David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“Every time you take something out,” she said as they backed out from under the sink, “close it. Otherwise, you may forget you left it open, or be interrupted and have no time to run in here and do it.”

They went into the bedroom, where she opened a nightstand and took out a laptop and crawled onto the bed with it. She opened it and powered up.

“Always use the computer in here in the bedroom. Anyone coming to see you will have to cross the whole studio from the landing, and that’ll buy you time to ditch what you’re doing.”

She tapped in the security code, and while she was waiting for it to clear, she continued explaining.

“The CDs are a complete library of everything pertaining to the case. One of the things you’ll read about is how Jude worked his way into the cell run by a guy named Khalil Saleh. Jude used being an artist as a cover, along with a second life as a smuggler of pre-Columbian artifacts. That’s how he finally got to meet Ghazi Baida.

“It was arranged for Jude to fly to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, in the Triple Border region, to meet an unnamed man who was interested in his smuggling operation. We knew from other intelligence that this was probably a feeler from Baida’s people.

“On the first trip, Jude was left alone in a bar full of noisy parrots near the Parana River waterfront. Soon, a man of Middle Eastern descent appeared and introduced himself as Mazen Sabella. He said that he represented the man Jude had come to meet, but before that meeting could take place, Mazen needed to ask Jude a few questions.

“They talked for nearly two hours, entirely in Spanish.” She stopped. “You don’t speak Spanish.”

“Not much. No, hardly any.”

She didn’t waste her time being exasperated by that.

“The man was polite, but thorough. He explored Jude’s life through a series of questions that seemed more like a casual conversation between friends than a vetting. By the time the guy left, he had very skillfully extracted a bundle of leads he’d use in the inevitable background check. But no one claiming to be Baida ever showed at the bar.”

Susana kept one eye on the screen and slapped in a few more codes on the keyboard.

“A month later, another meeting was set up. Again Jude flew down. Another bar on the waterfront. Again Sabella arrived. Again they spoke in Spanish, and the major point of the discussion this time was the structure and operation of Jude’s smuggling route. The guy posed a series of hypothetical situations involving unexpected events, asking how Jude would handle them. It seemed that every possible scenario was played out. Then Sabella excused himself, saying that his boss would appear within the half hour. But Baida never came. Finally, Jude left the bar and flew home.

“Two weeks later, Jude was summoned again. Jude sent word back that everyone in Ciudad del Este could go fuck themselves, especially Sabella, who had been lying to him, and the guy who never showed up. Ahmad said, No, no, no, this time it was guaranteed he would meet Baida. The meeting place was the lobby of a small and smelly hotel in the oldest part of the city. Jude said the place reeked of raw sewage, had a jungle of potted palms in its rancid lobby, hosted the largest amber roaches in Latin America, and employed the most beautiful whores on the globe.”

Susana made this last remark with as much gravity as she had the rest of it. There was no attempt to make light of it.

“This time, a guy he’d never seen before walked into the lobby,” Susana said. “He went over to Jude with a smile on his face and said in impeccable English, ‘I hear you’ve grown impatient with us. That’s understandable.’ He extended his hand and said, ‘I’m Ghazi Baida.’”

“Wait a minute,” Bern said. “Why didn’t Jude recognize him from your files? You’ve got to have pictures, don’t you?”

“Yeah, we do. But they’re at least a decade old.”

“It’s not that hard to age them.”

“Right, and we’d done that. But we weren’t sure it was doing us any good. We had pretty good intelligence that Baida had cosmetic surgery about four years ago in Zurich, but we’d never been able to confirm it. So we weren’t sure who the hell we were looking for.”

“And this was your confirmation.”

“That’s right. And the alterations were significant.”

“And then Jude made drawings.”

“Very detailed ones.” After a couple more taps on the keys, she turned the laptop around for him to see the screen. “Ghazi Baida,” she said.

Jude had done four frontal drawings of Baida in four different styles, smoothly blended, smooth controlled, sketchy controlled, and sketchy hatching. Below each picture were active toggles that would take you to variations in each of the styles: profiles, three-quarter views, smiling, with beard, with glasses, with mustache, thin, heavy, and several combinations of these variations. Bern toggled through the variations.

“These are very good,” he said. “Very good.”

Susana pulled one of the pillows from under the bedspread, jammed it against the wall, and sat back against it, one leg drawn up, the other stretched out on the bed.

“Only three people have seen these drawings,” she said. “You make the fourth.”

He didn’t say anything, but he kept staring at the sketches. He looked at the way Jude had handled his materials, how he had switched pencils, used the long side of the lead, used the point, laid on some chalk here and there. Very subtly, he had given Baida a kindly appearance. Is that what he had seen?

“What about their conversations?” he asked.

“After each trip, Jude sat down at the computer and typed out a detailed account of the meetings.”

“I want to read them.”

“You have to read them,” she said. “Everything’s on the CDs-operation reports, Baida’s dossier, information on the Triple Border area, pictures and brief bios of everybody significant. There are also some drawings that Jude made of Mazen Sabella. The whole thing was put together for you. It’s a lot to read, and the sooner you do it, the better.”

She slid her other leg up and rested her elbows on her upright knees as she pushed her fingers into her hair again. It was an interesting habitual gesture, a physical reflection of a psychological state. She looked as if she were pushing herself, as if she had drained her energy right to the bottom and every hour that went by was costing her double.

She sat that way in silence for a few moments, and then she sighed and looked up at him.

“I just can’t do this any longer. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

Without another word, she rolled off the other side of the bed, went to a wardrobe against the wall, and took out a gown. Then she headed to the bathroom and closed the door.

Bern got a chair from the studio and took it over to the windows that looked out onto Avenida Mexico and the park. He sat down with the laptop and began scrolling through the index of CDs. Night air moved tentatively through the window.

When Susana came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a simple chocolate brown silk gown. Her hair was combed out, and when she came around the end of the bed, he could see that she had washed her face.

“Let me show you how to lock up,” she said.

They went downstairs, where she showed him how to set the locks. He turned out the lights and followed her upstairs, watching her hips, seeing now and then the cleavage of her buttocks beneath the swaying nightgown.

He turned out the bedroom lights as they came through the door.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “The way I feel, I could sleep inside a lightbulb.”

“I don’t need it for the laptop,” he said.

He returned to the chair and the city glow coming in through the windows. Susana sat in the near dark on the edge of the bed, just a few feet away. He tried to concentrate on the screen, but he was aware that she was sitting there looking at him. After a few moments, she asked, “What did they do… to make you do this?”