David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“A taxi came for her. I remember standing on the front porch and watching the smoke coming from the taxi’s exhaust in the cold gray air as it disappeared down the street. For some reason”-she shrugged, tilting her head to one side with a sympathetic smile-“that struck me as a particularly lonely sight.”

Bern stared into his glass. He was glad to know that much at least. Regina Lerner’s story was both satisfying and dissatisfying, and he decided that that’s the way it would have been regardless of what the story had been. That’s the way the beginning of his life was, a conundrum woven of whys and if onlys, a sort of logic worked out in the frightened mind of a lonely young girl who was trying to be wise for her parents, and for herself, and for the two little boys she didn’t want to grow up in the old judge’s cruel world. You couldn’t blame her for being young.

But he couldn’t help but wonder if she really was terminally ill, or if that had just been a story to give them all a reason to put an end to it, to put it all to rest. Of course, if he was going to doubt that, he might as well go ahead and doubt all of it. How could he pick and choose his truths?

Regina reached out and placed her hand on his. She held it there a moment as they looked at each other, and then she removed it.

“Mr. Gordon,” she said, “Richard Gordon, told me about some of what happened to Jude… and to you. And he told me that since Jude was nonofficial cover, or even something more… I don’t know, more secret than that, we couldn’t talk much about it.”

“I guess not,” Bern said.

“And you’re an artist, too,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s… amazing.” She smiled, marveling, taking a moment to look at him again, as if his face revealed wondrous things to her. And Bern imagined that it did.

“Well, anyway,” she went on, “I’m going to Mexico City next week. To clean out his apartment. Mr. Gordon said the embassy would have someone stay with me. I can ship it all back, he said. Everything.”

She looked at Bern, and he said that was good. She glanced at Susana and then back at Bern.

“I’d like to do that alone,” she said. “But when I have everything back here, would you like to come over? We’ll divide his things. I.. . want you to have whatever you’d like to have.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

She looked down at her own hands, which she was clutching together on the table now. “Mr. Gordon said that there’s no body. I’m… I’m so sorry about that, but I know… I know how Jude loved what he did. And I’ve known all along that there would always be secrets, maybe even painful ones.

“But I’m going to have a memorial service. My husband is dead-Jude’s father was a doctor, a very wise man, and a wise father-but I have close friends who knew Jude all through his years of growing up. I want to do that… for all of us.”

Bern nodded.

“You’ll come, won’t you? Both of you?”

“Of course,” Bern said, and he was surprised to see Susana reach out and put her hands on Regina’s.

In the quiet that followed, Bern said nothing about the skull wrapped in velvet scraps and stored in the old ebony paint box that he had used in Paris. And yet something told him that if she had known about it, Regina Lerner would have forgiven him for his secret.

The ingenuous ruse that Ghazi Baida had managed to design and execute-in which he, in the guise of Mazen Sabella, was able to micromanage his terrorist operation while hiding in plain sight-died with him. His death remained known to only a handful of men and women in the intelligence community.

In the final analysis, Susana and most intelligence analysts believed that Baida (Sabella) had never intended to defect. It was all a ruse to have the Americans witness “Baida’s” death. Whoever the poor devil was who had been playing the role of Baida with a new face was being set up. The real Baida was going to kill him, or have him killed, in the apartment above the plaza Jardin Morena, with U.S. intelligence operatives acting as the official witnesses.

And then capricious fate stepped in. Baida learned from Bern that Vicente Mondragon was still alive and was in close pursuit, hell-bent on killing Baida for what he had done to him. So the real Baida fled in the rainstorm and let it happen. Mondragon did the job for him.

The fact that the real Ghazi Baida had died in the shallow waters of Lake Austin in Central Texas, six weeks after he was thought to have died in Mexico City, convinced U.S. intelligence that Baida had most likely had time to put together the final details of some kind of a terrorist operation somewhere inside the United States. His appearance at Bern’s house seemed to suggest that his work was finished. His last visit to Jude Teller was the icing on the cake, a triumphant swagger before the man who thought he had outsmarted Ghazi Baida, a last victorious strut before the endgame, when Baida would kill Jude and bring it all to a close.

Again, it was the grim consensus of most analysts that the launching of the operation that Baida had put in place during the last six weeks was only awaiting the final signal from Baida himself. If his ego hadn’t demanded one more face-to-face encounter with Jude Teller to prove to Jude that Baida had finally “won” after all, his operation would most likely have been executed within a few days.

Now nearly everyone agreed that the operation probably remained cocked, awaiting the final signal-one that only Baida would know-that would trigger the event. Therefore, the secrecy surrounding Baida’s death was of paramount importance. If his death were known, someone, somewhere, sometime, would retool the operation and set it into motion again. The longer his death could be kept secret, the more time counterterrorist agencies had to try to uncover some thread of the operation.

As it stood, there was an uneasy peace. How long did sleeper agents sleep? How long would it take before the terrorists on the edges of the operation realized that Baida must surely have met his death somewhere, and then how long before they would begin trying to reconstruct Baida’s design? And how long would it take them to locate the twelve sleeping mentors and their agents and reassemble an operation that had been so carefully scattered and compartmentalized? It was a design that did not anticipate the present circumstances, and it would be as difficult to rebuild from within as from without.

The U.S. intelligence community could only hope that the famous discipline of Baida’s mentors would remain intact and, God willing, that they would sleep forever.

Paul Bern’s life eventually returned to an altered version of what it had been before. He resumed his work as a forensic artist, and played a central role in identifying Mazen Sabella. Sabella’s skull was x-rayed. The plastic surgeon in Zurich who had given Ghazi Baida a new face was finally located and an X ray of Baida’s skull was obtained from him. The two X rays were overlaid and then were matched point for point by computer enhancement in order to confirm that the two men were the same.

But Paul Bern never again looked at a face in the same way that he had before the tragic events that began when a stranger walked into his studio with a box containing the skull of his twin brother. He compared himself to a blind man who had suddenly been given the gift of sight, but he knew deep within himself that what he had really gained was the gift of insight.

Bern had acquired a modern glimpse into an ancient belief; that a man’s face is much more than its physical features. It is, rather, a physical representation of his personality, of his soul even. But modern man has easily deceived himself about the landscape of the face and has often trivialized its value, reducing it to the simple elements of attractive or unattractive.