The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

The faceless are Paul Bern's business. As a forensic artist in Austin, Texas, Paul painstakingly reconstructs the likenesses of unfortunate souls whose features have been obliterated by crime or accident. As macabre as his vocation may be, it has become a comfortable and lucrative routine - until the day a mysterious woman arrives at his studio. The visitor brings two gifts. The first is a human skull she has smuggled out of Mexico. The second is a staggering secret that brings him eyeball to eyeball with a past he never knew he had.

Suddenly, Paul's own government blackmails him into cooperating in a clandestine mission against a Middle Eastern terrorist group that has made the drug jungles of South America its staging ground. By using his own face as bait to lure the enemy, he will become all too intimate with the underworld of violence that he seeks to destroy, while thousands of lives hang in the balance of his intricate and dangerous deception.

Release date: April 20, 2004

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

Chapter 1

Mexico City

Lincoln Park

“Something’s going on.”

These were the first words out of Mingo’s mouth, and he could hardly wait to say them. Even in the shadows of the park, the other man could feel his anxiety.

“What’s the matter?” The other man’s voice was calm, softened by a Texas accent. In his late thirties, he was a decade older than Mingo and far more seasoned. Even so, he was caught off guard by the younger man’s agitation.

“Khalil’s been gone three days. Don’t know where. When he came back two days ago, the first thing he did was meet with a guy I’d never seen before. This guy’s staying in a rented room in Tacubaya, not far from Khalil. I’ve seen them huddling together in a pastelería.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Uh, balding, maybe early forties, not athletic, kind of puffy-looking. Office type. Very serious. Never relaxed. Then this moring, same pastelería, they met with Ahmad.”

“The three of them?”

“Yeah.”

This was contrary to their own strict rules of operational discipline. Mingo was right to report it.

“Okay.”

“Afterward, everybody was tense, edgy. Things looked different. Something big has happened.”

They had met where the broad sidewalk bisected the long, narrow park across the middle of its length, between the statues of Lincoln on one side and Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other. It was just after dusk in the rainy season, and the sidewalks of the park were still glistening from the evening shower that came every summer day at this hour to cool the air and tamp the city’s suffocating smog.

The younger man had fallen in behind his slightly older companion as they began walking, ignoring each other as they turned onto the sidewalk that ran along the perimeter of the park. They headed toward the clock tower at the western end of the park. The man in front hadn’t slowed down so that the other one could come up abreast of him until they had reached the point where Calle Lafontaine intersected the park to their right.

“What else?” the Texan asked. What the younger man had to say was interesting, something to factor into the overall picture, something to keep in mind. But it wasn’t news. They were supposed to meet face-to-face only if there was news—and news meant something that significantly affected the operation.

“I think I spotted your man.”

The Texan didn’t even break the rhythm of his casual pace. Eagerness was a mistake. Always.

“Who is that, exactly?”

“My boys watching your place last night, they picked up a guy in Parque México. He stayed there an hour and a half. He was watching your place. He was using night- vision binoculars. Thomas went down there with his telephoto night lens and got a shot of the guy. Just one shot. It sure as hell looks like Baida to me.”

Mingo handed an envelope to the Texan. “Check it out for yourself,” he said.

This was it. The point of all the months of hard work. The point of so much patience and effort and planning and risk.

“Do you have any other information about him being here?” the Texan asked, putting the envelope into his pocket and forcing a calm tone into his voice.

“He’s never showed up anywhere else, if that’s what you mean.”

“This was last night?”

“Yeah. Nine-thirty to eleven o’clock.”

“They try to follow him?”

“No.”

Good. Good. Mingo was worth the money. He did exactly what he was supposed to do, and he didn’t do a bit more. He had been trained well. Follow instructions precisely. Even when you can do more, don’t. That way, everyone knew exactly where you stood and where the operation stood.

“You think this is him?” the Texan asked.

“Yeah, I do.”

Though the park was in the middle of tranquil streets, the city’s traffic rumbled in the surrounding gloom. In fact, the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s main boulevard, was only blocks away. But besides that, 22 million people simply made a lot of noise.

