The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  After a while, Bern couldn’t put off the question any longer.

  “Mrs. Lerner,” he said, “did you . . . do you have any idea who our biological parents were?”

  She smiled, the same melancholy, understanding smile that his aunt had smiled when he visited her in Houston and asked the same question.

  “Well, you should call me Regina,” she said. “All right?” And then she hesitated a moment before she added, “Not for many years, I didn’t know.” She looked away and then down at her hands on the table. “Jude was just out of university,” she said, lifting her eyes to Bern. “He knew he was adopted, but he never particularly showed any interest in his biological parents. I don’t know why. So many people do. But he didn’t. And he knew that we would’ve happily helped him find them if he had wanted. We’d always made that clear to him. But he never asked to pursue it.”

  She studied her hands again, smiled, and shook her head.

  “And then one day—this is still so strange to me, even now—I answered the doorbell. A woman was standing there . . . and very abruptly she said that she was Jude’s mother and that she would like to talk to me.

  “It was a cold, drippy day, early December, and I had a fire going in the living room in there. She was chilled, and I made coffee. We sat in there and talked, a couple of hours, I guess it was. She never told me her name. I begged her . . . but she was resolute.”

  Regina sipped her iced tea, and it seemed to Bern that she wanted to get the words right. He glanced at Susana, who had her eyes fixed on the woman.

  “She told me,” Regina said, “that she had terminal cancer and that while she was still well enough to talk about it, she wanted me to understand Jude’s beginnings. If I wanted to tell Jude about her and what she had to say, fine. If not, that was up to me. She just didn’t want the truth of it all to die with her.”

  Regina sighed and began her story.

  “She was from a small town in the South, wouldn’t say exactly where. She said that when she was seventeen, she discovered that she was pregnant, and that the father was the son of a prominent judge in the county. The boy’s family wanted her to have an abortion to prevent a scandal. But her parents—her father was a grocer—disagreed, saying they wanted the child and that they weren’t ashamed of anything . . . except that the boy wasn’t standing by their daughter.

  “The judge then began to bring certain pressures to bear against the girl’s family: Bank loans were suddenly called in; insurance policies were canceled for esoteric reasons. . . .” Regina shook her head. “A small town like that, uncommon deference to powerful men is not out of the ordinary. You can imagine. Anyway, the upshot of it was that the girl ran away, to spare her parents even more of the judge’s wrath. Her parents were heartbroken, but she wouldn’t reveal where she’d gone. The judge hired private detectives to try to find her.”

  Regina sighed again. “It was a sad and sorry story. During this time alone, running, the girl discovered that she was expecting twins.

  “It seemed like too much for her to bear,” Regina said, “working at menial jobs, unwed, pregnant, visiting charity Hospitals. When the boys were born—she wouldn’t tell me where—she got on a bus and traveled to St. Jude’s Charity Hospital in Memphis. She abandoned one boy there. Jude. That was the name they gave him there. We kept it. The other baby she took elsewhere. She didn’t say where. I guess it was Atlanta, the old Lanier Memorial, as you said.”

  “Why in the world did she go to so much trouble to separate the babies?” Bern asked.

  Regina nodded. “Well, the story of what was happening slipped out, as things like that have a way of doing, and the judge’s family was shamed into changing their own story, putting a different spin on it. Now they claimed that the girl had kidnapped the children and that their son wanted desperately to have custody of what was rightfully his. The girl was obviously irresponsible. The judge hired private investigators to find her. When . . . your mother learned of this, she vowed that the judge would never have her children.”

  Regina looked at Bern. When she spoke, her voice was compassionate, softened by years of seeing the unfairness of life, the dangers of rushing to judgment. “You have to understand. She was young and not terribly sophisticated. She thought the judge could pull strings everywhere, not just in their small town. As she saw it, the only thing to do was to separate you. Twins would be so much easier for the judge’s investigators to track down. So, different hospitals, different cities.”

  Bern was amazed, but he could imagine the rest of it.

  “And St. Jude’s’ records were intact,” he said. “That’s how she was able to go back there and find you.”

  Regina nodded.

  “And the old Lanier Memorial’s records were fouled up somehow.”

  “That seems to be the way it happened.” She nodded. “Yes.”

  “And then years later,” Susana said, “when the CIA came to you for their standard interview when Jude applied, you told them about Jude having a twin.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you tell Jude about it, after our mother came here?” Bern asked.

