The Face of the Assassin Part 19

Mondragon spritzed his head. He sipped straight scotch from a gla.s.s. Tonight, his raw skin was throbbing. Stress. That's what it was. For some insane reason, stress made it worse.

The front of his head was on fire. He spritzed it again. He wanted to close his eyes and wait for the cooling effect of the a.n.a.lgesic. But he couldn't. He sat there in the half-light of the sedan, his eyes goggling at everything, seeing, seeing, seeing, taking in everything. His eyeb.a.l.l.s fanned around like searchlights that couldn't be extinguished.

He took another shot of scotch. He was on the edge here. A few more sips and he wouldn't be able to think straight. He would be in that zone, that strata of exquisite self-deception where he'd a.s.sume he was thinking straight, even though he wasn't, like a pilot flying too high without oxygen, slipping into a nether zone of absolutely believable delusion. This was his fate since his face had been sloughed away-to endure by balance, to linger at the edge of delusion but not to step over, to be constantly tempted by relief but never able to taste deliverance.

Mondragon turned the front of his head to the window again. Just a slight shift in focus made the city rush away at warp speed, and then his own reflection was staring back at him: eyeb.a.l.l.s and lips . . . a f.u.c.king horror show.

Then he picked up a wafer-thin translucent mask. Molded into the shape of a face, it was made of special materials that would fend off the infectious grit-laden smog of the city's night air. He carefully placed it over his face, attaching it to the back of his head with two Velcro straps. He took a moment to adjust the gel and membrane inner surface of the mask to the front of his head, making it as comfortable as possible. He could wear it only a couple of hours before he would have to remove it. But it would give him a little time to maneuver outside his car.

He looked out the window of the car and thought of the people inside the buildings he was going by. He thought of the millions of people in the city. In the whole universe, only one life meant anything to him at all. The others were nothing. They were mere bits of debris, blown and whipped about in the eddies of history, spinning out their stupid and irrelevant hours and days in meaningless insignificance.

But not Ghazi Baida. Not his old friend. Not that one certain soul. He deserved a special place in the scheme of things.

He poured a bit of scotch into a gla.s.s and carefully sipped it through the mask. He had to keep the buzz going, especially while he was in the killing house. The buzz would help him focus his thoughts on the events of the coming hours.

He thought of the faces of the people who were about to die, and he thought of all the people who died every day-how many? tens of millions?-who no longer needed their face. G.o.d threw away a city of faces every day, so many faces a.s.signed to fire and decay every day, wasted every day, that if you had them all in one place, you could shove them around with a bulldozer. You could push them into piles; you could build mountains with them. Every beggar and pustule on the globe had a face, and it was as nothing to him, no more important to him than his own a.s.s, which he never saw. But he saw his face every day, and no one, no one, no one, appreciated the significance of what he saw staring back at him from a mirror, or a bucket of water, or a puddle, or a window along the street. appreciated the significance of what he saw staring back at him from a mirror, or a bucket of water, or a puddle, or a window along the street.

Mondragon thought of the ubiquity of the human face, billions of them throughout the earth. A vast sea of faces. Mountains of faces pushed into the sea of faces, and every day they kept coming, gargantuan piles of faces, a face for every birth, a face for every death. Mondragon was haunted by the idea of dying without a face.

Chapter 35.

They both heard a faint tickling at the door handle, but neither of them had a chance to react before the door was pushed open and two men stepped inside, automatic weapons ready, although not pointing at them. As Susana gathered the front of her dress and started b.u.t.toning it, one of the men raised his hand for them to be calm.

Mazen Sabella came through the door between the two men.

"My apologies for coming in this way. Sorry."

He was holding a paper bag.

One of Sabella's guards went into the bathroom and then came out again.

"I have some coffee," Sabella said, holding the bag up to them. "And a few pastries." He was wearing the same clothes he had worn when Bern met with him. They were a little more wrinkled now.

