David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“A case. Twelve cans with labels exactly like the real ones. They’re boxed and sealed.”

“Perfect,” Sabella said, studying the man in front of him. The flesh around the man’s eyes was dark, marked by months of too little sleep, the pressure of managing a clandestine operation, too many cigarettes.

“And our friends,” Sabella asked, “where are they now?”

“I paid them off with the money you sent, and all of them are on their way. I have a man with each of them to make sure they are out of Mexico by this time tomorrow.” He gave a long pull on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke at Sabella. “And what about the six guys?”

“They’re across now. All of them. The last one had arrived last night. No problems. Everything’s fine.”

Sabella turned his eyes to another man, a small, wiry man with a beaked nose and watery eyes that protruded slightly. “What about your information?”

The man nodded. “Every mentor has his instructions for the timing and sequence. The prime contact has the code for Ghazi’s ‘go’ signal. When he receives that, the rest will follow in rapid sequence.”

“ Bueno. ” Sabella nodded. “Good job.” His gaze fell on a third man. “Alfredo?”

“We’ve been alternating through the same three crossings for six weeks now. The bribes are in, and all of them have been completely reliable. The product never travels with drugs, so there is no chance of an accidental discovery.”

Alfredo was waving a rolled harina tortilla as he talked. There was nothing in it. He paused and took a big bite of the diminishing snack, which he held in the stubby dark fingers of one hand. He was sitting on a plastic bucket, his heavy legs spread. Not finished chewing, he went on, talking around the food.

“In Chihuahua our cans will be slipped into a shipment of the real product from the maquiladora, ” he mumbled. “When they reach the warehouse in El Paso, our case will be divided into three groups of four, and our cans will be mixed in with cases of the real thing. Each group will be transported by a wholesale distributor, remaining in plain sight all the way. Eventually each can will reach a different city where it will be picked up by the mentors who will hold them until they receive the signal from Baida.”

During the conversation, the language had been a garble of Spanish, English, and Arabic. Sometimes one of the men would throw in a couple of words of French. The bustle behind them had begun to die down. The personal effects of the men who had lived here for just over a month had been carried out to cars in the cool of night, and a few men stood around, looking here and there at what was left, as if making sure they hadn’t forgotten something.

“Any problems with the money?” Sabella asked. “Only one more payment, right?”

Alfredo nodded, almost unconcerned. His job was to handle all of the negotiations with the Mexican narcos, whose routes they were paying to use. He was used to lies and violence and pressure. Nature had provided him with a high threshold for excitement. Only imminent death changed his heart rate.

“What about the machine?” the first man asked, looking across the lighted area to the assembly line of supply tanks, transfer pumps, pressure fillers, a heat exchanger, exhaust system, and hot-water supply, all connected by a network of pipes lying on the concrete floor and suspended by wires and cables from the high trusses.

“Everything goes,” Sabella said.

Still looking at the equipment, the man shook his head at the shame of it. The expensive equipment had cost them a fortune, and a hell of a lot of trouble to acquire. And they had gotten only twelve “items” with it. Still, he knew it was worth it. It just seemed a waste to get rid of it this way.

“They’ll be able to reconstruct it,” the second man said. “They’ll know what it is.”

“They could,” Sabella said, “if they knew what was here. But nobody is looking for anything. And there’s all the other stuff stored in here. It will just be a warehouse of stuff. Who will give a shit? Just bulldoze it away.” He glanced at the equipment. “Besides, it will all be too late then. It really won’t matter what they reconstruct. They’ll already know what we had to have to do it.”

They all pondered that a moment as Alfredo jammed the last of his tortilla into his mouth.

Sabella looked at each of them. “Anything else?”

They shrugged and shook their heads.

“Ghazi sends his congratulations and sincere gratitude to each of you,” Sabella said. “Everyone has been paid?”

Nods all around.

Out of habit and without even arranging it, the men drifted away from the warehouse one at a time over the next half hour. A few more loads of personal items disappeared as well, and soon everyone was gone except Sabella and his driver and bodyguards.

Each of them retreated into the dark reaches of the warehouse and returned with five-gallon plastic containers of diesel fuel. They kept retrieving containers until twenty of them stood around. They did not want an explosion, but they needed a fire that would be very destructive. Because diesel fuel burned hot, this would be guaranteed. They began emptying the fuel over everything under the wash of lights, working quickly to prevent fumes from accumulating and building to an explosive density.

The fire was burning along a trail headed into the warehouse as they got into the van and sped out of the maze of old buildings. Despite their plans, there was a concussive whump! an almost lazy, muffled explosion, as the warehouse was engulfed in flames. They felt the shudder of the concussion even inside the van, which was now many streets away.

As the van rattled back into the heart of the city, Sabella gazed out of the window, the sporadic bursts of secure communication playing softly in the background. His thoughts turned to what he had to do next.

Jude had been a puzzle to him from the beginning, when he first met him in Ciudad del Este. At first, Sabella had been sure that Jude was somehow connected to U.S. intelligence. He had come within a hair of having him killed, along with that impetuous idiot Ahmad, who had brought Jude into the picture. But something had made him hold off.

Sabella had watched Jude carefully on a video feed from the lobby of the shabby waterfront hotel. Jude had handled being dragged through the maze of his initial vetting with an accepting equanimity. It seemed that he knew what was happening, and he endured it the way a donkey endures a hailstorm, with wincing patience, with resignation and the understanding that it wouldn’t last forever. If he was nervous at being put through the scrubbing process, he didn’t let it show.

But when he had had enough, when he thought they’d taken it too far, he told them to fuck off. And he meant it. He had made the judgment that whatever good they might be for each other, it wasn’t worth the price of admission. But then when Baida finally arrived, Jude held no grudges and quickly got down to business. That was when the conversations got interesting, and Sabella grew to like the Texan, who kept his own smuggling operation very close to the vest.

And then there was the discovery of commonalities. Sabella remembered having to drag these bits of information out of him when he interviewed him in Ciudad del Este. Jude grudgingly revealed his background, and the behavior that gave Sabella some relief from his suspicions. Often a mole would too readily reveal mutual interests with his target, trying too hard to establish a common ground in an effort to make the target identify with him and feel comfortable.

Not Jude. His world was his world, and he wanted to keep it that way. If Sabella didn’t ask, Jude didn’t tell, and even when he did, he didn’t tell very much. Jude never volunteered anything. He was more interested in how he could make money moving anything they wanted him to move. Anything but drugs, that is. No drugs. Which was okay with Sabella, who already had that covered anyway.