They rounded the corner and crossed the end of the park under the clock tower. He was surprised that Baida had been watching his place. He would have thought they would have spotted him at Ahmad’s first. That would have made more sense. But then, making sense would make too much sense. If any of this had made sense, he wouldn’t be doing what he was doing. And he wouldn’t spend so much time in fear’s claustrophobic little rooms, in the dark, air-starved cubicles of his own imagination.

“You’ve got nothing else?” the Texan asked. “Just this ID?”

“Yes, just this ID.”

He caught Mingo’s emphasis. “No, you’ve done a fine thing, Mingo.”

“Good, then.”

“Check your pay drop the day after tomorrow.”

“Bueno.”

“The next time he shows up,” the Texan said, “push it just a little further. Be careful. There’s nobody better. He’ll spot your boys the second one of them loses concentration. If they glance at a woman . . . just that quick, we’re screwed. Of course, the pay goes up, too.”

“And so does the risk.”

“Listen, you’re getting paid a hell of a lot more than I am.”

“But when you’re through,” Mingo said, “you can go home to Texas. You’ve got U.S. government benefits waiting for you.”

Right now, all of that seemed half a world and a thousand lies away. It seemed remote, and that remoteness had begun to eat at him in the last couple of years.

“Yeah,” the Texan said. “Those benefits.”

He looked over Mingo’s shoulders at the two figures moving toward them from the other end of the park. A couple, huddled together, breathing each other’s breath. Lovers. He did not think or fear that they were anything other than what they appeared to be, but they reminded him that it was time to be moving on.

“Keep in touch,” he said.

Mingo was used to the abrupt departures, and he nodded good-bye. The Texan was already walking away.

Chapter 2

Four hours later, the Texan was alone. He was in another part of the vast and sprawling city, a world away from the upscale park in Polanco. Here, the treeless maze of ancient streets was narrow and twisting and filthy, and being a solitary gringo here at night was suicidal.

He was in Tepito, near the heart of the city, in a barrio that had existed for over five centuries and had often made its living off of things that the rest of the city had thrown away. Tepiteños married Tepiteños and had done so for centuries. They were as clannish as Gypsies, and to them, all the rest of the world was made up of outsiders.

During the day, the stalls of illegal street vendors practically blocked access to legitimate stores here. The places on the sidewalk for these squatter stalls were “bought” from Korean thugs who, despite the neighborhood’s closed culture, had viciously usurped much of the control of Tepito’s institutionalized banditry. Mexico was now third, behind only Russia and China, in the commerce of pirated goods, selling fake labels on everything from condoms to caviar, and anything plastic. Tepito was the beating heart of this illicit trade.

He had taken a taxi, but at a certain point the driver had refused to go any farther into Tepito. The Texan had climbed out of the car and started walking deeper into the labyrinth.

Every once in a while, he stepped into the recess of a doorway that smelled of urine and ancient stone. He listened. He was sweating, despite the fact that Mexico City sat in a valley at an altitude of 7,340 feet and was surrounded by mountains nearly twice that high. The nights were always cool. He stepped out of the doorway and continued walking.

Samarra was a street of silences. Off the beaten track, even during the day, it was alleylike and foul-smelling, the wafts of sewage mixing with the odor of frying onions and dust. The flat faces of the buildings were stark and unadorned. Occasionally as he moved through the ocher-tinged shadows, the fluorescent glint of a television seeped through the crack of a shutter or flickered off the ceiling of a second-floor room with an open window. Now and then, he caught snatches of voices dripping with pathos—a telenovella—or the surging canned laughter of a sitcom. But mostly, he heard only his own footsteps, muted as they crunched on the grit of the old stones. His shoe fell on something soft, followed a moment later by the pungent odor of animal feces.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Suddenly, a few yards in front of him, a door opened and a figure stepped out on a spill of dull light. He raised an arm horizontally, directing the Texan inside. Though he had never before met them in Tepito, he knew the routine. He turned and went in.