The same guard went to the armoire and opened it. Then he got down on his knees and checked under the bed.

"What's going on?" Bern asked.

"You and I have to talk," Sabella said. "You've done a very good job of cleaning yourselves. The street is clean." He addressed Susana. "Your cell phone, please."

She reached for her purse, retrieved the phone, and gave it to Sabella, who gave it to the second guard. The man left the room with it.

"You'll get it back," Sabella said. "We just don't want to be overheard." He looked around the room. "So we'll talk here." Then he spoke to Susana again. "But I'm afraid we'll have to talk alone. My men will take you across the street for a bite to eat. We'll be able to see you from the window."

Silence.

"Now?" Susana asked.

"Yes, please."

Giving Bern a level look that told him nothing, she stepped into her shoes as she picked up her purse, then left the room with the two men. Bern and Sabella were alone now.

Sabella walked around the bed and sat in the chair where Susana's bag had been. He opened the sack and put one of the paper cups of coffee on the nightstand, then placed a hard pan dulce pan dulce beside it. He took the other coffee for himself. beside it. He took the other coffee for himself.

Bern came around the end of the bed, too, and glanced down at the street, where Susana was crossing Calle Pasado to the pasteleria. pasteleria. The lights inside the The lights inside the pasteleria pasteleria gave it a cheerful glow. Susana went to the gla.s.s display cases to order while one man sat at a table and the other one waited outside, where a light fog moved along the street. gave it a cheerful glow. Susana went to the gla.s.s display cases to order while one man sat at a table and the other one waited outside, where a light fog moved along the street.

Bern went over and sat down on the bed, picked up the pan dulce pan dulce and the coffee, and bit into the bread, which was sweet and crumbly. His stomach was churning. What in G.o.d's name was going to happen now? and the coffee, and bit into the bread, which was sweet and crumbly. His stomach was churning. What in G.o.d's name was going to happen now?

Sabella sipped his coffee and looked at Bern with large dark eyes that sagged at the outside corners. They were bloodshot, the irises deep brown, melting into the pupils. Bern tried to swallow the bite of pan dulce, pan dulce, but it was too dry and hung in his throat. He sipped the coffee. This was Sabella's show. He would have to handle the opening scene himself. but it was too dry and hung in his throat. He sipped the coffee. This was Sabella's show. He would have to handle the opening scene himself.

"We are completely alone," Sabella said. "No one listening. Only the two of us. My people aren't listening. Your people aren't listening." He gestured at Bern with his coffee. "You and I are alone."

Bern stared at him, still trying to make the bread go down. Sabella stared back.

What did a man like Sabella think about in such a moment? Was he thinking strategically, trying to foresee how Jude would react to what he was about to say, and then trying to decide what his own reaction should be in response to that? This moment of hesitation, was it a moment of doubt? What could he be thinking as he sipped his coffee and watched Bern trying to hide the fact that he was nearly choking on a chunk of sugared bread, trying to hide the fact that he was petrified that his outrageous lie had been discovered by these violent people who had seen and used every imaginable trick to kill and to survive.

"Jude the smuggler," Sabella said pensively. He sat in the straight-backed chair as if it were a throne, occupying it with confidence and shrewdness. His legs parted in a posture of stolid resolution. His back was straight, and wiry black hair showed through the open front of his shirt, while on his wrist, as on Baida's, a black military watch counted down the diminishing hours.

"We talked about so many things, didn't we, Judas, in Ciudad del Este?"

Bern nodded. He wanted to appear . . . Jude-ish. Wiser than Bern. With more guts than Bern. With a view of the world that made him unflappable, and with a cynicism that Bern would never be able to understand.

"Do you know what I think, Judas?" Sabella's eyes were alert, but his face was benumbed by the gravity of his game, by the high stakes involved. "I think you know . . . precisely . . . who Ghazi Baida is." He paused, letting the surprise do its work in silence. Then: "He's not just some guy who wants to move twenty kilos of something in a box. And you're not just a smuggler who doesn't care what it is, who will move anything but dope. You're not just some guy who's trying to save his a.s.s, who wants a bundle of money."

