David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“This guy here,” he said to Baida, “Judas. This isn’t Judas. Judas really was killed in Tepito. This is his twin. No shit. Identical twin. Those dummies Khalil and Ahmad, somehow they learned that Judas was U.S. intelligence-I still don’t know how that happened-but they killed Judas before you could find out that they had brought a spy into your operation, and then they blamed it on a drug deal gone bad. And then a few nights later, my boys killed them. All of them. Then we put the word out on the street that it was drugs again and that Judas hadn’t been killed after all. Big, elaborate, complex operation, Ghazi. All dreamed up just to get you.”

Mondragon shook his head, the lips sneering again.

“The point is, Ghazi, I have been circling you for a long time, getting closer. If you pissed on a bush, I’d piss on top of that. If you left your scent on a tree, I would rub mine over it. Your life has been getting shorter and shorter all the time because I had grabbed your future in both my hands, and I was tearing pieces off of it as fast as I could. When I couldn’t take a lot, I’d take a little, whatever I could get.”

For the first time since Mondragon had come through the door, something began to stir in Baida’s eyes. Bern was fascinated by the animation that he saw awakening there. It was fear, yes, but it was something more than fear, too. Baida wanted to say something; Bern could see that. Baida even began to make noises, wordless sounds uttered from behind his gag. An outpouring of inflections and modulations issued from him, a desperate effort to communicate.

Mondragon was oblivious. He turned around in his chair and leaned close to Baida, his goggle eyes and fleshy lips looking more eerie than ever as he jutted his head forward in a menacing posture.

“You see this, Ghazi?” Mondragon asked, his words coming slowly now, his voice strained by a scarcely contained rage. “You wanted to do the worst that you could do to me, to obliterate my face, the heart and center of my self, my visible soul. Killing me would have been merciful. But you wanted me to die not once, but every day. And so I have.”

Mondragon paused, and Baida ceased his furious effort to convey an urgent plea or explanation. Now Bern could hear them both breathing, as if the breath that left one of them was sucked in by the other, the hatred passing back and forth between them.

“But your desecraton has given birth to a paradox, Ghazi. By taking away my face, you have created another one in its place. Look well at this,” Mondragon said, leaning in even closer and slowly turning his head slightly this way and that so Baida could see into his flesh. “This is the face of your own death.”

God loved Lex Kevern. His luck held out.

As soon as he and Susana entered the corridor that opened off the street, they huddled together to catch their breath and settle their nerves. But they didn’t take long. With Kevern going first, they eased forward to the lighter end of the corridor to check the courtyard. Luckily, it took Kevern only a few seconds to locate the guy who had been sent down to ground level to keep an eye on the courtyard entrances.

Smoking a cigarette, he was leaning against the wall under the arch of the corridor that led out to the street around the corner from the plaza. He was hardly visible, just an elbow, and now and then a puff of smoke.

Kevern stepped back and leaned toward Susana, his lips close to her ear for a few moments. Then they both returned the way they had come, and at the corridor’s entrance, they turned in opposite directions, walking out into the rain again.

Susana made her way around the block to the entrance on the opposite side of the courtyard from the guard smoking in the doorway. The moment she entered, she began searching for a prop, something to give her a reason to be going out into the courtyard. She found it halfway down the corridor. Two wash buckets sat in the empty hallway, a mop leaning against the wall between them.

She hid the Sig Sauer under her dress, wedging it beneath the waistband. The rest of it she would do out in the open. Picking up the two buckets, she walked to the entrance of the corridor and eased up to look across the courtyard. The guard was still there.

On the other side of the building, Kevern eased up to the corridor entrance and looked around the corner. The guard was still leaning on the wall at the far end; nothing had gotten his attention yet. Kevern jabbed Mondragon’s pistol into the small of his back, pushed off his shoes, dug the pocketknife out of his pants, and opened it.

On the other side of the courtyard, Susana stepped out into the portico and walked over to one of the cascading gutters, which was spewing a stream of rainwater out onto the flagstones. Setting down the buckets, she kicked off her shoes and began gathering the hem of her skirt, pulling it up high, exposing as much of her legs as she could as she tucked it into the waist of her dress. Then she picked up one of the buckets and placed it under the gutter, her back to the guard. Pretending to adjust the bucket, she bent over, giving him a chance to have a good long look at her butt through her rain-soaked panties.

When Kevern looked around the corner the second time, he could see that the guard’s body language had changed. He was standing up straight now, his attention fully engaged by something across the way. Kevern eased around the corner, grateful for the roaring rain, which drowned out the little sounds that could spell disaster.

He had to slash the short blade across the guard’s throat twice to do the job and then he held him while he lost consciousness. As Kevern eased him down on the floor, he looked across at Susana, who had just gone back under the portico and was turning around. Kevern waved her toward the plaza side of the courtyard.

Before they even started up the stairs, they discussed what they might find. When they had played out the most probable variables, Kevern handed Susana the silenced pistol he had taken from the guard. She had the most experience with sound-suppressed weapons, and accuracy was going to be critical.

They were surprised to find that Quito and the other guard weren’t directly outside the apartment door. There was a small open-air courtyard with plants and a few pieces of patio furniture outside the door. It was maybe fifty feet across the courtyard to the short hallway where Quito and the guard were biding their time. The landing where the stairwell surfaced on the second floor was another fifty feet away from them.

Another brief whispered discussion. Then Kevern backtracked, going all the way around to the other side of the courtyard to an identical stairwell. He removed his shoes and started up the stairs, hurrying as best he could, headed for the second floor, where he would circle around and be within a few feet of Quito and the other guard.

But then it all began to catch up with him. The nausea hit him again like a slug to the stomach. He didn’t even have time to bend over before he started vomiting, repeated waves that shot burning liquid out of his mouth and knocked his legs out from under him. And then he saw the granular black vomitus, and he knew that he wasn’t going to get to the top of the stairs… ever. He felt as if he were sinking into warm liquid that was rapidly turning cold. He looked across the courtyard, but he couldn’t see her… and he couldn’t call her. The stairs began to fold back on him, rippling like a ribbon in the wind. He couldn’t believe it. Well, shit…

Susana waited, counting out the seconds. At two minutes, she crept up the stairs until her head was even with the floor; then she eased up until her eyes cleared the landing. Looking through the wrought-iron railing, which helped conceal her, she looked for Kevern’s feet. Nothing. He should have been there by now, just an arm’s reach away.