The Face of the Assassin Part 13

She turned around. "Okay," she said. "We've got a lot to do. How's Gordon?"

"Good," Kevern said. "He's good."

Susana nodded. "Okay."

So much for the tight family thing.

"We're going to bury ourselves in background," she said. "We'll be in touch when we get a grip on the best way to handle it."

"Good," Kevern said. "I've got a cell upgrade for you." He stood from edge of his desk again, went to a table jumbled with electronic gear, and picked up a cell phone and its charger. He went over and gave them to her.

"Give me your other one," he said.

Susana went to her purse, retrieved the other cell phone, and gave it to him.

"Okay," Kevern said, "this one has everything built into it. We'll know where you are every moment. We want updates as often as you can send them or need to send them. Punch oh six oh and start talking. It's as secure as an electronic signal is capable of being. We monitor it live around the clock. We'll respond immediately. Everything else is the same."

"Okay. Fine."

"I guess you'd better a.s.sume that Baida could get wind of this within hours. Maybe already knows. If this guy Mingo knows that Jude's alive, we've got to a.s.sume everyone knows. Just be ready to handle that."

"We'll push as fast as we can," she said.

She put the cell phone and the charger in her purse, and they left.

Chapter 24.

They took a taxi to Paseo de la Reforma, where they got another taxi to a pasteleria pasteleria on the fashionable Avenida Masaryk in Polanco. Susana had said nothing during the ride, gazing out her window in thought. At the on the fashionable Avenida Masaryk in Polanco. Susana had said nothing during the ride, gazing out her window in thought. At the pasteleria, pasteleria, they ordered coffee and found a small table in a corner. Susana began talking immediately. they ordered coffee and found a small table in a corner. Susana began talking immediately.

"What I did was way out of line," she said, referring to their trip to see Kevern. "They'd just moved the operations to a new location, and I risked exposing it by doing that. Kevern was furious."

Her face was weary, serious.

"But I had to do two things. I needed to find out what the Mingo business was all about. I wasn't expecting what Lex told me, but then I didn't know what to expect, so I guess I'm no worse for wear. And I wanted you two to meet."

"I wouldn't have met him if you hadn't done that?"

"Probably not. If he could've kept his distance from you, he would've done it. Lex and Jude were a mutual- respect society. They weren't friends. Neither of them had friends. They had informants, sources, targets, agents, superiors, subordinates, mistresses, but no friends. But Kevern took Jude's death hard. Especially because of what he had to do. Or thought he had to do."

She told him about Jude's death, about the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones' surveillance images, what had happened to the remaining members of the cell, how they had found Jude's body, Kevern's plan to use Bern as a stand-in, the device of using Jude's skull to lure Bern into cooperation, and how he had initiated the plan before getting clearance from the group, the small circle of men who had initiated the operation in the first place.

All of this was told to him in a quiet, calm fashion, and the enormity of the words were diminished by her controlled demeanor, so that the remarkable implications of what she was telling him followed her recitation by some moments. Still, when she was finished, Bern was floored by the audacity of Kevern's actions. And it put into startling perspective the boldness of what he'd gotten himself into. Feeling like a man knocked off his feet by a sudden blow to the head, he was still trying to collect his thoughts. She was quiet for a moment, waiting for his reaction.

"One question," he said. "Will Mondragon use those pictures if I don't do this? These people will let him do that to her?"

"No, they can't do that," she said. "But then, they can't let Ghazi Baida do what he wants to do, either. They make a choice. They make a chain."

"A chain."

"They create a chain between themselves and you. Each additional link is farther away from them, and because each link is its own independent ent.i.ty, the less real control they can legitimately claim over it. And the less responsibility they feel. The more links they have, the more deniability they have."

"But the fact is," Bern said, "when Washington yanks its end of the chain, the other end rattles."

She didn't say anything. He studied her. "And so you're telling me this . . . why?"

"It's a personal thing with me," she said. "I told you before, and I told Kevern, we're joined at the hip on this one. We've got to commit to each other, and you've got to have as much of the picture as I can give you to be able to do that. It's a matter of survival."