Sabella raised his coffee and blew on it softly, his eyes remaining on Bern all the while. But he didn't take a sip of the coffee.

"I think you know Ghazi Baida . . . intimately, Judas," Sabella said, "the smell of his breath, the way he understands the color of light, the way he tastes something . . . the way he hates. I think you know . . . every tiny thing about him. You have memorized him from dossiers. You know his shoe size. You know the women he's slept with. You know the brand of cigarettes he smokes, and you know how many he smokes a day."

Bern sipped his coffee. He felt sweat popping out along his hairline. He saw faint shadows behind Sabella, clumps of fog prowling along the street. He felt not entirely within himself, as if he were pulling loose from his own personality, the dis...o...b..bulated Dr. Jekyll.

Sabella lifted his chin in a kind of acknowledgment and went on.

"You know, too, that we have not been able to find out a d.a.m.n thing about you, my friend. Nada. You appear, in fact, to be Judas Teller. An artist. A smuggler. A f.u.c.ker of many women. A loner. A n.o.body much. Perhaps a bitter man."

Now Sabella sipped his own coffee. He swallowed, nodded to himself.

"But . . . Baida smells you, Judas. He smells the s.h.i.t on you. He doesn't care what he can't prove; he knows what he knows. Ghazi is not an idiot."

His face didn't change. He didn't blink. His voice was curiously pensive, with no edge to it, no urgency.

"What is it?" Sabella asked. "They want to kill him? Is it you? Are you supposed to do it yourself? It's not the right time yet? Not the right place? And Mexico makes it more difficult for you, doesn't it? Maybe it has to look like something else. It wouldn't do for the CIA to be involved in an a.s.sa.s.sination scandal in a country so close. So there has to be some elaborate planning. That takes time. Not easy, huh?"

Bern watched Sabella's face, and he knew what was happening. Sabella was giving him a polygraph test, his own version of that dubious examination. He had seen this kind of penetrating scrutiny too many times on Alice's face, the impaling gaze that saw the unseen, that read the unreadable, the gaze that crawled inside the head, and even inside the heart, and sniffed out the lie. After more than twenty years of running and hiding with Baida, Sabella's whole being had become a trembling sensor for the lie. It had kept them alive, this tremulous humming within him, attuned to deceit. Bern remembered reading the incisive interviews that Jude had had with Sabella before Baida even showed his face. Extraordinary.

"I don't know," Bern said. "But I think there's a big misunderstanding here."

Something changed in Sabella's face, subtle, hardly there at all, Bern couldn't even describe it, but he knew that Sabella had just gotten the answer that he knew was there all along.

Sabella leaned forward, lowered his voice.

"Ghazi Baida wants to make a deal," Sabella said.

Bern swallowed. He couldn't help it. He didn't even have the presence of mind to take a sip of coffee to cover it.

"A deal," Bern said. What did he do with this? He was numb. He couldn't make his mind put together a response.

"He wants you to kill him," Sabella said. "He wants you to put him out of his misery. And in return, he will spare ten thousand American lives."

Chapter 36.

Jude would listen. Bern had no doubt of that. But he knew, as surely as Jude would have known, that there was a downside. If he listened, he would practically be admitting that he was who Sabella suspected him of being. If he wasn't, he wouldn't listen, because he would know d.a.m.n well that in this business, knowing too much would get you killed.

Bern cursed himself for not being able to read Sabella's face. Though he had made his living studying faces, his recent experiences with Alice had taught him that despite his experience, he had never really penetrated the face's deeper dimensions. He knew bones. He knew tissue and muscle. He knew the mechanics of tension and structure and elasticity. But he had never gone beyond that; he had never seen the unseen like Alice, like Sabella himself. At this moment, he could see only that Sabella's face had softened, that it had changed, but that was all. He couldn't explain the inner landscape, or decipher the hidden story.

