The Face of the Assassin Part 17

"When?"

"Soon."

"Soon meaning?"

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Where do my people pick it up? Guatemala?"

"No. It's here," Sabella said. "Mexico City."

Bern gave it some more thought. "I'll have to check with my people, set things up, make some arrangements."

"There's not a lot of flexibility here," Baida interjected. "Practically none."

Bern got the picture.

Sabella looked at his watch. "As soon as you have final plans," he said, "let us know. If we don't hear from you by ten o'clock tomorrow morning, we'll be forced to do it some other way."

"Fine. How do I get in touch with you?"

"Call the American British Cowdray Hospital," Sabella said, "any hour, at exactly a quarter before or a quarter past the hour. Ask for the pharmacy. Ask for Flor. When she asks, tell her you are Luis. She will tell you what to do."

As if on cue, they could hear people entering the sala, sala, the loud voices echoing in the vast empty room. They fell silent as someone rapidly crossed the room and then came out onto the terrace and approached them. the loud voices echoing in the vast empty room. They fell silent as someone rapidly crossed the room and then came out onto the terrace and approached them.

"Take him wherever he wants to go," Sabella said in English to the man who waited at the edge of the arbor. Then the three of them stood, and Bern saw that Ghazi Baida was not a big man, but he was powerfully built. Baida casually put his hands in his pockets.

"Ten o'clock tomorrow," Sabella said.

"Yeah," Bern said, and that was that.

Bern sat in silence, alone in the backseat of the car. Most of the architectural monotony in Mexico City was created in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the millions who flooded into the metropolis from the impoverished countryside strangled its lakebed plains and its foothills and ravines with a metastasizing blight of squatters' shanties. Fleeing the dest.i.tution of their small villages, where even industrious Death could hardly stir the energy to take them, they sought hope among strangers and created a new kind of misery for the ma.s.ses.

The car entered one of these vast spiritless colonias colonias of two-story cinder-block buildings, where every structure had started to deteriorate the moment its crude construction began. The streets were narrow, straight, endless, and full of potholes, and the few low-wattage streetlights that worked glowed sullenly. Despite the fog and closed windows, the car filled with the odor of dust. The whole surreal scene was a physical representation of Bern's mental state: stark and alien and menacing. of two-story cinder-block buildings, where every structure had started to deteriorate the moment its crude construction began. The streets were narrow, straight, endless, and full of potholes, and the few low-wattage streetlights that worked glowed sullenly. Despite the fog and closed windows, the car filled with the odor of dust. The whole surreal scene was a physical representation of Bern's mental state: stark and alien and menacing.

The driver pulled to the curb and cut the engine. He rolled down his window, and they waited. Bern looked at his watch. Five minutes pa.s.sed. Ten. He rolled down his window also. Twenty. Twenty-five. The driver's cell phone rang. He opened it and listened.

"Bueno," he said. He snapped the phone closed, started the car, and then drove away.

Chapter 31.

The driver dropped him off at one of the Sanborn's stores on the Paseo de la Reforma, just around the corner from the Four Seasons Hotel. He walked around to the hotel, went into the men's room, and washed his face with cold water. When he came back out, he went to one of the sitios, sitios, which could always be found outside hotels. which could always be found outside hotels.

For the next half hour, he went through a series of cab switches, using major hotels as his changing points because they provided ample opportunity for him to exit the hotel unseen. Finally, he gained a little confidence in his execution of a highly difficult technique, and he made his last stop. He got out of the sitio sitio and started walking into the darker streets. and started walking into the darker streets.

Now he was standing under a laurel tree in front of a pasteleria pasteleria that was still open. About fifty yards away, this quiet, small street merged with a larger one that was brighter and much busier. He was on Calle Pasado. that was still open. About fifty yards away, this quiet, small street merged with a larger one that was brighter and much busier. He was on Calle Pasado.

He turned to look across the street. Cars were parked on either side of the lane, and about four cars down, almost obscured behind the laurel trees, was a small hotel in a narrow building several stories high. The pale blue neon sign that hung un.o.btrusively over the sidewalk could just be glimpsed through the trees: Hotel Palomari, the words Susana had whispered to him in the Beso Azul. Bern crossed the street and entered the hotel.

