David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“Oh!” he said. “God.” Hopeful, he lifted his hand some more. The blood still came, but it was seeping, and even that was subsiding. “Shit! Good, good!”

“Jude,” Susana said again, trying to get his attention, and then she caught herself, but before she spoke again, she saw that Bern already had begun to realize that Baida was dead.

Remaining on his knees, Bern knelt there awhile-he didn’t know how long-and stared at Ghazi Baida. He looked at the half-flayed face of a terrorist and a drug trafficker, the face of hatred and fear. The face of hopelessness. The face of a man.

Bern slowly got off his knees, turned around, and looked at Susana. She hadn’t moved an inch. She hadn’t-not even for a second-taken her eyes off Vicente Mondragon.

“Stay right there,” Bern said to her.

He walked out of the living room and into the kitchen, the way he had seen Mondragon go to get the knife. He went to the sink and washed his hands under the faucet and then bent down and washed the blood and brains of Carleta de Leon off his face and neck. Methodically, he soaped his hands, lathered them, and then soaped his face. Then he rinsed off his face and hands, and washed the woman and Ghazi Baida down the drain.

He dried his hands and his face with a towel that he got off a hook on the side of the cabinet, and then he hung the towel back on the hook. He returned to the living room and picked up the Sig Sauer that was on the floor beside Baida’s chair.

He gave the gun to Susana, who seemed to intuit everything perfectly, as if they were sharing the same mind. She held both pistols on Mondragon until Bern took the one with the sound suppressor from her. He walked over to Mondragon.

The two men looked at each other. Bern remembered the first time he saw Mondragon, the sad, hideous spectacle of his disfigurement. He remembered how Mondragon had challenged him to look his fill, to get his morbid curiosity out of his system so that they could move on to more important things. More important things. God, if Bern had only known then.

“Did you know what we were trying to do?” Bern asked. “Did you know what Ghazi Baida was going to give us?”

Mondragon seemed to hesitate. It was strange, but even without a face, he seemed to convey a sense of defiance, an imperious attitude of self-absorption that swept aside everything that got in its way. Nothing was more important to Vicente Mondragon than his own outrageous suffering, suffering that he knew would not end until he drew his last breath, suffering that could never be revenged enough, not even at the price of ten thousand lives. His grief for himself was insatiable.

“Ghazi Baida was a fucking liar,” Mondragon said.

Bern raised the pistol and shot him in the front of his head.

The plan had been in the works for nearly a year, before Ghazi Baida was even brought into the mix. It had been an obsession for Ziad Khalife ever since he had accidentally come across a mother lode of death in Islamabad: two kilos of plutonium 240 that had been smuggled out of an Obninsk nuclear research laboratory in Russia.

He scraped together the money and then began shipping the lode to India, where he knew a disgruntled nuclear research scientist in Madras who had, until a year earlier, worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. But the scientist was skeptical. Big risk. The aerosolizing of plutonium was a delicate process. It made the element more unstable than in its solid state. Not out of the question, but delicate. And it was costly. The equipment. It would take a small team of scientists. That was costly also.

Khalife flew to Riyadh and took his case to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was then that Ghazi Baida was first mentioned, and that sealed the deal. If Baida would agree to do the American end of it, then Khalife would get his financing.

Khalife flew back to Madras with enough money to put the scientist in business, and then he put the word out to the kind of people who would know such things, saying that he would like to talk with Ghazi Baida.

Three months later he walked into a cafe in Doha, Qatar, and sat down with Baida to talk business. Khalife explained everything. The necessary ingredients would be smuggled into Mexico City in six months’ time. Also, following the scientist’s specifications, Khalife was arranging for the purchase of Benning Technologies AeroTight propellant-filling equipment to be purchased by a dummy company in Mexico City. The equipment would be set up in a warehouse, and the scientist from Madras would provide the personnel to process and package the aerosolized plutonium. Khalife was personally arranging all of that. The logistics were complex, so it would be several months before the equipment would sail for Veracruz. From there, it would be trucked to Mexico City.

Baida agreed to take the job of building a cell to distribute the plutonium.

It took Baida several months to select his men. He wanted English and Spanish speakers, not an easy combination to come by in the Middle East. But then, he wasn’t going to look for them in the Middle East. As soon as he could make the arrangements, he flew to the Triple Border region. There was a huge Muslim population there and, among them, a significant Lebanese presence. He had been there before, and he knew plenty of sympathetic Latin American Muslims who could speak Spanish and could easily pass for Mexicans.

Within a month, Baida was set up in Ciudad del Este and began recruiting his men. At the same time, he began planning the best way to distribute the aerosolized plutonium. He had already developed his theory about the vulnerability of the American heartland. All he had to do was to decide the best way to exploit it.

And, always the entrepreneur, Ghazi began building a drug-smuggling operation. The profits he made from drugs would be used to help finance other operations that he had in the works but which he had temporarily set aside when he agreed to contract with Khalife. If he was going to be in and out of Mexico City, he figured he might as well take advantage of a booming market. It wouldn’t be difficult. He had contacts both there and in the Colombian territories that were controlled by that country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Within two months, Ghazi Baida had fine-tuned his plan and had his men. It hadn’t been difficult. If their Muslim zeal wasn’t enough to carry the day for them, it didn’t matter. Baida was paying them well and promising them even more. And, he told them, there was no personal risk. Baida hired an out-of-work Brazilian chemical engineer to pose as a scientist and give the men a “safety” lecture. Just wear a simple hospital mask and everything would be okay, he told them.

Soon, Baida moved his operation to Mexico City and stepped up the level of training. The men received a full six-week course in refrigeration servicing and even received certificates-from a bogus refrigeration-training school in Houston, Texas.

To make sure the men followed through with their task and didn’t just take advantage of a free ride to the United States, the lion’s share of what they were to be paid was payable only after they had dispensed the aerosol plutonium at their targets. This, they were told, would be confirmed by instrumentation that had been installed by a team that had preceded them. As soon as they dispensed the aerosol, they were to go to a certain address, where the confirmation would have already been made, and they would be paid.

Bueno. That seemed fair enough. Everyone was happy. Baida was always amazed that the more convoluted the lie, the more likely people were to believe it.

In another sixty days, Baida had each man’s documentation in order and began sending them into the United States in pairs. Twelve good men. Seven fewer than Al Qaeda had used on September 11.