The empty room was shrouded in a hazy, feeble light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. He raised his arms while the Korean patted him down. The guard wore a misshapen suit and street shoes, a cutoff M16 slung over his shoulder.

He followed the man through a darkened room and then out into a courtyard bathed in the same jaundiced light as the street outside. The limp silhouettes of banana trees were scattered about the compound, and other rooms, some dark, others with dull lights, surrounded them. A second Korean guard fell in behind him, and a shorthaired dog appeared from the smudgy corners of the enclosure and snuffled at his legs and nudged his hand with its damp nose, the only compassionate creature that the Texan was likely to encounter during the entire long night. They crossed to an outside stairwell and started up.

On the second floor, they doubled back and approached another lighted doorway, where yet another guard waited outside. They went in, interrupting three men huddled in deep conversation around a small wooden table. None of them was Korean or American—or Mexican.

“Judas,” said the man who had been sitting with his back to the door and was now turning to look at the Texan. His name was Ahmad, and when he stood to shake hands, there was no characteristic smile, and his eyes regarded the Texan with a pained solemnity. Something was up.

“Khalil,” the Texan said, nodding at a man his own age who was sitting directly across the table from Ahmad. Khalil hadn’t shaved in several days and looked as if he had missed a lot of sleep. He was surly and didn’t offer his hand.

The third man at the table was a stranger to the Texan and sat opposite an empty fourth chair. The Texan stared at him cockily, suggesting by his pointed gaze that a name was expected. It was all a game, and it mattered very much how you played it.

But the man didn’t look at him, and apparently he was not going to be introduced. He was hollow-cheeked, with an olive complexion gone pasty, bald, and had thin shoulders, which made his head look too big for his body. In the deep crease at the upper right of his mouth was a dark mole the size of a raisin. Without making eye contact, he leaned forward and sipped from a teacup in front of him, holding the cup by its rim, not its handle.

“Please,” Ahmad said, “join us.” He offered the fourth chair at the table.

The Texan sat down and was aware of the two Koreans remaining in the room, although they stood out of sight behind him. The three men at the table were drinking the familiar strong, sweet tea, but none was offered to the Texan. A significant sign, one that caused another wave of perspiration to rush to the surface of his skin.

Silence followed. Now Khalil averted his eyes, too, but Ahmad continued looking at him, his expression grave.

“Bad news, Judas,” Ahmad said, and it was painful to hear the genuine note of sadness in his voice. The two of them had learned to like each other, and actually had grown close in a perverse way. Friendship as rape—it was another talent the Texan had perfected, another admirable human trait that he had corrupted in the service of a questionably higher calling.

Khalil looked up now, too, and he and Ahmad stared at him in silence. The third man continued to look down.

“It’s over, my friend,” Ahmad said. “We know.”

He hadn’t seen it coming. Something else, maybe. There were always fears. But this . . . he hadn’t seen this coming.

From somewhere, he summoned the strength not to panic and bolt for the door. He frowned, gave them a dumb, puzzled look. But before he could stop himself, he swallowed. Goddamn. It was as good as a confession. He felt something against his leg and glanced down. The dog had followed them up the stairs and was standing there looking at him. Waiting, it seemed, just like the rest of them.

The unidentified man, his eyes still averted, coughed a little and cleared his throat, pulling up a wad of phlegm, which he worked with his tongue.

Oh shit. The Texan’s heart stopped. It didn’t beat at all. It just hovered in his chest, not even touching the surrounding tissue. The light in the room dimmed. . . . No, no, not this. He did not want to faint.

“What is this?” he managed to say, but the intended tone of bravado was not convincing.

The stranger’s head shot up, and he sprang to his feet and spat with a force that shook his body. The crap from his throat flew across the table and slapped against the corner of the Texan’s mouth.

Before he could react, someone grabbed his arms from behind and wrenched them backward, snapping one of his elbows. He screamed out, hardly aware that someone was taping his wrists together as someone else taped his ankles to each of the chair’s front legs. His head was clamped between two hands sheathed in rubber gloves.

