David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“What’s the word from your people?” Sabella asked suddenly. His voice was hushed, as if he had to speak softly to keep from being discovered. Where the hell was he?

“It’s a deal,” Bern said. He had been so preoccupied trying to figure out all the angles of what was happening to him that he was unaware of the physical effects of the stress he was under. When he spoke, there was hardly enough air to push out the words. “They need to know… have you got a plan-”

“Yes. There’s a plan.” Sabella was curt; an edgy impatience had slipped into his voice now. “But first, Judas, I have to know what’s going on here. Who the hell are these people?”

Bern was sweating, his hand massaging the telephone as he tried to keep a grip on it. Something was changing. What was Sabella seeing? Bern saw nothing. None of the men had moved. They were waiting. Everyone was waiting.

A ray of sun pierced the clouds, sending a thin bar of laser-bright light transiting the plaza.

God, thought Bern. All of his options were risky, and he was taking too long to make up his mind. Each person involved here was dangling by his own slender strand; each was betting on Bern to do the thing he wanted him to do.

Mondragon was waiting for him to lead him to Baida, and Mondragon was betting that he would do this because of Susana. Sabella was betting that he would deliver Baida and him from twenty-two years of killing and fear and hiding and sleeplessness. Kevern was betting that Bern could live his lie just a few more hours and bring about the richest intelligence coup of the terrorism wars.

And Susana. Bern guessed that for all her training and professionalism, for all her personal bravery, she was, at this moment, simply thinking like a terrified woman. She knew what Mondragon was capable of, and deep within her she must be weak with fear, knowing that the only thing standing between her and Mondragon’s violence was the judgment of an equally petrified Paul Bern.

But ultimately, Bern’s decision came down to the husk of a memory that might well have blown away in the gale of intervening events. But it, too, had waited on Bern, suspended and latent in his subconscious.

The last thing Sabella had said to him before leaving the room in Hotel Palomari was that there were pressures on Baida that made this window of opportunity very small. “When it closes, it cannot be opened again,” he’d said.

“Judas,” Sabella said, speaking slowly, as if his suspicion had reached critical mass, “what have you done?”

“Listen, Mazen,” Bern said, turning his back to the plaza again. He hunched over the phone box as if protecting a private conversation, then carefully pulled Kevern’s phone out of his inside coat pocket.

“I’ve got a secure cell phone to my people, and I’m opening it right now,” he said, running his thumb down the three digits as Lupe had showed him. “Okay?”

“Yes, okay,” Sabella said.

Bern waited, listening to the hum, the click, the connection.

“I’m here,” Kevern said.

“Now… I’m talking to both of you,” Bern said into both phones. “You’re both hearing what I’m saying at this moment. Okay, Mazen?”

“Yes, okay.”

“Lex?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” Kevern’s voice had slipped into the smooth monotone of operational dispassion. Be cool, it said to Bern. Be careful. Don’t let the juice confuse your thinking.

“Lex, let me bring you up to-”

“We know,” Kevern said quickly. “Your phone’s been live all this time. We’re up to speed.”

Bern was stunned and pissed, but there was no time for that.

“Well, shit, then,” he snapped, “are you sending someone?”

“We’re on the way,” Kevern said.

Move on, move on, Bern kept telling himself.

“Mazen, I know you’re at a vantage point where you can see this side of the plaza. Are you in rooms above Farmacia Pedras?”

“Hurry,” Mazen said.

Flustered, Bern went on. “Okay, these men in the plaza are Vicente Mondragon’s. He’s got Susana, and he said he’d kill her if I told you, or contacted my people. He’s expecting me to lead him to you. I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s planning, but we’ve tried to stop him. Now he’s broken communication with us.”

Bern was talking fast, cramming everything in.

“Mazen, listen, you said that we had only a small window of opportunity here and after that it would be too late. Were you referring to information that you have that’s time-critical? Do you need to tell us something now? Do we need to do something?”

The ensuing lack of response was the most unnerving silence Bern had ever experienced. Weirdly, he began to experience an alteration in perception, not of sight or sound or touch, but of the flow of time. Sabella’s silence extended through the afternoon and into dusk.

“Mondragon,” Sabella said. His voice, too, was accommodating the numbing stress of their situation. “Yes, that was a good choice, Judas. A good choice, because we didn’t even know that he was still alive.” His voice had lost its tension, and he seemed composed. Or was it the serenity of resignation?

“Where’s Vicente now?” Sabella asked.

Bern told him about Mondragon catching up to him on his way to Jardin Morena, about the phone, the conversation they’d had, the threats.

“So I don’t know where he is,” he added. “I guess he’s in the area somewhere.”

“Yes, hanging back,” Sabella agreed.

“But Kevern is on the way with people.”

“Four of us,” Kevern interjected.

“Four,” Bern said to Sabella.

“We don’t have any people here,” Sabella said, and this time Bern could clearly hear the resignation in his voice. And yet it wasn’t quite resignation, either, it was more like an intimacy with fate, as if he held no rancor for the inevitable. It was a philosophical acceptance of the inevitable.

“We come to Plaza Morena twice a week, if we can. We’ve done it for over a year now. But we come alone. We have a very elaborate process that we go through that allows us to come here-safely, alone. When we enter Plaza Morena, we’re just two more anonymous capitalinos, nothing more.”

“Twice a week?”

“Ghazi has a woman here,” Sabella explained.

Oh shit. “He’s with her now?”

“Yes.”

“And no bodyguards?” Bern couldn’t believe it. Despite what Kevern had told him, he thought Sabella and Baida would have someone to help them.

This explained why Sabella seemed to know the plaza so well. He must have spent hours sitting by the window, wherever the window was, gazing down at the plaza. When you are familiar with the daily rhythms of life on a street or in a neighborhood, you acquire a sense of what normal is in that place. A new face or a change in routine is like an alarm going off.

Bern related Baida’s situation to Kevern and then asked, “Where the hell are you?”

“We’re about halfway there.”

“Look, when you get to the Jardin Morena,” Bern said, “I’m-”

“There’s GPS on your cell, Paul. We know exactly where you are.”

“He’s taking too long,” Quito said, referring to Bern talking on the pay phone. He was sitting in Mondragon’s Mercedes, around the block from Jardin Morena. Susana was in the backseat with Mondragon, and Quito was sitting beside the driver, working the radio equipment that was keeping him in touch with his men on the plaza. “He’s talking to Kevern or Baida, telling them what’s happened.”

“I don’t know,” Mondragon said. “Baida’s plan will be very elaborate, complex. He will want to give himself plenty of room to check and cross-check.”

“He’s not writing anything down,” Quito said.