The Face of the Assassin Part 27

"Jude," Susana said again, trying to get his attention, and then she caught herself, but before she spoke again, she saw that Bern already had begun to realize that Baida was dead.

Remaining on his knees, Bern knelt there awhile-he didn't know how long-and stared at Ghazi Baida. He looked at the half-flayed face of a terrorist and a drug trafficker, the face of hatred and fear. The face of hopelessness. The face of a man.

Bern slowly got off his knees, turned around, and looked at Susana. She hadn't moved an inch. She hadn't-not even for a second-taken her eyes off Vicente Mondragon.

"Stay right there," Bern said to her.

He walked out of the living room and into the kitchen, the way he had seen Mondragon go to get the knife. He went to the sink and washed his hands under the faucet and then bent down and washed the blood and brains of Carleta de Leon off his face and neck. Methodically, he soaped his hands, lathered them, and then soaped his face. Then he rinsed off his face and hands, and washed the woman and Ghazi Baida down the drain.

He dried his hands and his face with a towel that he got off a hook on the side of the cabinet, and then he hung the towel back on the hook. He returned to the living room and picked up the Sig Sauer that was on the floor beside Baida's chair.

He gave the gun to Susana, who seemed to intuit everything perfectly, as if they were sharing the same mind. She held both pistols on Mondragon until Bern took the one with the sound suppressor from her. He walked over to Mondragon.

The two men looked at each other. Bern remembered the first time he saw Mondragon, the sad, hideous spectacle of his disfigurement. He remembered how Mondragon had challenged him to look his fill, to get his morbid curiosity out of his system so that they could move on to more important things. More important things. G.o.d, if Bern had only known then.

"Did you know what we were trying to do?" Bern asked. "Did you know what Ghazi Baida was going to give us?"

Mondragon seemed to hesitate. It was strange, but even without a face, he seemed to convey a sense of defiance, an imperious att.i.tude of self-absorption that swept aside everything that got in its way. Nothing was more important to Vicente Mondragon than his own outrageous suffering, suffering that he knew would not end until he drew his last breath, suffering that could never be revenged enough, not even at the price of ten thousand lives. His grief for himself was insatiable.

"Ghazi Baida was a f.u.c.king liar," Mondragon said.

Bern raised the pistol and shot him in the front of his head.

Chapter 53.

The plan had been in the works for nearly a year, before Ghazi Baida was even brought into the mix. It had been an obsession for Ziad Khalife ever since he had accidentally come across a mother lode of death in Islamabad: two kilos of plutonium 240 that had been smuggled out of an Obninsk nuclear research laboratory in Russia.

He sc.r.a.ped together the money and then began shipping the lode to India, where he knew a disgruntled nuclear research scientist in Madras who had, until a year earlier, worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. But the scientist was skeptical. Big risk. The aerosolizing of plutonium was a delicate process. It made the element more unstable than in its solid state. Not out of the question, but delicate. And it was costly. The equipment. It would take a small team of scientists. That was costly also.

Khalife flew to Riyadh and took his case to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was then that Ghazi Baida was first mentioned, and that sealed the deal. If Baida would agree to do the American end of it, then Khalife would get his financing.

Khalife flew back to Madras with enough money to put the scientist in business, and then he put the word out to the kind of people who would know such things, saying that he would like to talk with Ghazi Baida.

Three months later he walked into a cafe in Doha, Qatar, and sat down with Baida to talk business. Khalife explained everything. The necessary ingredients would be smuggled into Mexico City in six months' time. Also, following the scientist's specifications, Khalife was arranging for the purchase of Benning Technologies AeroTight propellant-filling equipment to be purchased by a dummy company in Mexico City. The equipment would be set up in a warehouse, and the scientist from Madras would provide the personnel to process and package the aerosolized plutonium. Khalife was personally arranging all of that. The logistics were complex, so it would be several months before the equipment would sail for Veracruz. From there, it would be trucked to Mexico City.

Baida agreed to take the job of building a cell to distribute the plutonium.

It took Baida several months to select his men. He wanted English and Spanish speakers, not an easy combination to come by in the Middle East. But then, he wasn't going to look for them in the Middle East. As soon as he could make the arrangements, he flew to the Triple Border region. There was a huge Muslim population there and, among them, a significant Lebanese presence. He had been there before, and he knew plenty of sympathetic Latin American Muslims who could speak Spanish and could easily pa.s.s for Mexicans.