Yeah, Bern thought, and he'd just gotten through seeing how difficult it was for even Susana to have the whole picture. He remembered the surprised look on her face when she found out about Jude and Mingo.

Jesus. He was nearly a basket case of scrambled emotions. He was scared. He was recklessly curious about what he would discover about Jude's life. And he was horrified that those pictures of Alice would surface somewhere, and that Dana and Phil would never, ever, no matter what, be able to look at him the same way again.

h.e.l.l, there was no way to turn back the clock. Yeah, he was committed, the same way he was committed to the coming of night, to the pa.s.sage of time, to the surety of death.

In the afternoon, Bern went on reading the files. He moved the laptop to the sofa in the studio and kept plowing through the pages and pages of data. When he had questions, Susana explored every detail with him. They were both determined that Bern would grab as much information as possible in the short time they had.

They plunged into Ghazi Baida's life.

"Maybe the main thing about Baida," Susana said, "is that he's not your typical Hezbollah terrorist. For one thing, he's not an angry young man. He was born in 1954 in Beirut, the only child of a couple whose backgrounds seem to begin with the birth of their son. We don't know anything at all about where they were from or who their families were. The father was a textile merchant, and when Ghazi was eight, his father moved the family to Mexico City, where there was already a large Lebanese community. Ghazi attended private American schools here and became fluent in English and Spanish.

"When it came time for him to go to university, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. He had a h.e.l.l of a time there, went nuts over the freewheeling life of a well-to-do university student. He totally bought into the American collegiate idea. Ball games, parties. Even a spell in a fraternity. Women. He was good-looking, and charming. In short, he had a blast."

Susana went on to outline his graduation, his unhappy return to Mexico, his falling-out with his father after a year in the family business, his rebellious move back to Beirut while the country was in the throes of a civil war. Then he seemed to have fallen into a black hole. For the next decade, information about him was scarce, except for a few key facts: The war politicized him, as did his love affair with Rima Hani, a young Lebanese woman who was educated at the Sorbonne and was also from a wealthy Beirut family. In April of 1981, the two married.

In September of 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalange units swept into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla and ma.s.sacred some eight hundred civilians. Israeli forces who were responsible for the camps' safety stood by and let it happen. Rima, who was working as a medical volunteer in the camps, was killed in the ma.s.sacre.

"When Ghazi surfaced again," Susana said, "he was Hezbollah's most skilled operational designer." She nodded at the laptop. "You've got them there, the list of horrors that bear his trademark-bombings, kidnappings, a.s.sa.s.sinations throughout the Middle East and Latin America.

"But after 2002, Baida dropped off the intelligence radar screens again. Rumors placed him in Latin America. And rumors were all they had, until Jude spoke to him in Ciudad del Este a little more than two months ago."

They spent the rest of the day and into the night studying Jude's smuggling route from Guatemala to Houston. Names. Names. Names. Places. Places. Places. Code words. Contacts. Whom he paid for what. What he paid to whom. Names. Places.

The next morning, they began with Jude's notes on his meetings with Mazen Sabella and Ghazi Baida. Names. Places. Jude's impressions. Susana told him little bits of details that Jude had shared with her during their long conversations, feelings and hunches, the sorts of things that didn't make their way into his official reports. Not facts, just feelings, the way Jude felt at the third meeting in Ciudad del Este when the stranger walked into the ratty hotel and introduced himself as Ghazi Baida. What Jude thought of Baida's facial surgery, how it had dramatically changed his appearance, and how Jude imagined that it must have affected his personality as well.

By late in the afternoon of the second day, Bern was beginning to get a good feel for the way his brother had been trying to ferret out the pieces of the puzzle. The sun was coming through the studio windows at an acute angle, just clearing the trees and the cityscape. The sharp contrast of light and shadow would not last long. In a few minutes, the sun's rays would hit the densest layer of the city's notorious smog shroud. The light would soften, and then the clouds would move in, gathering for the summer afternoon's rain showers.

Bern stood stiffly from where he had been grounded for hours on the sofa. His muscles needed stretching; his body yearned for a swim in the cove. But his mind was electrically charged, and his new knowledge was generating an intense energy, which made him as antsy as a cat.