Whatever this man was about to say on Ghazi Baida's behalf, it would have been a surprise to Jude. No one-not Kevern, not Mondragon, not anyone in Washington-would have expected Ghazi Baida to turn around and face his enemy-and appeal to him for help.

"Ghazi and I have worked together for a long time, Judas," Sabella began. "Almost from the beginning. I met him shortly after Rima Hani was killed, and he was like a man on fire. Hatred emanated from him like a molten aura."

Sabella's a.s.sumption that Bern would know who Rima Hani was demonstrated how sure he was of Jude's real role.

"We were young warriors together. Of course, I recognized immediately that I had none of Ghazi's brilliance. Ghazi was exceptional-his ability to innovate, to see things that others couldn't see, to imagine things others could not imagine. Those are Ghazi's gifts, and he has used them well and selflessly in the service of Allah for these twenty years."

He had lowered his voice yet again. They might be alone, but for Sabella, alone was never alone enough.

"My talents were more humble," he continued, "but they were necessary to Ghazi's success. Hundreds of us have happily served his vision, working in our own small ways to make it a living reality.

"But everyone has enemies, and men like Ghazi have more than most. Not only do leaders of Western governments want to see him dead but so do some in rival factions of Islam's armies. Life has become very difficult, almost impossible. Like an old lion, Ghazi is having to devote more and more of his energy to just staying alive."

Sabella paused to sip his coffee, but his eyes never left Bern; their intensity never subsided.

"But from great trials come great opportunities," Sabella said. "Let me explain. There are plans," he said tentatively, carefully testing the water, "that your government should know about. There are developments going on even now that it would be fatal for your country to overlook. Ghazi has a sensitivity to such things, having lived as both American and Arab; he sees many sides to both worlds. He knows how both sides think.

"In the months following the events of September eleventh, he saw a country that most Arabs didn't see. He told me that it was like watching someone and being able to see his skeleton. Ghazi has always said that in revolution, as in life, success depends upon one's ability to see beyond the obvious. The obvious is reality's wh.o.r.e. Anybody can have her, but only fools believe it's love."

The two men had been watching each other closely, but it was just beginning to dawn on Bern that Sabella was under a lot of pressure. His controlled demeanor was only a disguise. Being Ghazi Baida's lieutenant and intermediary was a punishing role.

"I can give you an example," Sabella went on. "By the end of the first year following the crashing towers, while many jihadis were still rejoicing, Baida told me that he saw something quite different happening. It didn't even take a year, he said, not even a year, for most of your country to return to its old rhythms of living, to its old preoccupations, to its old business of being busy.

"In New York and Washington, D.C., of course, that was not the case perhaps. And maybe even in other large cities the population was skittish, if not vigilant. But everywhere else-for example, in that beloved 'heartland' that American politicians love to speak of-life returned to normal almost immediately. After all, they had little to fear themselves. There were no buildings in the heartland that were considered symbols of American power and domination, targets to the symbol-loving terrorists. There were no subways to trap people in, no density of population to gas or blast or spray with germs. The patterns of life didn't change in the heartland because there was nothing there that offered itself to the imaginations of the terrorists, who love the idea of spectacle."

Sabella glanced at his military watch. The gesture was fleeting-if Bern had blinked at that instant, he would have missed it.

"So, what do I fear if I live in a small town in Kansas? What do I need to be afraid of in Maryville, Ohio? Or in San Angelo, Texas? Or Tempe, Arizona? Terrorists? No, they want the Sears Tower. They want the White House. They want the Golden Gate Bridge. They want symbols. If it happens again, h.e.l.l, they know they can watch it on television.

"What Baida saw, just one year later, was that America hadn't really been terrorized at all," Sabella continued. "Even the people in New York and Washington, D.C.,were afraid only occasionally-when they saw something that reminded them of what had happened, when they recalled a sound, a smell, tasted a particular thing that brought it back again. But that was only an occasional thing. It didn't preoccupy them anymore."

