella leaned toward him. “Twins,” he said, lowering his voice to hoarse whisper, “he said you were Judas’s identical twin.”

  Bern saw no reason to deny it now. “That’s right,” he said.

  Sabella continued looking at him. Was he angry? What did that expression in his eyes reflect? And why in God’s name would it matter at this point?

  “This is very creative,” Sabella said, nodding as his eyes made their way over Bern’s features “even for the CIA. Sending twins through all of that training, waiting years for just the right time, just the right operation when they could use them somehow. Hell, I’m flattered.”

  Flattered?

  Sabella looked around the studio. “So this is your cover, then? You’re a artist, too? Shit. A forensic artist? Amazing coincidence!”

  The tone was insolent as he pretended to be gulled by the outrageous concoction of the twin scenario.

  “It’s not a cover,” Bern said.

  Sabella nodded, waiting for the explanation.

  “I’m not CIA.”

  Bern could see that Sabella didn’t believe him, but he thought he saw a flicker of doubt creep in at the edges of Sabella’s eyes, even a slight change in his mouth.

  Bern shook his head. “I’m a forensic artist.” He gestured at the room. “This is my life. Mondragón came to me, said they needed me to stand in for Jude for a few days, that’s all. He said I wouldn’t have to do anything, just pretend to be Jude for a few days.”

  Sabella continued looking at him, skeptical, yet tempted perhaps. He knew better than Bern that the truth could be even more complex than this, so convoluted, in fact, that sometimes it could never be unraveled. Or it could be just as Bern said. As simple as that.

  Sabella looked at Susana. “What about you, then? Just switched brothers? Just like that? Didn’t matter to you which one you were screwing, huh?”

  Bern felt the sudden heat in his face. What the hell was Sabella doing? What did he hope to accomplish by humiliating her? Jesus Christ.

  Susana still said nothing, looking at Sabella without emotion as she held the bloody tissue to her head.

  Sabella turned his eyes on Alice.

  “Who are you?”

  Alice glowered at him. The drama of the last few minutes had clearly cast him as the villain in her mind.

  “She’s a friend’s daughter,” Bern explained. “How did you find out about this?” He wanted to get the attention off Alice as fast as he could. “You had the room bugged, didn’t you, the room at the Jardin Morena?”

  Sabella pulled his eyes away from Alice. “I listened to the whole damn thing. Vicente bragging to Ghazi about how smart he had been, crowing and strutting around.” He looked at Susana and then back to Bern. “But he didn’t get to enjoy it very long, did he?” He pondered a moment. “How was that for you, anyway? You being just an artist, just an average guy, shooting a man like that. Point-blank. Murdering him.”

  He smirked. “Of course, you knew that he’d killed Kevern and the others. And he’d killed Ghazi. And he’d snatched Susana because he had already planned to screw Kevern’s operation even before Kevern had called him off. And, of course, he would have killed you, too, both of you, if time hadn’t run out on him. Vicente was burning his bridges. He’d done it before.”

  Yes, Bern had indeed realized all of this, but it hadn’t made it any easier to pull the trigger.

  He glanced at Susana to see if she was following the drift of Sabella’s performance. She met his look, and then she slowly looked down at her side, shifting her hip against the arm of the sofa. Jesus, he couldn’t tell anything from that, except that she seemed to be uncomfortable.

  Bern didn’t want to talk about what he’d done to Mondragón. “How did you find me?”

  “You find a loose thread, you pull it, things unravel,” Sabella said. He shrugged, dismissed it, studied Bern a little bit longer, then glanced around.

  “So they just came to you with this idea, then?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And you just did it.”

  “After some persuasion.”

  Sabella nodded. “Vicente’s persuasion.”

  “Yeah, I think he wanted Baida more than the Agency wanted him.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Sabella said. “He and Ghazi went to school together. ¡Pinche cabrón! Ghazi looked out for him. When Ghazi got involved in the Middle East, in Lebanon, he stayed in touch with Vicente, and threw a lot of business to him. Vicente had his great intelligence connections through CISEN. Shit, we practically had escorts through Mexico for our stuff. And we ran guns through Latin America, explosives, drugs. They did a lot together, running stuff through Cuba, Spain, Algeria.

