David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Bern went back to that moment, recalling the seconds before the little boy stood up with the pistol.

“Oh shit,” he said, and he leaned back against the headboard and rammed his hand down into his pocket. He felt the piece of paper and pulled it out.

“This,” he said, “he gave me this.”

Before he could even react, she snatched the piece of paper from his hand and was turning on the lamp on her nightstand. She stooped over the paper, her head up under the light.

“It’s a woman’s name,” she said, reaching up and turning off the lamp, plunging the room into the pale glow again. “Estele de Leon Pheres. Her maiden name is Lebanese. I guess it’s the woman he was talking about.”

She stood, half-turned away from him, and stopped, staring out the window to the street. Looking through the limp curtains, Bern could see the pale light glittering off the rain.

Every silence like this was excruciating for him now. He never lost his awareness of time’s flight, of it sweeping through the dark hours, hurling him toward his next encounter with Ghazi Baida.

“Look,” he said. “Baida’s waiting for me to get back to him.”

“I know that,” she almost snapped. She returned to the window, then moved back a little and leaned a hip and shoulder against the wall. All Bern could see of her now was her face in the icy light. She was staring down to the pasteleria across the street.

“I’m going to call Kevern again,” she said, turning to him. “They got Mingo’s ID, and he’s sent Mondragon’s people to search his place. I need to give him this name, too, turn Mondragon’s people loose on it.”

“So what’s the deal with Mondragon?” Bern asked. “He’s Kevern’s pit bull, is that it?”

“Essentially, yeah, but he’s a hell of a lot more than that. Vicente used to be a major force, a section chief, in CISEN, the Center for Investigations and National Security. At the time, it was Mexico’s superintelligence agency, the FBI and the CIA all rolled into one. Only thing is, it was totally a tool of the PRI, the political party that had been the sole power in Mexico for over seventy years. That is, until Vicente Fox was elected president. CISEN collected dossiers on the PRI’s political enemies, on powerful corporate executives, the wealthy and influential in Mexico. Bugged everybody. Spied on everybody. Had more stuff on individual citizens than the old East German Stassi.

“When Fox came into office, he made a big deal out of ‘reforming’ CISEN, and one of the ways he did that was to kick out some of the agency’s most notorious figures. Mondragon was one of them. But nothing ever changes much in Mexico. CISEN is still a PRI tool. Mondragon still has contacts inside. He’s Kevern’s back door to their vast files. And he even uses some of their tech people. Off the record, of course. They moonlight for him.”

She turned her face to watch the rain, her profile floating like a ghostly mask in the pale light.

“He’ll find her,” Susana said. “And he’ll find her tonight.”

“You seem to be a little sobered by that,” Bern observed.

“We’re in a hurry here. Mondragon’s people… they’ll find out what she knows. We just have to concentrate on what we’re going to do with the information. How they get it-you don’t let yourself think about that.”

The battered panel truck clattered off the Periferico on the far northern edge of the city and made its way into a grid of featureless straight streets that stretched out across the plain of the former lakebed of the Valley of Mexico. This part of the city had missed most of the rain showers that had hammered the heart of the city earlier in the night, and the panel truck threw up a spume of gritty dust that drifted lazily over the cinder-block houses that clung to the ancient lakebed like crustaceans.

Soon the hovels gave way to a vast hinterland of warehouses interspersed with an occasional street of more dark cinder-block houses. Some of the warehouse compounds were brightly lighted by the coppery glow from perimeter lights on high poles within an encirclement of high chain-link fences. There were guards and guard dogs. Some of the warehouses had loading docks that were still operating, but most of the district was quiet and deserted.

The van kept going until the sharp, clean lines of the brighter modern warehouses gave way to the warehouses of another era, out of date, deteriorating, derelict, and abandoned. These buildings were less well kept, less well lighted, or entirely dark.

The men in the van had been sending and receiving burst communications, so the van’s approach was well noted, and its secure status was well documented. It had been running a surveillance-detection route for the past half hour.

Then the van slowed, turning into a side street that burrowed into a sector of densely packed buildings. Soon it turned again, moving into an alley and going past four long rusting warehouses before it pulled to the side, overgrown weeds scraping noisily against the undercarriage of the truck before it came to a stop and the driver cut its lights.

Three men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders bailed out of the rear of the van and immediately spread out. Then the door on the passenger side of the van opened slowly and Mazen Sabella stepped out. While his bodyguards spoke into their headsets, Sabella walked to the edge of the nearest building, unzipped his pants, and pissed against the rusty metal siding.

He smelled the staleness of his surroundings. Dereliction had an odor all its own, like none other in the world. He was intimate with that odor, having smelled it in a dozen countries, and aboard rusting, creaking ships in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. He had smelled it on the breath of women in all those ports, and on the clothes of their children. He had even smelled it on the moonlight, when there was a moon, and when there wasn’t, he had smelled it on the dust of the stars.

He shook himself off and zipped his pants. One of his guards had walked 150 feet ahead, where a warehouse door opened and two armed men stepped outside to greet the bodyguard. Sabella came along the rutted alley with his other guards and approached the men waiting for him.

The darkness outside receded as they went through the door into the warehouse. The vast open space was dark except for an isolated lighted area about fifty yards away and roughly in the center of the gloomy cavern. This spot was lighted by hooded lamps that hung down from trusses hidden high up in the dark recesses of the warehouse.

Half a dozen men were busy carrying personal items in duffel bags, cardboard boxes, and a few suitcases, emptying tents that sat in the shadows beyond the lighted work area. The isolated pocket of activity in the vast space of the warehouses reminded Sabella of coming upon a busy guerrilla base in a hidden desert wadi. But the bustle of activity here had to do with breaking camp. The bivouac had served its purpose, and now the mission was moving into another phase.

As Sabella and his armed guards arrived, three men broke away from the others and came out to meet them. Empty buckets were turned upside down and a few plastic chairs were brought over to form a small gathering place, and Sabella sat down with the three men.

“Okay,” Sabella said, addressing a short, stocky man with prematurely thinning hair and a black mustache, “Ghazi says that this is the final check. It’s the last time we meet. Where is the product?”

The man jerked his head toward one of the dark corners of the room as he lighted a cigarette. “Over there,” he said. “El Samy will take it away within the half hour.”

“How many did you finally get?”