David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

They all looked up in puzzled disbelief as he approached. At a glance, Bern sized them up as the white-jacketed pharmacist, his wife perhaps, also wearing a white jacket, a child, and a woman who appeared to be her mother. He didn’t stop to figure it out, just pushed through them, nearly slipping on the stuff that they were looking at.

By the time that he realized that he had walked through a pool of blood and then realized how it had gotten there, he was opening the door to the courtyard. A woman grabbed him.

“?Andale! ” she said, already turning to lead the way, her blue dress swirling around her legs as she took him around the courtyard, through a door on the far side and into another courtyard, and then immediately up a flight of stone stairs that led to the second floor. They turned into a corridor and came face-to-face with Mazen Sabella.

“I dragged the guy under a stairwell down there,” he said to the woman. He looked at Bern, and there was an awkward moment in which Bern felt as if something was happening but he was missing it. He saw blood on Sabella’s clothes. He was sweating and out of breath.

Sabella broke eye contact with him and looked at the woman.

“I’m going down to get the car ready. I’ll be waiting for you across the street. You know where.”

Suddenly, he was gone, and the woman pushed Bern through a doorway and out into an open-air patio. They crossed the patio and then burst into an apartment.

Baida turned to them. He was standing by a pair of open windows that overlooked the plaza. They were above the Farmacia Pedras. He had an automatic pistol in one hand and with his other hand he held a tiny headset to his ear.

“Your man’s not coming,” Baida said. “They’re dead. All of them.”

Bern gaped at him, stupefied.

Baida held up the headset and the automatic.

“Sabella got these from the guy downstairs in the pharmacy. I heard the report to Mondragon that it was done.”

Bern knew it was true. There was no doubt at all.

“Mondragon’s boys saw you go into the pharmacy,” Baida said. “They tried to contact this guy, and when he didn’t answer, they switched frequencies. It’s no good now,” he said, flinging the tiny headset across the room. “And down there,” he added, jerking his head toward the plaza, “they’ve all disappeared.”

Baida was talking fast, his celebrated composure showing signs of fraying.

“I’ve called my people,” he said, lunging across the room to an armchair where a gray nylon bag lay open. He jammed the gun inside. “I have to go.”

The woman, who still hadn’t said a word, was pulling things out of an open drawer in a chest near the entrance to another room. She brought a packet of something wrapped in clear plastic-it looked like documents-to Baida, who jammed it into the bag. He was sweating profusely.

“I’m going to give you a number,” Baida said. “You won’t remember it… with all this… I’ll show you where to hide it. Pull down your pants. Carleta, un boligrafo! ”

The woman grabbed a ballpoint pen from the top of the chest and gave it to Bern, who unbuckled his pants.

“Write it high on the inside of your thigh. If they strip you, they won’t see it there.”

“Who-”

“Anybody! Hurry!”

Bern bent over and with a trembling hand wrote on the inside of his thigh the number Baida recited to him. Baida repeated it, and Bern nervously traced over the numbers. Hell, someone would figure it out later.

“When you get to our people, use the number,” Baida said. “Time is running out.”

Time was running out. Bern pulled up his pants and buckled his belt. In fact, he was damned convinced that it was gone entirely, and that the numbers he had just written on his skin were useless.

Baida started to zip the bag, then stopped suddenly. He looked up at Bern. Then he pulled the gun out of the bag and handed it to him.

“My advice,” Baida said. “If you get a chance to kill Vicente, do it.”

The pistol was lighter than Bern expected. He didn’t even know the caliber. He found the safety above his thumb on the grip. He checked the magazine and was surprised to see that it was loaded. Jesus. He shoved it back into the grip.

Baida quickly zipped the bag, and all Bern could think about was Baida walking out of there with his terrible secret. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed Baida’s shirt.

“Wait! Listen-”

In a move that Bern didn’t even see, Baida ripped Bern’s hand off his shirt and was holding another pistol to Bern’s forehead before Bern could even recoil.

“Listen to me, my friend.” Baida’s voice was tight. The barrel of Baida’s automatic was cutting Bern’s forehead. His face was inches away from Bern’s, and every pore was moist, every nerve taut.

“The deal for my cooperation was my guaranteed safety,” Baida panted. “That isn’t happening, is it? And it doesn’t look like it’s going to. In fact, it looks like Vicente is in the process of wiping out your whole operation. I think you need protection as much as I do.” He was trembling. “But… if there is a miracle anytime soon, you know how to reach me-the numbers are warming your balls.”

In the silence of the moment, an incredible sound seeped into the room through the windows overlooking the plaza: the gentle, serene whisper of a slow rain. Bern concentrated on it. In fact, he clung to it as if that sound alone could redeem him to reality, to sanity, offer him deliverance from this nightmare.

Baida lowered his pistol.

“You’d better get the hell out of here,” he said.

Kevern lay in a hedge of some kind at the far side of the restaurant and watched pedestrians craning their heads toward the sound of the collision on the other side of the building. He heard the unmistakable rivet-driving sound of an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol. He heard screams, saw the pedestrians retreating, heard the pause to reload. He heard the ripping of the second magazine. He saw people running away now, heard the screaming of the motorcycles as the riders full-throttled them onto the expressway. Then the grenade blast and the immediate explosion of the first gas tank, and then the second one.

People yelling. The pedestrian flow stopping now, reversing itself, and surging in the other direction as people headed toward the explosions and the billowing smoke.

That was the anatomy of a killing. People reacted the way people always did, terrified, then horrified, then, as the assassins fled, curious as hell.

He had checked all of them as he was fighting his seat belt. He had seen a lot of people die. He had seen a lot of people dying. It was creepy how you knew instantly. You didn’t have to check the vital signs; you just threw them a look, and you either saw death looking back at you or you saw death crawling onto them like a little monkey, impatient to get inside at the first chance. When you saw that, you didn’t wait around.

He looked at the street again. He was on the back side of the restaurant, looking around the next corner, where sitios sometimes waited for customers. There were a couple of them, the drivers out of their cars, craning their heads toward the direction of the disaster.

When a small group of people fled the restaurant and took the first sitio, Kevern knew he couldn’t wait. Grimacing with pain, the pressure in his stomach intensifying, he crawled out of the hedge and staggered toward the second sitio. The driver, seeing a second group of people fleeing the restaurant, was getting ready to take them, when Kevern ran up to him and showed his automatic. The deal was done.

They got into the black Lincoln and drove away.

Mazen Sabella left through the courtyard of the building and made his way to the street. At every corner, he waited, scanning the cars parked along the street, scanning the windows in the buildings opposite, taking a moment longer to consider every darkened doorway.