  “But the son of a bitch wasn’t getting rich fast enough, so he stole four million dollars from us.”

  Alice had begun to squirm on the sofa. Bern had noticed that she had started to watch Sabella after a few minutes, her attention no longer focused on tending to Susana’s bleeding forehead. Something about him was irritating her. Bern glanced at her. Jesus, this just wasn’t a good time for any of her crazy stuff.

  She caught him looking at her.

  “He’s not doing the thing that is,” she snapped, looking at Bern and shaking her head indignantly, her attitude making it clear that Sabella wasn’t fooling her. “He’s not doing the real place, not in his mouth he isn’t.”

  “It’s okay,” Bern said to her, already anticipating Sabella’s reaction to her nonsense. “It’s okay.”

  “What the hell’s she saying?” Sabella was frowning, suspicious. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s . . . she has a disability,” Bern said. “A brain dysfunction.”

  Sabella looked at her, and Alice glared back, her disapproval of him very clear to everyone.

  “What’s the matter?” Sabella asked again.

  “Look,” Bern said, “what do you want? I don’t have anything to do with this anymore.”

  Sabella dragged his suspicious eyes away from Alice.

  “Oh, you just want to be left alone, I guess,” he said, giving it some thought.

  Bern didn’t like any of this. Sabella, of course, was lying about something and Alice was picking up on it. But Sabella’s world wasn’t a place that her subtle talents could comprehend. Lying wasn’t an anomaly in his Wonderland, where every utterance was a chess move, never complete in itself, but always calculated against an anticipated response that hadn’t yet entered the other person’s mind. Alice couldn’t know that Sabella’s lying was a given. For Bern and Sabella, it wasn’t a deception, but an assumed behavior.

  But something else about her reaction bothered him. Sabella hadn’t really said anything that Bern didn’t already know to be generally true. He hadn’t really lied about anything. What was she picking up on, then? His sarcasm? His hateful words to Susana? Maybe, but she had never reacted like this to anything but lying. But then, he had never seen her afraid before, either. Who knew how that would affect her.

  “I can’t help you,” Bern said, wanting it to be over. But he knew damn well that Sabella hadn’t come just to satisfy his curiosity.

  Chapter 58

  “Your brother,” Sabella said to Bern, leveling his eyes at him, “was good, but he wasn’t as good as Ghazi Baida. And he never would be. When they met in Ciudad del Este, it was a contest of masters from the start. Judas was trying to lure Ghazi into Mexico, and he had decided to play a very risky game to achieve that, a game of . . . insouciance. Do you know that word . . . Paul?”

  “Yes, I know the word.” But Bern had taken note of the way Sabella had hesitated before saying his first name. And he also noticed something that he hadn’t seen in the previous few minutes. As he had done that night in the Hotel Palomari, Sabella seemed to be covering up the fact that he was under a lot of pressure. Perspiration was beginning to glisten on his temples, and an underlying note of tension had begun to show through his relaxed manner.

  “Unworrie
d,” Sabella said. “Unconcerned. Take it or leave it. That was Judas. When that game is played well, and Judas played it very well indeed, it can be most enticing. If the target—in this case, Ghazi—senses that this insouciance is an act—then it’s all over. But Judas was a master of the fuck-off attitude. He offers you a deal, but it is slightly in his favor. He pretends not to notice this, but he knows that you do. And then he tells you to take it or leave it. He bets the whole table on his attitude, and on this moment when his target might say, Okay then, I’ll leave it. If he says that, it’s over. Taking that kind of risk, all or nothing, that takes very big balls.”

  Sabella looked a the two women, then back to Bern.

  “But you know what?” he went on. “Insouciance, genuine insouciance, can be seductive. Why? For the same reason that gold is seductive, or certain kinds of pearls, or love. Because it is rare.”

  Sabella leaned a little more toward Bern, his body language suggesting he was about to share a secret.