The elderly man who sat behind a reception desk of heavy dark wood topped with green marble seemed startled to see him walk into his tiny foyer. The name Palomari was set in blue tile in the center of the white tile floor. The desk clerk, whose complexion seemed to have been deprived of sunlight for several decades, had heavy swags of flesh under his watery eyes, and a too-black pencil-thin mustache sliced across his long upper lip. While Bern signed an alias in the ancient registration book, the clerk wriggled subtly with pleasure, flicking nervous smiles at him. From somewhere Bern caught a disconcerting whiff of gardenia.

He had asked for room 202, which was on the second floor, up a winding narrow staircase that groaned miserably as he ascended. The Palomari was only three rooms wide, and his was the center one in the short hallway. But he didn't go to his room. Instead, he stopped in the gloomy hallway and tapped softly on room 201.

Silence. Nothing. Maybe it was only a few seconds-he didn't know, as time had become a wildly elastic thing in the past few hours-but however long it was, it was time enough for his mind to seize upon every disastrous possibility: He had heard the name wrong. Something had happened. It was a trap. She was dead.

Susana opened the door.

"G.o.d," he said, and she stepped back to let him in.

She had not turned on the lights in the room, but she had thrown open the two panels of the room's window, which let in the faint glimmer of the hotel sign below, and the glow from the pasteleria pasteleria across the street. It was a ghostly light, but bright enough. across the street. It was a ghostly light, but bright enough.

Susana said nothing as she turned and walked over to the window. They looked at each other. A sluggish breeze stirred the gauzy curtains on either side of the window, just once, like a desultory breath.

He glanced around: a bed, one nightstand and one chair on either side of the bed, an old armoire with a mirrored front sitting against the wall across from the foot of the bed. The door to the bathroom was open, and an old-fashioned white porcelain bidet stood alone, framed in the doorway.

Susana's reticence was strange, but he was so wrapped up in himself, in his fear, his confusion, his relief at seeing her, that he didn't realize how unusual the moment really was, nor, again, how long it had lasted. It could've been only seconds.

"Paul," she said-the first time she had called him by his name, he realized-"are you all right?"

Maybe he was the one behaving strangely, not her. Yes, that must be it.

"Yeah," he said. No, he wasn't, but what would it matter if he had said otherwise?

There was a second, only that, or maybe two, when he thought that if he walked over and embraced her, as he wanted desperately to do, that she would understand, that, in fact, she wanted him to do it. He was as sure of that as he had been of anything since all of this had begun. And then, instantly, he was. .h.i.t by the reality of how absurd that would be to her, how utterly unexpected and inappropriate . . . and out of control.

"G.o.d," he said again. He felt weak suddenly. He went over to the bed and sat down. "d.a.m.n," he said.

"Did you talk to him?" she asked. A perfectly logical question, it cut through the instability of his emotional fantasies.

Bern pulled off his suit coat-Jude's suit coat-and tossed it over the chair on his side of the bed.

"Yeah, I did. And no, I don't think he had a clue that he wasn't talking to Jude."

"Incredible," she said.

He told her everything that had happened, all that had been done and said from the moment he left her at the Beso Azul to the time he knocked on her door at the Palomari. Susana remained silent. She didn't interrupt him to ask questions or to ask him to expand on a particular point, or to ask for clarification.

At first, she stayed by the window, but then she began pacing, arms folded. Finally, she returned to the window again and looked down at the street, her profile cast against the glow. When he finally finished, she turned toward him again.

"Holy Christ," she said. She remained still, her forearms crossed low above her waist in the way women do. She was studying him, the faint light from behind her allowing her to get a good look at his face. "Look, I want you to know that I think you've done a magnificent job. But I'll be honest with you: I didn't think you'd be able to pull this off. I'm sorry, but I didn't. And especially after the shooting-"

She stopped herself for no apparent reason.

"No, I didn't think I'd be able to do it, either. It doesn't matter. Let's just get on with it."

"Okay," she said. Uncrossing her arms, she went over and sat on the foot of the bed. "Okay, now listen. You need to tell me quickly what happened before the shooting. I heard everything that was said, but I want to know everything that was happening. Was Mingo buying you being Jude? How was he reacting?"

