The Face of the Assassin Part 12

"I'm not sure." She picked up a comb from the foot of the bed and started combing her damp hair, tilting her head to the side.

"I thought I wasn't supposed to go out," he said, "until you've had time to bring me up to speed."

"Did you read last night?"

"Yeah, until late."

"Then I guess you're picking up speed."

She turned around and headed for the bathroom. "I'll be out of there in five minutes."

Bern got out of bed and slipped on his pants. There was a chest of drawers near Jude's closet, and he looked inside. Underwear, T-s.h.i.+rts, socks. This was going to be strange.

He looked around the room. On one side of the door that led out to the studio was a wardrobe, which he hadn't even noticed before. He heard the hair dryer going in the bathroom, so he went to the wardrobe and opened it. Susana's clothes. Or some woman's clothes at least. He lifted one of the blouses and smelled it. Susana's perfume. A smaller chest on the other side contained her lingerie.

He went back to the closet and stared at the clothes. Would he find things in the pockets, an old theater ticket, a receipt for some small purchase? The hair dryer stopped. He didn't want Susana to find him staring blankly into Jude's closet, so he went back to the door that led to the studio and looked out. It felt familiar. Being there one night couldn't have done it. There was more to it than that.

"Okay," she said, coming out of the bathroom, "it's all yours."

Her thick hair was fluffy from drying, and she was rubbing lotion on her arms. Bern guessed she would now go around to her side of the bed, the side near the window, and sit on the edge of the bed and rub lotion on her legs.

She went past him and around the end of the bed. She sat down and began putting lotion on her legs, leaning over, her bare back to him.

It was just that easy. He could fall back into the routine in less than a day. The thought of it left a hollow place in his stomach. He headed for the shower and closed the bathroom door behind him.

He stood at the sink a long time, the towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet, looking at the shelves in the medicine cabinet. He looked at the tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled from the bottom. A tin of bandages. Over-the-counter antihistamines. Razor heads. Antiseptic throat spray. Advil. Midol. A packet of emery boards. Dental floss. Deodorant.

He closed the door. The jar of shaving cream was on the marble countertop. Bern used shaving cream, too. Most people didn't, but millions did, he guessed. There was no need to believe there was any special significance in that. He opened it and caught the scent of almonds. His own cream was almond-scented, too. But then, he figured, millions of men must use that also.

Looking into the jar, he saw where Jude had run his fingers through the cream and scooped it out. Good G.o.d. Slowly, he put his own fingers into the same grooves of the cream and carefully pulled them through the same shallow flutes created by Jude's fingers. He looked at the cream on his fingers and then looked into the jar. The striations of Jude's fingertips were gone. Paul had taken the first steps of replacing him. He began to lather his face.

The next forty minutes or so were a nearly hallucinatory experience as he slowly crawled into the minutiae of his brother's life. He deliberately did not replace the razor head, wanting a tactile intimacy with Jude, though he didn't stop to reason why. After shaving, he used Jude's lotion on his face, then put Jude's talc.u.m under his arms.

In the bedroom, he opened the chest of drawers and took out a pair of Jude's shorts and put them on. He put on a T-s.h.i.+rt. As if in a trance, he went to the closet and chose a pair of trousers, selected a belt from a rack of them on the closet door, picked out a freshly laundered s.h.i.+rt. The shoes. Jesus Christ, he had forgotten about the shoes. He chose a pair, then got a pair of socks and put them on. Everything fit. Everything suited him.

He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on Susana's wardrobe, and it was only at that moment that it hit him how important it was for him to become Jude as deeply and as completely as humanly possible. None of this was going to work, not even for a moment, if he didn't.

It was something that should have hit him like a lightning bolt from the very instant that it was proposed to him by Mondragon back in Houston, but it hadn't. He thought he had understood, but he hadn't. Not really. Not until this intimate intercourse with the details of Jude's small moments, not until he saw himself in Jude's clothes and slept in the same bed with the same woman that Jude must have slept with, not until this very moment in front of Jude's mirror, looking into Jude's face, did the full impact of the reality of his situation actually hit him. His life depended upon the resurrection of the face in the mirror. If he wanted to live, Jude had to be reborn, whole and believable.

