The Face of the Assassin Part 22

"What the h.e.l.l's going on?" Bern asked. "Those were your your people who took Susana?" people who took Susana?"

"Yes. Tell me quickly what is happening," Mondragon insisted.

Bern's thoughts swarmed. Kevern said that there would be demands. Whoever kidnapped Susana would contact them and tell them what they wanted in return for her safety.

"For Christ's sake," Bern said, "what are you doing? What's this all about?"

"I want to know where Ghazi Baida is. That's what we've all been doing for over a year."

"You're still trying to find Baida?" Bern asked.

"Of course."

"I was with Kevern when he called you, told you to hold off. I heard him tell you to wait until he got in touch with you again. What're you doing?"

"Oh, yes, he did tell me that," Mondragon said, sounding amused that Bern knew this. "And just why did he do that, Paul?"

Bern was tired, confused. He didn't trust anyone anymore except Susana, and he really believed that there was a good chance that this freak he was talking to was going to kill her.

"What I want to know," Bern said, growing heated, p.i.s.sed at Mondragon, p.i.s.sed at Kevern, p.i.s.sed at all of it, "is what in the h.e.l.l is going on here with Susana? What are you up to?"

"It's not important," Mondragon said. "It's a little matter of insurance."

"Insurance? Insurance against what?"

"I need to be sure you will cooperate with me in whatever way I need," Mondragon said.

"Well, what do you need?"

"Right now, Paul," Mondragon said slowly, trying to get past Bern's confusion and panic, "I need to know what is happening. I need to know where you are going and why. Do you understand that I need to know that? Susana's life depends on it."

There was a pause while Bern locked onto this last remark and processed it. For all the gravity of his mission regarding Ghazi Baida's defection, the foremost concern in his mind was getting Susana away from Mondragon. It happened in an instant.

"Baida wants to defect," Bern said.

This time, the hesitation came from Mondragon's end of the line.

"To defect?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"He doesn't suspect that you are not Jude?"

"No, he doesn't suspect anything," Bern said.

"How do you know he doesn't suspect you?"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it! He doesn't. I'd sense it. I'd know. He doesn't!"

"Where are you going now?"

"Colonia Santa Luisa. There's a little park there, Jardin Morena. I make a phone call from there."

"And then what?"

"Somebody tells me what to do."

"To make the arrangements for his defection?"

"That's my guess. Just make the call, he said, so that's where I'm going, and that's what I'm going to do."

"Will he be at Jardin Morena?"

"I don't know."

"Why is he doing it like this?" Mondragon asked, talking to himself as much as to Bern. He sounded suspicious, either of Bern or of Baida. Then he said, "Listen to me carefully, Paul. I will say this only once. I know you must have a way of communicating with Kevern. Do not tell him that we have spoken. Do not tell him that I am still looking for Ghazi. Now that I have found you, I will not let you out of my sight. I have people in front of you, and now I'm going to send others to Jardin Morena. They will be everywhere around you now, all the time.

"Three things you have to remember to stay alive: Do not tell Kevern what I am doing. Do not even mention my name to Ghazi Baida."

He stopped, waiting for Bern to ask the question.

Bern obliged. "And the third thing?"

"If you are lying to me," Mondragon said, his voice reflecting a chilling lack of pa.s.sion, "Susana is f.u.c.ked."

Chapter 42.

When they heard the phone ring, the three of them exchanged puzzled glances. They were gathered around a receiver and a digital recorder, watching the lime green display numbers flying by as if they were comprehensible words.

"Cabbie's phone," Mattie conjectured.

"No, he's not answering it," Lupe said.

"Well, it's not Bern's cell," Mattie countered.

She and Kevern were sipping soft drinks. Lupe was still nursing a cup of coffee. All three of them were sitting on chairs, leaning over notepads on the table in front of them. Lupe was doodling, drawing caracoles, caracoles, three elaborately spiraled snails. three elaborately spiraled snails.

The phone stopped ringing.

"n.o.body's talking," Kevern said. They could hear traffic in the background.

"He's listening," Lupe said. "Bern is."

"Not on our phone, he isn't," Mattie insisted again. "Where'd he get another cell?"

They exchanged looks.

"Those were your your people who took Susana?" people who took Susana?" Bern asked incredulously. Bern asked incredulously.

Kevern was leaning his beefy forearms on the table, making it sag a little, staring hard at the receiver. Bern continued, asking the person on the other end what he was doing, what he wanted. Silence while Bern listened, and then he asked, "You're still trying to find Baida?" "You're still trying to find Baida?"

"Oh s.h.i.+t," Kevern said in dismay. "He's talking to Vicente. It's Mondragon."

"I was with Kevern when he called you, told you to hold off. . . . What're you doing?"

They listened to more expressions of Bern's incredulity. And then: "Insurance? Insurance against what?" "Insurance? Insurance against what?" Bern asked. Bern asked.

Silence ensued while Bern listened to Mondragon. And then Bern said, "Baida wants to defect." "Baida wants to defect." Silence. Silence. "Yeah, that's right." "Yeah, that's right." Silence. Silence. "No, he doesn't suspect anything." "No, he doesn't suspect anything."

"Well, there it is," Mattie said. "Now Mondragon knows why you pulled him off the hunt."

Heated words from Bern followed as he insisted that Baida didn't suspect anything, that he would know if Baida did, that he would sense it.

Then Bern told Mondragon where he was going and what he was supposed to do when he got there.

"We should've told him the phone was live," Lupe said, shaking her head, looking at Kevern. "He could've worded all of this differently. He could've been more informative, pa.s.sed a lot more to us."

Kevern shook his head resolutely. "It would've been a mistake. He would've tried to tell us too much, repeated things Mondragon was saying to let us know what was going on. Vicente would've been all over that. No, we're f.u.c.king lucky we didn't tell him."

