David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“I’ve got to have a drink,” she said. “I’ve waited long enough.”

“I’ll get it,” Bern said. He went over to the ebony cabinet and made the drink just as she had shown him how to do that first night. He made one for himself, too, then took Susana’s over and handed it to her.

“If you’re right about Mingo,” he said, sipping his drink, which he held in one hand, the other hand in a pocket, “then it seems to me-”

Jude’s cell phone rang, startling both of them. Susana put down her drink before she picked up the phone.

“Yes.”

Hesitation at the other end.

Bern went over to her, and she tilted the phone so he could hear.

“Why are you answering this phone, senora?”

“Who is this?”

“I need to speak to Jude.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I have to know who this is.”

Pause. “Tell him it’s Mingo.”

“Look,” she said, “he’s sick; tomorrow would be better.”

“Give the phone to him,” Mingo said. “Even if he is sick. This is very important.”

“I have to have-”

Suddenly, Bern grabbed the phone from her. She gasped, stunned.

“Mingo.” His instincts told him to keep his voice calm. Very calm. “This is Jude.”

He cut his eyes at Susana. She was looking at him as if he had shot her.

“Judas? Jesus, man, we thought you were dead. I can’t believe it. Where the hell have you been?”

“Who thought I was dead?”

“Everybody, man. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Bern said.

There was silence on the other end. Bern imagined the other man’s face, his eyes narrowing, straining to see what was in store for him as he stared into the diminishing light of suspicion.

Mingo said, “We thought the narcos got you.”

“I was lucky.”

“No shit.”

“You said you had something important to tell me.”

Pause. “This phone, it’s still good?”

“Yeah, it’s clean.”

“It’s about Baida, Judas. I need to talk to you.”

“Okay, good-”

“The same place, then?”

“No. Can’t do that anymore. Look, give me fifteen minutes, then call me back.”

“ Bueno. ”

When he punched off the phone and turned around, Susana was gaping at him, breathing hard, her eyes still wide in disbelief.

“What in the fuck was that? What are you-”

“He said he needed to talk to me about Baida. That was his urgent message.”

“Shit.” She stared at him. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? You think you’re ready for this? Is that it? Is that what this is? Listen, you wouldn’t be up to this if you’d spent a goddamned decade getting ready. That”-she was so pissed that her voice had changed-“kind of stunt”-she pointed at the telephone-“will get you killed so fast that they’ll be shipping your head back to the States for someone to… to… reconstruct!”

“Look,” he said, “I should’ve… I just didn’t-”

“You didn’t! You didn’t! Hell no you didn’t! You didn’t tell me what you were going to do. You probably didn’t know what you were going to do. You didn’t give it any thought. You didn’t know enough about anything to do anything!”

The intensity of her emotion had literally changed some of the features of her face.

And for a moment, Bern almost believed her rant was justified. For a second, his conviction wavered, and the instantaneous clarity of the idea that had driven him to grab the phone almost slipped away from him. Almost, but it didn’t. It was still there, clear and sure, and he knew, as surely as he had known anything during the last four days, that he had done the right thing.

He forced himself to be calm, to keep his voice level. He wanted what he was about to say to be measured and clear.

“Listen to me,” he said. “We’ve got fifteen minutes for you to figure out how, and where, you want me to meet this guy.”

“We don’t even know what he looks like!” she snapped.

He pointed at her, the phone still in his hand.

“You said something just then that’s probably true. If I had a decade, I couldn’t get ready for this thing. Hell, you were probably right, too, when we first spoke and you said that you thought this was the craziest idea you’d ever heard. Okay, so why the hell are you so insistent on being rational about this?”

“Rational?”

“Yeah. What were you doing stalling my meeting with Mingo for another day? Did you think we could get ready-ready by your standards-by tomorrow? Hell no. The fact is, you didn’t know what the hell you were doing, either, did you? All you knew was that you didn’t think I was ready. You were buying time, but you didn’t really know what for, did you?”

She said nothing, too angry to respond. He wasn’t even sure she was hearing him. She stood there in front of him, rigid, still unable to believe what he’d just done.

“Here’s the truth about what we’re doing,” he said. “Logic isn’t going to get us where we want to go. The odds of this thing being even remotely successful aren’t going to improve because you’re able to buy me another twelve hours to cram for the test.”

He stopped, calmed himself. He wanted to be methodical, though he wasn’t really feeling methodical. But he did feel right about what he was doing. He felt sure of himself. He only hoped he wasn’t being delusional.

“What do we want?” he asked. “We want Baida to believe that I’m Jude. For a day? Two days? A week? Two weeks? And you haven’t even told me why. When were you going to get around to that, Susana? Why were you holding back? Is this some of that ‘need to know’ shit? Well, who in God’s name would need to know more than me?”

She didn’t answer. He didn’t know if she couldn’t or just wouldn’t. Right now, he didn’t understand anything that he saw in her face.

“Look, this would’ve been hard enough to do if I had known Jude,” he went on. “Hard to do, even, if I’d known his friends. The only thing we have going here is that I look like him as much as any human being possibly could. That”-he hesitated, not knowing if this would sound embarrassingly absurd to her-“and the fact that we share the same DNA. Maybe… Mondragon was more on target to emphasize the advantages I do have than we are moaning about the disadvantage we can’t overcome. Maybe I do have instincts that’ll serve your purposes. Maybe, as you’ve said, I just naturally act like him without even knowing it, do things that he would do, small things. Things that sometimes are more telling than the things we carefully plan. Things that will say more to Mingo… or Baida… than all the imitation truth that we could accomplish in a month of dress rehearsals.”

She swallowed. He saw it, and he saw her listening now, saw her finding a thread in what he was saying that she could hang on to.

“That’s what we’re going to have to rely on,” he said. “That’s the best we’ve got. I’ve read all the files now. Only once, I know. And I don’t have a photographic memory. But we’ve been over and over and over the two most important elements that’ll make me convincing to Baida: knowing the details of the smuggling scheme and knowing the details of Jude’s conversations with Sabella and Baida. It’s been little more than a crash course… but that’s all we’ve got.”

She stared at him in silence, and then she said, “You son of a bitch.”

Then she reverted to an already-familiar gesture: She ran the fingers of one hand over her brow and into her thick hair and held them there, eyes fixed.

“But you don’t know Baida’s bio well enough, not like Jude did. And you haven’t studied it the way you sh-”