David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

There are some people, however, who look at a face and see the world of the inner man. Bern had seen evidence of this kind of insight in the acute intuitions of Alice Lau, whose own gifts were unknown to her. He had seen it in the clever perceptions of Ghazi Baida, and in the cruel grief of Vicente Mondragon, who revenged himself on the wrong man and died without a face, fulfilling his worst fear.

But most often now, Bern saw evidence of this when he looked into the mirror. He no longer saw merely his physical features there. He saw the complex and mysterious mind of his brother. He saw a self that he had never known before, a whole other man, someone capable of thoughts and deeds that until now had remained hidden from him.

And he saw the face of the assassin.

By good fortune, or God’s grace, or the laws of physics, he and Ghazi Baida had hit the shallow water in the very same position in which they had left the edge of the deck. Baida hit the shallows first, with Bern on top of him, clinging to him in a viselike embrace triggered by an adrenaline-driven animal instinct for survival. Both men were stunned, but Baida bore the brunt of the weight and the shock.

Bern recovered his senses first, and he fought furiously to gain his footing in the shallows. He grabbed Baida by the throat and shoved him under the water. As Baida began to recover and found himself struggling for his life, he fought desperately. Suddenly he had a knife, and he slashed and jabbed viciously, finding his target again and again with wild and random stabs. But Bern let them come; his hands never left Baida’s throat.

In the end, Paul Bern had completed the job that his identical twin, whom he had never known, had spent nearly three years planning. And Ghazi Baida died at the hands of a man whose face he knew but who was, in fact, a stranger.