David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Austin, Texas

Susana sat on the sofa, and Bern and Richard Gordon sat in the two armchairs that were gathered around the big mesquite coffee table in Bern’s studio. Bern’s bandaged leg was propped on an ottoman, and beyond the glass wall to his left the sun glittered off the rippling surface of the lake in laser shatters. And, as always in the long Texas summers, the lake was scattered with sailboats tacking in the southern breezes.

Gordon had arrived shortly after lunch, accompanied by two athletic-looking young men wearing dress pants and polo shirts and carrying side arms. The two men stayed away from the studio, and occasionally Bern would see one them on the terrace outside the dining room, looking out across the lake.

This was Bern and Susana’s second debriefing since their return from Mexico City a week earlier. A team from Tyson’s Corner had come down the day after they arrived in Austin and stayed three days. It was a thorough and intense debriefing, which included Bern and Susana being questioned separately and then together. There was hardly a minute of Bern’s four days in Mexico City that the team didn’t know about when they flew back to Tyson’s Corner.

Now, two days later, Gordon had come for a conversation. It seemed that mostly he just wanted to hear the story from them in their own words, but he also had a lot of questions that Bern assumed had been provoked by digesting the debriefing transcripts. As the afternoon progressed, the questions moved from the specific to the general. He wanted to know about impressions, about their “sense” of things. He asked about suspicions and hunches, and he started a lot of questions with “Did you have the feeling that…”

Bern was already trying to wean himself off the painkillers, so his leg was a constant irritant, although not exactly a distraction. The pistol shot to the outside of his upper left leg had plowed right through the tissue, blowing out a good chunk of his leg but missing the bone. He had lain awake a portion of every night since their return wondering how in the hell he had gotten through it all with only this much damage. The whole ordeal had been unbelievable, right up to this very moment.

Gordon took off his reading glasses and laid them on the fat arm of his chair. He studied the grain of the mesquite table for a bit, then looked at Susana. He had seemed particularly careful with her all day, respectful. He picked up his reading glasses and fiddled with them.

“I had some luck in Mexico City,” he said. “We had a guy in El Salvador who flew in the same night and quickly pulled together a team of his own people, a totally different crowd from the one Kevern usually worked with. Luckily, the bodies in the car were charred too badly to tell that they were even gringos. That gave our man time to pull the strings to get them out of the morgue.”

Gordon cleared his throat. “There was a hell of a lot of cleaning up. A couple of the members in the group wanted to call in people from the Mexico City station to help, but we argued them down. The guy from El Salvador worked his ass off, cleaned up the safe house in Plaza Rio de Janeiro, Jude’s apartment, Mondragon’s penthouse in Residencial del Bosque, Mingo’s place. Good disinformation leaked to the media.

“This guy was something, did it all without the station knowing anything at all. I don’t know how he did it. Even got the bodies back into the States. Anyway, miracle of miracles, we didn’t lose it. The whole thing stayed black. The whole thing. A damned miracle.”

He shook his head, sighed, and slumped back into his chair.

“But everyone’s discussing what you two came out of there with. They’re going over your debriefing transcripts. They’re combing through other intel out of the Triple Border region and Mexico. They’re overlaying matrices. Shit, they’re looking at everything. They’re taking it seriously, I have to say.”

“But…” Susana said, wanting him to get to the point.

“But we’re afraid it’s too little, too fragmented, too vague, too subjective…” His voice trailed off.

“We knew that,” Susana said quickly.

Bern guessed she wanted to cut off any kind of commiserating. The failure to salvage Baida’s defection haunted both of them, but in addition to that, Susana was still trying to cope with having invested more than two years in an operation that had completely reversed its mission in its final hours, only to have the original mission accomplished by an accident of great misfortune. Despite elaborate preparations by some of the very best people in the intelligence business, operation Heavy Rain had failed because they had been blindsided by reversals, the unforeseeable twists of fate that every intelligence officer lives in fear of.

And to add to the surprises, the wild flier they took with Bern had been successful. And no one but the psychotic Mondragon had had any faith in it at all.

Suddenly, a huge sailboat emerged from behind the point, coming from the direction of the marina. They all turned to look at it as it came close in, clearly visible from the right side of the glass wall. It glided serenely by the little inlet below Bern’s walls, and for a few brief moments its massive white sails caught the sun’s brilliance, igniting the canvas like billowing sheets of phosphorus against the cobalt sky. And then it was gone.

No one said anything, as if the vision’s departure had carried their thoughts away with it. Then Gordon sat up in his chair.

“They could’ve been lying,” he said.

“What would’ve been his reasons for that?” Bern asked.

Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“I keep thinking about it,” Bern said, shifting his leg to relieve a sharp spike of pain. He had replayed his conversations with Baida and Sabella over and over, had seen their faces in his mind’s eye and even in his dreams. He had gone over every crease and wrinkle, every perspiring pore, and had to see the whole of the message in the assembly of their features.

He winced and put both hands around his thigh and massaged it.

“I think they were telling the truth,” he said simply.

Susana suddenly got up from the sofa as if she couldn’t get enough air to breathe and walked over to the windows. She put one hand on her hip, wrist in, and thrust the other into the front of her thick hair and held it there. Both men looked at her, waiting. She was easy to look at.

Gordon folded his reading glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. He picked up his notebook and stood, punching a single button on his cell phone before putting it away.

He walked over to Bern and handed him a piece of paper.

“Here’s the address you wanted,” he said. “She knows pretty much everything. Not classified stuff, of course, but in general.”

He reached down and shook Bern’s hand.

“Thank you both,” he said. He glanced at Susana, who remained with her back to him, looking out at the lake.

One of the security guards came in off the terrace, and the other came in the front door of the studio. Richard Gordon walked out of the studio with them.

Bern looked at Susana. Beyond her, far out on the lake, he could see the visionary sailboat, its shimmering sails gleaming like a daystar against the wooded cliffs.

In the United States, money continued to grease the wheels for Ghazi Baida’s heartland operation. Because these men were not zealous in their fundamentalism, they were not compelled to separate themselves from society; these were not the tight, isolated little cells that intelligence officials quickly recognized as typical of the September 11 terrorists. That profile of the terrorist agent simply melted away in Baida’s heartland operation. Instead, it was the open and gregarious nature of the huge Latino communities in the United States that provided great cover for Ghazi Baida’s new kind of sleeper agents. It was easy for them to disappear in plain sight.