The Face of the Assassin Part 15

Don't say the name? Oh Jesus. Remember. Remember. The pages in Jude's file flew through his mind, swirling like litter scattered in a storm.

"Yeah! I got it. Yes."

"Get a taxi. Go there. Okay? You have that?"

"Yeah, good. I . . . I've got it."

"Now, get rid of the phone!" Susana snapped. "Throw it away right now. Drop it. Now! Go, get away from it!"

She ran through the dark edges of the park. When she got to Avenida Sonora, she flagged a taxi.

He threw the d.a.m.n cell phone against a building, shattering it, unable to get rid of it fast enough, and kept running. He ran for another block without thinking, just getting farther away from the shooting, from the phone, from the images in his head. Finally, he had to stop to catch his breath. He fell back against a building, bent over, and grabbed great desperate gulps of Mexico City's thin, resinous air.

In the darkness his mind cast up images of the shooting. He saw the shoe-shine boy's little hunched shoulders as he burrowed the muzzle of the huge handgun into Mingo's stomach, each blast digging deeper into him. He saw Mingo's astonished face: shock, pain, realization, dismay, horror. Every explosion from the hands of the child a.s.sa.s.sin reflecting in his face as he spun deeper and deeper into his vanishing mortality.

Horrible.

He began running again, but it couldn't have been more than just another block before he had to stop once more. Jesus. The alt.i.tude. Where was he? s.h.i.t. He was hopelessly disoriented by his mad dash into nowhere. Though he couldn't have gone all that far, the streets were narrow and murky, the doorways were hollows descending to unknown horrors, and the few people he encountered under the trees hurried past without looking, wanting nothing to do with a marked man, wanting nothing to do, even, with the night air that moved around him.

To his left, across the street and near the middle of the next tree-lined block, he saw light spilling onto the sidewalk from a doorway, a few people milling in the glow inside. He forced himself to walk slowly, to control his breath, not wanting to approach them gasping for air.

It was a small hotel, its lobby door thrown open to the cool night. Pausing in the low wattage of the foyer, he saw a young woman standing behind an old curved registration desk, an older woman mopping the terrazzo floor, and a young man with no apparent purpose other than to talk to the young woman. They turned their eyes on him.

He asked the girl if she would call a sitio sitio for a taxi. It was dangerous to flag a taxi off the street, especially the little green Volkswagen cabs. These innocuous-looking little vehicles had a brutal history of collusion with armed robbers and kidnappers, and not a few people had lost their lives after stepping inside one of them. for a taxi. It was dangerous to flag a taxi off the street, especially the little green Volkswagen cabs. These innocuous-looking little vehicles had a brutal history of collusion with armed robbers and kidnappers, and not a few people had lost their lives after stepping inside one of them.

The girl did as he asked, and he thanked her, moving out of the spill of light to wait alone at the curb. Immediately, he heard sirens. He looked back at the small foyer and saw that all three pale faces were turned to him. But their expressions were unreadable. It was a learned trait in a city of secrets. No one knew anything. And no one, no one, no one, was curious. was curious.

The night shadows are impatient in Mexico City. They stick close to you when you turn off a major street, crowd you as you walk, and overtake you by the time you've gone only a few yards. So Bern stood surrounded by them, his back flat against a stone wall a few feet from where the taxi had left him.

He was in a neighborhood on the edge of Colonia Roma, not all that far from Condesa-a fact that made Susana's choice wildly reckless to him. Across the street and a little farther down, Beso Azul-the Blue Kiss-stood on the corner under a old jacaranda that fractured the light falling onto the sidewalk from a nearby streetlamp. The club's entrance was on the angle of the corner, and through the dappled haze in front of its opened doors, a languorous music floated out into the darkness.

Should he go inside, then? Wasn't that implied? He didn't know what the h.e.l.l was implied. The words stood alone, stubbornly without implication. "Go there" was all she had said.

