David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

As he got out of the car, Bern saw the dark silhouettes of palmettos against the building’s facade, and now, too, the armed guards were visible, milling about the courtyard. Looking through a porte cochere that led into a second walled courtyard, he could see other cars and men carrying armloads of boxes out of the house and putting them into the cars.

He was escorted through the front door and into an unfurnished entry hall where voices echoed off the stucco walls and marble floors, making it impossible to tell the direction they were coming from.

They ascended a wide staircase, his two escorts having to move to one side as three men started down with armloads of laptops. Armed guards appeared in the empty entry below, speaking occasionally into wire mikes dangling from earpieces. Bern noticed that the painted plaster walls were peeling.

Turning into a barrel-vaulted hallway, they followed it to double wooden doors on the left, which swung open just as they approached. They entered a long room that looked as if it might have been a grand sala at one time. Here, too, men were busily working, breaking down electronic equipment and loading it into boxes that were then being carted away. French doors opened off the opposite long wall, revealing a terrace.

He was quickly marched through the room and out onto the terrace, where a waiting bodyguard motioned to Bern, who followed him to a trellis-covered alcove. Three men were sitting in patio chairs in the gloamy light, and as Bern approached, one of them stood and walked out of the arbor, heading in the opposite direction.

“Judas.” One of the remaining figures stood, came around the table, and extended his hand, his face now visible out of the arbor’s shadow. Bern recognized Mazen Sabella from Jude’s sketches. “ Bienvenidas, ” Sabella said. He was unremarkable in either size or height, maybe thinner than Jude’s drawing had led him to expect. He wore a dress shirt, sleeves rolled nearly to the elbow. He needed a shave.

Bern shook his hand, but his eyes immediately sought the other man, who was still sitting at the table.

“Judas,” the other man said, and he stood also, but remained where he was. “It’s good to see you again.”

Though he didn’t step out of the arbor, Ghazi Baida’s face was visible in the reflected copper glow from the valley, and Bern looked into the face of Jude’s portraits. He look into the face of a murderer, an assassin, a terrorist. He looked into the face of the man that the CIA very much wanted to kill.

“Hello,” Bern said. What the hell else should he say? He reached over the table and they shook hands.

Baida was a nice-looking man. The light was poor, but it was good enough for Bern to see that Baida needed a shave, too, that his white dress shirt was badly wrinkled, the cuffs rolled back from his forearms with rough indifference, the front unbuttoned nearly to midchest.

After hours of concentrating on Jude’s portraits and studies of this man, the real thing was fascinating. Even in the coppery light, he could see how fine a job Jude had done. Still, the flesh-and-blood face of Ghazi Baida was more complicated, his features more interesting, than Jude had been able to portray. He was at once more rugged and more refined than Bern had expected.

“Please sit down with us,” Baida said. There was a loud crash as something fell somewhere in the echoing rooms of the house. “We’ll be gone from here shortly,” Baida said, referring to the noise. “We have to make the most of our time.”

Baida paused, but Bern had nothing to say. Jude would have had something to say, he knew, never having been at a loss for words. Baida considered him a moment from across the table. Games. He sat in his chair with a relaxed authority, unperturbed.

“I’ve been trying to make contact with you,” Baida said. “But that hasn’t been easy to do… at least not if we wanted to avoid being discovered. In the panic that followed the shooting, we lost you. But we also had someone watching Susana. When she ran out of your apartment on Avenida Mexico, we guessed that if we stayed with her, we would have a good chance of finding you.”

Bern heard car doors slamming down in the courtyard, engines starting, tires rolling over gravel, and then engines accelerating as the vehicles hit the paved drive and started down the hill. The place was emptying rapidly, but Baida didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He was completely unruffled and sat in his chair as if he had the entire night to talk, as if he knew just the moment when he needed to move to avoid whatever misfortune it was that all the others were hurrying away from.

In the silence, Bern rehearsed his role as Jude. He had just come out of hiding. He had met with his intelligence man, who had discovered that he was still alive, and then someone had shot him. A couple of kids. What would Jude have been thinking? What would Mingo’s death have told him? What would Jude have seen in all of this? Would he have been thinking of anything except what he could do to save his skin?

Baida sat slumped in his chair, his right elbow on the arm of the chair while his face rested in the fingers of his hand, two fingers folded across the right side of his mouth, two fingers vertically bracing his temple. Bern noticed a black military-style watch on his left wrist. As he stared at Bern, watching him closely-did he sense something, suspect that this wasn’t Jude sitting in front of him?-Baida gave off a sense of animal masculinity, which was probably one of the first things anyone would notice about him.

“Tell me,” Baida said finally, straightening up in his chair, “why you were at that place in Tepito the night of the shooting.”

“Khalil called me and told me to meet him there. Didn’t say why. I nearly stumbled right into it.”

“And how did you manage to avoid that?”

“Dumb luck.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No.”

“You heard the shooting.”

“Yeah, and I ran. Ran like hell.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“I heard… on the street, like everybody else.”

Baida nodded pensively. “And why have you been hiding all this time?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened in Tepito that night. I just wanted to make damn sure that the word on the street had that straight before I showed my face again.”

There were raised voices in the courtyard below, and then someone was running somewhere on the second floor. Baida seemed oblivious of this, and his eyes remained fixed, boring into Bern. He appeared to have something on his mind, maybe a decision to make, and Bern could only assume it had something to do with Jude. He tried to follow the logic of it, follow it the way he thought that Jude would have, play it the way he thought Jude would have played it.

“What was Domingo Huerta doing for you?” The question came from Sabella, who had been sitting quietly, watching Bern. He had sipped once from a white demitasse cup. Coffee, Bern guessed.

“You know what he does,” Bern said. “I went over that with you when we talked in Ciudad del Este.”

“And you weren’t in communication with him… while you were waiting during these past weeks?”

“I think you know damn well we haven’t been in touch.” Bern focused on Sabella. “You’ve been all over him, I’d guess.”

“Who else does he work for?”

“He doesn’t tell me.”

“He works only for you.”

“No. I can’t afford that.”

“Who else, then?”

Bern glanced at Baida, who remained quiet, watching him, then back to Sabella.

“What the hell’s going on here? What’s the matter?”

“After you disappeared,” Sabella said, “Domingo began looking around in places where he shouldn’t have been looking.”