David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

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. 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. 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 neoclassical 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, passing a replica of Michelangelo’s 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.

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.

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, assessing, 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 pushing 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 passes 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, goddamn you,” she said, “what in the hell 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 classified. 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 attitude seemed to be, Thank you very much for pushing 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 Washington 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.”