He was standing at the studio windows when he heard the front door open and close. A few minutes later, Susana's quick footsteps crossed the living room and stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"Jude," she yelled.

Caught off guard, he felt a wash of panic, and then he immediately caught himself.

"Yeah," he called back.

"I'm bringing up the pastries. You want some coffee?"

"I just got a fresh cup," he said, and heard her start up the stairs.

He turned away from the windows and was halfway across the studio when she came around the top of the landing and saw him. Her quick pace halted abruptly, as if someone had yelled at her, and then she came toward him slowly. She was holding the white sack of pastries, and the look on her face was a conflation of surprise and an effort to conceal it. Her eyes were all over him, absorbing the sight of him.

When she got to him, she reached up without hesitation and put her hand softly along the side of his face, looking at him as if she were remembering him, not seeing him, and then she dropped her hand and put it flat against his chest, feeling him breathe.

Suddenly, she took her hand away and went around him and put the pastries on the coffee table in front of the sofa a few feet away.

"We need to get moving," she said, her back to him as she shrugged off her shoulder bag and began looking into it for something. "You'd better grab a bite. It's going to take us about an hour to get there."

They descended to the street and stepped out into the quiet morning on Avenida Mexico. Bern could hear the roar of the city only a few blocks away in any direction, but the park was an island of tranquility, the loudest distraction coming from the songs of birds in the high canopies of the trees.

Susana took her secure cell phone out of her purse and made a call, which resulted in a series of exchanges and another call. Then they walked up Teotihuacan to Avenida Amsterdam, where they caught a cab and headed south on Avenida Insurgentes.

"This is a good surveillance-detection route," she said, turning halfway around in the seat and looking back over her shoulder through the rear window. "The traffic's always terrible, so anyone following us will have to take some risks. Sooner or later, they'll have to run a light, squeeze through an intersection, cut across traffic, something that'll give them away."

The next half hour was spent running the surveillance-detection route. Instead of going into Coyoacan as she had told the driver, at the last minute she sent him into San Angel, up into the hilly and narrow callejones. callejones. She made phone calls to two friends whose homes shared a common garden wall in the rear, though the front of their properties opened onto different She made phone calls to two friends whose homes shared a common garden wall in the rear, though the front of their properties opened onto different callejones. callejones. Using these private gardens, they switched taxis and headed back downtown on Insurgentes again. Using these private gardens, they switched taxis and headed back downtown on Insurgentes again.

Soon they were in Roma Norte, where many of the limestone buildings from the late nineteenth century still survived, their gray stones streaked with charcoal tears from a century of pollution. They got out of the taxi on a small cross street and walked until they arrived at a leafy little park called Plaza Rio de Janeiro.

Susana stopped and made another phone call while keeping her eyes on an old neocla.s.sical building through the trees. When a man stepped out of the foyer of the building and lighted a cigarette, they crossed into the park and angled toward the opposite corner, pa.s.sing a replica of Michelangelo's David David rising above the mists of an encircling fountain in the center of the park. On the other side, they crossed the street, walked past the man with the cigarette, who ignored them, and entered the building. Ascending an old marble staircase, they circled the landing and walked into one of the three doorways around the stairwell. rising above the mists of an encircling fountain in the center of the park. On the other side, they crossed the street, walked past the man with the cigarette, who ignored them, and entered the building. Ascending an old marble staircase, they circled the landing and walked into one of the three doorways around the stairwell.

Two women, a strawberry blonde and a Mexican, looked up from laptop computers that were sitting on folding tables. They were obviously expecting Susana and Bern, but their eyes went to Bern, and he could see the marvel in them. Cell phones lay around on the tables, along with grease-stained take-out sacks, empty plastic water bottles, and take-out coffee cups. Both women were wearing sidearms.

"Yeah," the blonde said. She stood, looking at Susana, and then with no further greeting, she snapped her head to the side and said, "He's in there."

"Come on," Susana said to Bern, and they crossed the room, which had no other furniture in it besides the two tables and chairs, and opened the door into a second room.

Chapter 23.

A big man with hefty shoulders and a thick neck looked up from where he was squatting on the floor over a banker's box full of manila file folders.