The bald man slammed his hands down on the table, exploding the cups of tea. Lurching forward over the broken cups, his face rigid with violence, his hands planted in the syrupy mess that was running off the edges of the table, he shrieked, “Jasus! Jasus!”

The Texan heard a door behind him open and close and then footsteps approached. Somebody set down something with a thud. A man stepped around in front of him, holding two insulated electrical cables with bare ends. He wore a mismatched jogging suit, which was unzipped to his hairy stomach.

When the wires touched either side of the Texan’s neck, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his throat. He thought his head had been blown off his body. But that was only an illusion. The sensation that he was involuntarily pissing his pants was not.

The stranger who had spat on him yawed back his head, mouth wide open, wide as a baboon’s maw, his eyes glittering, the veins in his neck engorged, standing out like great plum-colored worms.

They were all standing. Suddenly, Ahmad’s arms flew out wide, as if he were conducting an orchestra with brio, and the spray of his brains fled the blast from Khalil’s outstretched arm. No more Ahmad.

The wires again, rammed precisely into his ears.

Silence.

The stranger was straddling him, his face contorted like a Francis Bacon portrait, his mouth twisted grotesquely up the right side of his head, one eye pig-size and wandering, the other protuberant and goggling.

The Texan felt the man inside his mouth, and for a split second he thought the whole man was in there, because he couldn’t see him, but he could feel him walking around.

Then the stranger held something in front of the Texan’s face, jabbing at it insanely with his knife for him to see, then slapping his face with it, again and again.

But the Texan was already drowning, and he found it difficult to care too much about what the man was doing. It was hard to drown in your own blood, even so much of it. He found that drowning wasn’t a progressive event, as he might have imagined. Rather, it was a lurching sort of thing: Choking on the surge of blood, he faded; then he coughed, spewing a geyser of blood, and was instantly back in the brutal clarity of the moment.

He tried to go ahead and die, but he was disappointed to realize that he couldn’t force it. He went through the whole cycle again. Then he smelled the feces, which were undoubtedly his own, and he was surprised to feel a sad, profound embarrassment.

Then, just when he began to die after all, and he knew for certain that he was dying, he saw the man with the contorted features toss to the dog the thing that he had been flourishing and stabbing in his wild rant. The poor cadaverous creature pounced on it in an instant, and with hunched shoulders and great gorging efforts of his outstretched neck, he wolfed it down.

It was only then that the Texan realized that the man had cut out his tongue.

Chapter 3

Austin, Texas

“I’ve got a client coming in about half an hour,” Bern said, leaning over and blowing eraser crumbs off the sketch he was finishing. He was making a last-minute alteration to the composite drawing of a man accused of raping a University of Texas student.

The victim had been brought to him the night before, and in sporadic, sharp observations she had described the face that had now emerged from under his pencil. Early that morning, the detective had called and asked for a variation in detail.

Alice was sitting on her stool, an arm’s reach away, a sketch pad on her lap, watching over his shoulder. When he stopped drawing, she immediately returned to her own creation for the morning, a conga line of Kewpie doll stick figures, each with a single curl of hair standing upright on its head, all marching toward a cliff.

Alice Lau was seventeen.

Paul Bern sipped coffee from his black mug and looked at her. She was oblivious now, absorbed in her drawing. Wearing designer-faded hip-hugging jeans that revealed her navel, and a cutoff T-shirt that exposed her midriff, she was sitting with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, waggling her bare foot in the universal teenager’s fidget. She was spreading a piece of gum with her tongue and lips, as if she were about to blow a bubble, but the bubble never materialized. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a long braid that was draped over the front of one shoulder.

She was the only child of Bern’s closest friends, Dana and Philip Lau. He and Philip had been undergraduates together at Rice, and though their careers had taken them to different parts of the world, over the years they and their wives had regularly managed to spend a few days of vacation together every couple of years. When Philip became a tenured professor of political science at the University of Texas, he and Dana started lobbying Paul and Tess to move to Austin. Eventually, they were persuaded, and it had been a wonderful decision in every way . . . until just about a year ago.