"The paperboy," Mattie said, still bothered by the sudden appearance of another cell phone. "He threw the phone in there. That's what happened."

"Listen, listen." Kevern leaned into the recorder. Nothing but traffic, horns, someone yelling, hawking something. The screech of brakes.

"He's giving him instructions," Lupe conjectured. "Wants him to do something?"

"And the third thing?" Bern asked. Bern asked.

Silence. More traffic. A snippet of music. No more conversation.

"He's giving him a list of things to do," Mattie said.

Lupe had left off wth the snails. "Or not to do," she said. "Vicente's threatening him."

"That's what picking up Susana was all about," Mattie said. "Mondragon wants Bern to do something. And Susana's screwed if he doesn't do it."

Kevern began his subdued groan, seeming to hold it back. The two women looked at him.

"What the h.e.l.l is Mondragon planning?" Kevern asked no one in particular. "He wants to get to Baida anyway?"

He stood up and looked at his watch. Grunting softly, he moved around the room, rubbing the back of his neck, his head down.

"He's not calling us," Mattie said. "You'd think he'd call after he got off the phone with Mondragon."

Kevern shook his head. "Vicente threatened him, like Lupe said. Vicente didn't want him to call us."

"So Bern's holding on to our phone," Mattie said, "and he's sure as h.e.l.l hanging on to Mondragon's phone, too." She listened to the transmissions. Again street sounds, but they were fading. "They've turned off Insurgentes," she said. "He's going to be at Jardin Morena pretty soon, Lex. What're you going to do? Do we call Bern?"

"No," Kevern snapped, stopping his pacing and turning to them.

"Call Mondragon," Lupe said. "Tell him he's about to screw up in a f.u.c.king big way."

"Then he'll know Bern's wired," Kevern said. "He'll work around it. This way, if he thinks the threat to Susana is going to buy Bern's cooperation-and it looks like it will-he'll think he can communicate with him. We'll have a shot at it at least."

Kevern's situation looked bad. Though he directed the operation and controlled the purse strings, he had to use Mondragon's tech people, Mondragon's intelligence, Mondragon's muscle. Now it seemed that Mondragon suddenly had his own agenda, leaving Kevern toothless.

Normally in an emergency situation, he would automatically turn to the CIA station's technical services. But of course this wasn't a normal situation. If he did that, he would be blowing Heavy Rain, which was running off the books right under the Mexico City station's nose. Not only would it cause a s.h.i.+t storm inside the Agency, but the resulting brawl within the Agency could very well boil over into the intelligence community's gossip mills. Within hours, it would be in the press, and that would automatically trigger an international incident.

But if his hunch was right, he just might have to take that risk anyway in order to save Baida from being a.s.sa.s.sinated by Mondragon. Jesus, talk about irony.

Why Mondragon was h.e.l.l-bent to do this, Kevern couldn't imagine, and he didn't have time to try to figure it out. But he was sure of it. He felt it in his gut-s.h.i.+t, he felt in his nuts, right down inside the core of him, so solid, so right, he had no doubt about it at all. No proof, but it was a f.u.c.king certainty.

Lexington Kevern was scared.

He looked up, unaware that he had had his head ducked, staring at the floor, until he saw the two women staring at him. Then suddenly, they heard another transmission. Bern was paying the taxi driver.

Kevern had to decide. In for the bet, in for the pot.

"Lupe, get the GPS monitor," he snapped, going to his desk, taking his handgun out of the drawer, and clipping it onto his belt. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit a number. "Jack, get the car."

Chapter 43.

El Paso, Texas By eight o'clock the next morning, the Rivera van was pulling into another warehouse district, this one on the outer edges of El Paso. At a regional distribution center for refrigeration products and supplies, the twenty-four cases of aerosol V-belt lubricant were off-loaded in their usual section of the warehouse. The inventory foreman checked them in, and the van headed to the Cordova Bridge on the Rio Grande and back to Mexico.

The floor foreman directed his three employees to move various stacks of inventory to new locations, a temporary reshuffling, he said. The jobs took them to the far side of the warehouse. When they were gone, he went to the waiting cases of Dempsey's Best lubricant and found the one with a red dot on the lower right corner of each side.

Opening the case, he removed four cans with red dots on their concave bottoms and subst.i.tuted them for four regular cans in a second case. He resealed the second case, added red dots to each of its lower right sides, and labeled the case for pickup by the Rocky Mountain Refrigeration Supply van.

He followed the same procedure with another four cans of the red dot lubricants, again opening an unmarked case of lubricant and subst.i.tuting four red dot cans for regular cans and resealing the case, adding red dots to the lower right corner of its four sides, and labeling it for pickup by the Ames Midwest Air Conditioning Supplies van. He resealed the original red dot case, which now contained only four cans with red dots on their bottoms and eight cans without red dots, and relabeled the case for pickup by the American Industrial Refrigeration Supplies van.

Within an hour, all three vans had picked up their cases of Dempsey's Best aerosol V-belt lubricant. Hidden among these cases in each van was one containing four cans with red dots. These red dot cans were headed for a dozen different destinations in a dozen different states. Within forty-eight hours, every red dot aerosol can would be in the hands of the men who would use them.

The El Paso warehouse foreman who enabled the distribution knew nothing about what he was doing except that he had agreed to shuffle cans with red dots and to keep his mouth shut about it. In exchange, he would receive twenty thousand dollars for his troubles.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, he received a telephone call from Juarez confirming that all the red dots were safely on their way. Mission completed. The money was his. He told his boss that he was coming down with a stomach virus, then took the rest of the afternoon off. He drove across the Cordova Bridge, headed to a motel in Juarez to collect his money.

But he never returned.