It seemed rash to leave the shadows. Jesus Christ. To show his face anywhere seemed insanity. Suddenly, he was aware of his legs trembling. She had said, "You don't know this yet, but you can trust me. You need to grab hold of that fact as quickly as you can."

He stepped out of the shadows and crossed the street.

Once inside, his eyes began to adjust to the gloam. He saw immediately that the Beso Azul was not de moda, de moda, was not was not de ambiente. de ambiente. This was not the gathering place of the chic young crowds that frequented the stylish and trendy clubs in Condesa and Polanco. There were no cell phones here, no sungla.s.ses, no pounding electronic storm. This was not the gathering place of the chic young crowds that frequented the stylish and trendy clubs in Condesa and Polanco. There were no cell phones here, no sungla.s.ses, no pounding electronic storm.

Though the decor was an unintentional faded memory of the Art Deco era of the late 1920s, the crowd was, in fact, a mixture of the middle-aged and young. Here, in a blue haze, the dancers embraced closely, exuding a poignant s.e.xual melancholy as they glided about the dance floor in the fluid slow-quick-quick, slow-quick-quick rhythm of the graceful Cuban danzon, danzon, a sweet and romantic music played by a cello, a couple of violins, an old piano, and a flute. a sweet and romantic music played by a cello, a couple of violins, an old piano, and a flute.

"Aaaah, Judas." The purring woman's voice caught him by surprise. He turned to see her as she was pa.s.sing by with her partner, a woman his own age, the bare tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swollen by her partner's tight embrace. Turning her head to follow him with her eyes as she danced, she smiled, her white teeth iridescent. Her swarthy partner jerked his head in a serious greeting without speaking, and they slowly danced away.

He was on the edge of the dance floor moving among the tables along its perimeter, moving to nowhere.

"Judaaaas." A middle-aged man smiled and lifted his chin at Bern from a tiny table, cigarette smoke streaming from his nostrils, his woman leaning on him, smiling at Bern, too.

Jesus Christ. He thought he spoke to them; he thought he smiled at them; he thought he seemed at ease.

Someone hissed through the danzon, danzon, and he turned and saw a woman smiling from a table farther away. Another man nodded his head soberly in greeting. and he turned and saw a woman smiling from a table farther away. Another man nodded his head soberly in greeting.

This was surreal. Enveloped in a smoky sapphire glow, surrounded by the languid music and dancers who seemed to belong to another era, Bern began to feel a weird disconnect from the heart-hammering velocity of his flight. The tacky Club Cuica, the blast of the child's gun, the blown blood and viscera-all of it seemed to recede, as if it had never been anything but a memory anyway, as if it were being absorbed, even obliterated, by this reanimation of a scene from an old movie.

Inexplicably, he even began to feel as if he were remembering this place, the Blue Kiss in Roma, as if he were returning to an old retreat, returning to these strangers, old friends forgotten. He felt that he understood these people, that he knew why they came here, seeking one another's company in this melancholy place with its sweet, heartbreaking music. Instinctively, he knew exactly why Jude had come here to sketch the somber faces of these lovelorn men and the coy smiles of their women.

Gently, she took his arm from behind, and when he turned, she was as close to him as the embracing dancers, as close as when she had kissed him the very first moment that they met. She pulled his face to her, not for a kiss this time, but to whisper. His lips were at her neck, in the shallow of her collarbone, and he smelled her skin. And he smelled fear.

Chapter 28.

Kevern's small team of four, including himself, was well versed in electronics, but for the more complex ops they depended on Mondragon's techs, who were all ex-Mexican military or intelligence officers. But there hadn't been time for them to put together video surveillance, though they did have a good audio feed.

Mondragon's security goons were there, blending in with the crowd, though they were there only as observers this time and had no real responsibilities beyond providing more eyes and ears. Everyone half-expected Baida to have people there also, if he was indeed looking for an opportunity to contact Bern, and Kevern hoped someone would be able to pick up on some of his people. A good percentage of the crowd on Calle Genova belonged to a surveillance ent.i.ty of one kind or another.

