Bern sat on the edge of his bed in his underwear and stared out the window of his darkened hotel room. It was 2:40 in the morning, and the traffic on West Loop South was sparse. The night sky was hazy with moisture, and the lights that stretched eastward toward downtown receded into the misty distance. He was nowhere near sleep.
His thoughts cycled over and over and over variations of the same three concerns: his fear of the exposure of the photographs (the storm of emotions that this would unleash for the Laus was almost unbearable to consider), his anger and frustration at being extorted without any recourse, and his inability to imagine or prepare for what he was going to have to do to for Mondragon.
He wasn’t a total innocent. He had heard and read about the contractors that U.S. intelligence used all over the world with increasing regularity. He knew nothing of their legal standing, but he knew enough to understand that they were proxies for a reason. Somehow they managed to squeeze between the threads of the legal fabric to do things for the CIA that the CIA didn’t want to get caught doing themselves.
He had no doubt that an end-run effort around Mondragon’s extortion would trigger the anonymous release of the photographs, and then he could kiss his old life good-bye. Essentially, he had no choice.
And he grieved for Alice. Just knowing that those pictures were out there somewhere and that someone could look at them as much as they wanted made him ache for her. She would be so ashamed. And Dana and Phil. Goddamn Mondragon.
It was a spooky feeling, too, that someone had been in his house and installed digital video-surveillance cameras in the lower bedroom, and he hadn’t even had a clue. This was scary stuff.
Midmorning the next day, Bern picked up a printout of his own DNA string at the private laboratory off North Loop West. From there, he went to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center, where the skull’s DNA was being sorted out. After last night, the result of the DNA reading had even more importance for him than it had before.
He sat in a small sterile room with a humming fluorescent light while a molecular geneticist with a pallid complexion and round eyeglasses of pinkish plastic examined and compared the two strings. Bern noticed that the pocket of the doctor’s crisp white lab coat was still starched closed.
“Monozygotic twins. Yeah.” The doctor looked up. “Identical. Yeah.”
The flight back to Austin occupied a time zone all its own, and the fifteen-mile drive from the airport to his house on the lake was completely lost to him.
As soon as he got back to the house, he parked the TR3 in the garage and went up and checked his messages in the kitchen. He took a flashlight out of the drawer under the telephone and went down the steps to the guest bedroom that opened out onto the terrace. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at the wall opposite the French doors. The garage was on the other side of the wall. That was the likeliest spot. Near the ceiling.
He dragged a chair over to the wall and stood on it. Starting at the left corner of the room, near the ceiling, he shined the flashlight flat against the wall and carefully followed every inch. And then there it was. A little smooth spot about the size of his thumbnail. Color was the same, but the texture was too smooth. Drywall texturing was hard to duplicate in a patch.
With his arms, he measured the distance from the intersecting wall to his left, and then he went upstairs and then down again to the garage. He climbed up on the workbench that was built against the bedroom wall and measured from the front of the garage. And there it was. The bastards hadn’t even bothered to patch the hole in the garage. A hole the size of the diameter of his thumb, and next to it a shelf with cans of paint pushed to one side, where they had set something.
He looked out the garage door to the rock wall and the lake beyond. It wouldn’t have been that hard at all. Easy, in fact. Shit.
Back in the kitchen, he opened a bottle of Shiner beer and made a ham sandwich. He went outside to the ter- race and sat at the table under the arbor while he ate. He gazed at the lake sparkling in the summer light and thought about what he was going to have to do.
After he finished, he put the dishes into the dishwasher and walked over to the studio. As he stepped inside and breathed in the familiar odors, his eyes fell on the partially dismantled skull of his brother.
His brother.
Would this ever seem real to him? Monozygotic. Who in the hell had their mother been? What in God’s name had happened to her that scattered them in those critical days of their infancy?
He walked over to the workbench. The weird suspicion that had gripped him last time he saw this skull-that he had some mysterious connection to it-had now been replaced with a scientific certainty. Now there a total reorientation regarding himself and this incredible relic, and he could hardly bring himself to touch it.
But more than that, he didn’t want it to wear his by-the-numbers reconstruction when he knew that it should have his own face. And then an astounding thought hit him: If fate had been otherwise, if he had had the opportunity six weeks ago to reach out and touch this same human bone, he would have touched the living face of his identical twin.
It was approaching dusk by the time Bern finished thoroughly cleaning off the clay face and reattaching the jaw to the skull. Now he retrieved an old ebony box that he had bought in Paris when he was a student studying anatomy. The box smelled richly of oil paints and seemed an appropriate resting place for Jude’s skull.
He dragged some old green velvet scraps out of a storage cabinet and cut a piece to fit in the bottom of the box. Then he set the skull inside and loosely wadded more velvet around it for protection. He put the box on a bookshelf among his art books.
He deliberately had avoided drinking while he was doing all of this, because he was thinking about what he was going to do, and he wanted to be lucid. But now he poured a gin and tonic from the cabinet in the studio, tossed in some ice and a fat wedge of lime, and took his cell phone to the sofa. He turned out all the lights so he could watch the clean arrival of night and dialed the sterile number Vicente Mondragon had given him.
The phone rang several times, and Bern tried to imagine why it wasn’t answered right away. What did a man like Mondragon do at dusk, without a face?
“Hello, Paul,” Mondragon said.
“Okay,” Bern said, “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Mondragon said quickly, although without seeming eager. “Then you can leave immediately?”
“No. I’ve got to make arrangements for someone to look after the house. Maybe by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try to book a flight.”
“Not necessary. I’ll fly you down. It’s important that you arrive at Jude’s place at night. We don’t want anyone to see you for several days, until you’ve had some time to be briefed.”
“How does that happen?”
“We have someone who knew Jude very well. That person will have everything you will need to be briefed. Be ready by seven o’clock in the evening. Someone will pick you up and take you to a charter plane. It’s a two-hour flight. In Mexico City, someone will meet you and take you to Jude’s place in Condesa.”
“I hope to hell this is something I can handle.”
“We are well aware that you are not a professional, Paul. We’ll do everything we can to make this work for you. Everyone is working toward the same goal.”
“You want this guy to think Jude’s still alive,” Bern said. “You’ve got to know that this kind of thing can’t be taken too far.”
“Yes, we do know that. But we are going to take it as far as we can.”
And without another word, Mondragon ended the call.