They were listening to Tom Waits’s CD Alice, an appropriate choice for many reasons, all completely lost on the girl on the stool. She couldn’t understand anything Waits was singing. She couldn’t understand anything Bern was saying, for that matter, but he always talked to her as if she understood everything. And, mysteriously, it seemed that she often did.

He stood and looked down at his drawing, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the mug of coffee. The guy’s eyes were wide-set, his nose was broad and slightly upturned, and his maxilla was distinctly sunken, emphasizing his prominent front teeth. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t a flattering combination, and it stuck very clearly in the victim’s mind. She also remembered that his hair was worn in a mullet, a feature that only added to the stupidity of his appearance.

“This is as far as I’m going to take it,” he said. “Don’t want to push it.”

Alice looked up while he was talking and glanced at the drawing, too.

“It’s no way through the legs so,” she said, “but if there’s a really wrong, then who would fly on it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “They only asked for one variation, and I’ve given them three. I don’t want to start putting ideas in her head.”

Alice shrugged and smiled and then went back to the Kewpie dolls.

He looked at his watch. No time to start anything else. Tom Waits was singing about Poor Edward—“On the back of his head/He had another Face/Was it a woman’s face/Or a young girl?”—and Alice’s foot was waggling, but not in time with the music. Bern knew she appreciated music and understood the beat and rhythm of it, if not the words.

Over a period of months, he had experimented with her and had found that she responded to particular musical moods. Sometimes she was upset if he put on Miles Davis, and she wouldn’t settle down until he switched to Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach. Other times, it was the other way around: Not Bach; let’s have Tosca’s tangos.

But she wasn’t often so definite about it. Usually, anything he liked, she liked. She was pretty simpatico that way. The way Tess had been. Jesus. Alice didn’t often remind him of Tess anymore. Not often. Still, sometimes . . . But he didn’t let it derail him now like it used to.

He had gotten used to having Alice around. It was a little awkward at first, and he had worried that it was awkward for Alice, too. But it didn’t take him long to get to know the new Alice, and he realized that his concern was unnecessary. For her, the situation was not so complex. Not in the same way it was for him anyway.

When the doorbell rang, Alice looked up at him, waiting for his reaction.

“That’s my client,” he said, starting back across the room.

He passed the drawing tables, easels, and workbenches cluttered with the tools of his craft—cans of paintbrushes, partially used tubes of oil paints, sketchbooks, sticks of charcoal and pastel chalks. There were cabinets of materials and supplies, books on shelves, and a complete skeleton dangling from a chrome stand. He went up the six steps, which were nearly the width of the room itself.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he called back.

Alice said something in response, the tone and cadence of which sounded reasonable, though the syntax of the words made no sense whatsoever.

“Okay,” he said as he opened the door. “Be right back.”

He saw the woman through the heavy grillwork of the iron gate as he approached her across the interior courtyard. She was standing in the lacy morning shade of a mesquite tree, holding a cardboard carton about the size of a small hatbox in her hands.

He quickly took her in: a simple sleeveless summer dress of lemon yellow, straight, just above the knees. She had a berry-brown suntan. Five eight or nine. Early thirties. Dark blunt-cut hair worn just shorter than shoulder length, but long enough for her to pull it back out of her way and fix it with a practical rubber band. At this moment, she had the sides of it tucked behind her ears. She was trim and fit, not in the sense of an athlete, but more like someone who enjoyed the outdoors, maybe hiked a lot.

“Becca Haber,” she said, peeping at him through the grille as he approached. “Sorry I’m late.”

“It’s all right. Everybody gets lost out here,” he said, sliding back the bolt on the gate to let her in. “I’m used to it.”

Bern lived in one of the countless bends of the Colorado River, which had been dammed up more than half a dozen times as it passed through the hills of central Texas. The dams formed a chain of wooded lakes northwest of Austin, with the lower two lakes coming right into the city where Bern had built his semisecluded house.

He and the woman crossed the courtyard under a canopy of wisteria, which spanned the open space, draping across it from the high stone walls of the surrounding house. He had been watering plants earlier, and the odors of dampened soil and stones still filled the warm morning air.

