David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

But with time, the nightmares began to subside. As the heat of late summer slowly retreated and the harsh light of August softened into September, Bern began to assemble a perspective of what had happened in Mexico City that allowed him a rough peace with those events. He couldn’t have done that without Susana. She had become the Angel of Solace for his restless discontent.

At the end of the second week in September, Dana Lau’s mother underwent heart surgery in Chicago, and Phil and Dana flew up to be with her for a few days. Alice stayed with Bern and Susana for the weekend. The weather had been sultry and heavy as a seasonal tropical storm roiled westward along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, pushing wet, heavy clouds inland. It had drizzled for several days, and then a little cool front came down across the plains and pushed the low-pressure system back out into the Gulf. The temperatures dropped to the high eighties, and the sky cleared to a clean, brilliant azure. It was the first real break in the oppressive weather of the season, and it gave everyone hope that the withering summer heat was not, after all, interminable.

Bern spent all of Friday morning interviewing the sole survivor and witness of an armed robbery that had ended in a triple homicide. He had promised the homicide detectives who had flown from Dallas with the woman that he would work up a series of drawings of each of the two assailants over the weekend and have them ready by Monday. He planned to work all weekend.

Around seven o’clock, when the shadows covered the terrace and the water’s edge, Bern grilled fresh vegetables and, following Susana’s directions, prepared camarones al ajillo, shrimp grilled with garlic and chilies. They ate while watching the sun set on the far shore. After clearing the dishes, they returned to the studio, where Bern continued working while the girls played a card game that Alice loved, and they listened to a CD of serene Duke Ellington selections.

Around 9:40, Susana brought their attention to the nearly full moon rising above the hills across the lake. Using the remote he kept in his pocket, Bern turned off the lights in the studio, and they moved to the sofa to watch one of the lake’s loveliest spectacles. After a little while, Bern noticed that Alice was nodding off in her corner of the sofa.

Susana got up and poured a Glenfiddich for herself and one for Bern, and then she wandered over to the glass wall, leaned on the window frame, and stared out at the palely luminous landscape. Bern lost track of time, but Charlie Haden’s sax was only a few bars into “Passion Flower” when he sensed the mood in the room change, and he looked at Susana, who had turned her head to look at him, the right side of her face illuminated by the moonlight.

Instantly, a warm flush of alarm washed over him.

“There’s a boat in the cove,” she said. There was almost a hint of the incredulous in her voice.

Alice, so sensitive to voice tone, stirred awake, and in the moon glow flooding the room, Bern could see her face as she looked at Susana.

“ In the cove?” he asked. “Not on the point?”

“In the cove,” she answered, and the incredulity was gone and something harder had taken its place.

Alice, sensing their concern, sat up. Bern reached for the remote control and snapped off the music as he stood. Alice got up from the sofa, too.

“You don’t see anybody?” he asked as Susana reflexively moved back along the wall.

“No, just the boat. A powerboat.”

Bern and Alice joined her at the window, where the moonlight created the illusion that the boat was floating in the air about a foot above the water.

“You recognize it?” Susana asked.

“No.”

“If ever there was a blue tree, I wouldn’t know myself, either,” Alice whispered, taking Susana’s arm.

“What about the doors?” Susana asked.

But Bern was already heading toward the front. He heard a noise behind him: A drawer was opened and closed in the cabinet that stood a few feet from the studio door that led out to the terrace.

“We shouldn’t… we shouldn’t open our eyes for the singers to be scared,” he heard Alice say in a dramatic stage whisper.

He had cleared the steps and was crossing to the front door that opened into the courtyard corridor at the same moment that Susana was approaching the door that led to the terrace. Just as Bern reached out to put his hand on the dead bolt, Susana hissed, “Paul-”

Suddenly, both doors flew open, knocking them back into the room. Bern staggered backward, falling on the steps and tumbling down to the floor in front of his drawing tables. Alice screamed as Susana was hurled into her, sending both women reeling, overturning chairs and a side table and smashing a lamp.

A man yelled something in Spanish. Alice screamed back something unintelligible, which was followed by a second sharp bark of Spanish.

Silence.

Bern’s head hit the concrete floor at the bottom of the steps, making him dizzy momentarily, but he was already recovering as someone roughly pulled him to his feet. By the time he was dragged across the room and shoved into one of the armchairs, Susana and Alice were already sitting on the sofa. In the pale light coming through the glass wall, he could see that Susana had been cut on the forehead. Alice was helping her stanch the bleeding with bunches of tissues from the box sitting on the coffee table.

“I’m okay,” Susana said, her voice a little shaky. “The edge of the door-”

“?Las luces! ” someone commanded.

“They want the lights,” Susana said.

“The remote’s on my drawing table,” Bern said.

“Shit,” another voice said. “Get it, then.”

Suddenly, Bern was alert, his mind scrambling to place the familiar tone and inflection.

As Bern stood, a man came up to him and followed him around to the drawing table. Bern knew where he had left the cell phone, and as he pretended to feel around for the remote, he hoped he would be able to feel the right buttons fast enough in the dark. Nine-one-one-send. Nine-one-one-

But the instant he touched the keypad, it lighted up, and the guy beside him swung his arm down like a sledgehammer, smashing the phone and sending shattered pieces pinging all over the dark room.

“That was brilliant, Judas,” the familiar voice said from across the room. “Just turn on the damn lights.”

Bern felt the remote in his pocket and punched on the lights, pretending to leave the remote on the drawing table. As the lights came up, he was stunned to see two Mexicans with MAC-10s and… Mazen Sabella.

“Jesus,” Bern said, glancing at Susana, who merely looked at Sabella in silence. Alice’s eyes were huge, but she was controlled, helping Susana but throwing nervous glances at the two men with the MAC-10s.

Bern returned to his chair by the sofa, hiding the small remote in his hand as he walked past Sabella, who was wearing jeans, a pair of scruffy loafers, and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows as before. Bern noticed that the black military watch was still there, and that his shirt was just as wrinkled as the one he’d been wearing in Mexico City.

“This isn’t going to take long,” Sabella said to Bern, “but I just had to know if what Vicente had said to Ghazi was true.”

He picked up the overturned end table, put it down near Bern’s chair, and sat down on it. He studied Bern.

Bern didn’t say anything. A two-day stubble covered Sabella’s face, and he had begun growing a Vandyke, which looked to be a couple of weeks old.

Sabella leaned toward him. “Twins,” he said, lowering his voice to hoarse whisper, “he said you were Judas’s identical twin.”

Bern saw no reason to deny it now. “That’s right,” he said.