  “Yes, I did. I told him just what I’ve told you.”

  “Then he knew he had a twin.”

  She nodded.

  “And how did he feel about that?”

  “He was pretty sobered by it. As I said, the woman wouldn’t leave her name, gave no information about herself. She said it wouldn’t do any good. She said that I was Jude’s mother and that’s the way it ought to stay.”

  “And then she . . . just left?”

  “Yes, but first, sitting there in the living room before the fire, she opened her purse and took out a small envelope. Then she took out a little pair of scissors. She cut a lock of her hair and put it in the envelope, then sealed and put it next to her cup on the coffee table. ‘For DNA,’ she said. ‘And maybe a memory.’

  “A taxi came for her. I remember standing on the front porch and watching the smoke coming from the taxi’s exhaust in the cold gray air as it disappeared down the street. For some reason”—she shrugged, tilting her head to one side with a sympathetic smile—“that struck me as a particularly lonely sight.”

  Bern stared into his glass. He was glad to know that much at least. Regina Lerner’s story was both satisfying and dissatisfying, and he decided that that’s the way it would have been regardless of what the story had been. That’s the way the beginning of his life was, a conundrum woven of whys and if onlys, a sort of logic worked out in the frightened mind of a lonely young girl who was trying to be wise for her parents, and for herself, and for the two little boys she didn’t want to grow up in the old judge’s cruel world. You couldn’t blame her for being young.

  But he couldn’t help but wonder if she really was terminally ill, or if that had just been a story to give them all a reason to put an end to it, to put it all to rest. Of course, if he was going to doubt that, he might as well go ahead and doubt all of it. How could he pick and choose his truths?

  Regina reached out and placed her hand on his. She held it there a moment as they looked at each other, and then she removed it.

  “Mr. Gordon,” she said, “Richard Gordon, told me about some of what happened to Jude . . . and to you. And he told me that since Jude was nonofficial cover, or even something more . . . I don’t know, more secret than that, we couldn’t talk much about it.”

  “I guess not,” Bern said.

  “And you’re an artist, too,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s . . . amazing.” She smiled, marveling, taking a moment to look at him again, as if his face revealed wondrous things to her. And Bern imagined that it did.

  “Well, anyway,” she went on, “I’m going to Mexico City next week. To clean out his apartment. Mr. Gordon said the embassy would have someone stay with me. I can ship it all back, he said. Everything.”

  She looked at Bern, and he said that was good. She glanced at Susana and the
n back at Bern.

  “I’d like to do that alone,” she said. “But when I have everything back here, would you like to come over? We’ll divide his things. I . . . want you to have whatever you’d like to have.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

  She looked down at her own hands, which she was clutching together on the table now. “Mr. Gordon said that there’s no body. I’m . . . I’m so sorry about that, but I know . . . I know how Jude loved what he did. And I’ve known all along that there would always be secrets, maybe even painful ones.

  “But I’m going to have a memorial service. My husband is dead—Jude’s father was a doctor, a very wise man, and a wise father—but I have close friends who knew Jude all through his years of growing up. I want to do that . . . for all of us.”

  Bern nodded.

  “You’ll come, won’t you? Both of you?”

  “Of course,” Bern said, and he was surprised to see Susana reach out and put her hands on Regina’s.

  In the quiet that followed, Bern said nothing about the skull wrapped in velvet scraps and stored in the old ebony paint box that he had used in Paris. And yet something told him that if she had known about it, Regina Lerner would have forgiven him for his secret.

  Chapter 60

  The ingenuous ruse that Ghazi Baida had managed to design and execute—in which he, in the guise of Mazen Sabella, was able to micromanage his terrorist operation while hiding in plain sight—died with him. His death remained known to only a handful of men and women in the intelligence community.

  In the final analysis, Susana and most intelligence analysts believed that Baida (Sabella) had never intended to defect. It was all a ruse to have the Americans witness “Baida’s” death. Whoever the poor devil was who had been playing the role of Baida with a new face was being set up. The real Baida was going to kill him, or have him killed, in the apartment above the plaza Jardin Morena, with U.S. intelligence operatives acting as the official witnesses.

  And then capricious fate stepped in. Baida learned from Bern that Vicente Mondragón was still alive and was in close pursuit, hell-bent on killing Baida for what he had done to him. So the real Baida fled in the rainstorm and let it happen. Mondragón did the job for him.