Sabella paused and shook his head. "That's not terror, Ghazi says. That is shock, a temporary thing. Terror is something altogether different. You do not have to recall terror, nor be reminded of it, because it never leaves you. It creates a perpetual foreboding, a constant dread, which suffocates your peace of mind."

Sabella's soft manner of speaking combined with his now-visible difficulty in containing his agitation presented an eerie, frightening context. It was discordant, like laughter at a funeral.

He reached out and put his coffee on the edge of the nightstand.

"Listen to me," he said, his voice so soft that Bern found himself leaning forward on the bed and concentrating on Sabella's mouth in order to decipher the words; "America will be in a h.e.l.l of a lot of trouble when terrorists finally realize that the heartland is the ideal target. The captains of counterterrorism are watching the great American symbols that reside in the nation's metropolitan centers. That's where your government has put its funding. But security in the heartland? Nonexistent. Office buildings in Des Moines? No security. The crowded stadium at a regional football playoff in Oklahoma City? No security. A statewide basketball tournament in Indianapolis? Nothing. A school, a restaurant, a movie theater . . . in any heartland town?"

Suddenly, the small room seemed claustrophobically intimate to Bern. The fog outside was so heavy now that it even dampened the sounds of the city. Calle Pasado seemed isolated, a foreign country all its own, a place far away, on the borders of the imagination.

Sabella stared stoically at Bern. "Who could be more deluded about their safety than heartlanders? When you really get down to it, their belief that they don't have anything to fear, that something like that really can't happen to them, is pathetic. And that makes them the perfect targets."

Bern was horrified at the implications of Sabella's monologue, and he was horrified that he had been placed in this position, with so little understanding of what he should do. It didn't do him any good to imagine what Jude would do. This was way beyond that kind of simple role-playing. And it was far too important to be left to the inexplicable currents of intuition.

Bern put his own coffee beside Sabella's on the nightstand and stood. He stepped to the windows and looked down at the pasteleria pasteleria. Susana was sitting at a table with the bodyguard. They weren't talking. She was staring out into the gray morning light through the plate-gla.s.s window of the shop.

He turned to Sabella.

"Explain it to me very simply," he said. "Exactly. Precisely. No innuendo. No implications. I have to know exactly what you want and what you are offering in return."

Sabella looked down at his hands. His fingers were interlocked, the thumb of his right hand kneading the base of the thumb of his left hand. It wasn't much of a gesture, but Bern was stunned to see it. This was forbidden body language, a small but profound blunder, one that gave away Sabella's state of mind. He was under some kind of crushing pressure.

He lifted his head and looked at Bern.

"You can get this to the right people?"

Bern's heart pummeled away at his chest. This was wild. He had no authority to answer this. He had no way of knowing even if he should answer it. It was a wild, out-of-control feeling, a mad, plunging ride, where absolutely everything was at stake.

"Yes."

Sabella nodded, regarding him. "I thought so."

Without warning, rain started falling, a sudden deluge. Bern looked across the street. He could still see Susana's dress through the smear of rain.

As he watched her, wishing desperately that he could see her face, he realized that he had just given away everything. Without any effort at all, Sabella had learned that Jude was connected to American intelligence. A warm, damp fear washed over him. He was suddenly nauseated, and he could almost feel the barrel against his temple. Slowly, he turned to Sabella.

But Sabella wasn't holding a gun. With sagging shoulders, he sat gazing at Bern, his deeply wrinkled white shirt profusely stained with sweat. The sound of the rain almost drowned out his soft voice.

"Ghazi wants you to stage his a.s.sa.s.sination," he said. "Then he wants you to prove to Mossad that he is dead. And prove it to all the others, too. Then he wants you to hide him somewhere and protect him."

Bern saw him swallow.