Within a month, Baida was set up in Ciudad del Este and began recruiting his men. At the same time, he began planning the best way to distribute the aerosolized plutonium. He had already developed his theory about the vulnerability of the American heartland. All he had to do was to decide the best way to exploit it.

And, always the entrepreneur, Ghazi began building a drug-smuggling operation. The profits he made from drugs would be used to help finance other operations that he had in the works but which he had temporarily set aside when he agreed to contract with Khalife. If he was going to be in and out of Mexico City, he figured he might as well take advantage of a booming market. It wouldn't be difficult. He had contacts both there and in the Colombian territories that were controlled by that country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Within two months, Ghazi Baida had fine-tuned his plan and had his men. It hadn't been difficult. If their Muslim zeal wasn't enough to carry the day for them, it didn't matter. Baida was paying them well and promising them even more. And, he told them, there was no personal risk. Baida hired an out-of-work Brazilian chemical engineer to pose as a scientist and give the men a "safety" lecture. Just wear a simple hospital mask and everything would be okay, he told them.

Soon, Baida moved his operation to Mexico City and stepped up the level of training. The men received a full six-week course in refrigeration servicing and even received certificates-from a bogus refrigeration-training school in Houston, Texas.

To make sure the men followed through with their task and didn't just take advantage of a free ride to the United States, the lion's share of what they were to be paid was payable only after they had dispensed the aerosol plutonium at their targets. This, they were told, would be confirmed by instrumentation that had been installed by a team that had preceded them. As soon as they dispensed the aerosol, they were to go to a certain address, where the confirmation would have already been made, and they would be paid.

Bueno. That seemed fair enough. Everyone was happy. Baida was always amazed that the more convoluted the lie, the more likely people were to believe it. That seemed fair enough. Everyone was happy. Baida was always amazed that the more convoluted the lie, the more likely people were to believe it.

In another sixty days, Baida had each man's doc.u.mentation in order and began sending them into the United States in pairs. Twelve good men. Seven fewer than Al Qaeda had used on September 11.

Chapter 54.

Austin, Texas Susana sat on the sofa, and Bern and Richard Gordon sat in the two armchairs that were gathered around the big mesquite coffee table in Bern's studio. Bern's bandaged leg was propped on an ottoman, and beyond the gla.s.s wall to his left the sun glittered off the rippling surface of the lake in laser shatters. And, as always in the long Texas summers, the lake was scattered with sailboats tacking in the southern breezes.

Gordon had arrived shortly after lunch, accompanied by two athletic-looking young men wearing dress pants and polo shirts and carrying side arms. The two men stayed away from the studio, and occasionally Bern would see one them on the terrace outside the dining room, looking out across the lake.

This was Bern and Susana's second debriefing since their return from Mexico City a week earlier. A team from Tyson's Corner had come down the day after they arrived in Austin and stayed three days. It was a thorough and intense debriefing, which included Bern and Susana being questioned separately and then together. There was hardly a minute of Bern's four days in Mexico City that the team didn't know about when they flew back to Tyson's Corner.

Now, two days later, Gordon had come for a conversation. It seemed that mostly he just wanted to hear the story from them in their own words, but he also had a lot of questions that Bern a.s.sumed had been provoked by digesting the debriefing transcripts. As the afternoon progressed, the questions moved from the specific to the general. He wanted to know about impressions, about their "sense" of things. He asked about suspicions and hunches, and he started a lot of questions with "Did you have the feeling that . . ."

Bern was already trying to wean himself off the painkillers, so his leg was a constant irritant, although not exactly a distraction. The pistol shot to the outside of his upper left leg had plowed right through the tissue, blowing out a good chunk of his leg but missing the bone. He had lain awake a portion of every night since their return wondering how in the h.e.l.l he had gotten through it all with only this much damage. The whole ordeal had been unbelievable, right up to this very moment.

Gordon took off his reading gla.s.ses and laid them on the fat arm of his chair. He studied the grain of the mesquite table for a bit, then looked at Susana. He had seemed particularly careful with her all day, respectful. He picked up his reading gla.s.ses and fiddled with them.

