Kevern’s small team of four, including himself, was well versed in electronics, but for the more complex ops they depended on Mondragon’s techs, who were all ex-Mexican military or intelligence officers. But there hadn’t been time for them to put together video surveillance, though they did have a good audio feed.
Mondragon’s security goons were there, blending in with the crowd, though they were there only as observers this time and had no real responsibilities beyond providing more eyes and ears. Everyone half-expected Baida to have people there also, if he was indeed looking for an opportunity to contact Bern, and Kevern hoped someone would be able to pick up on some of his people. A good percentage of the crowd on Calle Genova belonged to a surveillance entity of one kind or another.
At the sound of the first shot, Kevern’s team bailed out of their car, which was double parked near the French embassy on Calle Niza. But by the time they had all hit the pavement, the last shot was being fired, and by the time they had reached the corner of Calle Hamburgo, they slammed into a tide of screaming Zonistas fleeing in the opposite direction.
When they finally fought their way upstream, the samba dancer was dancing alone, though some people in the crowd were already slowing down and turning around to glance back from a safer distance. Kevern dived into the palmettos, getting bloody up to his elbows as he deftly retrieved Mingo’s wallet.
Then they were gone, leaving the Policia Judicial to discover the body for themselves and to sort it all out on their own, which they weren’t going to be able to do.
Moments later, after they had returned to the car, Kevern discovered that Susana wasn’t answering either her surveillance cell or her regular encrypted cell. But the tracking equipment had picked up her encrypted call to Bern’s phone.
Kevern’s officers immediately began homing in on the GPS signals from the two phones. Bern’s was stationary.
Kevern began going through the possibilities of why Bern’s signal wasn’t moving as their car eased through the streets, sneaking away from the chaos in the Zona Rosa. He had been killed. Or he had been kidnapped and his phone discarded. Whatever Susana’s reasons were for not answering, he just had to trust her.
He hunched over in his seat and concentrated on listening to the playback of Bern’s conversation with Mingo, listening to it again and again. “They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do.” Kevern replayed it once more and then looked at the agent sitting across from him in the backseat. “I have found a woman who has the thing you want.”
“What the hell’s he saying?” Kevern grunted.
Jack Petersen said nothing. He had worked undercover in Latin America for thirteen years. Buenos Aires, Iguacu Falls, Bogota, Sao Paulo. He had last worked with Kevern in Colombia. He put his head down and listened, shaking his head.
“Shit,” Kevern said. He fast-forwarded to Bern’s response. “Oh?” Again. “Oh?” Again. “Oh?” Then: “And?” Again. “And?”
Then the recording fell silent, except for the samba music that was being picked up in the background. Samba music. Samba music.
Then the first blast. Screams. And then the other blasts following rapidly.
Kevern didn’t replay the shots.
They followed the GPS signal from Bern’s cell phone, approaching carefully, reading the traffic on the sidewalks. As they neared the signal on the dark street, pedestrians disappeared altogether. Finally, a dozen blocks from the Zona Rosa, they found Bern’s cell phone scattered all over the sidewalk.
Using his cell phone, Petersen finally reached Quito Lopez, Mondragon’s main ops guy, but Lopez said it all happened so fast, they didn’t even get a chance to cover the crowd. The truth was, nobody was expecting a hit, not in a meeting between partners, and the shooting caught everyone off guard. “By the way,” Quito said, “Mingo passed something to Bern, a piece of paper. Bern read it and put it in his pocket.”
Kevern stood on the dark sidewalk, listening to Petersen’s report and putting Susana’s actions through his mental analysis mill. The car sat idling in the street, its rear doors open. Lupe Nervo, one of Kevern’s two female team members, had gotten out to gather up the pieces of the cell phone, and now she was fiddling with them as if she could put the phone back together again. As if it mattered.
“Son of a bitch,” Kevern grunted.
Petersen was lighting a cigarette. “This guy was still looking into something, even though he thought Jude was dead? I think he confirmed something Jude had suspected. Probably what was written on the piece of paper.”
“That’s what it sounds like.” Kevern was pissed. He wasn’t sure what was going on here.
“It’d be a mistake to assume too much here,” Petersen said, mostly talking to himself as he worked it out. “The hit doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what Mingo was telling Bern. Could’ve been totally unrelated.”
A light breeze moved down the narrow street, bringing heavy moisture. The early-evening rains had not moved out entirely, as was their habit, and a fog was beginning to settle in. Kevern could feel it on his face and could see it gathering around the few streetlamps that stretched far down the diminishing street.
“Lex,” said Mattie Sellers, the second female team member, who was sitting in the car with her door open, watching the signal from Susana’s phone on her GPS monitor, “she’s not far away. Southern edge of Colonia Roma.”
Lupe had gotten back into the car to get out of the mist, which was growing heavier.
Petersen hunched his shoulders, turned up the collar of his shirt, dropped his cigarette butt-he never smoked a whole one anymore-and put his foot on it.
“I trust her,” Kevern said, as if Petersen had asked him if he did. He was still staring into the distance. “She’ll do what has to be done.” He didn’t move his eyes off the street, which seemed to be receding into the soup of dark and mist. “Let’s get back into the car and see where she’s going.”
