David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

By dusk, he had most of it done, and two views of a generic version of John Doe sat on his drawing board. But Bern was uncomfortable with them. Something didn’t seem right, though he had no way of knowing what it was. He looked at the two drawings in one of the three mirrors that he moved around the benches when he was sculpting or drawing in order to see what he was doing from a slightly different perspective. But in this case, it really wasn’t much help at all. There was still something about the drawings that left him dissatisfied. In fact, he was oddly uncomfortable with them.

But he had worked long enough.

He turned out the lights, and blue flooded the studio as he walked over to the large glass wall and stood looking out over the lake. Across the water, lights were coming on all along the shoreline, and the hills above them were momentarily purple before nightfall. He pushed on a section of the wall, which swung open on a center-post hinge, and stepped outside. He could smell the water and the cedars on the hills. A waft of cedar-wood smoke came by and was gone, and the sound of a launch way off in a distant cove grumbled across the water.

He didn’t much think of the skiing accident anymore, but after having mentioned it to Becca Haber, it was on his mind again. A year was not enough time for any of the details to have melted away. Every hour of that day was still vivid, too easy to recall.

It had been late August, and Alice and a couple of her girlfriends had talked Dana and Tess into taking them skiing one last time before the summer vacation was over. Neither he nor Philip had been able to go. The sky was bright and blistering as they pulled the Laus’ boat out of its slip at Oyster Landing in midafternoon and headed up the long green avenue of Lake Austin.

The lake was calm, a perfect ski day, and there was a lot of activity on the water. The third girl had just gotten up on her skis when four college-age guys came up behind them in a spanking new powerboat. They had passed them a couple of times, going in the opposite direction, but the kids had noticed one another and some light flirting was going on. Then the guys were behind them, cutting back and forth in the wake of the third girl’s skis.

Before anyone had time to realize that it was about to get out of hand, the powerboat throttled wildly and roared past the girl on skis and then up beside Dana, who was driving. The guys were waving beer bottles and shouting, when suddenly their boat swerved recklessly and slammed into the side of the Laus’ boat.

Tess and Alice were sitting on the side that the powerboat rammed. Tess was thrown headfirst into the other boat’s hull, and Alice was pitched into its stern. Both boats came to a dead rest in the water, the powerboat piercing the other boat’s hull. Tess and Alice were both unconscious in the water.

Tess died on the way to the hospital. Alice was in a coma for three months. When she finally recovered, she was an enigma to the world.

In the aftermath of the funeral, Bern had thought he would sell the house. He had thought he would grow to hate the lake and all the things associated with it that he and Tess had loved so much. Those things, like the sunsets over the water, the night swims, the stars in the still waters that doubled the great expanse of the night sky, had become their things, like a song became your song because the two of you fell in love with it together.

He stayed on, waiting for the dissonance that shared things took on when the one you had shared them with was gone. He waited, sorry for it in advance of its coming.

But Tess’s death didn’t affect his life the way he had imagined it would. The familiar things they had shared, the house they both had worked so hard to build over the years, the lake, with its sounds and light and smells, that was so much a part of them both-all of that didn’t go hollow for him. They didn’t haunt him. Instead, he loved them all the more because they reminded him of her, and rather than making him lonely, they gave him comfort.

Even Alice had been a comfort to him. Her survival did not remind him of his own loss. Instead, it only reminded him that everything changes, that nothing is guaranteed, that there are degrees of loss, and of hope, too. It wasn’t a trade-off, Tess’s life for Alice’s. It didn’t have to be either one of them.

It just was what it was. There was no fate involved; there was no grand dark scheme. It simply happened, like the changing breeze, like that waft of smoke he had smelled just once and then was gone and would not come again.

Washington, D.C.

Richard Gordon walked down the long hall on the third and top floor of a motel on one of the commercial thoroughfares in Fairfax, Virginia. The place was generic in spades, like a blank piece of paper, or the surface of the moon. But you knew people had been there. The management had tried to cover up that fact by soaking the blue-green carpet in untold gallons of antiseptic air freshener, the spoor of their compliance with governmental health regulations.

He stopped at the door with the right number on it and knocked. The bare walls of the corridor converged in the fluorescent distance in both directions. These motel room rendezvous grew increasingly depressing with the passing years. They typified the whole shabby business he and his colleagues toiled in, as if mocking the high ideals that had launched their careers but which, over the years, they often lost sight of and sometimes even forgot entirely.

When the door opened, he walked into a room lighted only by the cool bluish halogen illumination from the streetlamp on an overpass just outside the window.

“Richard,” a strangled voice said. “Good, good,” and Lex Kevern walked away from the door, leaving Gordon to close it himself, the back of Kevern’s bearish shoulders presenting a bulky silhouette.

They didn’t shake hands, even though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. Despite the fact that they didn’t much like each other they were working together on an operation with a “Sequestered” classification. This was a new and rarefied sensitive compartmented information designation that indicated that the operation was clandestine, rather than covert. That is, apart from it being known to a handful of men, a few in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a few in the National Security Council, the operation did not exist.

Gordon looked around. No one else was there. The light sifted through open venetian blinds in horizontal bars, revealing furnishings that were wholesale warehouse decor, 1975. The air was stale and heavy, suggestive of rampant flatulence. A small suitcase lay open on the bed, its contents rifled, as if something had been roughly pulled from underneath the carefully packed contents.

Kevern picked up something off an end table and fell heavily into an armchair against the wall, under the window of blue light.

“It’s been awhile,” Gordon said. “Montevideo.”

“Yeah, yeah, Montevideo,” Kevern grunted. With the light coming in from above him, he was more shadow than man. He stretched out his beefy arm, and the television screen flickered. He was already watching it.

Gordon looked at Kevern’s profile in the pale, grainy light from the television. His body was thicker with age, but still in operational condition. The military haircut was gone, but his hair was still neat, trimmed. He was wearing street clothes, not the jeans and muscle-revealing T-shirt of former years, but there was no mistaking the condition of the body underneath the clothes. Lex had been in intelligence and special operations a long time. It would never wear off.

“So what is it?” Gordon asked, taking a vinyl-covered chair. There was a sofa, but he didn’t want to sit on the damn thing. He imagined the fibers caked with the effluvium of an endless parade of transient lodgers with piggish habits.