The Face of the Assassin Part 10

She slipped off the blouse and, without looking, lay it with gentle unconcern over the corner of a tilted drawing board as she went by, her arm reaching across her bare stomach as she began unb.u.t.toning her skirt. Just as she was about to push it down over her hips, he stopped her.

"Wait a second," he said softly, but she was already over to him, close enough for him to have leaned down and kissed the soft tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She stopped.

"Look," he said, "I . . ."

But her face was already changing even as they were looking at each other. The antic.i.p.ation in her eyes grew cold, and her hazy expression of seduction faded into a weary look of impatience.

She turned and stepped over to the drawing board and picked up her blouse, but she didn't put it on immediately. Instead, she went back her gla.s.s of gin and took a drink, holding the blouse down at her side as she swallowed the first sip, looking at him, and then took another.

Bern scrambled for a way to finish his sentence, but nothing came to him.

"You didn't handle that well at all," she said. The coy mistress was gone, and an irritable woman had replaced her. "When you came to the bedroom door, you were visibly confused, right from the very first moment. You held me awkwardly. You were speechless. Jude, whatever his other faults, was never speechless."

Bern was fl.u.s.tered.

She put the gla.s.s down again, ran the fingers of one hand through her thick hair, and sighed heavily. Then she slipped on the blouse but didn't b.u.t.ton it.

"Just for the record," she said, "I told them this was the worst idea I'd ever heard in my life. I tried to stop it."

Bern had whiplash. He was relieved, and in the same instant, he was p.i.s.sed, really furious.

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" he asked.

"Susana Mejia. I was working this thing with Jude. I'm supposed to make you . . . pa.s.sable."

"By making me feel stupid."

"That's how it's going to feel," she said. "Even after you've had hours and hours of briefing. Every moment of being Jude, you're going to feel exactly the way you felt just now. You're inexperienced, and no matter how much you've been briefed, you're still going to feel stupid, and anxious. You're always going to be afraid that the very next thing someone says will expose you."

They stared at each other. She was smoldering, not at all happy with what she had been a.s.signed to do. She sipped her gin, eyes on him, studying him. She began to shake her head slowly.

"G.o.d," she said, "you really were were identical twins." identical twins."

"That's the only reason I'm here," he said.

"That's the reason they wanted you here. But what's the reason you you are here?" are here?"

He was evasive. "It's not complicated," he said, feeling that it was so complicated, he wasn't sure he would ever sort it out. "Four days ago, I thought I was an only child. Then a woman brought me a skull in a box. Two days later, I found out that the skull was that of my identical twin." He hesitated a beat. "Now I don't know, but I'm guessing that's probably more reason than you have for being here."

Susana Mejia sipped her gin and turned to look out the windows at the park. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then she looked down at her gla.s.s, thinking. When she turned back to him, the tension she was working under showed in her face and in her posture.

"I've read your file," she said. "You're an intelligent man, so I'm betting you're smarter than to have walked into this on your own."

"I sure as h.e.l.l didn't volunteer," he said. About the smart part, he wasn't so sure anymore.

She stepped out of her shoes and rubbed one stockinged foot on top of the other as if her feet were aching. She ran the fingers of one hand into the thick hair above her forehead and held it there, thinking.

"Look," she said finally, "neither of us wants to be doing this. Me, because I think the risks are astronomical. You, I don't know, maybe you just think you can't do it. But whatever our reasons are, they don't cancel out the reality that this is a d.a.m.ned important thing, and regardless of what our reservations are, it's got to be done. And regardless of what our reservations are, we're going to do it."

This time, Susana drank her gin as if it were a gla.s.s of water, three big gulps and then it was gone. She paused, looking at him.

"Right?"

"Yeah," he said. "That's right."

"I'm going to be blunt with you," she went on; "there's no time for games between us. You don't know this yet, but you can trust me. You need to grab hold of that fact as quickly as you can. It'll save you a lot of anxiety. You can trust me. I want to get this job done, but I don't want to lose your life doing it. And, more important to me, I don't want to lose my life, either."

She rattled the ice in her gla.s.s.

"How much do you know?" she asked.

He told her what Mondragon had told him.

"s.h.i.+t," she said, looking away. "s.h.i.+t." Silence ensued while she seemed to try to control herself, though he guessed she really wanted to throw the gla.s.s of ice across the room.

"Look," she said, turning to him, "essentially, Jude and I were on our own. In fact, until Jude was killed, we hadn't met face-to-face with anyone connected to this operation in over a year. Communication was constant, encrypted, and always to Lex Kevern." She stopped. "You don't know Kevern."

He shook his head. "No."

