The Face of the Assassin Part 11

He turned out the bedroom lights as they came through the door.

"You don't have to do that," she said. "The way I feel, I could sleep inside a lightbulb."

"I don't need it for the laptop," he said.

He returned to the chair and the city glow coming in through the windows. Susana sat in the near dark on the edge of the bed, just a few feet away. He tried to concentrate on the screen, but he was aware that she was sitting there looking at him. After a few moments, she asked, "What did they do . . . to make you do this?"

He wasn't sure he should tell her. He seemed to have been dropped into a world where the shapes of your friends and enemies could change even as you looked at them, where one could easily become the other, depending upon a criteria that was completely outside his understanding.

But he found himself in desperate need of a friend right now, and the tone of her voice alone seemed genuine and inviting, and he wanted to believe, as she had said he should, that he could trust her.

He closed the laptop to get the cold glare out of his face, and the shadows closed around them. He could just make out her figure on the edge of the bed, her back straight, her hands in her lap, unthreatening, almost absent of bravery.

He told her about the conversations with Mondragon and then with Mitch.e.l.l Cooper. He told her of Mondragon's proposal, of his refusal to be any part of it, and then of Mondragon's extortion. He went on and told her of Alice and her family, of Tess's death and Alice's disability, and of their close relationship. He told her that he would do just about anything not to destroy his connection with that family.

When he was through, she said nothing. He waited for her to speak, to ask another question, to commiserate in some way, however perfunctorily, but she said not a word. He felt the air move through the window and pa.s.s over him.

"Tomorrow, you need to start wearing Jude's clothes," she said.

Jesus. He hadn't fully appreciated how strange this was going to be. He imagined it would be like looking at himself in a mirror with his reflection out of focus, two overlapping selves.

She was studying him. "You sit the same way he did," she said. "Exactly. It's very strange. You cross your legs the way he did. Your hands look like his, too, and you use them the way he did." She was speaking softly, almost meditatively. "And the way you use your voice. And show impatience."

He could see her on the bed, her figure a little lighter than darkness.

"The way you look at me," she went on, "my face first, absorbing it completely. You tend to look at my mouth more than my eyes when I talk. He did that."

She suddenly stopped, as if catching herself.

"Sleep here," she said. "I don't want to wake up and not know where you are."

She was quiet a moment, and he felt that he should say something, but nothing seemed quite right to him. And then the moment pa.s.sed, and she stood. He could only barely see her, and at moments he wasn't sure he could see her at all. He heard her turn back the covers, and then the barely audible rustle of her gown coming off slipped through the darkness to him like a fugitive memory. The sounds of her body moving between the covers made him ache with memories of Tess.

He opened the laptop again and made himself concentrate on the screen. It wasn't hard, because he began with Jude's biography file. The information was riveting, and he read until his eyes felt like they had been rubbed with sandpaper. Susana was breathing the heavy sleep of exhaustion as he returned the CD to its hiding place and plugged in the laptop to recharge.

He went back to the windows and looked down into the black trees of the park. He recalled the nude drawings that Jude had made of her. He hadn't slept next to a woman since Tess's death, and even though Tess had been dead for almost a year now, he couldn't shake the odd feeling of guilt simply at the thought of crawling into bed with Susana. But it was going to be good just having her there beside him, sharing the silence and the darkness . . . the way it used to be.

He lost track of time by the windows. He heard sounds in the park across the narrow street. Once, he thought he heard footsteps on the sidewalk underneath the trees over there. Hours pa.s.sed, it seemed-he deliberately didn't look at his watch-before he was too tired to stand there any longer. He went around to the other side of the bed, pulled off his clothes, laid them over a chair, and carefully crawled under the covers.

His hand was on the cell phone after the second ring, but he was still asleep when he picked it up.

"Yeah."

"Judas," the voice said. "It's Mingo."

But before Bern could respond, someone grabbed the cell phone. Foggy-headed, he struggled to open his eyes. The room was highlighted in a blue dusk. Confused, he couldn't move.

"Si," he heard a woman say.

She was on one elbow, leaning against him. "Quien es este?" Pause as she listened. "No, se enfermo." Pause. "Quien es este?" Pause as she listened. "Dos o tres dias." Pause to listen. "Si. Si. Bueno."

She stayed on her elbow and punched off the phone. He could see her profile against the light from the window.

"Did he say anything to you?" she asked.

Bern was awake now. The guy had said something. . . .

"It's . . . I think he said, 'It's Mingo.'"

"Mingo?"

"Yeah. Yeah, he . . . that was it."

"Mingo," she said.

"Yeah."

She was quiet, looking at him, though her face was in shadow, the light coming in from behind her.

"Don't answer the phone," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

She kept the phone and put it on the table on her side of the bed. She lay down again.

He turned on his side to look at her. She was lying on her back, the sheet folded down to her rib cage, the surface of her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s dusted in a pale powder blue light. She was staring into the darkness above her, and he could see a glint in the moisture that glazed her eyes.