Vicente Mondragon was finding it hard to breathe. Sometimes the membrane covering his nasal cavities was affected by the peculiar atmosphere in Mexico City. The high altitude made the air very dry, even in the rainy season, and then the pollution added to the ineffectiveness of the membrane’s porosity. Sometimes the whole raw front of his head, where his face used to be, ached, despite the analgesic spray. To help dampen the pain, he continuously consumed a farrago of mixed drinks.
The events in front of the samba dancer had been narrated to him by Quito Lopez, who was reporting from his position on the dark roof of Club Cuica, where Quito’s technicians were broadcasting to Kevern a live feed of the conversation that they were picking up with a parabolic microphone. He was waiting for the phone call he knew he would be getting soon from Kevern. Quito had seen Kevern retrieve Mingo’s wallet, and soon Kevern would want Mondragon’s men to find out where he lived and to strip the place for information.
This had been a good contract for Mondragon. Lex Kevern always paid well, gave Mondragon and his men a lot of leeway, and still believed that the law of spoils was a justified concept. As long as the operation was done well, Mondragon was welcome to pick up the debris that inevitably followed in its wake.
But the downside of working with the Americans was having to put up with their arrogance. Their superiority in everything was so automatically taken for granted that they fell into it as naturally as shitting. They thought that the people they hired knew only the things that the Americans told them, that the hirelings had no real creative abilities of their own. It was hard for those who came from a powerful country to believe that they could be outsmarted, that they could be manipulated just as easily as they manipulated others. Although it would seem that in the age of terrorism, and in an age when the Colombian drug cartels, with whom the American’s had been “at war” for decades, were still earning more annual revenue than McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, and Microsoft combined, the Americans might get the hint that they were not always the smartest people in the world.
But the truth was, there couldn’t be enough downsides in this operation to dampen his enthusiasm for finding Ghazi Baida. Sometimes maniacal fate handed you a gift, and Kevern calling Mondragon for this operation was one of those times, as rare and sweet as an angel’s breath. Mondragon had inhaled the opportunity with a vicious enthusiasm. Kevern did not know it, and Mondragon would not tell him, but hunting Ghazi Baida had been Mondragon’s obsession for nearly three years. Kevern had only provided Mondragon with a kind of legitimacy, and a face, to do the very thing that kept his heart beating.
When the telephone rang, he picked it up.
“I got the guy’s wallet,” Kevern said, “and I’ve given it to Quito. Name’s Domingo Huerta. Ever hear of him?”
“No.”
“Well, I need as much as I can get on him, and I need it as fast as I can get it.”
“Sure,” Mondragon said. “Did Quito tell you about the pass?”
“Yeah.”
“So where is Bern now?”
“Don’t know. Susana had him ditch his cell phone, which was smart. She’s picking him up. I’m waiting to hear. I’ll tell you one thing: We weren’t the only ones putting up wires on that street tonight. Whoever did this had some investments to protect. We need to know if this guy was killed because of something else he was into, or whether it had to do with Jude. Let’s find out what the hell’s going on here.”
That was it. Kevern broke the connection. Mondragon dialed his encrypted phone and told Quito that he was to check with him first about whatever they found at Mingo’s.
Outside his windows the fog that was moving in was melting the city’s lights, creating a coppery glow, which was quickly enveloping the entire valley of lights.
Mondragon fought depression. Having no face was a living hell. He turned his back to the windows and looked into the half-light of his room of floating faces, everything bathed in rose-gold luster.
God, God, God, how he wanted a face.
The Nahuatl poets-the Mexica philosophers-believed that the human face was the most intimate manifestation of the intrinsic nature of each individual. It was the physical representation of the spiritual self. The personality. Without a face, a man vanished. He was nothing.
I cause sorrow to your face, to your heart.
If he had a thousand lives to live, he would forfeit them all in exchange for just one with a face.
A lover of darkness and corners… he takes things… a sorcerer, destroyer of faces, he causes others to lose their faces.
If he had a thousand lives to live, he would hunt Ghazi Baida in all of them and destroy him over and over without ceasing.
He stared with his never-closing eyes at the floating faces in the clear boxes. Even detached from their bodies, even separate from their selves, they were more than he was. Here was a man. Here was a woman. You see their faces, you see their lives. Here is the woman who is no more, gone to paradise. Here is the man who is no more, gone to hell.
But he, Vicente Mondragon, was evanescent. He would be forgotten. He was desaparecido -disappeared-his self raided and stolen from him, his existence removed from him in strips of flesh, in strands of muscle, in shards of cartilage.
Mondragon drew close to one of the faces in its clear acrylic cube and put his raw head close to it, closer to it than he could have done if he had had a nose. His lips breathed a wavering ghost on the acrylic. His eyeballs, no lids, no lashes, nearly touched the cube. It was a woman’s face, one of his favorites, for she was Asian, and he had grown to love the clean lines of the Asian race. This woman, Chinese.
As he stared at her, his vision caressing her graceful contours as intimately as if he had been touching her with his fingers, Mondragon began to weep, keening softly so that his servants wouldn’t hear.