She nodded. "Okay. Quick overview: This operation originated somewhere in the rarefied air of Was.h.i.+ngton's national security and intelligence circles. It's a clandestine operation, rather than a covert operation. In a covert operation, the objective, the act that's performed, might become known, but the country responsible for that act remains unknown. In a clandestine operation, the act itself remains unknown. It never happened. A guy named Richard Gordon was brought in to put it together. Gordon's an old CIA hand, a good guy. But he's Langley. He called in Lex Kevern to be the case officer. Kevern's also an old hand, but in-country. Does dirty work. Deals with the contract people. Runs agents. Takes risks.

"Gordon picked me and Jude to be the operations officers, the people who actually do the work. We'd met before, but we'd never worked together. But at separate times, we'd both worked with Gordon in other Latin American postings, and he trusted us. Jude had special qualifications. He knew Ghazi Baida inside out. And he went to the same university as Baida: the University of Texas."

She sighed heavily.

"Where did he grow up?" Bern asked. "Jude, I mean."

She looked at him, and he could see that she had some inkling what this must be like for him, that he must be in near shock.

"Austin."

Jesus Christ. Of all the places he could have chosen to live, he had ended up in Jude's hometown. But by the time he got there, Jude was gone for good.

"His parents still live there?"

"Only his mother," she said. "His father, a doctor, died a few years ago."

Susana turned and walked across the room and stood in the doorway of Jude's bedroom, looking in, her body turned three-quarters away from Bern. From that angle, he couldn't really see the expression on her face, but her posture said a lot. Even the baggy s.h.i.+rttail hanging over her skirt didn't hide the shape of the woman in Jude's drawings.

"The truth was," she said, her back still to him, "Jude was more likable when he was pretending to be someone else than he was when he wasn't." She turned around. "When he was Jude Lerner, he was very, very complicated. Lerner seemed to require a certain kind of complexity in order to operate, a complexity that Jude carried around with him like a sack of rocks.

"But when he was Jude Teller-Teller was his cover name-he was so busy funneling his psychology and energy into being that other man-and it was a h.e.l.l of a job-that he was actually . . . endearing. Jude was very graceful in deceit. It suited him perfectly."

Bern was suddenly alert. Now she was sounding like a woman instead of an intelligence officer. But she didn't allow herself to go too far with that. The discipline was intact. She shook her head wearily.

"Come on," she said. "I need to show you something."

Chapter 20.

He followed her into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. She gathered her skirt and got down on her knees in front of the sink.

"Come on. Get down here," she said.

Bern dropped to his knees and watched as she got down on her elbows and moved under the sink. He did the same. She pointed to the four-inch-high baseboard on the wall.

"These two nail heads here," she said. "Press them simultaneously with one hand while you lift here with the other."

A two-foot section of the baseboard folded up on hidden hinges, revealing a compartment and two handles. She pulled on one of the handles and a metal tray slid out revealing four CDs lying flat and layered back at angles so that the front edges of all four CDs were visible. She retrieved two CDs and then pushed in the drawer and closed the hinged baseboard.

"Every time you take something out," she said as they backed out from under the sink, "close it. Otherwise, you may forget you left it open, or be interrupted and have no time to run in here and do it."

They went into the bedroom, where she opened a nightstand and took out a laptop and crawled onto the bed with it. She opened it and powered up.

"Always use the computer in here in the bedroom. Anyone coming to see you will have to cross the whole studio from the landing, and that'll buy you time to ditch what you're doing."

She tapped in the security code, and while she was waiting for it to clear, she continued explaining.

"The CDs are a complete library of everything pertaining to the case. One of the things you'll read about is how Jude worked his way into the cell run by a guy named Khalil Saleh. Jude used being an artist as a cover, along with a second life as a smuggler of pre-Columbian artifacts. That's how he finally got to meet Ghazi Baida.

"It was arranged for Jude to fly to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, in the Triple Border region, to meet an unnamed man who was interested in his smuggling operation. We knew from other intelligence that this was probably a feeler from Baida's people.

"On the first trip, Jude was left alone in a bar full of noisy parrots near the Parana River waterfront. Soon, a man of Middle Eastern descent appeared and introduced himself as Mazen Sabella. He said that he represented the man Jude had come to meet, but before that meeting could take place, Mazen needed to ask Jude a few questions.

"They talked for nearly two hours, entirely in Spanish." She stopped. "You don't speak Spanish."

"Not much. No, hardly any."

She didn't waste her time being exasperated by that.

"The man was polite, but thorough. He explored Jude's life through a series of questions that seemed more like a casual conversation between friends than a vetting. By the time the guy left, he had very skillfully extracted a bundle of leads he'd use in the inevitable background check. But no one claiming to be Baida ever showed at the bar."

Susana kept one eye on the screen and slapped in a few more codes on the keyboard.