At the sound of the first shot, Kevern's team bailed out of their car, which was double parked near the French emba.s.sy on Calle Niza. But by the time they had all hit the pavement, the last shot was being fired, and by the time they had reached the corner of Calle Hamburgo, they slammed into a tide of screaming Zonistas fleeing in the opposite direction.

When they finally fought their way upstream, the samba dancer was dancing alone, though some people in the crowd were already slowing down and turning around to glance back from a safer distance. Kevern dived into the palmettos, getting b.l.o.o.d.y up to his elbows as he deftly retrieved Mingo's wallet.

Then they were gone, leaving the Policia Judicial to discover the body for themselves and to sort it all out on their own, which they weren't going to be able to do.

Moments later, after they had returned to the car, Kevern discovered that Susana wasn't answering either her surveillance cell or her regular encrypted cell. But the tracking equipment had picked up her encrypted call to Bern's phone.

Kevern's officers immediately began homing in on the GPS signals from the two phones. Bern's was stationary.

Kevern began going through the possibilities of why Bern's signal wasn't moving as their car eased through the streets, sneaking away from the chaos in the Zona Rosa. He had been killed. Or he had been kidnapped and his phone discarded. Whatever Susana's reasons were for not answering, he just had to trust her.

He hunched over in his seat and concentrated on listening to the playback of Bern's conversation with Mingo, listening to it again and again. "They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do." "They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do." Kevern replayed it once more and then looked at the agent sitting across from him in the backseat. Kevern replayed it once more and then looked at the agent sitting across from him in the backseat. "I have found a woman who has the thing you want." "I have found a woman who has the thing you want."

"What the h.e.l.l's he saying?" Kevern grunted.

Jack Petersen said nothing. He had worked undercover in Latin America for thirteen years. Buenos Aires, Iguacu Falls, Bogota, So Paulo. He had last worked with Kevern in Colombia. He put his head down and listened, shaking his head.

"s.h.i.t," Kevern said. He fast-forwarded to Bern's response. "Oh?" "Oh?" Again. Again. "Oh?" "Oh?" Again. Again. "Oh?" "Oh?" Then: Then: "And?" "And?" Again. Again. "And?" "And?"

Then the recording fell silent, except for the samba music that was being picked up in the background. Samba music. Samba music.

Then the first blast. Screams. And then the other blasts following rapidly.

Kevern didn't replay the shots.

They followed the GPS signal from Bern's cell phone, approaching carefully, reading the traffic on the sidewalks. As they neared the signal on the dark street, pedestrians disappeared altogether. Finally, a dozen blocks from the Zona Rosa, they found Bern's cell phone scattered all over the sidewalk.

Using his cell phone, Petersen finally reached Quito Lopez, Mondragon's main ops guy, but Lopez said it all happened so fast, they didn't even get a chance to cover the crowd. The truth was, n.o.body was expecting a hit, not in a meeting between partners, and the shooting caught everyone off guard. "By the way," Quito said, "Mingo pa.s.sed something to Bern, a piece of paper. Bern read it and put it in his pocket."

Kevern stood on the dark sidewalk, listening to Petersen's report and putting Susana's actions through his mental a.n.a.lysis mill. The car sat idling in the street, its rear doors open. Lupe Nervo, one of Kevern's two female team members, had gotten out to gather up the pieces of the cell phone, and now she was fiddling with them as if she could put the phone back together again. As if it mattered.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Kevern grunted.

Petersen was lighting a cigarette. "This guy was still looking into something, even though he thought Jude was dead? I think he confirmed something Jude had suspected. Probably what was written on the piece of paper."

"That's what it sounds like." Kevern was p.i.s.sed. He wasn't sure what was going on here.