They lay that way for a long time, and her eyes were still open when he lost consciousness.

Chapter 21.

The twin towers known as Residencial del Bosque faced Avenida Ruben Dario and the sixteen-hundred-acre Bosque de Chapultepec (the Woods of Chapultepec), a sprawling park in the heart of Mexico City. Once the site of the palace of the Aztec poet-king Nezahualcoyotl, Chapultepec was now the home of Los Pinos, the palatial residence of the Mexican president.

Designed by the U.S. architectural firm of Cesar Pelli & a.s.sociates, the postmodern towers were the most expensive residential structures in the city. Constructed of alternating bands of dark gla.s.s and terracotta tile and brick, they were home to some of Latin America's richest men, and it was rumored that many of them had acquired their fortunes by dubious means and maintained them by the same.

The walled compound had the requisite gated security service, but the real protection was in the hands of the men in dark suits and sungla.s.ses who lingered in the shade of the trees along the boulevard and the surrounding wooded streets. With their automatic weapons casually slung underneath the open lapels of their shiny suits, they smoked with pa.s.sive faces. Like blind serpents at the mouth of a den, they sensed danger without having to see it.

Even at night, Vicente Mondragon could see the lights of the presidential palace from his twenty-ninth-floor suite near the top of the second tower. He always felt different in Mexico, even after being there for only a few hours. In Mexico he was more alert, more aware of the depths of the water he swam in.

He had arrived in the late afternoon, before Paul Bern had even left Austin. Like the president, he had choppered to the helipad at the Residencial del Bosque from his private airstrip on the southwestern edge of Santa Fe. Now he was standing at the display case of one of his plastinized faces, which were exhibited in the same manner as those in Houston, floating in pools of soft light, scattered across the breadth of the shadowy room.

Lex Kevern, looking uncomfortable but stubborn, sat in the typical gloomy twilight of the Mondragon residence, his thick body filling one of Mondragon's lush leather armchairs.

"You hang on to those videotapes of that girl," Kevern said. "If those things get out to some d.a.m.ned underground p.o.r.n circuit, I'll kill you myself."

There was a whisking sound as Mondragon spritzed the raw front of his head, the mist dazzling and falling through the pale light from the display case.

"He didn't even fight it," Mondragon said. "When he saw those pictures, it was all over."

"Yeah, okay," Kevern said.

"Does that worry you?"

"You mean because he didn't kick up a fuss? If he's like Jude, he wouldn't. You had him by the d.i.c.k-no use wasting his energy. But my guess is he won't forget what you've done to him. If I were you, I'd be ready to do the right thing with those pictures when this is all over."

"Why wouldn't I?"

"I don't know, Vicente. Why wouldn't you?"

Mondragon leaned in closer to the face. This one happened to be a Spaniard, a poor but beautiful young woman from Tarifa who had died of a blood disease. She sold her face for the price of the remaining mortgage on her mother's grim little cottage facing the Strait of Gibraltar. The old woman had sat at a window there, looking toward Tangier, mooning over her youthful years in Morocco. Mondragon remembered most of the stories connected to the faces, and this one especially, because it was so pitiful. This girl could have been a film star, or at least a d.a.m.ned good mistress.

He straightened up and went over and stood near Kevern in a dark pocket of the room "I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Mejia. If somebody found out about Jude, what about her?"

"Well, we've been over that, haven't we, Vicente?" Kevern's scratchy voice sounded strained. "What's the matter? You forgetting how to think like a Mexican? Look, she's deeper than Jude. He was out there, pushing it. She was doing what Mexicans think women ought to do, taking her clothes off. How many men in this G.o.dd.a.m.ned country have a piece of a.s.s on the side? And how many of these women do you suspect of being clandestine CIA operatives? h.e.l.l, she's playing a role that makes her as common as a d.a.m.ned street vendor. She's not going to be at the top of anybody's list."

He paused and then added, "She and Jude were as good as a d.a.m.n team could get. She's played this as smart as I've ever seen it played. And it's hard to say which one of them had the biggest b.a.l.l.s."

"Okay, fine. But she didn't like this idea with Bern," Mondragon said. "Can you be sure she's going to stay with it?"

He watched Kevern, knowing the question would irritate him, and knowing that Kevern didn't like it when he stood in the darkness. He would much rather see Mondragon's goggling eyes and his isolated lips stuck onto the hamburger that used to be his face than for Mondragon to stand hidden in the dark. Mondragon wasn't quite sure why this bothered Kevern so much, but once he discovered that it did, he did it as often as he could.

"You know what, Vicente? You wouldn't understand," Kevern said. "A guy like you."

Kevern was sitting forward in the leather chair, his hefty shoulders as wide as a bull's, his forearms on his knees, the thick fingers of his big hands interlaced. Mondragon could see Kevern staring at the shadow where his head was hidden, and he sensed Kevern's aggravation.