Bern turned, one leg resting on the bed, the other on the floor. It took him a moment to get his mind around something that now seemed so long ago.

In the half-light of the aging hotel room, its furnishings giving off the odors of decades of transient living, its walls embracing the secrets of countless biographies, he told Susana everything he could remember-and he concentrated in order to remember every detail-while she sat on the bed and listened.

He was unnerved by how much detail he could recall, how vividly he could relive the shock and fear and panic. Not only did he recall the facts in detail but he also experienced every emotion that had accompanied those facts. To call it a debriefing hardly did justice to the experience.

When he finished, she waited a little before she asked her first question. She waited long enough for him to be aware of the sounds of the street rising to the window, long enough for him to be aware that it had begun to rain, softly, quietly.

"It seemed to me," she said, "that near the end, just before he was shot, something happened. Mingo said that he had found a woman that had the thing Jude wanted. You said, 'Oh?' And there was a bit of a pause and then you said, 'And?' And there was more silence . . . and then the shots."

Bern went back to that moment, recalling the seconds before the little boy stood up with the pistol.

"Oh s.h.i.t," he said, and he leaned back against the headboard and rammed his hand down into his pocket. He felt the piece of paper and pulled it out.

"This," he said, "he gave me this."

Before he could even react, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the piece of paper from his hand and was turning on the lamp on her nightstand. She stooped over the paper, her head up under the light.

"It's a woman's name," she said, reaching up and turning off the lamp, plunging the room into the pale glow again. "Estele de Leon Pheres. Her maiden name is Lebanese. I guess it's the woman he was talking about."

She stood, half-turned away from him, and stopped, staring out the window to the street. Looking through the limp curtains, Bern could see the pale light glittering off the rain.

Every silence like this was excruciating for him now. He never lost his awareness of time's flight, of it sweeping through the dark hours, hurling him toward his next encounter with Ghazi Baida.

"Look," he said. "Baida's waiting for me to get back to him."

"I know that," she almost snapped. She returned to the window, then moved back a little and leaned a hip and shoulder against the wall. All Bern could see of her now was her face in the icy light. She was staring down to the pasteleria pasteleria across the street. across the street.

"I'm going to call Kevern again," she said, turning to him. "They got Mingo's ID, and he's sent Mondragon's people to search his place. I need to give him this name, too, turn Mondragon's people loose on it."

"So what's the deal with Mondragon?" Bern asked. "He's Kevern's pit bull, is that it?"

"Essentially, yeah, but he's a h.e.l.l of a lot more than that. Vicente used to be a major force, a section chief, in CISEN, the Center for Investigations and National Security. At the time, it was Mexico's superintelligence agency, the FBI and the CIA all rolled into one. Only thing is, it was totally a tool of the PRI, the political party that had been the sole power in Mexico for over seventy years. That is, until Vicente Fox was elected president. CISEN collected dossiers on the PRI's political enemies, on powerful corporate executives, the wealthy and influential in Mexico. Bugged everybody. Spied on everybody. Had more stuff on individual citizens than the old East German Sta.s.si.

"When Fox came into office, he made a big deal out of 'reforming' CISEN, and one of the ways he did that was to kick out some of the agency's most notorious figures. Mondragon was one of them. But nothing ever changes much in Mexico. CISEN is still a PRI tool. Mondragon still has contacts inside. He's Kevern's back door to their vast files. And he even uses some of their tech people. Off the record, of course. They moonlight for him."

She turned her face to watch the rain, her profile floating like a ghostly mask in the pale light.

"He'll find her," Susana said. "And he'll find her tonight."

"You seem to be a little sobered by that," Bern observed.

"We're in a hurry here. Mondragon's people . . . they'll find out what she knows. We just have to concentrate on what we're going to do with the information. How they get it-you don't let yourself think about that."

Chapter 32.

The battered panel truck clattered off the Periferico on the far northern edge of the city and made its way into a grid of featureless straight streets that stretched out across the plain of the former lakebed of the Valley of Mexico. This part of the city had missed most of the rain showers that had hammered the heart of the city earlier in the night, and the panel truck threw up a spume of gritty dust that drifted lazily over the cinder-block houses that clung to the ancient lakebed like crustaceans.