"A month later, another meeting was set up. Again Jude flew down. Another bar on the waterfront. Again Sabella arrived. Again they spoke in Spanish, and the major point of the discussion this time was the structure and operation of Jude's smuggling route. The guy posed a series of hypothetical situations involving unexpected events, asking how Jude would handle them. It seemed that every possible scenario was played out. Then Sabella excused himself, saying that his boss would appear within the half hour. But Baida never came. Finally, Jude left the bar and flew home.

"Two weeks later, Jude was summoned again. Jude sent word back that everyone in Ciudad del Este could go f.u.c.k themselves, especially Sabella, who had been lying to him, and and the guy who never showed up. Ahmad said, No, no, no, this time it was guaranteed he would meet Baida. The meeting place was the lobby of a small and smelly hotel in the oldest part of the city. Jude said the place reeked of raw sewage, had a jungle of potted palms in its rancid lobby, hosted the largest amber roaches in Latin America, and employed the most beautiful wh.o.r.es on the globe." the guy who never showed up. Ahmad said, No, no, no, this time it was guaranteed he would meet Baida. The meeting place was the lobby of a small and smelly hotel in the oldest part of the city. Jude said the place reeked of raw sewage, had a jungle of potted palms in its rancid lobby, hosted the largest amber roaches in Latin America, and employed the most beautiful wh.o.r.es on the globe."

Susana made this last remark with as much gravity as she had the rest of it. There was no attempt to make light of it.

"This time, a guy he'd never seen before walked into the lobby," Susana said. "He went over to Jude with a smile on his face and said in impeccable English, 'I hear you've grown impatient with us. That's understandable.' He extended his hand and said, 'I'm Ghazi Baida.'"

"Wait a minute," Bern said. "Why didn't Jude recognize him from your files? You've got to have pictures, don't you?"

"Yeah, we do. But they're at least a decade old."

"It's not that hard to age them."

"Right, and we'd done that. But we weren't sure it was doing us any good. We had pretty good intelligence that Baida had cosmetic surgery about four years ago in Zurich, but we'd never been able to confirm it. So we weren't sure who the h.e.l.l we were looking for."

"And this was your confirmation."

"That's right. And the alterations were significant."

"And then Jude made drawings."

"Very detailed ones." After a couple more taps on the keys, she turned the laptop around for him to see the screen. "Ghazi Baida," she said.

Jude had done four frontal drawings of Baida in four different styles, smoothly blended, smooth controlled, sketchy controlled, and sketchy hatching. Below each picture were active toggles that would take you to variations in each of the styles: profiles, three-quarter views, smiling, with beard, with gla.s.ses, with mustache, thin, heavy, and several combinations of these variations. Bern toggled through the variations.

"These are very good," he said. "Very good."

Susana pulled one of the pillows from under the bedspread, jammed it against the wall, and sat back against it, one leg drawn up, the other stretched out on the bed.

"Only three people have seen these drawings," she said. "You make the fourth."

He didn't say anything, but he kept staring at the sketches. He looked at the way Jude had handled his materials, how he had switched pencils, used the long side of the lead, used the point, laid on some chalk here and there. Very subtly, he had given Baida a kindly appearance. Is that what he had seen?

"What about their conversations?" he asked.

"After each trip, Jude sat down at the computer and typed out a detailed account of the meetings."

"I want to read them."

"You have to read them," she said. "Everything's on the CDs-operation reports, Baida's dossier, information on the Triple Border area, pictures and brief bios of everybody significant. There are also some drawings that Jude made of Mazen Sabella. The whole thing was put together for you. It's a lot to read, and the sooner you do it, the better."

She slid her other leg up and rested her elbows on her upright knees as she pushed her fingers into her hair again. It was an interesting habitual gesture, a physical reflection of a psychological state. She looked as if she were pus.h.i.+ng herself, as if she had drained her energy right to the bottom and every hour that went by was costing her double.

She sat that way in silence for a few moments, and then she sighed and looked up at him.

"I just can't do this any longer. I've got to get some sleep."

Without another word, she rolled off the other side of the bed, went to a wardrobe against the wall, and took out a gown. Then she headed to the bathroom and closed the door.

Bern got a chair from the studio and took it over to the windows that looked out onto Avenida Mexico and the park. He sat down with the laptop and began scrolling through the index of CDs. Night air moved tentatively through the window.

When Susana came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a simple chocolate brown silk gown. Her hair was combed out, and when she came around the end of the bed, he could see that she had washed her face.

"Let me show you how to lock up," she said.

They went downstairs, where she showed him how to set the locks. He turned out the lights and followed her upstairs, watching her hips, seeing now and then the cleavage of her b.u.t.tocks beneath the swaying nightgown.