"This is unfinished business for her now," Kevern explained. "She's feeling stuff like loyalty and determination . . . and a sense of doing the right thing. She knows d.a.m.n well the risk to her and Paul Bern in a c.o.c.k-up scheme like this, but she's gonna put that out of her head. And you know why she's gonna put that out of her head? Because she's disciplined. And she's loyal. And because she lies awake at night wondering what in the f.u.c.k Ghazi Baida's going to do if he gets his hands on a safe, reliable underground connection into the States. She cares about s.h.i.t like that."

Mondragon waited without responding. In that brief monologue, Kevern had exposed more of himself than he had ever done in the eight years of their a.s.sociation. It was a telltale sign of the pressure he was feeling. Kevern had never let it show before, and this brief outburst-by Kevern's standards-was all that he was going to let show now. He fell silent.

Mondragon waited a few beats before he said, "And what do you do now?"

"Wait," Kevern rasped.

"What do you think the odds are that Baida knows who was behind the Tepito killings?"

"Nil."

"Maybe he suspects something."

"Sure he does. People like that are suspicious. Guys like him, they never bend down to get a drink of water."

Mondragon wasn't going to ask him what that meant. Kevern was full of those kind of Americanisms, mixed in with operational lingo. He used to be worse, but Mondragon had told him to stop it.

Kevern grunted in his chair and shrugged his beefy shoulders.

"It was a drug hit," Kevern said, jutting his chin forward and stretching his thick neck as if his tie was too tight. Only he wasn't wearing a tie. "I do know that's the story that his man took back to him. I haven't heard rumors that it was anything but a narco hit, and the street is pretty reliable about that sort of thing. If something else had been out there, something with more credence, it would've come around to me."

Mondragon turned away, walked to the gla.s.s wall, and looked out over Mexico City. He could see Kevern in the reflection of the dark gla.s.s. He spritzed his face.

"I think it's been too long," he said, his voice bouncing off the gla.s.s. "He suspects something. If you lose an entire cell, you think somebody was inside. It's been six weeks." He shifted the focus of his eyes and picked up his own eyeb.a.l.l.s gawking back at him. His lips floated alone, unattached.

"He lives in a spooky world," Kevern grunted. "He has his people, runs his traps like the rest of us. Like I said, he sent his guy up here. People disappear in his world all the time. Can't know everything. You live that life, you live with uncertainty. You acclimate."

"Jude had already had three meetings with Baida when Khalil killed him. How was he going to deal with Jude's sudden disappearance? Or Ahmad's?"

"Probably lay it off on somebody in Jude's smuggling world," Kevern said. "That's what I'd have done. Guy like that disappears, what can you say about it? s.h.i.t, the odds caught up with him. Besides, Khalil was more afraid of Baida's wrath if he'd found out they'd introduced him to a spy. Baida doesn't tolerate that kind of sloppy work from anybody, especially cell leaders. That's why Khalil killed Ahmad. h.e.l.l, they weren't even supposed to be meeting together in one place. Khalil was running a sloppy cl.u.s.ter."

Mondragon saw Kevern jut out his chin and neck again. The man was full of quirks. What did it feel like, being pumped up like that, having your muscles swollen because of steroids? He must always feel as if he's wearing a second skin, another layer of flesh weighted down with muscles.

Mondragon was still facing into the gla.s.s, his focus readjusted to pick up Kevern's reflection again.

Kevern grunted under his breath, as if in preamble to speaking, like he first had to haul the words up from his gut. But he said nothing.

Mondragon watched him. Kevern had handsome eyes. Good shape to his eyebrows. Mondragon wouldn't mind having something like that when he got his new face. There was a fullness above his eyelid that almost obscured it, and it gave him a look of strength. At least it read that way to Mondragon. Strength. And it made him look as if he kept his own counsel. Which Kevern surely did. Even in this conversation, Mondragon had had to pull things out of him. The man was just made that way. It was maddening.

Chapter 22.

The next morning, Bern was shaken awake by Susana, who was leaning over him, a towel wrapped around her, another draped over her wet head.

"Wake up," she said.

When he opened his eyes, she resumed fluffing the towel through her hair. It took him a second to remember where he was, and then he rolled over and raised himself on one elbow.

"Listen," she said, "we've got to go somewhere. You need to get up."

He wasn't sure about the tone of her voice, and for a second it seemed urgent. His heart lurched. But then she bent over and let her hair fall over her head as she continued to dry it, and it seemed he'd misread her. She wasn't frantic. Bern could smell the shampoo. She straightened up quickly, flinging her hair back.

"I've made some coffee in the kitchen," she said. "While you're showering, I'm going to run a quick errand. I'll be back in less than an hour, and I'll bring some pastries with me. You grab a bite and then we'll go."

"Go where?"

"I'll explain it to you on the way."

"So who was that on the phone last night?" he asked.