"Susana," he said as he stood, his expression softening as he stepped over to her. They hugged a little awkwardly, and Bern remembered that she had told him that it had been over a year since either she or Jude had seen anyone from the operation in person.

Immediately, the man's eyes turned to Bern, and he extended his hand and said, "Paul, Lex Kevern."

They shook hands as Kevern's eyes took him in, a.s.sessing, Bern felt, how well his prime bait was going to play with Ghazi Baida.

"We got here okay?" Susana asked.

"Yeah, we didn't pick up anyone on you." His eyes went back to Bern. "I appreciate this. It's got to be rough on you."

"Yeah, well, it's happening pretty fast," Bern said.

"You're in good hands," Kevern said. "You'll be all right. She'll get you where you need to be."

"Let's get right to business," said Susana, cutting in.

Despite having said she would, she hadn't told Bern where they were going or why. Kevern, Bern gathered from his behavior, didn't know what this was about, either. It seemed to Bern that Susana was pus.h.i.+ng something here.

"You wanted the meeting," Kevern said. "Go ahead."

Susana began pacing. Kevern, glancing at Bern, crossed his arms and sat on the edge of his desk, waiting for her to get on with it. With one hand flat against the small of her back, her head down, Susana made a couple of pa.s.ses in front of Kevern's desk, between him and Bern, who stood near the open window overlooking the street. Then she stopped abruptly.

"Lex, I need to know what you're not telling me here," she said.

He gave her a puzzled look.

"Somebody's already spotted Bern," she said. She told him about the telephone call at 3:30 that morning.

"Mingo?" Kevern asked.

"Yeah." Susana was watching Kevern closely, but it seemed to Bern that his face conveyed nothing.

"When they call on that phone," she elaborated, "I should know who they are, Lex. That was Jude's secure phone. And this guy knew Paul was there." She paused. "Something else is going on here. The people who have that number think Jude was killed six weeks ago in the drug raid. But that number has rung eight times since that night, as you know. Four of those times, we think, were Baida. Just checking. Four other times, it was traced back to another encrypted phone."

"This guy?"

"Yeah, same phone. And I think you know who it is."

Kevern stared at her a moment. Bern watched them. He couldn't see much on Kevern's face, but he could see that Susana saw something, and she didn't much like what she saw.

"Lex, G.o.dd.a.m.n you," she said, "what in the h.e.l.l are you doing to me?"

Kevern stood up and raised his beefy hands, palms out to her.

"Now wait a second. Listen to this before you explode. Then if you think it's not right, be my guest."

Susana was seething.

Kevern looked at Bern. "This is cla.s.sified. Could you just give us-"

"No," Susana snapped. "This is the way it's going to be, Lex."

Kevern's face registered something this time that even Bern could see: a flare of anger that he instantly suppressed, stopped cold.

"In the next couple of days," Susana said to Kevern, "I'm going to be telling him everything I know. Everything. No secrets. We're a team. You wanted it; you got it. I'm not going to be put in a position of having to decide what I'll hold back from him and what I won't. He needs to know everything I can get into his head in order to stay alive. This is hard enough without adding another layer of secrecy."

Kevern's eyes were fixed on her again. It seemed that Susana was telling Kevern that she was going to pull out all the stops and throw operations protocol out the window in favor of a survival regimen. Her att.i.tude seemed to be, Thank you very much for pus.h.i.+ng us off the cliff, but now that you have, we're going to be in charge of the falling. And the landing. If Kevern and Was.h.i.+ngton didn't like it, they could shove it.

"Fair enough," Kevern said, but it seemed that the words were hard for him to get out.

"Here's what I think's going on," Kevern began, "but I can't be sure. I've gone over and over it. Just about the time your training for this was coming to a close at the Farm, Jude pulled me aside, wanted to talk, outside. We met at a bar, and he pitched his deal."

Susana's face went stiff. Bern suspected that Kevern had just delivered a successful thrust in their little duel of nerves.

"Jude didn't think the smuggling story would sell without some kind of credible intelligence operation of his own in place. The way he saw it, a guy in his position couldn't operate a top-notch smuggling op without some kind of security rig. He wanted permission-and the financing-to put together his own smuggling intel deal."

