David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Now, in fact, there was a drug-sniffing dog on duty in these early-morning hours, and the guard expertly covered his anxiety as the animal and its trainer did their business, going over the twenty-four cases of sixteen-ounce cans of V-belt aerosol lubricant for commercial refrigeration compressors. The Rivera truck brought through a variety of products twice a week. When the dog lost interest, his trainer called him off, and the guard waved the van on. Then he poured another cup of coffee from his thermos and looked across the empty bridge to Mexico, satisfied that the serious sweat that he had expended during the last ten minutes had been worth the thousand dollars a minute that he had been paid.

Mazen Sabella left Hotel Palomari as abruptly as he had arrived, and in the midst of a downpour. The knock on the door didn’t seem to surprise him, and when the door swung open and his men stood there soaking wet, it was time to leave.

“Wait a second,” Bern said. “What… what…”

Sabella said something in Arabic, and his men stepped back out into the narrow, dreary hallway and closed the door. He turned to Bern.

“Just find out if they will do it,” Sabella said. “We can work out the details later. And the sooner the better. There are… pressures on Baida that make this window of opportunity very small. When it closes, it cannot be opened again.”

“And to get back with you?”

“The hospital. Same instructions.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Stay here five minutes. Susana will stay in the pasteleria. ” Sabella took a step toward Bern, put his left hand on Bern’s right shoulder, and gripped it. He was going to say something else, then changed his mind and turned and walked out of the room.

Bern turned to the window and looked down to the front door, over which hung the Palomari’s anemic blue neon sign. Nothing. After a couple of minutes, they still hadn’t stepped out into the thundering rain. But he knew they were gone.

He looked across the street through the screen of driv-ing rain and saw Susana standing close to the plate-glass window, looking up at him. He motioned to her that he was coming over. He saw her nod, and then he turned and headed for the door. Screw the five minutes-he wanted out of that hotel room.

He banged against the wall in the narrow stairwell, making the turn without even seeing his own feet. Suddenly in the foyer, he hardly registered that there was more to the astonished expression on the old man’s face than merely being surprised by Bern. In a breath, he was across the white tile floor and out the Palomari’s doorway. The rain was sweeping across the street at an angle, and he was completely soaked before he hit the sidewalk on the other side.

When he burst into the pasteleria, it took him only an instant to realize that the astonished faces and frozen postures of the two women behind the pastry counter had nothing to do with his arrival. He looked in stunned disbelief at the overturned table and chairs next to the plate-glass window, the splattered coffee running down the glass. The two women were still frozen, eyes wide, expectant.

Then he bolted out into the middle of the street, frantically scanning the rain-blurred sidewalks, looking everywhere at once. The downpour was deafening. But there were no cars. No people. Nothing. Just the rain.

He stood in the middle of the street in the driving rain as if he had been clubbed. He just couldn’t think. And then when he could, all he could think of was Susana-what was happening to her right now, how she must feel, the fear, the panic, the wild confusion.

And he thought of what might happen to her if he wasn’t ready when he needed to be ready, ready for whatever was going to come later, because he knew in his gut that something sure as hell was going to come later. They weren’t through with him. Nobody was through with him. Everybody wanted something more, and he had a feeling that Susana was going to be used somehow, and he was going to have to be ready.. . for something.

All of this flashed through his mind in milliseconds, and then he started running toward Insurgentes.

He grabbed the first taxi on Insurgentes and told the driver to get to the Glorieta Insurgentes at Avenida Chapultepec as fast as he could. Maybe hoping for a big tip for his efforts, the driver pushed his way through the dense traffic as if his life depended on it. But Bern was oblivious of the driver’s frantic efforts, his mind replaying what the two pastry shop clerks had described to him of Susana’s abduction. As soon as the two men who were with her bolted from the shop and crossed the street, Susana went to the window and looked up. She stayed there until she seemed to catch someone’s attention in the window of the hotel across the street, and then immediately two other men burst into the shop and went after her. There was a struggle during which she was slapped to the floor, and then the two men took her out into the rain and led her to a waiting car.

That was all they saw, all they knew, and after telling him about it two times, they wouldn’t say any more. Bern played this scene over and over in his mind during the trip up Insurgentes. Just after the taxi driver crossed Alvaro Obregon, Bern told him to turn right on Durango, and suddenly the cab was at Plaza Rio de Janeiro. Bern grabbed everything he had in his pocket, flung it into the front seat, and jumped out of the taxi.

He ran across the dark, empty plaza, past the statue of Michelangelo’s David, and bolted across the street and into the building on the corner. He was met at the foot of the stairwell by the man who had been smoking a cigarette outside the door when he and Susana had come here.

“Hey-hey-hey!” the guy shouted at him as he crouched, his gun drawn and pointing at Bern, the other hand up, palm out.

“I need to talk to Kevern,” Bern wheezed, sucking air. “Okay? I need to see him.”

The guy produced his cell phone, pushed a button. “Bern’s here.. . in a hurry.” He slapped the phone closed and frisked Bern, then said, “Come on,” and they ran up the stairs together.

Kevern and the two women were waiting as they pushed through the door, faces registering controlled alarm.

“What’s the deal?” Kevern growled, his face hard, anticipating bad news. The two women’s eyes were devouring him.

The rooms reeked of the leftovers of old take-out meals and lack of circulation. They got him a chair, but he wouldn’t sit down, couldn’t stop pacing.

Suddenly, he was light-headed, too much running for an elevation stingy on oxygen, and he had burned more than was available. Dizzy, he must have swayed a little, because the guy behind him helped him into the chair, where he sat, heaving like an asthmatic. The Mexican woman stepped into the other room and came back with a plastic bottle of water. Twisting off the cap, she handed it to him. He nodded to her and then gulped a few mouthfuls from the bottle, staring at the floor. His thoughts were bouncing all over the place. He decided to go to the heart of it.

“I’ve just finished a meeting with Mazen Sabella. Baida wants to defect… for protection.” He was looking at Kevern, whose mouth actually dropped open.

“Jeee-susss,” Kevern said.

“After the meeting, I crossed the street to a… uh, pastry shop, where Susana was waiting with two of Sabella’s men. The place had been wrecked. Two women there said that two men ran into the place, grabbed Susana, who put up a struggle, and left with her.”

The strawberry blonde wheeled around and looked at the monitor.

“Her GPS is dead,” she said to the others without looking at them.

“Sabella said Baida wanted to de fect?” Kevern rasped.

Bern gulped another couple of mouthfuls of water and nodded.