David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“Look,” Gordon said, “all I’m saying is that you’ve got a reputation, Lex. Reputations have a way of gaining weight. When you get too heavy for those guys to carry, when it’s just not worth the effort to them anymore, they’ll cut you loose.” He paused. “Just don’t let Mondragon take it too far. There are limits.”

“Not for Ghazi Baida,” Kevern said evenly.

Gordon said nothing more. They’d been in this circle too many times to count, each taking his respective side and pushing it as far as he could. It made for constant tension. Maybe some people would call it balance, neither side giving anything to the other, but both of them keeping the other from indulging in extremes. It was exhausting, unrelenting, never ending.

He shifted his weight, and the subject.

“Tell me something,” Gordon said. “Just for my own curiosity: How in the hell did you get Jude’s skull?”

“One of the Koreans,” Kevern said. “Before he got killed in the drug raid, we had the opportunity to put him through a little questioning. Turns out he’d dumped the bodies himself. Him and his buds. He took us out to a garbage dump in Nezahualcoyotl.”

Kevern hesitated a beat, just enough for you to notice something if you were perceptive, but he kept it tough.

“There he was”-he shrugged-“all crumpled up under an old truck radiator and some other shit. The feral dogs had been at him. And the possums and cats. He was kind of scattered around. We got what we could. At first, we didn’t believe the damn slope, didn’t think it was him. And then we found his head. Rats had cleaned it slick, but they hadn’t chewed on it. It was weird. Clean as a lab specimen. I knew the key dental markers, so…

“We shot the slope right there and left him where Jude had been. Kind of a swap. Made the rats happy.”

“Shit,” Gordon said. He took another drink. “And the woman who took the skull to Bern?”

“Paid and gone.”

Gordon was going over all of it in his head again. Hell, he hadn’t stopped going over it from the moment he first heard the plan from Kevern. When he presented it to the group the first time, they were dumbfounded; then the more they thought about it, the more it began to seem like a crazy kind of possibility to them. Especially in light of the potential horrors of the alternatives.

One of the deciding factors in favor of letting Kevern go ahead with it had been his successes in the past. He had that much of a reputation. He also had another kind of reputation. These were the things the group had weighed, and in the end, they went with the devil they knew, as wild as he was, because the devil they didn’t know was just too appalling to imagine.

“And the idea… of doing it this way?” Gordon asked. “Sending him his brother’s skull-”

“I told you,” Kevern said. “The idea was to get the guy emotionally invested before we approached him. He’s a forensic artist, Gordy. We wanted him to puzzle it out, rev up his curiosity. We wanted him motivated and steaming under his own momentum before we approached him.”

“I know, I know, I remember that, but what if it just scares the hell out of him instead?”

Kevern shook his head. “No. Won’t happen. We think he’s too much like his brother. What if you’d done that to Jude? You have any doubt about what would’ve happened?”

“But let’s just ask ourselves this: What if he isn’t convinced?” Gordon said.

Kevern leveled his eyes at Gordon. “Mondragon will convince him.”

And that was exactly what Gordon had warned Kevern about. Jesus H. Christ, putting a psycho in charge of psy ops. Gordon looked across the table and held his tongue. With a sense of resignation, he decided to let Kevern go with it. In twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most, they would know. He would let it go that far.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “What about Jude’s partner? Mejia’s going to have to prep Bern, right? I’m guessing this is creating a little stress.”

“Mejia’s got guts. That’s why we went through the big ordeal in the beginning, remember? These were two of the best people that ever went through training at the Farm. There’re damn few like them. Mejia will do what’s got to be done, and what’s got to be done comes from me. Mejia’s on board.”

Where did these people come from? Gordon had monitored the five-month training ordeal that these two officers had gone through in preparation for Heavy Rain. At the time, it had seemed over-the-top, and Gordon had chalked that up to the overzealous, gung ho types at the Farm. That was their deal; he left it up to them.

But now it seemed that the extreme psychological preparations had been right on target. He didn’t want to think what was waiting for Mejia and Bern as they tried to salvage the operation in the wake of Jude Lerner’s death.

“One last thing, Lex.” Gordon lifted his scotch and finished it off. He put down the empty glass and then slowly shoved it across the table until it touched Kevern’s beefy hand, and left it there.

“By wiping out Khalil’s cell, you may have kept Baida from finding out that Jude was a spy, but it seems to me you’ve also created a big problem for yourself. How the hell are you going to find out who exposed Jude in the first place?”

He thought he saw a beat of hesitation in Kevern’s eyes, but then maybe he only imagined it. Maybe he had wanted to see it just so he’d know that the guy had something left in him that could still be scared.

“We’re working on that,” Kevern said.

The windows of the large Mercedes were dark-tinted, so Bern couldn’t see where they were going. The driver, efficient, polite, and clearly also a bodyguard, explained that it was for Mr. Mondragon’s security, and he even apologized for it, as if it were an impolite inconvenience for Bern.

As best as Bern could tell, they drove roughly in the direction of the posh River Oaks section of West Houston, and after about ten to fifteen minutes stopped at what seemed to be a security gate, and then went down a slope into what must have been an underground garage. They descended several floors, then entered an elevator and ascended thirty-four floors, where the elevator doors opened into a private entry hall. Mondragon had the whole floor, wherever they were.

The lighting was subtle here, and the furnishings were uncluttered, sleek, and elegant, with a predominant color scheme that seemed to favor dun and deep chocolate. A young Mexican woman who wore a simple black cocktail dress and was just as sleek as the decor ushered Bern into a living room situated on the corner of the building. Houston spilled out before him, glittering into the distant darkness.

The woman offered to get him something to drink, but Bern declined. She said Mr. Mondragon would be with him in a moment, and then she left.

Bern’s attention was at first pulled to the dazzling view of the city laid out against the night as if for an exhibition, the lights shimmering in a single iridescent color spectrum of white and aquamarine and powder blue and beryl. But very quickly, his eyes caught sight of something more fascinating. Scattered about in the twilit room were a dozen or so clear acrylic cubes sitting on glistening black pedestals about chest-high. The cubes were slightly more illuminated than the rest of the room, so that they seemed to hover and float in the dusk. Displayed in each cube was a human face.

More fascinated than startled, Bern moved toward the first face and leaned in close to the acrylic case. The face, which appeared to be that of a man in his mid-twenties and of Chinese descent, stood on a pedestal of its own inside the box. The face was complete up to the hairline, including the ears, but the back half of the head was replaced by a smooth, black, and slightly concave surface upon which the face was mounted. It looked rather like the theatrical masks of Comedy and Tragedy.