A big man with hefty shoulders and a thick neck looked up from where he was squatting on the floor over a banker’s box full of manila file folders.
“Susana,” he said as he stood, his expression softening as he stepped over to her. They hugged a little awkwardly, and Bern remembered that she had told him that it had been over a year since either she or Jude had seen anyone from the operation in person.
Immediately, the man’s eyes turned to Bern, and he extended his hand and said, “Paul, Lex Kevern.”
They shook hands as Kevern’s eyes took him in, assessing, Bern felt, how well his prime bait was going to play with Ghazi Baida.
“We got here okay?” Susana asked.
“Yeah, we didn’t pick up anyone on you.” His eyes went back to Bern. “I appreciate this. It’s got to be rough on you.”
“Yeah, well, it’s happening pretty fast,” Bern said.
“You’re in good hands,” Kevern said. “You’ll be all right. She’ll get you where you need to be.”
“Let’s get right to business,” said Susana, cutting in.
Despite having said she would, she hadn’t told Bern where they were going or why. Kevern, Bern gathered from his behavior, didn’t know what this was about, either. It seemed to Bern that Susana was pushing something here.
“You wanted the meeting,” Kevern said. “Go ahead.”
Susana began pacing. Kevern, glancing at Bern, crossed his arms and sat on the edge of his desk, waiting for her to get on with it. With one hand flat against the small of her back, her head down, Susana made a couple of passes in front of Kevern’s desk, between him and Bern, who stood near the open window overlooking the street. Then she stopped abruptly.
“Lex, I need to know what you’re not telling me here,” she said.
He gave her a puzzled look.
“Somebody’s already spotted Bern,” she said. She told him about the telephone call at 3:30 that morning.
“Mingo?” Kevern asked.
“Yeah.” Susana was watching Kevern closely, but it seemed to Bern that his face conveyed nothing.
“When they call on that phone,” she elaborated, “I should know who they are, Lex. That was Jude’s secure phone. And this guy knew Paul was there.” She paused. “Something else is going on here. The people who have that number think Jude was killed six weeks ago in the drug raid. But that number has rung eight times since that night, as you know. Four of those times, we think, were Baida. Just checking. Four other times, it was traced back to another encrypted phone.”
“This guy?”
“Yeah, same phone. And I think you know who it is.”
Kevern stared at her a moment. Bern watched them. He couldn’t see much on Kevern’s face, but he could see that Susana saw something, and she didn’t much like what she saw.
“Lex, goddamn you,” she said, “what in the hell are you doing to me?”
Kevern stood up and raised his beefy hands, palms out to her.
“Now wait a second. Listen to this before you explode. Then if you think it’s not right, be my guest.”
Susana was seething.
Kevern looked at Bern. “This is classified. Could you just give us-”
“No,” Susana snapped. “This is the way it’s going to be, Lex.”
Kevern’s face registered something this time that even Bern could see: a flare of anger that he instantly suppressed, stopped cold.
“In the next couple of days,” Susana said to Kevern, “I’m going to be telling him everything I know. Everything. No secrets. We’re a team. You wanted it; you got it. I’m not going to be put in a position of having to decide what I’ll hold back from him and what I won’t. He needs to know everything I can get into his head in order to stay alive. This is hard enough without adding another layer of secrecy.”
Kevern’s eyes were fixed on her again. It seemed that Susana was telling Kevern that she was going to pull out all the stops and throw operations protocol out the window in favor of a survival regimen. Her attitude seemed to be, Thank you very much for pushing us off the cliff, but now that you have, we’re going to be in charge of the falling. And the landing. If Kevern and Washington didn’t like it, they could shove it.
“Fair enough,” Kevern said, but it seemed that the words were hard for him to get out.
“Here’s what I think’s going on,” Kevern began, “but I can’t be sure. I’ve gone over and over it. Just about the time your training for this was coming to a close at the Farm, Jude pulled me aside, wanted to talk, outside. We met at a bar, and he pitched his deal.”
Susana’s face went stiff. Bern suspected that Kevern had just delivered a successful thrust in their little duel of nerves.
“Jude didn’t think the smuggling story would sell without some kind of credible intelligence operation of his own in place. The way he saw it, a guy in his position couldn’t operate a top-notch smuggling op without some kind of security rig. He wanted permission-and the financing-to put together his own smuggling intel deal.”
Kevern wiped a hand over his face and snorted. He stared at the floor and grunted, then crossed his arms again.
“We went over the pros and cons,” he said, looking up. “He’d given it a lot of thought and had an answer for everything. He was afraid that if Baida’s people probed too deep when they were checking him out, they might catch him running counterintelligence measures. If they did, he could easily claim it was for the smuggling operation. Jude figured Baida would be satisfied with that explanation. It made sense.