Soon the hovels gave way to a vast hinterland of warehouses interspersed with an occasional street of more dark cinder-block houses. Some of the warehouse compounds were brightly lighted by the coppery glow from perimeter lights on high poles within an encirclement of high chain-link fences. There were guards and guard dogs. Some of the warehouses had loading docks that were still operating, but most of the district was quiet and deserted.

The van kept going until the sharp, clean lines of the brighter modern warehouses gave way to the warehouses of another era, out of date, deteriorating, derelict, and abandoned. These buildings were less well kept, less well lighted, or entirely dark.

The men in the van had been sending and receiving burst communications, so the van's approach was well noted, and its secure status was well doc.u.mented. It had been running a surveillance-detection route for the past half hour.

Then the van slowed, turning into a side street that burrowed into a sector of densely packed buildings. Soon it turned again, moving into an alley and going past four long rusting warehouses before it pulled to the side, overgrown weeds sc.r.a.ping noisily against the undercarriage of the truck before it came to a stop and the driver cut its lights.

Three men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders bailed out of the rear of the van and immediately spread out. Then the door on the pa.s.senger side of the van opened slowly and Mazen Sabella stepped out. While his bodyguards spoke into their headsets, Sabella walked to the edge of the nearest building, unzipped his pants, and p.i.s.sed against the rusty metal siding.

He smelled the staleness of his surroundings. Dereliction had an odor all its own, like none other in the world. He was intimate with that odor, having smelled it in a dozen countries, and aboard rusting, creaking ships in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. He had smelled it on the breath of women in all those ports, and on the clothes of their children. He had even smelled it on the moonlight, when there was a moon, and when there wasn't, he had smelled it on the dust of the stars.

He shook himself off and zipped his pants. One of his guards had walked 150 feet ahead, where a warehouse door opened and two armed men stepped outside to greet the bodyguard. Sabella came along the rutted alley with his other guards and approached the men waiting for him.

The darkness outside receded as they went through the door into the warehouse. The vast open s.p.a.ce was dark except for an isolated lighted area about fifty yards away and roughly in the center of the gloomy cavern. This spot was lighted by hooded lamps that hung down from trusses hidden high up in the dark recesses of the warehouse.

Half a dozen men were busy carrying personal items in duffel bags, cardboard boxes, and a few suitcases, emptying tents that sat in the shadows beyond the lighted work area. The isolated pocket of activity in the vast s.p.a.ce of the warehouses reminded Sabella of coming upon a busy guerrilla base in a hidden desert wadi. But the bustle of activity here had to do with breaking camp. The bivouac had served its purpose, and now the mission was moving into another phase.

As Sabella and his armed guards arrived, three men broke away from the others and came out to meet them. Empty buckets were turned upside down and a few plastic chairs were brought over to form a small gathering place, and Sabella sat down with the three men.

"Okay," Sabella said, addressing a short, stocky man with prematurely thinning hair and a black mustache, "Ghazi says that this is the final check. It's the last time we meet. Where is the product?"

The man jerked his head toward one of the dark corners of the room as he lighted a cigarette. "Over there," he said. "El Samy will take it away within the half hour."

"How many did you finally get?"

"A case. Twelve cans with labels exactly like the real ones. They're boxed and sealed."

"Perfect," Sabella said, studying the man in front of him. The flesh around the man's eyes was dark, marked by months of too little sleep, the pressure of managing a clandestine operation, too many cigarettes.

"And our friends," Sabella asked, "where are they now?"

"I paid them off with the money you sent, and all of them are on their way. I have a man with each of them to make sure they are out of Mexico by this time tomorrow." He gave a long pull on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke at Sabella. "And what about the six guys?"

"They're across now. All of them. The last one had arrived last night. No problems. Everything's fine."

Sabella turned his eyes to another man, a small, wiry man with a beaked nose and watery eyes that protruded slightly. "What about your information?"

The man nodded. "Every mentor has his instructions for the timing and sequence. The prime contact has the code for Ghazi's 'go' signal. When he receives that, the rest will follow in rapid sequence."

"Bueno." Sabella nodded. "Good job." His gaze fell on a third man. "Alfredo?"