He walked over to the windows, where the sun was streaming in, and looked out over Parque Mexico. The windows were open, and he could feel the cool, soft late-afternoon breeze that carried the burble of pigeons and, occasionally, the lilt of children's voices from the park. He leaned on the windowsill and marveled at the strange and alien feeling of the moment. He might as well have been in Bangkok or Samarkand.

"Jude used to stand that way," Susana said. "Just like that. Right there in that window."

When he turned around, she was standing, too, looking at him with an expression of haunted memory.

"I've got to have a drink," she said. "I've waited long enough."

"I'll get it," Bern said. He went over to the ebony cabinet and made the drink just as she had shown him how to do that first night. He made one for himself, too, then took Susana's over and handed it to her.

"If you're right about Mingo," he said, sipping his drink, which he held in one hand, the other hand in a pocket, "then it seems to me-"

Jude's cell phone rang, startling both of them. Susana put down her drink before she picked up the phone.

"Yes."

Hesitation at the other end.

Bern went over to her, and she tilted the phone so he could hear.

"Why are you answering this phone, senora senora?"

"Who is this?"

"I need to speak to Jude."

"You don't understand," she said. "I have to know who this is."

Pause. "Tell him it's Mingo."

"Look," she said, "he's sick; tomorrow would be better."

"Give the phone to him," Mingo said. "Even if he is sick. This is very important."

"I have to have-"

Suddenly, Bern grabbed the phone from her. She gasped, stunned.

"Mingo." His instincts told him to keep his voice calm. Very calm. "This is Jude."

He cut his eyes at Susana. She was looking at him as if he had shot her.

"Judas? Jesus, man, we thought you were dead. I can't believe it. Where the h.e.l.l have you been?"

"Who thought I was dead?"

"Everybody, man. Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," Bern said.

There was silence on the other end. Bern imagined the other man's face, his eyes narrowing, straining to see what was in store for him as he stared into the diminishing light of suspicion.

Mingo said, "We thought the narcos narcos got you." got you."

"I was lucky."

"No s.h.i.t."

"You said you had something important to tell me."

Pause. "This phone, it's still good?"

"Yeah, it's clean."

"It's about Baida, Judas. I need to talk to you."

"Okay, good-"

"The same place, then?"

"No. Can't do that anymore. Look, give me fifteen minutes, then call me back."

"Bueno."

Chapter 25.

When he punched off the phone and turned around, Susana was gaping at him, breathing hard, her eyes still wide in disbelief.

"What in the f.u.c.k f.u.c.k was that? What are you-" was that? What are you-"

"He said he needed to talk to me about Baida. That was his urgent message."

"s.h.i.t." She stared at him. "What in G.o.d's name do you think you're doing? You think you're ready for this? Is that it? Is that what this is? Listen, you wouldn't be up to this if you'd spent a G.o.dd.a.m.ned decade getting ready. That"-she was so p.i.s.sed that her voice had changed-"kind of stunt"-she pointed at the telephone-"will get you killed so fast that they'll be shipping your your head back to the States for someone to . . . to . . . reconstruct!" head back to the States for someone to . . . to . . . reconstruct!"

"Look," he said, "I should've . . . I just didn't-"

"You didn't! You didn't! h.e.l.l no you didn't! You didn't tell me what you were going to do. You probably didn't know what you were going to do. You didn't give it any thought. You didn't know enough about anything to do do anything!" anything!"

The intensity of her emotion had literally changed some of the features of her face.

And for a moment, Bern almost believed her rant was justified. For a second, his conviction wavered, and the instantaneous clarity of the idea that had driven him to grab the phone almost slipped away from him. Almost, but it didn't. It was still there, clear and sure, and he knew, as surely as he had known anything during the last four days, that he had done the right thing.

He forced himself to be calm, to keep his voice level. He wanted what he was about to say to be measured and clear.

"Listen to me," he said. "We've got fifteen minutes for you to figure out how, and where, you want me to meet this guy."

"We don't even know what he looks like!" she snapped.

He pointed at her, the phone still in his hand.