  “Ghazi Baida saw himself in Judas,” Sabella said softly. “He saw the same kind of man that he was looking back at him from Judas’s eyes. And he accepted Judas’s challenge. Why? Because it was the ultimate challenge, to bet your life—everything—against a man who is exactly like yourself. Ghazi accepted Judas’s challenge, and he came to Mexico City, stepping willingly into Judas’s advantage.”

  Sabella paused and smiled, despite his barely subdued agitation.

  “And he won,” Sabella said.

  Suddenly, Alice burst into a tantrum.

  “No! No! Nononono! He’s the who man! Just really . . . really the shitty no man,” she blurted at Bern, flinging a look at Sabella, her Asian features hardened into an indictment. “He’s the who of the whole thing about him.”

  Sabella flinched and locked his eyes on Alice, anger, alarm, and suspicion mingled in his expression.

  Before Bern could speak, Susana intervened.

  “Alice, Alice, listen to me . . . listen . . . the lights . . . the lights . . . don’t worry about it . . . anytime. Just the lights. It’s okay. Understand? Understand?”

  Bern was caught off guard, and it seemed for a moment that Alice was, too. She looked at Susana, her eyebrows raised in puzzled fascination, and then she began to rock her head from side to side.

  “You need to listen to me, Alice,” Susana went on. “The lights . . . okay. Now! The lights now!”

  “Okay,” Sabella snapped. “That’s enough of this shit. You think you can do this? You think I’m an idiot, Judas? You don’t have any idea what’s happened to you.”

  Bern was dumbfounded. Sabella really thought he was Jude!

  “Wait a second,” Bern said, his head growing lighter, his disbelief at what was happening almost scrambling his thinking. “This is . . . insane. Look, I’m not Jude. I can prove it.”

  “No!” Sabella said, stretching out an arm as one of his guards handed him a small tape recorder. “Let me prove something to you.”

  He clicked a button the recorder, and they listened to Mondragón’s final moments in Carleta de León’s apartment overlooking the plaza Jardin Morena.

  There was a loud smashing noise as Quito and Susana burst into the room, sending Mondragón and Quito crashing into the dining room table and chairs.

  “Guns on the table!” Bern yelled.

  “Don’t do it!” Susana screamed as she swung her gun around to Quito, who was scrambling to his feet. “No! No!” But Quito brought up his gun anyway.

  They heard the punt and smack of her silenced bullet blowing out the back of Quito’s head. There was the sound of Bern rushing to Baida’s side as he tried to stanch the hem-orrhaging wound in his neck.

  Silence. Then: “Jude,” Susana snapped, “has he talked?”

  “No!”

  “Nothing? You don’t know anything?”

  “No!”

  Another prolonged silence while Bern continued to stanch the bleeding in Baida’s neck, and Susana had her gun on Mondragón.

  “Oh! God. Shit! Good, good!” Bern said, momentarily deluded into thinking that Baida’s bleeding was stopping. In fact, he was dying.

  Silence.

  “Jude,” Susana said again, trying to get his attention.

  Sabella punched off the recorder.

  Shocked, Bern and Susana looked at each other, realizing what her slip of the tongue had done to them.

  Silence.

  Alice, picking up on the building tension in the room, was growing increasingly flustered. Then suddenly her arm flew up and she pointed a finger at Sabella and began yelling.

  “He’s the who man! . . . The who man! . . . The who man! . . .” she chanted, her eyes flashing at Sabella. “He’s the who man! . . . The who—”

  Sabella’s two bodyguards threw nervous glances at everyone, shifting their weight from foot to foot as if to be ready for anything, as if Alice’s wailing could unleash some hidden threat.

  “The lights!” Susana yelled at Alice. “Goddamn it, the lights!”

  The last word hit Bern with a flash of understanding, and his thumb hit the bottom button on the remote.

  Instant darkness.

  Alice screamed, a prolonged high-pitched shriek.

  Everything was crowded into the short burst of the next few seconds.

  Sabella yelled, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”

  But the bodyguards’ hesitation was fatal.