“You got into town last night?” Bern asked. The woman was walking just a step behind him as they entered a barrel-vaulted corridor of brick and stone slurried over with white plaster.

“Yes, more or less,” she said.

Okay. The light from the other end of the tunnel spun toward them, as if anticipating their arrival, but they turned into an open doorway halfway around the tunnel’s arc and stepped into Bern’s studio.

The woman paused on the landing and took in the large airy room that lay below the short flight of steps. Built piecemeal over a period of years, much of the work having been done by Bern himself, the studio was an assimilation of concrete, angled glass walls, and limestone boulders, with a high, sloping ceiling supported by steel beams. The glass wall on the far side of the room was slightly cantilevered over the lake, which was twenty feet below the floor of the studio.

He saw Becca’s eyes come to rest on Alice, who, knowing the routine, had moved her stool over to the sitting area near the glass wall, awaiting their arrival.

Becca said nothing as they crossed the room to the massive slab of mesquite that served as a coffee table. There were several armchairs and a sofa.

“This is Alice,” Bern said.

Alice smiled. Becca Haber nodded soberly.

Bern offered her a place on the sofa, but she chose one of the armchairs instead. She sat down with her sandaled feet close together on the concrete floor, holding the box on top of her thighs. She glanced at Alice.

“This is, uh, this is very personal,” she said softly to Bern.

He nodded. “I know, but it’s okay. She’s—she can’t understand you.”

Becca Haber kept her eyes on Bern. “She’s deaf?”

“No—”

“Oh. Chinese.”

“Chinese, yes, but her family’s been in the United States for more generations than mine. She can’t understand you because she has brain damage. A waterskiing accident about a year ago.”

“What do you mean, ‘she can’t understand’?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Brain injuries, they’re quirky things. There’s a cognitive disconnect of some sort.”

“‘Cognitive disconnect’?”

Bern had hoped she would just accept that and they could go on. But he could see what he always saw in people who were told about Alice’s condition: puzzlement and a ton of questions.

“Basically, she can’t recognize or understand the meaning of words,” he said. Over the past year, he’d developed a long and a short version of this explanation. She was going to get the short one.

“Even though she doesn’t understand the meaning of the words you’re speaking, she’s verbally fluent. I mean, she’ll hold a conversation with you. She’ll pause to let you have your turn at the appropriate time; then she’ll take her turn. She even punctuates her sentences correctly—for the most part. But it just doesn’t compute. It makes no sense whatsoever. The strangest part is, she thinks she understands the conversation. So I just go along with it.”

Becca glanced again at Alice, who was staring back at her with a birdlike curiosity, insensitive to the indelicacy of her frank gaze.

“Who, uh, who is she?”

“She’s the daughter of old friends. Actually, I’m her godfather.” He pulled around another chair and sat on the other side of the coffee table from her. “It calms her to watch me draw, and we’ve discovered that it has a kind of therapeutic effect on her. So Alice’s mother brings her by here a couple of times a week to watch me work. It frees her up for a few hours to do some shopping, run errands.”

“She doesn’t bother you?”

“Nope. We just talk, listen to music.”

“But she doesn’t make any sense?”

“Nope.”

Alice was still looking at Becca Haber with a penetrating concentration, waggling her foot, working her gum. It was as if the woman were a newly discovered object and Alice was trying to figure out her meaning and usefulness. It wasn’t exactly a calming thing for Becca Haber, who already seemed to be a little tightly wound.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Bern said.

Chapter 4

Glancing tentatively one more time at Alice, Haber leaned forward, carefully placed the box on the mesquite slab in front of her, and opened it, revealing the underside of a human skull cradled in a nest of shredded paper. Inserting her thumb into the foramen magnum on the underside of the skull, she lifted it out of the box. With her other hand, she took out the skull’s detached mandible, its horseshoe-shaped lower jaw.

With an odd expertise, she put the mandible just behind her suntanned bare knee, its two sides straddling her thigh like a beret, the teeth po. . .