"I had some luck in Mexico City," he said. "We had a guy in El Salvador who flew in the same night and quickly pulled together a team of his own people, a totally different crowd from the one Kevern usually worked with. Luckily, the bodies in the car were charred too badly to tell that they were even gringos. That gave our man time to pull the strings to get them out of the morgue."

Gordon cleared his throat. "There was a h.e.l.l of a lot of cleaning up. A couple of the members in the group wanted to call in people from the Mexico City station to help, but we argued them down. The guy from El Salvador worked his a.s.s off, cleaned up the safe house in Plaza Rio de Janeiro, Jude's apartment, Mondragon's penthouse in Residencial del Bosque, Mingo's place. Good disinformation leaked to the media.

"This guy was something, did it all without the station knowing anything at all. I don't know how he did it. Even got the bodies back into the States. Anyway, miracle of miracles, we didn't lose it. The whole thing stayed black. The whole thing. A d.a.m.ned miracle."

He shook his head, sighed, and slumped back into his chair.

"But everyone's discussing what you two came out of there with. They're going over your debriefing transcripts. They're combing through other intel out of the Triple Border region and Mexico. They're overlaying matrices. s.h.i.t, they're looking at everything. They're taking it seriously, I have to say."

"But . . ." Susana said, wanting him to get to the point.

"But we're afraid it's too little, too fragmented, too vague, too subjective . . ." His voice trailed off.

"We knew that," Susana said quickly.

Bern guessed she wanted to cut off any kind of commiserating. The failure to salvage Baida's defection haunted both of them, but in addition to that, Susana was still trying to cope with having invested more than two years in an operation that had completely reversed its mission in its final hours, only to have the original mission accomplished by an accident of great misfortune. Despite elaborate preparations by some of the very best people in the intelligence business, operation Heavy Rain had failed because they had been blindsided by reversals, the unforeseeable twists of fate that every intelligence officer lives in fear of.

And to add to the surprises, the wild flier they took with Bern had been successful. And no one but the psychotic Mondragon had had any faith in it at all.

Suddenly, a huge sailboat emerged from behind the point, coming from the direction of the marina. They all turned to look at it as it came close in, clearly visible from the right side of the gla.s.s wall. It glided serenely by the little inlet below Bern's walls, and for a few brief moments its ma.s.sive white sails caught the sun's brilliance, igniting the canvas like billowing sheets of phosphorus against the cobalt sky. And then it was gone.

No one said anything, as if the vision's departure had carried their thoughts away with it. Then Gordon sat up in his chair.

"They could've been lying," he said.

"What would've been his reasons for that?" Bern asked.

Gordon shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

"I keep thinking about it," Bern said, shifting his leg to relieve a sharp spike of pain. He had replayed his conversations with Baida and Sabella over and over, had seen their faces in his mind's eye and even in his dreams. He had gone over every crease and wrinkle, every perspiring pore, and had to see the whole of the message in the a.s.sembly of their features.

He winced and put both hands around his thigh and ma.s.saged it.

"I think they were telling the truth," he said simply.

Susana suddenly got up from the sofa as if she couldn't get enough air to breathe and walked over to the windows. She put one hand on her hip, wrist in, and thrust the other into the front of her thick hair and held it there. Both men looked at her, waiting. She was easy to look at.

Gordon folded his reading gla.s.ses and put them in his shirt pocket. He picked up his notebook and stood, punching a single b.u.t.ton on his cell phone before putting it away.

He walked over to Bern and handed him a piece of paper.

"Here's the address you wanted," he said. "She knows pretty much everything. Not cla.s.sified stuff, of course, but in general."

He reached down and shook Bern's hand.

"Thank you both," he said. He glanced at Susana, who remained with her back to him, looking out at the lake.

One of the security guards came in off the terrace, and the other came in the front door of the studio. Richard Gordon walked out of the studio with them.

Bern looked at Susana. Beyond her, far out on the lake, he could see the visionary sailboat, its shimmering sails gleaming like a daystar against the wooded cliffs.

Chapter 55.

In the United States, money continued to grease the wheels for Ghazi Baida's heartland operation. Because these men were not zealous in their fundamentalism, they were not compelled to separate themselves from society; these were not the tight, isolated little cells that intelligence officials quickly recognized as typical of the September 11 terrorists. That profile of the terrorist agent simply melted away in Baida's heartland operation. Instead, it was the open and gregarious nature of the huge Latino communities in the United States that provided great cover for Ghazi Baida's new kind of sleeper agents. It was easy for them to disappear in plain sight.

