David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Each of the twelve men had a single contact to get in touch with when they reached their designated cities. The wisdom of reducing the terrorist cells to two was obvious. These single contacts, known as mentors, were a little higher up on the evolutionary scale of Islamic fundamentalism. They all had been instructed in the Wahhabi strain of Islam, and they knew who Ibn Taimiyah was and what he meant to their faith. Their devotion to jihad was absolute.

After the red dot cans of Dempsey’s Best aerosol V-belt lubricant departed El Paso in three separate vans, they were soon scattered across the American heartland, each group of cans ultimately dividing two more times at ever more distant locations. When each can finally arrived at one of twelve different destinations, it was the mentors who retrieved them and made sure, one way or the other, that the men from Mexico City had a means of accessing their targets.

The objective was to gain access to the heating, ventilation, and cooling systems of a variety of buildings in twelve different cities scattered throughout the country. The buildings had been picked because of their particular types of self-contained air systems and because of their high population density within a specific time frame. The specific window of opportunity was no greater than fifteen hours, beginning on Saturday night and extending into midmorning Sunday-a difficult time for headline news to spread very fast if something should go wrong.

By the time the men from Mexico City arrived in the United States, the mentors had already been in place a year or more. Time enough to make the necessary access possible. There was no single way that this could be done, or should be done. After all, twelve targeted buildings, the locations of which spanned the distance from North Carolina to Nevada, allowed for some flexibility.

Each mentor was left to his own devices. Some made friends with the engineers in charge of the Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning systems in a given building, thereby gaining access to those systems without arousing suspicion. Some cased the HVAC systems of their target buildings as if they were casing a bank. A break-in was a piece of cake in most instances, and this became the preferred method of access. Two mentors had actually gotten jobs as HVAC engineers in their target buildings.

By the end of the second week following Richard Gordon’s return to Tyson’s Corner from Paul Bern’s house on Lake Austin, everything in Ghazi Baida’s heartland operation was in place and ready to go. The mentors patiently awaited the go-ahead sign from Ghazi Baida.

Each target facility awaited a very simple application of aerosol spray, delivered from a common aerosol can found in every HVAC equipment room and on every HVAC repair truck. When the time came, a full can of Dempsey’s Best V-belt lubricant would be sprayed into the air-handler vents of the HVAC systems. Each can contained five ounces of finely aerosolized plutonium 240 with an average micron size of three. In less than two minutes, everyone in the target buildings would receive a lethal dose of plutonium radiation.

No one in any of the buildings would even be aware of what had happened to them. Within a few days, people would begin dying, and it would take a few days more for epidemiologists to see the pattern.

The targets had been well chosen. The Starlight Grand Music City on the famous 76 Strip in Branson, Missouri, held an average Friday-night crowd of about 850 country music fans. The Marion Seely Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama, usually had a weekend-night occupancy of around 650. Other locations included a convention center in Denver; a country-and-western dance club in Lubbock, Texas; a retirement center in Phoenix; a music venue in Nashville; and a midsize casino in Las Vegas.

But the easiest targets didn’t come available until Sunday morning. By eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the HVAC systems of five large midtown and suburban churches and synagogues in Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Little Rock, Charleston, and Raleigh would be sprayed with Dempsey’s V-belt radiation.

By noon on the designated Sunday, over seven thousand people would have received lethal doses of aerosolized plutonium. All of them would die.

It would take just one phone call. But the sleeper mentor who was responsible for disseminating the signal once he had received it waited in vain for the message.

Still, he waited. Like all the other mentors, he had been selected for this operation because of particular attributes he possessed. Patience was among them.

Determined that no one would see any change in his life, Bern immediately accepted several jobs that had been waiting for him when he returned. To the few people who asked where he had been for a couple of days, he mentioned something about a spur-of-the-moment minivacation, a break from a hectic schedule. His leg injury he explained away as a fall on the rocks while working on his quay. Susana was introduced as an old friend from Cuernavaca. Eventually, of course, a better explanation would be made to Dana and Philip Lau, but time and friendship would take care of that.

Bern began working on the quay again as soon as he was able to support himself on his leg. It was tricky business, negotiating the lakeside rocks on a muscle-ripped leg, and at first he did little more than piddle. He and Susana would get up around sunrise, have coffee on the terrace, then put on their swimsuits and go down to the water’s edge and begin hauling rocks to the pile that he would eventually cover with concrete. After the sun cleared the point, they would quit and go for a late-morning swim in the cove.

Alice resumed her visits to the studio as well and, much to Bern’s surprise and relief, she accepted Susana’s presence with equanimity. He had feared, at the very least, an awkward period of adjustment, but, in fact, Alice treated her as if she were a very interesting object that had turned up at Bern’s studio-an exotic seashell or a wonderfully smooth river stone that Bern had brought home. Alice liked looking at her, and she liked being around her.

For her part, Susana was comfortable with Alice’s quirky, lively behavior from the beginning. She seemed to intuit even better than he the jumbled meanings in Alice’s symbolist gabbling. She was completely at ease responding to Alice’s verbal nonsense in a kind of pigeon palaver of her own, sometimes peppering it with Spanish, which delighted Alice, often making her laugh uproariously for no apparent reason.

On the mornings when Alice came, they all went to the studio, where Bern worked while Alice and Susana read and listened to music. In the afternoon, Alice and Susana would swim in the cove while Bern continued to work. Sometimes when Dana arrived to pick up Alice, she would bring her suit and join them for a swim and then stay for a glass of wine.

But the late afternoons belonged to Bern and Susana. Often he cooked on the terrace around sunset, and then they would swim in the cove once again as night fell across the lake. Afterward, they would sit in lounge chairs with drinks and watch the night boats move across the water against a backdrop of scattered lights on the far shoreline.

It was during these hours that they talked about what they had been through. Gradually, they disclosed their lives to each other by an intricate progression of small revelations, as if they were providing each other with a mosaic of themselves that could only be assembled slowly, over time, piece by piece with the mortar of insight and understanding. It was an unconscious process, which in its unfolding brought them closer together than either of them had anticipated.

But for Bern, the nights were troublesome. He never slept for more than a couple of hours at a time before waking up with nightmares, sweating. Over and over, he jolted awake at the very instant that Mondragon’s blood exploded across his face. Time and time again, Carleta de Leon’s brains splattered into his eyes, and Jude’s face-his own face-appeared on Kevern’s body, or on Mondragon’s, or on Baida’s. Over and over, Mondragon’s flayed head stared back at him when he looked into dream mirrors. This happened so often and with such vivid effect that Bern began to dread looking into mirrors even when he was awake.