David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Bern tried to concentrate on the logistics of it. He tried to ignore what was really making him light-headed-the genetic factor: What were the implications here for him?

“He couldn’t do it down in Ciudad del Este,” she went on, still using the mirror as an intermediary. “It would’ve been suicidal. Baida was well protected down there. By this time we had pretty good intelligence that he was moving into Mexico, and we thought it would be easier to do here, where our resources were better.

“And then Jude was killed. The assassination was shifted to Mondragon, and you were recruited to set up Baida.”

She hesitated, then said, “Before we get on with this, I want you to know something else.” Hesitation again. “Your first meeting with Baida tonight-we didn’t know what he might’ve learned during that month or so after the killings in Tepito. There was no way we could know. Jude was our man inside. There was no other access. If Baida had

… somehow learned the truth, that Jude had in fact been killed in Tepito… they would’ve killed you tonight.”

She was as still as the curtains.

“That’s the part that Mondragon-that none of us told you. There was always that little bit of possibility-well, that’s not right, because we didn’t know, had no idea, what the degree of possibility was-that you wouldn’t make it back from your first meeting with Baida.”

Bern looked at her dark eyes in the mirror, and suddenly Susana was transformed into an absolute stranger. In an instant, her nearness to him on the bed was turned into a proximity filled with danger, as if he were lying next to a woman who had walked in off the street. Her manner, her glance, even her pauses and silences emanated a sense that, with her, anything could happen. The next moment with her could bring anything from the ordinary to the fantastic, and all were equally likely. She simply did not distinguish between these vastly different contexts. He had no idea who she was. He knew nothing about her, could not imagine what her life had been like a moment before she walked into the room.

“Remember,” she asked, “how upset I was about… finding out that Jude had been working with Mingo behind my back?” Her voice took on a reflective tone. “You could tell, I know, that that hurt me.”

She hesitated. When she went on, she spoke more slowly, and more softly, as if she was afraid to touch the subject.

“The thing about working with a single partner undercover… it’s more complex than you might imagine. It’s a cliche, I know, but we were close in a special way. No one can ever understand just how that is unless they experience it for themselves. And precious few people qualify for that.”

The sound of the rain lent a sense of consecration to the moment. She had lowered her head a little, her chin nearly resting on top of her knees. Her eyes glinted in the mirror, fixed on him from beneath her parted dark hair.

“What Jude and I needed from each other… and gave to each other during this last year, was as special in its own way as any personal sacrifice could ever be. We learned to turn loose of all the lifelines that people cling to, and we submitted to a kind of… free fall. Against all of our instincts, we… committed to the idea that the other person would always be waiting at the end of our fall. We were faithful unto death.”

She cleared her throat, still looking at Bern.

“But that kind of trust doesn’t come without a price. It changes you, a piece of you, forever.”

The rain came hard now, no breeze, just straight down, slapping the leaves of the laurel trees below the window, thundering in the street.

He heard her clear her throat again.

“I needed you to know this,” she said. “I told you that you could trust me, and then…”

Her voice trailed off. Uncharacteristically, she couldn’t bring herself to come right out and say it.

“I wouldn’t have done that to Jude,” she said. “Ever. I couldn’t have. And I shouldn’t have done it to you, either.”

She was very still, and Bern felt as if he were being lifted off the bed by the sound of the pounding rain.

“I’m… I’m telling you this,” she said, abandoning their reflections in the mirror and turning to look directly at him, “because… this is only going to get rougher. I want you to know. .. that I’ll give you the same kind of loyalty that I gave to Jude. I’m willing to go against my instincts… to be waiting at the end of the free fall.”

She was still looking at him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her face. He didn’t know what to say. She had just told him that she had been willing to risk letting him be killed to see if he could pass as Jude. And then almost within the same breath she had pledged a loyalty to him that superseded her loyalty to the ideas that had enabled her to betray him. The first revelation had been shocking; the second one seemed reckless in its promise.

As suddenly as it had begun, the downpour stopped. Silence. And then dripping, like far-off whispers, a world of whispers.

“What in God’s name do you expect me to say to something like that?” he asked. Oddly, he wasn’t furious; he was simply at a loss for framing a response. Despite himself, he believed her. He believed the betrayal, and he believed the pledge of loyalty. It was the staggering simultaneity of them that confused him, and made her seem wildly unstable.

She let go of her knees, leaned away from him, and got off the bed. She stood a moment with her back to him, and then she sat down in the chair near the nightstand, her legs apart, her hands sunk into the skirt gathered between her thighs, the front of her dress still unbuttoned. She was looking toward the window, her profile powder blue in the wet light.

The city had vanished, and the universe was nothing but a dripping darkness as far as the mind could imagine.

Sleep was impossible, so Mondragon had reverted to what was becoming a way of life for him-cruising the city’s streets in the dead hours of the night. As he stared through darkened windows, his thoughts often drifted into the familiar doldrums of self-pity, and at other times they were sucked into the superheated whirlwind of his loathing. Regardless, it all led to the same theme of his constant meditation: his hatred for Ghazi Baida. It was an ulcerated wound, one that was never allowed to heal.

He was halfway across the city when he got the call from Quito that they had picked up one of Domingo’s girls, and immediately he instructed his driver to head toward the colonias near Benito Juarez International. Then on the way, he got the second call about Estele de Leon Pheres, a name that gave him great hope the moment he heard it. He knew that name, and he knew the possibilities it implied.

Mondragon spritzed his head. He sipped straight scotch from a glass. Tonight, his raw skin was throbbing. Stress. That’s what it was. For some insane reason, stress made it worse.

The front of his head was on fire. He spritzed it again. He wanted to close his eyes and wait for the cooling effect of the analgesic. But he couldn’t. He sat there in the half-light of the sedan, his eyes goggling at everything, seeing, seeing, seeing, taking in everything. His eyeballs fanned around like searchlights that couldn’t be extinguished.

He took another shot of scotch. He was on the edge here. A few more sips and he wouldn’t be able to think straight. He would be in that zone, that strata of exquisite self-deception where he’d assume he was thinking straight, even though he wasn’t, like a pilot flying too high without oxygen, slipping into a nether zone of absolutely believable delusion. This was his fate since his face had been sloughed away-to endure by balance, to linger at the edge of delusion but not to step over, to be constantly tempted by relief but never able to taste deliverance.