David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Bern was flustered.

She put the glass down again, ran the fingers of one hand through her thick hair, and sighed heavily. Then she slipped on the blouse but didn’t button 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 pissed, really furious.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Susana Mejia. I was working this thing with Jude. I’m supposed to make you… passable.”

“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 assigned to do. She sipped her gin, eyes on him, studying him. She began to shake her head slowly.

“God,” she said, “you really were 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 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 glass, 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 hell 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 damned 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 glass 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 glass.

“How much do you know?” she asked.

He told her what Mondragon had told him.

“Shit,” she said, looking away. “Shit.” Silence ensued while she seemed to try to control herself, though he guessed she really wanted to throw the glass 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 Washington’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 shirttail 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 hell 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.”

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.