“And even if Baida was still suspicious, it would make it a hell of a lot harder for his people to dig up a secondary explanation. In a sense, Jude had come up with another form of backstopping. It was a lightning rod that would ground any suspicion of his actions firmly into the smuggling operation. It was smart.”
Kevern paused and sat down on his desk again. He looked tired. It had been a long run for all of them and now, instead of arriving at a resolution to all their hard work, they were beginning a second round.
“Jude had one caveat,” Kevern went on. “He didn’t want to tell you what he was doing. He reasoned, and he was right I think, that there was no need to add to the balancing act you were already handling. If your cover didn’t involve you in his smuggling operation, then why should you be burdened with having to keep track of the operation’s intelligence concerns? That would simply add to the stress on you.”
He paused, raising an eyebrow, and looked up at her as if he were trying to read her real thoughts.
“That’s the whole big secret,” Kevern said. “That’s all there is to it.” He hesitated. “Incidentally, Gordon doesn’t know about that little operation, either. Just me. And by God, I put it out of my mind.”
In the silence that followed, Bern saw the hurt in Susana’s face. Or maybe he only imagined it. He knew the importance of trust between partners, especially partners who had learned to submit to the free fall of espionage, where the assumption was that the other partner was securing the lifeline that would prevent the plunge from being fatal. That kind of trust came with an emotional price, especially between partners who might have shared more than the secrets of state.
Now she was learning that Jude had kept this secret from her the whole time. And she had never even suspected it. That was deception, and in the context of their world, it was akin to adultery.
“Okay?” Kevern asked.
Susana nodded. “It would’ve been a weak point in the continuity.” She nodded. “He was right to want to do it that way.”
There was a flurry of conversation in the outer office, and both of them paused, listening, until it quieted down.
“Okay,” she said, clearing her throat. “Give me something, anything. We’ve got to deal with this guy.”
Kevern shook his head. “I told you. That day in the bar was the last time we talked about it. I always assumed he’d done it, but that was Jude’s thing. For me, it didn’t even exist. I didn’t know anything about it then, and I don’t want to know anything about it now.” He gave her a significant look. “Jude was on his own with this one. Even for the downside-if it came to that. And if you use this guy, it’ll be the same for you.”
“You would’ve given him permission to dig his own grave if he’d wanted to, wouldn’t you?”
“You going to give me a lecture on letting him stick his neck out?” Kevern asked. “Come on, Ana. That’s why all three of us got pulled into this one. We all know the story. It’s an old story.” He glanced at Bern again, then back at Susana. “They want Ghazi Baida. Whatever it takes.”
Susana looked at Bern. “It’s like announcing a job opening for people who like adventure,” she explained. “When the applications come in, you throw them all out except for those few who are addicted to Russian roulette. Then you send them into a Chinese gambling den to find a guy who’s selling a revolver with only one shell in it. Odds are, your agents will eventually find your man for you, but you’re not really surprised when you lose a few of your people in the process. You figure that into your overhead in advance.”
Kevern looked hard at her. Bern thought he was trying to see inside her head to see if she was changing on him.
She turned to Kevern. “You don’t know if this guy knows about Baida?”
Kevern shook his head. “But I’m guessing that he does.”
Silence.
Susana walked over near Bern and looked down onto the street. It was a quiet, densely populated residential area, and looking between the branches of the trees, he could see a couple of maids sloshing soapy water onto the sidewalk and sweeping it off into the street.
“Jude liked to juggle,” Susana said, watching the maids take a few moments to chat, looking up and down the street to see what life could show them. “He liked having a lot of limes in the air at once, having complete control of a complex situation.” She nodded. “Yeah, I’m guessing Mingo knows about Baida, too.”
She turned around. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to do. How’s Gordon?”
“Good,” Kevern said. “He’s good.”
Susana nodded. “Okay.”
So much for the tight family thing.
“We’re going to bury ourselves in background,” she said. “We’ll be in touch when we get a grip on the best way to handle it.”
“Good,” Kevern said. “I’ve got a cell upgrade for you.” He stood from edge of his desk again, went to a table jumbled with electronic gear, and picked up a cell phone and its charger. He went over and gave them to her.
“Give me your other one,” he said.
Susana went to her purse, retrieved the other cell phone, and gave it to him.
“Okay,” Kevern said, “this one has everything built into it. We’ll know where you are every moment. We want updates as often as you can send them or need to send them. Punch oh six oh and start talking. It’s as secure as an electronic signal is capable of being. We monitor it live around the clock. We’ll respond immediately. Everything else is the same.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“I guess you’d better assume that Baida could get wind of this within hours. Maybe already knows. If this guy Mingo knows that Jude’s alive, we’ve got to assume everyone knows. Just be ready to handle that.”
“We’ll push as fast as we can,” she said.
She put the cell phone and the charger in her purse, and they left.