"It'd be a mistake to a.s.sume too much here," Petersen said, mostly talking to himself as he worked it out. "The hit doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what Mingo was telling Bern. Could've been totally unrelated."

A light breeze moved down the narrow street, bringing heavy moisture. The early-evening rains had not moved out entirely, as was their habit, and a fog was beginning to settle in. Kevern could feel it on his face and could see it gathering around the few streetlamps that stretched far down the diminishing street.

"Lex," said Mattie Sellers, the second female team member, who was sitting in the car with her door open, watching the signal from Susana's phone on her GPS monitor, "she's not far away. Southern edge of Colonia Roma."

Lupe had gotten back into the car to get out of the mist, which was growing heavier.

Petersen hunched his shoulders, turned up the collar of his shirt, dropped his cigarette b.u.t.t-he never smoked a whole one anymore-and put his foot on it.

"I trust her," Kevern said, as if Petersen had asked him if he did. He was still staring into the distance. "She'll do what has to be done." He didn't move his eyes off the street, which seemed to be receding into the soup of dark and mist. "Let's get back into the car and see where she's going."

Vicente Mondragon was finding it hard to breathe. Sometimes the membrane covering his nasal cavities was affected by the peculiar atmosphere in Mexico City. The high alt.i.tude made the air very dry, even in the rainy season, and then the pollution added to the ineffectiveness of the membrane's porosity. Sometimes the whole raw front of his head, where his face used to be, ached, despite the a.n.a.lgesic spray. To help dampen the pain, he continuously consumed a farrago of mixed drinks.

The events in front of the samba dancer had been narrated to him by Quito Lopez, who was reporting from his position on the dark roof of Club Cuica, where Quito's technicians were broadcasting to Kevern a live feed of the conversation that they were picking up with a parabolic microphone. He was waiting for the phone call he knew he would be getting soon from Kevern. Quito had seen Kevern retrieve Mingo's wallet, and soon Kevern would want Mondragon's men to find out where he lived and to strip the place for information.

This had been a good contract for Mondragon. Lex Kevern always paid well, gave Mondragon and his men a lot of leeway, and still believed that the law of spoils was a justified concept. As long as the operation was done well, Mondragon was welcome to pick up the debris that inevitably followed in its wake.

But the downside of working with the Americans was having to put up with their arrogance. Their superiority in everything was so automatically taken for granted that they fell into it as naturally as s.h.i.tting. They thought that the people they hired knew only the things that the Americans told them, that the hirelings had no real creative abilities of their own. It was hard for those who came from a powerful country to believe that they could be outsmarted, that they could be manipulated just as easily as they manipulated others. Although it would seem that in the age of terrorism, and in an age when the Colombian drug cartels, with whom the American's had been "at war" for decades, were still earning more annual revenue than McDonald's, Kellogg's, and Microsoft combined, combined, the Americans might get the hint that they were not always the smartest people in the world. the Americans might get the hint that they were not always the smartest people in the world.

But the truth was, there couldn't be enough downsides in this operation to dampen his enthusiasm for finding Ghazi Baida. Sometimes maniacal fate handed you a gift, and Kevern calling Mondragon for this operation was one of those times, as rare and sweet as an angel's breath. Mondragon had inhaled the opportunity with a vicious enthusiasm. Kevern did not know it, and Mondragon would not tell him, but hunting Ghazi Baida had been Mondragon's obsession for nearly three years. Kevern had only provided Mondragon with a kind of legitimacy, and a face, to do the very thing that kept his heart beating.

When the telephone rang, he picked it up.

"I got the guy's wallet," Kevern said, "and I've given it to Quito. Name's Domingo Huerta. Ever hear of him?"

"No."

"Well, I need as much as I can get on him, and I need it as fast as I can get it."

"Sure," Mondragon said. "Did Quito tell you about the pa.s.s?"

"Yeah."

"So where is Bern now?"