Each of the twelve men had a single contact to get in touch with when they reached their designated cities. The wisdom of reducing the terrorist cells to two was obvious. These single contacts, known as mentors, were a little higher up on the evolutionary scale of Islamic fundamentalism. They all had been instructed in the Wahhabi strain of Islam, and they knew who Ibn Taimiyah was and what he meant to their faith. Their devotion to jihad was absolute.

After the red dot cans of Dempsey's Best aerosol V-belt lubricant departed El Paso in three separate vans, they were soon scattered across the American heartland, each group of cans ultimately dividing two more times at ever more distant locations. When each can finally arrived at one of twelve different destinations, it was the mentors who retrieved them and made sure, one way or the other, that the men from Mexico City had a means of accessing their targets.

The objective was to gain access to the heating, ventilation, and cooling systems of a variety of buildings in twelve different cities scattered throughout the country. The buildings had been picked because of their particular types of self-contained air systems and because of their high population density within a specific time frame. The specific window of opportunity was no greater than fifteen hours, beginning on Sat.u.r.day night and extending into midmorning Sunday-a difficult time for headline news to spread very fast if something should go wrong.

By the time the men from Mexico City arrived in the United States, the mentors had already been in place a year or more. Time enough to make the necessary access possible. There was no single way that this could be done, or should be done. After all, twelve targeted buildings, the locations of which spanned the distance from North Carolina to Nevada, allowed for some flexibility.

Each mentor was left to his own devices. Some made friends with the engineers in charge of the Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning systems in a given building, thereby gaining access to those systems without arousing suspicion. Some cased the HVAC systems of their target buildings as if they were casing a bank. A break-in was a piece of cake in most instances, and this became the preferred method of access. Two mentors had actually gotten jobs as HVAC engineers in their target buildings.

By the end of the second week following Richard Gordon's return to Tyson's Corner from Paul Bern's house on Lake Austin, everything in Ghazi Baida's heartland operation was in place and ready to go. The mentors patiently awaited the go-ahead sign from Ghazi Baida.

Each target facility awaited a very simple application of aerosol spray, delivered from a common aerosol can found in every HVAC equipment room and on every HVAC repair truck. When the time came, a full can of Dempsey's Best V-belt lubricant would be sprayed into the air-handler vents of the HVAC systems. Each can contained five ounces of finely aerosolized plutonium 240 with an average micron size of three. In less than two minutes, everyone in the target buildings would receive a lethal dose of plutonium radiation.

No one in any of the buildings would even be aware of what had happened to them. Within a few days, people would begin dying, and it would take a few days more for epidemiologists to see the pattern.

The targets had been well chosen. The Starlight Grand Music City on the famous 76 Strip in Branson, Missouri, held an average Friday-night crowd of about 850 country music fans. The Marion Seely Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama, usually had a weekend-night occupancy of around 650. Other locations included a convention center in Denver; a country-and-western dance club in Lubbock, Texas; a retirement center in Phoenix; a music venue in Nashville; and a midsize casino in Las Vegas.

But the easiest targets didn't come available until Sunday morning. By eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning, the HVAC systems of five large midtown and suburban churches and synagogues in Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Little Rock, Charleston, and Raleigh would be sprayed with Dempsey's V-belt radiation.

By noon on the designated Sunday, over seven thousand people would have received lethal doses of aerosolized plutonium. All of them would die.

It would take just one phone call. But the sleeper mentor who was responsible for disseminating the signal once he had received it waited in vain for the message.

Still, he waited. Like all the other mentors, he had been selected for this operation because of particular attributes he possessed. Patience was among them.

Chapter 56.

Determined that no one would see any change in his life, Bern immediately accepted several jobs that had been waiting for him when he returned. To the few people who asked where he had been for a couple of days, he mentioned something about a spur-of-the-moment minivacation, a break from a hectic schedule. His leg injury he explained away as a fall on the rocks while working on his quay. Susana was introduced as an old friend from Cuernavaca. Eventually, of course, a better explanation would be made to Dana and Philip Lau, but time and friendship would take care of that.