Kevern wiped a hand over his face and snorted. He stared at the floor and grunted, then crossed his arms again.

"We went over the pros and cons," he said, looking up. "He'd given it a lot of thought and had an answer for everything. He was afraid that if Baida's people probed too deep when they were checking him out, they might catch him running counterintelligence measures. If they did, he could easily claim it was for the smuggling operation. Jude figured Baida would be satisfied with that explanation. It made sense.

"And even if Baida was still suspicious, it would make it a h.e.l.l of a lot harder for his people to dig up a secondary explanation. In a sense, Jude had come up with another form of backstopping. It was a lightning rod that would ground any suspicion of his actions firmly into the smuggling operation. It was smart."

Kevern paused and sat down on his desk again. He looked tired. It had been a long run for all of them and now, instead of arriving at a resolution to all their hard work, they were beginning a second round.

"Jude had one caveat," Kevern went on. "He didn't want to tell you what he was doing. He reasoned, and he was right I think, that there was no need to add to the balancing act you were already handling. If your cover didn't involve you in his smuggling operation, then why should you be burdened with having to keep track of the operation's intelligence concerns? That would simply add to the stress on you."

He paused, raising an eyebrow, and looked up at her as if he were trying to read her real thoughts.

"That's the whole big secret," Kevern said. "That's all there is to it." He hesitated. "Incidentally, Gordon doesn't know about that little operation, either. Just me. And by G.o.d, I put it out of my mind."

In the silence that followed, Bern saw the hurt in Susana's face. Or maybe he only imagined it. He knew the importance of trust between partners, especially partners who had learned to submit to the free fall of espionage, where the a.s.sumption was that the other partner was securing the lifeline that would prevent the plunge from being fatal. That kind of trust came with an emotional price, especially between partners who might have shared more than the secrets of state.

Now she was learning that Jude had kept this secret from her the whole time. And she had never even suspected it. That was deception, and in the context of their world, it was akin to adultery.

"Okay?" Kevern asked.

Susana nodded. "It would've been a weak point in the continuity." She nodded. "He was right to want to do it that way."

There was a flurry of conversation in the outer office, and both of them paused, listening, until it quieted down.

"Okay," she said, clearing her throat. "Give me something, anything. We've got to deal with this guy."

Kevern shook his head. "I told you. That day in the bar was the last time we talked about it. I always a.s.sumed he'd done it, but that was Jude's thing. For me, it didn't even exist. I didn't know anything about it then, and I don't want to know anything about it now." He gave her a significant look. "Jude was on his own with this one. Even for the downside-if it came to that. And if you use this guy, it'll be the same for you."

"You would've given him permission to dig his own grave if he'd wanted to, wouldn't you?"

"You going to give me a lecture on letting him stick his neck out?" Kevern asked. "Come on, Ana. That's why all three of us got pulled into this one. We all know the story. It's an old story." He glanced at Bern again, then back at Susana. "They want Ghazi Baida. Whatever it takes."

Susana looked at Bern. "It's like announcing a job opening for people who like adventure," she explained. "When the applications come in, you throw them all out except for those few who are addicted to Russian roulette. Then you send them into a Chinese gambling den to find a guy who's selling a revolver with only one sh.e.l.l in it. Odds are, your agents will eventually find your man for you, but you're not really surprised when you lose a few of your people in the process. You figure that into your overhead in advance."

Kevern looked hard at her. Bern thought he was trying to see inside her head to see if she was changing on him.

She turned to Kevern. "You don't know if this guy knows about Baida?"

Kevern shook his head. "But I'm guessing that he does."

Silence.

Susana walked over near Bern and looked down onto the street. It was a quiet, densely populated residential area, and looking between the branches of the trees, he could see a couple of maids slos.h.i.+ng soapy water onto the sidewalk and sweeping it off into the street.

"Jude liked to juggle," Susana said, watching the maids take a few moments to chat, looking up and down the street to see what life could show them. "He liked having a lot of limes in the air at once, having complete control of a complex situation." She nodded. "Yeah, I'm guessing Mingo knows about Baida, too."