"Don't know. Susana had him ditch his cell phone, which was smart. She's picking him up. I'm waiting to hear. I'll tell you one thing: We weren't the only ones putting up wires on that street tonight. Whoever did this had some investments to protect. We need to know if this guy was killed because of something else he was into, or whether it had to do with Jude. Let's find out what the h.e.l.l's going on here."

That was it. Kevern broke the connection. Mondragon dialed his encrypted phone and told Quito that he was to check with him first about whatever they found at Mingo's.

Outside his windows the fog that was moving in was melting the city's lights, creating a coppery glow, which was quickly enveloping the entire valley of lights.

Mondragon fought depression. Having no face was a living h.e.l.l. He turned his back to the windows and looked into the half-light of his room of floating faces, everything bathed in rose-gold l.u.s.ter.

G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d, how he wanted a face.

The Nahuatl poets-the Mexica philosophers-believed that the human face was the most intimate manifestation of the intrinsic nature of each individual. It was the physical representation of the spiritual self. The personality. Without a face, a man vanished. He was nothing.

I cause sorrow to your face, to your heart.

If he had a thousand lives to live, he would forfeit them all in exchange for just one with a face.

A lover of darkness and corners . . . he takes things . . . a sorcerer, destroyer of faces, he causes others to lose their faces.

If he had a thousand lives to live, he would hunt Ghazi Baida in all of them and destroy him over and over without ceasing.

He stared with his never-closing eyes at the floating faces in the clear boxes. Even detached from their bodies, even separate from their selves, they were more than he was. Here was a man. Here was a woman. You see their faces, you see their lives. Here is the woman who is no more, gone to paradise. Here is the man who is no more, gone to h.e.l.l.

But he, Vicente Mondragon, was evanescent. He would be forgotten. He was desaparecido desaparecido-disappeared-his self raided and stolen from him, his existence removed from him in strips of flesh, in strands of muscle, in shards of cartilage.

Mondragon drew close to one of the faces in its clear acrylic cube and put his raw head close to it, closer to it than he could have done if he had had a nose. His lips breathed a wavering ghost on the acrylic. His eyeb.a.l.l.s, no lids, no lashes, nearly touched the cube. It was a woman's face, one of his favorites, for she was Asian, and he had grown to love the clean lines of the Asian race. This woman, Chinese.

As he stared at her, his vision caressing her graceful contours as intimately as if he had been touching her with his fingers, Mondragon began to weep, keening softly so that his servants wouldn't hear.

Chapter 29.

Someone in the crowd took his arm even as Susana was still talking, and he turned around and saw a man his own age staring at him, still holding his arm.

"Please, you need to come with us, Judas," he said. He raised his eyebrow coaxingly, and his expression was not threatening.

Bern turned to Susana, who was looking at him, too, and saw a man holding her arm, as well. Everyone exchanged looks, and then the man leaned close to Bern's ear and said, "Mazen Sabella."

Bern caught Susana's eye again and she nodded, or he thought she nodded, and then without anyone saying anything else, the four of them began moving slowly through the crowd.

Pushing through a clutch of people standing at the edge of the dance floor and against the wall adjacent to the orchestra, the man holding Susana's arm opened a door and they stepped into a narrow, musty hallway stacked with cases of empty liquor bottles and worn-out brooms and mops. At that moment, another door opened just ahead of them, blocking their way, and a woman stepped out of the rest room with her hands under the raised skirt of her dress as she finished adjusting her underwear. Surprised, she dropped her skirt, gave them a quick sheepish smile, and then with a "So what?" flick of her head, she squeezed past them in the tiny hallway.

"Did you say Mazen Sabella?" Bern asked, to let Susana know where they were going.

"Yes," the man said curtly.

They turned a corner and were at the back door of the club. The man with Susana opened the door, but then he let go of her arm and held his own arm out, blocking her.

"Alone," the man with Bern said.

"Hey, wait a second." Bern shook his head.