David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

She told him about Jude’s death, about the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones’ surveillance images, what had happened to the remaining members of the cell, how they had found Jude’s body, Kevern’s plan to use Bern as a stand-in, the device of using Jude’s skull to lure Bern into cooperation, and how he had initiated the plan before getting clearance from the group, the small circle of men who had initiated the operation in the first place.

All of this was told to him in a quiet, calm fashion, and the enormity of the words were diminished by her controlled demeanor, so that the remarkable implications of what she was telling him followed her recitation by some moments. Still, when she was finished, Bern was floored by the audacity of Kevern’s actions. And it put into startling perspective the boldness of what he’d gotten himself into. Feeling like a man knocked off his feet by a sudden blow to the head, he was still trying to collect his thoughts. She was quiet for a moment, waiting for his reaction.

“One question,” he said. “Will Mondragon use those pictures if I don’t do this? These people will let him do that to her?”

“No, they can’t do that,” she said. “But then, they can’t let Ghazi Baida do what he wants to do, either. They make a choice. They make a chain.”

“A chain.”

“They create a chain between themselves and you. Each additional link is farther away from them, and because each link is its own independent entity, the less real control they can legitimately claim over it. And the less responsibility they feel. The more links they have, the more deniability they have.”

“But the fact is,” Bern said, “when Washington yanks its end of the chain, the other end rattles.”

She didn’t say anything. He studied her. “And so you’re telling me this… why?”

“It’s a personal thing with me,” she said. “I told you before, and I told Kevern, we’re joined at the hip on this one. We’ve got to commit to each other, and you’ve got to have as much of the picture as I can give you to be able to do that. It’s a matter of survival.”

Yeah, Bern thought, and he’d just gotten through seeing how difficult it was for even Susana to have the whole picture. He remembered the surprised look on her face when she found out about Jude and Mingo.

Jesus. He was nearly a basket case of scrambled emotions. He was scared. He was recklessly curious about what he would discover about Jude’s life. And he was horrified that those pictures of Alice would surface somewhere, and that Dana and Phil would never, ever, no matter what, be able to look at him the same way again.

Hell, there was no way to turn back the clock. Yeah, he was committed, the same way he was committed to the coming of night, to the passage of time, to the surety of death.

In the afternoon, Bern went on reading the files. He moved the laptop to the sofa in the studio and kept plowing through the pages and pages of data. When he had questions, Susana explored every detail with him. They were both determined that Bern would grab as much information as possible in the short time they had.

They plunged into Ghazi Baida’s life.

“Maybe the main thing about Baida,” Susana said, “is that he’s not your typical Hezbollah terrorist. For one thing, he’s not an angry young man. He was born in 1954 in Beirut, the only child of a couple whose backgrounds seem to begin with the birth of their son. We don’t know anything at all about where they were from or who their families were. The father was a textile merchant, and when Ghazi was eight, his father moved the family to Mexico City, where there was already a large Lebanese community. Ghazi attended private American schools here and became fluent in English and Spanish.

“When it came time for him to go to university, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. He had a hell of a time there, went nuts over the freewheeling life of a well-to-do university student. He totally bought into the American collegiate idea. Ball games, parties. Even a spell in a fraternity. Women. He was good-looking, and charming. In short, he had a blast.”

Susana went on to outline his graduation, his unhappy return to Mexico, his falling-out with his father after a year in the family business, his rebellious move back to Beirut while the country was in the throes of a civil war. Then he seemed to have fallen into a black hole. For the next decade, information about him was scarce, except for a few key facts: The war politicized him, as did his love affair with Rima Hani, a young Lebanese woman who was educated at the Sorbonne and was also from a wealthy Beirut family. In April of 1981, the two married.

In September of 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalange units swept into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla and massacred some eight hundred civilians. Israeli forces who were responsible for the camps’ safety stood by and let it happen. Rima, who was working as a medical volunteer in the camps, was killed in the massacre.

“When Ghazi surfaced again,” Susana said, “he was Hezbollah’s most skilled operational designer.” She nodded at the laptop. “You’ve got them there, the list of horrors that bear his trademark-bombings, kidnappings, assassinations throughout the Middle East and Latin America.

“But after 2002, Baida dropped off the intelligence radar screens again. Rumors placed him in Latin America. And rumors were all they had, until Jude spoke to him in Ciudad del Este a little more than two months ago.”

They spent the rest of the day and into the night studying Jude’s smuggling route from Guatemala to Houston. Names. Names. Names. Places. Places. Places. Code words. Contacts. Whom he paid for what. What he paid to whom. Names. Places.

The next morning, they began with Jude’s notes on his meetings with Mazen Sabella and Ghazi Baida. Names. Places. Jude’s impressions. Susana told him little bits of details that Jude had shared with her during their long conversations, feelings and hunches, the sorts of things that didn’t make their way into his official reports. Not facts, just feelings, the way Jude felt at the third meeting in Ciudad del Este when the stranger walked into the ratty hotel and introduced himself as Ghazi Baida. What Jude thought of Baida’s facial surgery, how it had dramatically changed his appearance, and how Jude imagined that it must have affected his personality as well.

By late in the afternoon of the second day, Bern was beginning to get a good feel for the way his brother had been trying to ferret out the pieces of the puzzle. The sun was coming through the studio windows at an acute angle, just clearing the trees and the cityscape. The sharp contrast of light and shadow would not last long. In a few minutes, the sun’s rays would hit the densest layer of the city’s notorious smog shroud. The light would soften, and then the clouds would move in, gathering for the summer afternoon’s rain showers.

Bern stood stiffly from where he had been grounded for hours on the sofa. His muscles needed stretching; his body yearned for a swim in the cove. But his mind was electrically charged, and his new knowledge was generating an intense energy, which made him as antsy as a cat.

He walked over to the windows, where the sun was streaming in, and looked out over Parque Mexico. The windows were open, and he could feel the cool, soft late-afternoon breeze that carried the burble of pigeons and, occasionally, the lilt of children’s voices from the park. He leaned on the windowsill and marveled at the strange and alien feeling of the moment. He might as well have been in Bangkok or Samarkand.

“Jude used to stand that way,” Susana said. “Just like that. Right there in that window.”

When he turned around, she was standing, too, looking at him with an expression of haunted memory.