The Face of the Assassin Part 30

"And you're an artist, too," she said.

"Yes."

"That's . . . amazing." She smiled, marveling, taking a moment to look at him again, as if his face revealed wondrous things to her. And Bern imagined that it did.

"Well, anyway," she went on, "I'm going to Mexico City next week. To clean out his apartment. Mr. Gordon said the emba.s.sy would have someone stay with me. I can s.h.i.+p it all back, he said. Everything."

She looked at Bern, and he said that was good. She glanced at Susana and then back at Bern.

"I'd like to do that alone," she said. "But when I have everything back here, would you like to come over? We'll divide his things. I . . . want you to have whatever you'd like to have."

"Yes," he said. "I'd like that very much."

She looked down at her own hands, which she was clutching together on the table now. "Mr. Gordon said that there's no body. I'm . . . I'm so sorry about that, but I know . . . I know how Jude loved what he did. And I've known all along that there would always be secrets, maybe even painful ones.

"But I'm going to have a memorial service. My husband is dead-Jude's father was a doctor, a very wise man, and a wise father-but I have close friends who knew Jude all through his years of growing up. I want to do that . . . for all of us."

Bern nodded.

"You'll come, won't you? Both of you?"

"Of course," Bern said, and he was surprised to see Susana reach out and put her hands on Regina's.

In the quiet that followed, Bern said nothing about the skull wrapped in velvet sc.r.a.ps and stored in the old ebony paint box that he had used in Paris. And yet something told him that if she had known about it, Regina Lerner would have forgiven him for his secret.

Chapter 60.

The ingenuous ruse that Ghazi Baida had managed to design and execute-in which he, in the guise of Mazen Sabella, was able to micromanage his terrorist operation while hiding in plain sight-died with him. His death remained known to only a handful of men and women in the intelligence community.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, Susana and most intelligence a.n.a.lysts believed that Baida (Sabella) had never intended to defect. It was all a ruse to have the Americans witness "Baida's" death. Whoever the poor devil was who had been playing the role of Baida with a new face was being set up. The real Baida was going to kill him, or have him killed, in the apartment above the plaza Jardin Morena, with U.S. intelligence operatives acting as the official witnesses.

And then capricious fate stepped in. Baida learned from Bern that Vicente Mondragon was still alive and was in close pursuit, h.e.l.l-bent on killing Baida for what he had done to him. So the real Baida fled in the rainstorm and let it happen. Mondragon did the job for him.

The fact that the real Ghazi Baida had died in the shallow waters of Lake Austin in Central Texas, six weeks after he was thought to have died in Mexico City, convinced U.S. intelligence that Baida had most likely had time to put together the final details of some kind of a terrorist operation somewhere inside the United States. His appearance at Bern's house seemed to suggest that his work was finished. His last visit to Jude Teller was the icing on the cake, a triumphant swagger before the man who thought he had outsmarted Ghazi Baida, a last victorious strut before the endgame, when Baida would kill Jude and bring it all to a close.

Again, it was the grim consensus of most a.n.a.lysts that the launching of the operation that Baida had put in place during the last six weeks was only awaiting the final signal from Baida himself. If his ego hadn't demanded one more face-to-face encounter with Jude Teller to prove to Jude that Baida had finally "won" after all, his operation would most likely have been executed within a few days.

Now nearly everyone agreed that the operation probably remained c.o.c.ked, awaiting the final signal-one that only Baida would know-that would trigger the event. Therefore, the secrecy surrounding Baida's death was of paramount importance. If his death were known, someone, somewhere, sometime, would retool the operation and set it into motion again. The longer his death could be kept secret, the more time counterterrorist agencies had to try to uncover some thread of the operation.

As it stood, there was an uneasy peace. How long did sleeper agents sleep? How long would it take before the terrorists on the edges of the operation realized that Baida must surely have met his death somewhere, and then how long before they would begin trying to reconstruct Baida's design? And how long would it take them to locate the twelve sleeping mentors and their agents and rea.s.semble an operation that had been so carefully scattered and compartmentalized? It was a design that did not antic.i.p.ate the present circ.u.mstances, and it would be as difficult to rebuild from within as from without.

The U.S. intelligence community could only hope that the famous discipline of Baida's mentors would remain intact and, G.o.d willing, that they would sleep forever.

Paul Bern's life eventually returned to an altered version of what it had been before. He resumed his work as a forensic artist, and played a central role in identifying Mazen Sabella. Sabella's skull was x-rayed. The plastic surgeon in Zurich who had given Ghazi Baida a new face was finally located and an X ray of Baida's skull was obtained from him. The two X rays were overlaid and then were matched point for point by computer enhancement in order to confirm that the two men were the same.

But Paul Bern never again looked at a face in the same way that he had before the tragic events that began when a stranger walked into his studio with a box containing the skull of his twin brother. He compared himself to a blind man who had suddenly been given the gift of sight, but he knew deep within himself that what he had really gained was the gift of insight.

Bern had acquired a modern glimpse into an ancient belief; that a man's face is much more than its physical features. It is, rather, a physical representation of his personality, of his soul even. But modern man has easily deceived himself about the landscape of the face and has often trivialized its value, reducing it to the simple elements of attractive or unattractive.

There are some people, however, who look at a face and see the world of the inner man. Bern had seen evidence of this kind of insight in the acute intuitions of Alice Lau, whose own gifts were unknown to her. He had seen it in the clever perceptions of Ghazi Baida, and in the cruel grief of Vicente Mondragon, who revenged himself on the wrong man and died without a face, fulfilling his worst fear.

But most often now, Bern saw evidence of this when he looked into the mirror. He no longer saw merely his physical features there. He saw the complex and mysterious mind of his brother. He saw a self that he had never known before, a whole other man, someone capable of thoughts and deeds that until now had remained hidden from him.

And he saw the face of the a.s.sa.s.sin.

By good fortune, or G.o.d's grace, or the laws of physics, he and Ghazi Baida had hit the shallow water in the very same position in which they had left the edge of the deck. Baida hit the shallows first, with Bern on top of him, clinging to him in a viselike embrace triggered by an adrenaline-driven animal instinct for survival. Both men were stunned, but Baida bore the brunt of the weight and the shock.

Bern recovered his senses first, and he fought furiously to gain his footing in the shallows. He grabbed Baida by the throat and shoved him under the water. As Baida began to recover and found himself struggling for his life, he fought desperately. Suddenly he had a knife, and he slashed and jabbed viciously, finding his target again and again with wild and random stabs. But Bern let them come; his hands never left Baida's throat.

In the end, Paul Bern had completed the job that his identical twin, whom he had never known, had spent nearly three years planning. And Ghazi Baida died at the hands of a man whose face he knew but who was, in fact, a stranger.

Also by David Lindsey

The Rules of Silence

Animosity

The Color of Night

Requiem for a Gla.s.s Heart

An Absence of Light

Body of Truth

Mercy

In the Lake of the Moon

Spiral

Heat from Another Sun

A Cold Mind

Black Gold, Red Death