  From Susana’s corner of the sofa, one, two, three shots blasted through the darkness, and one of the guards flew backward as the other guard lunged away, ripping off a wild burst from his weapon an instant before Susana’s fourth and fifth shots blew into him, driv-ing him into a worktable and knocking over glass jars of Bern’s old paintbrushes, everything crashing into the darkness.

  “He’s Ghazi!” Susana screamed. “He’s Ghazi!”

  Unconsciously, a stunned Bern was keeping track of the sounds of the choreography: one down, two down, the third man bolting across the paths of the other two.

  Bern threw himself at Baida just as the Lebanese reached the glass wall, their momentum and combined weight exploding the glass and hurling them through the railing on the deck and over the side.

  The two men embraced.

  The fall lasted for days.

  Bern’s face was buried in Baida’s sweaty shirt, and he could smell the other man’s fear and his violence, and he could feel his taut muscles and energy and even the painfully slow boom . . . boom . . . boom of his heartbeat as it demanded life, even in the airy fall through the moonlight above the lake.

  Chapter 59

  She lived in Tarrytown, one of the older genteel parts of Austin, its quiet streets canopied by trees as old as the neighborhood itself. Her yard and two-story brick home were shaded by an almost unbroken shelter of oaks. The only sunny spots were at either end of the half-circle drive, where two pair of magenta crepe myrtles formed brilliant arches to arrive and leave by.

  Susana parked Bern’s old black Triumph in front of the house, and together they walked slowly along the short sidewalk. Bern was still stiff and wanting to favor every wound, though he was determined to hide it for the next hour or so. Luckily, the scores of stitches scattered all over his upper body, except the dozen crossing the bridge of his nose and sliding under his left eye, were all hidden by his long-sleeved shirt.

  They went up a few steps to the front porch as blue jays and mockingbirds punctuated the rhythmic background sound of an old sprinkler in one corner of the yard. Bern had hardly made it up the last step when the front door opened and a woman who appeared to be in her late sixties came out to meet them. Her dark hair, generously streaked with silver, was pulled back in a proper chignon. Without hesitating, she approached Bern, smiling.

  “Paul,” she said gently, and embraced him. It didn’t hurt; he didn’t let it hurt. She held him close, her arms wrapped tightly around him, and he could feel her breathing, feel her wanting to absorb him, feel her reluctance to release him. But then she did, looking a
t him closely for just a moment. She noted the stitches, but her eyes were seeing something else. Then she turned to Susana.

  “Susana, I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me.” She embraced her, too, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  She turned to Bern again, suddenly caught up once more by the presence of her son. For a few moments, she was lost in his face, and Bern knew and understood the emotions churning in her, sweeping away the logic of the moment. Then she caught herself.

  “Oh, please,” she said, reaching out and touching his arm, jogged from her fascination. “Come on, let’s get in out of the heat.”

  She led them into the coolness of the house, an old and spacious home with a living room, a staircase, a dining room, and a large kitchen, where she led them unpretentiously to a table that overlooked a back lawn, a brick-walled garden.

  “Would you like some iced tea?”

  “That would be great,” Bern said, and while Susana helped Jude Lerner’s mother, Bern stood at the windows and looked outside. There was a large birdbath, a sundial that would never tell the time in the deeply shaded yard, a patio with furniture. Jude had grown up here, in this yard, in this kitchen, with this gentle woman as his mother. The kitchen smelled of family and of memories.

  For a while, they spoke in generalities. Bern told her a bit about his life, where he lived, what he did. She rambled a little, sometimes flustered, it seemed, by her situation, telling of Jude growing up, saying that she had not seen as much of him in his last years as she would have liked.

  Bern was impatient, but he struggled not to show it. Still, he rather quickly steered the conversation around to how he had come to be in this situation, being careful to follow the parameters that Susana and Gordon had made clear to him. He told her what he knew of his past, the little that his aunt had revealed to him just before he went to Mexico City.

  As he talked, Regina Lerner devoured him with her eyes; he could almost feel her gaze. It would’ve been disconcerting if he hadn’t experienced something like this himself while living Jude’s life.