  The fact that the real Ghazi Baida had died in the shallow waters of Lake Austin in Central Texas, six weeks after he was thought to have died in Mexico City, convinced U.S. intelligence that Baida had most likely had time to put together the final details of some kind of a terrorist operation somewhere inside the United States. His appearance at Bern’s house seemed to suggest that his work was finished. His last visit to Jude Teller was the icing on the cake, a triumphant swagger before the man who thought he had outsmarted Ghazi Baida, a last victorious strut before the endgame, when Baida would kill Jude and bring it all to a close.

  Again, it was the grim consensus of most analysts that the launching of the operation that Baida had put in place during the last six weeks was only awaiting the final signal from Baida himself. If his ego hadn’t demanded one more face-to-face encounter with Jude Teller to prove to Jude that Baida had finally “won” after all, his operation would most likely have been executed within a few days.

  Now nearly everyone agreed that the operation probably remained cocked, awaiting the final signal—one that only Baida would know—that would trigger the event. Therefore, the secrecy surrounding Baida’s death was of paramount importance. If his death were known, someone, somewhere, sometime, would retool the operation and set it into motion again. The longer his death could be kept secret, the more time counterterrorist agencies had to try to uncover some thread of the operation.

  As it stood, there was an uneasy peace. How long did sleeper agents sleep? How long would it take before the terrorists on the edges of the operation realized that Baida must surely have met his death somewhere, and then how long before they would begin trying to reconstruct Baida’s design? And how long would it take them to locate the twelve sleeping mentors and their agents and reassemble an operation that had been so carefully scattered and compartmentalized? It was a design that did not anticipate the present circumstances, and it would be as difficult to rebuild from within as from without.

  The U.S. intelligence community could only hope that the famous discipline of Baida’s mentors would remain intact and, God willing, that they would sleep forever.

  Paul Bern’s life eventually returned to an altered version of what it had been before. He resumed his work as a forensic artist, and played a central role in identifying Mazen Sabella. Sabella’s skull was x-rayed. The plastic surgeon in Zurich who had given Ghazi Baida a new face was finally located and an X ray of Baida’s skull was obtained from him. The two X rays were overlaid and then were matched point for point by computer enhancement in order to confirm that the two men were the same.

  But Paul Bern never again looked at a face in the same way that he had before the tragic events that began when a stranger walked into his studio with a box containing the skull of his twin brother. He compared himself to a blind man who had suddenly been given the gift of sight, but he knew deep within himself that what he had really gained was the gift of insight.

  Bern had acquired a modern glimpse into an ancient belief; that a man’s face is much more than its physical features. It is, rather, a physical representation of his personality, of his soul even. But modern man has easily deceived himself about the landscape of the face and has often trivialized its value, reducing it to the simple elements of attractive or unattractive.

  There are some people, however, who look at a face and see the world of the inner man. Bern had seen evidence of this kind of insight in the acute intuitions of Alice Lau, whose own gifts were unknown to her. He had seen it in the clever perceptions of Ghazi Baida, and in the cruel grief of Vicente Mondragón, who revenged himself on the wrong man and died without a face, fulfilling his worst fear.

  But most often now, Bern saw evidence of this when he looked into the mirror. He no longer saw merely his physical features there. He saw the complex and mysterious mind of his brother. He saw a self that he had never known before, a whole other man, someone capable of thoughts and deeds that until now had remained hidden from him.

  And he saw the face of the assassin.

  By good fortune, or God’s grace, or the laws of physics, he and Ghazi Baida had hit the shallow water in the very same position in which they had left the edge of the deck. Baida hit the shallows first, with Bern on top of him, clinging to him in a viselike embrace triggered by an adrenaline-driven animal instinct for survival. Both men were stunned, but Baida bore the brunt of the weight and the shock.

  Bern recovered his senses first, and he fought furiously to gain his footing in the shallows. He grabbed Baida by the throat and shoved him under the water. As Baida began to recover and found himself struggling for his life, he fought desperately. Suddenly he had a knife, and he slashed and jabbed viciously, finding his target again and again with wild and random stabs. But Bern let them come; his hands never left Baida’s throat.

  In the end, Paul Bern had completed the job that his identical twin, whom he had never known, had spent nearly three years planning. And Ghazi Baida died at the hands of a man whose face he knew but who was, in fact, a stranger.