Bern began working on the quay again as soon as he was able to support himself on his leg. It was tricky business, negotiating the lakeside rocks on a muscle-ripped leg, and at first he did little more than piddle. He and Susana would get up around sunrise, have coffee on the terrace, then put on their swimsuits and go down to the water's edge and begin hauling rocks to the pile that he would eventually cover with concrete. After the sun cleared the point, they would quit and go for a late-morning swim in the cove.

Alice resumed her visits to the studio as well and, much to Bern's surprise and relief, she accepted Susana's presence with equanimity. He had feared, at the very least, an awkward period of adjustment, but, in fact, Alice treated her as if she were a very interesting object that had turned up at Bern's studio-an exotic seash.e.l.l or a wonderfully smooth river stone that Bern had brought home. Alice liked looking at her, and she liked being around her.

For her part, Susana was comfortable with Alice's quirky, lively behavior from the beginning. She seemed to intuit even better than he the jumbled meanings in Alice's symbolist gabbling. She was completely at ease responding to Alice's verbal nonsense in a kind of pigeon palaver of her own, sometimes peppering it with Spanish, which delighted Alice, often making her laugh uproariously for no apparent reason.

On the mornings when Alice came, they all went to the studio, where Bern worked while Alice and Susana read and listened to music. In the afternoon, Alice and Susana would swim in the cove while Bern continued to work. Sometimes when Dana arrived to pick up Alice, she would bring her suit and join them for a swim and then stay for a gla.s.s of wine.

But the late afternoons belonged to Bern and Susana. Often he cooked on the terrace around sunset, and then they would swim in the cove once again as night fell across the lake. Afterward, they would sit in lounge chairs with drinks and watch the night boats move across the water against a backdrop of scattered lights on the far sh.o.r.eline.

It was during these hours that they talked about what they had been through. Gradually, they disclosed their lives to each other by an intricate progression of small revelations, as if they were providing each other with a mosaic of themselves that could only be a.s.sembled slowly, over time, piece by piece with the mortar of insight and understanding. It was an unconscious process, which in its unfolding brought them closer together than either of them had antic.i.p.ated.

But for Bern, the nights were troublesome. He never slept for more than a couple of hours at a time before waking up with nightmares, sweating. Over and over, he jolted awake at the very instant that Mondragon's blood exploded across his face. Time and time again, Carleta de Leon's brains splattered into his eyes, and Jude's face-his own face-appeared on Kevern's body, or on Mondragon's, or on Baida's. Over and over, Mondragon's flayed head stared back at him when he looked into dream mirrors. This happened so often and with such vivid effect that Bern began to dread looking into mirrors even when he was awake.

But with time, the nightmares began to subside. As the heat of late summer slowly retreated and the harsh light of August softened into September, Bern began to a.s.semble a perspective of what had happened in Mexico City that allowed him a rough peace with those events. He couldn't have done that without Susana. She had become the Angel of Solace for his restless discontent.

At the end of the second week in September, Dana Lau's mother underwent heart surgery in Chicago, and Phil and Dana flew up to be with her for a few days. Alice stayed with Bern and Susana for the weekend. The weather had been sultry and heavy as a seasonal tropical storm roiled westward along Louisiana's Gulf Coast, pushing wet, heavy clouds inland. It had drizzled for several days, and then a little cool front came down across the plains and pushed the low-pressure system back out into the Gulf. The temperatures dropped to the high eighties, and the sky cleared to a clean, brilliant azure. It was the first real break in the oppressive weather of the season, and it gave everyone hope that the withering summer heat was not, after all, interminable.

Bern spent all of Friday morning interviewing the sole survivor and witness of an armed robbery that had ended in a triple homicide. He had promised the homicide detectives who had flown from Dallas with the woman that he would work up a series of drawings of each of the two a.s.sailants over the weekend and have them ready by Monday. He planned to work all weekend.

Around seven o'clock, when the shadows covered the terrace and the water's edge, Bern grilled fresh vegetables and, following Susana's directions, prepared camarones al ajillo, camarones al ajillo, shrimp grilled with garlic and chilies. They ate while watching the sun set on the far sh.o.r.e. After clearing the dishes, they returned to the studio, where Bern continued working while the girls played a card game that Alice loved, and they listened to a CD of serene Duke Ellington selections. shrimp grilled with garlic and chilies. They ate while watching the sun set on the far sh.o.r.e. After clearing the dishes, they returned to the studio, where Bern continued working while the girls played a card game that Alice loved, and they listened to a CD of serene Duke Ellington selections.