The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Incredible. But he had already decided what he needed to do next. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed another number.

  “Texas Department of Public Safety.”

  He asked for Ines Cortinas.

  “Crime Lab. This’s Ines.”

  “Ines, Paul Bern.”

  “Hey, Paul,” she replied, “it’s been a while. I’ll bet you want something.”

  “A quick question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You can do DNA testing using a bone from a skull, right?”

  “Yeah. Well, mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Mitochondrial is less specific. It’s passed on only through the female line, and we can’t distinguish between individuals. If we hit a match, we’d know the skull belonged to the descendants of a certain female line, but we wouldn’t be able to ID the skull itself or even tell if it was male or female. We’d just know it was a member of a particular female lineage.”

  That wouldn’t do Bern any good.

  “You have a skull?” she asked.

  “I know someone who does.”

  “Is it old?”

  “I doubt if the thing’s a year old.”

  “No kidding? Well, has it got teeth, then?”

  “Yeah, all of them.”

  “There you go. We can do a regular nuclear DNA test using the teeth. We can extract the pulp from the inside of the tooth, and then we’re on the way. No need to go the mitochondrial route.”

  “Any particular tooth the best?”

  “A molar. They have more pulp to harvest. And, of course, no fillings. Preferably no work at all on the tooth we test.”

  “What about time? How long would it take?”

  “Sounds like a rush.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We could do a nuclear short tandem repeat test in . . . maybe a day. Two days.”

  Bern thanked her and was off the line in a few minutes. While he showered, he worked it out. He didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but he did know that he didn’t want people he worked with regularly to be aware of it, whatever it was. The DPS crime lab was out.

  He made coffee, hurriedly ate a couple of pieces of toast, and then returned to the studio, where he photographed the reconstruction from every angle he could manage. Then he disassembled the lower jaw and located two molars that were without fillings. He removed them and put them in a small Ziploc bag. Checking his watch, he picked up the phone and called Southwest Airlines and booked a flight to Houston. Then he dialed another number in Houston and had a short conversation before hanging up and heading for Austin-Bergstrom International.

  Two hours later, he arrived at Hobby Airport in Houston. He took a cab to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center complex and filled out the necessary paperwork for having a DNA string run on the two molars. He paid extra for a rush to get the results the next day. From there, he went to another private genetic-testing lab just off North Loop West. There, he filled out the paperwork to have a genetic string run on himself, again paying extra to have the results by the next day.

  From there, it was short cab ride to Willow Lane in the upscale Meadow Wood section west of the Galleria. On a street nearly covered over with old water oaks, he had the taxi drop him off at a two-story Georgian home, its dun-colored walls carefully adorned with precisely trimmed fig ivy.

  While he was still walking up the sidewalk, the front door opened and Gina stood in the doorway, smiling at him.

  “You handsome devil,” she said, opening her arms to hug him. She was the prettiest seventy-four-year-old woman he would ever see. Her smile was as beguiling now as it had been thirty years ago, when he fallen in love with her as a small boy, and her hair just as blond, as well.

  Aunt Gina had cut an elegant swath through Houston’s society set, marrying three men of significant wealth and influence, the departure of each leaving her appreciably better off financially than the previous one. The first, her real love, had died in a car crash in Mexico. The other two marriages were unconscious searches for something as happy as the first, and both ended in divorce. From then on, she dated profusely, while understanding the wisdom of remaining a single woman.

  They had lunch together in her bright dining room, which overlooked her beloved rose garden, catching up on news of each other. Then following dessert and a lull in the conversation, she leveled her bright eyes at him across the table and her smile softened.

  “What brings you here, Paul?” she asked. “You seem to have something on your mind.”

  He nodded and swallowed the last bite of his cream tart, the last half of a strawberry.

  “I want to talk about my parents,” he said. “My biological parents.”

  She tilted her head to the side and her face took on a look of endearment. “Oh, dear boy, it’s taken you such a long time.”

  “Well, it never seemed important before. Sally and Ted raised me, loved me, nurtured me. They were my parents, and I thought they deserved my loyalty.”

  “So you’ve just kept your wondering to yourself?”

  “They didn’t offer to tell me. I took my cue from that.”

  She laughed gently. “You were always so obedient, Paul. You should’ve kicked your heels up once in a while. Well, they had different attitudes about adoption in those days, and God knows your mother wasn’t the adventuresome sort. She wasn’t about to buck conventions. Ted, either, as far as that goes. They were dear people, though, and they did what they thought was best for you.”

  “I knew that. I just didn’t want them to feel as if all that they had done for me wasn’t enough.”

  “But now you want to know.”

  “They’ve been dead a dozen years now,” he said, and let it go at that.

  Gina smiled again. That was the way it was with her. She had learned a long time ago that life went down better with a smile, and she had always had a ready one. He tried to smile, too, but he found it hard to hide the weight of what was waiting for him on his workbench back in Austin.

  She nodded, understanding. Then she looked out through the tall windows to the sunny garden. Her thoughts drifted, and he wondered if he would ever know what she was thinking at this moment. Gina’s buoyant attitude about life made it possible for her to survive her disappointments with aplomb. But it did not mean that she didn’t feel the ache all the same.

  She sighed and looked at him again.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to be frustrated,” she warned him. “There’s just so very little to know.”

  “There are ways to research things these days,” he said. “Things we’ve never had before.”

  “They’re not going to help you,” she said. She paused, then shook her head slightly, ruefully. “You were abandoned at a hospital in Atlanta,” she said. “Your biological mother, God bless her little heart, just walked into that old Lanier Memorial Hospital and left you in a little chair in the maternity ward. The ward nurse got a call saying you were there.” She smiled wanly and shook her head. “That’s all there was to it, Paul. It just doesn’t go any further than that.”

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to think about that. He didn’t feel anything in particular.

  “And we tried to pursue it,” she added. “Your mother and I. When you were about four, we went to Atlanta and tried to find out if there was anything more. We saw the official Lanier report about that night. Just a little ol’ piece of paper saying what had happened. Six lines. No more. You were handed over to child protective services, or whatever the people in Georgia called it back in those days. Your mother and daddy adopted you when you were only six days old. And that was all there was to it. When you were just a little over two years old, they moved back to Texas.”

  “You checked it out?” He found it hard to believe that there was no way to go any further with it.

  “We tried. We tried very hard. You know your mother. She just thought if she could find your biologica
l mother, she could do something good for the poor thing. She, Sally, was so thankful to have you. She stayed in touch with that agency—child protective services, whatever—for years to see if any woman ever inquired about that night. But nobody ever did.”

  Bern was surprised again. He had always assumed that if he ever wanted to know who his real parents were, he would be able to find out. It was a shock to discover that that door had closed for good. In fact, it had never even been open in the first place.

  “I suppose,” Gina said, “that in a very real way, you really were born to Sally and Ted. I mean, you practically had no history at all before they took you in.”

  Bern just sat there. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

  He took a final sip of coffee to cover his surprise and disappointment. He said nothing, and in the silence he could hear the heavy old grandfather’s clock that Gina had shipped back from Heidelberg on her first honeymoon ticking in the living room.

  She saw that this abrupt end to his search had caught him off guard, and he knew that she realized that he had probably imagined a far more compelling history for himself.

  “I guess you didn’t expect this,” she said softly.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  “I wish I had something for you,” she replied. She reached across and laid her hand on his, her right hand, which was never without the beautiful Colombian emerald ring that matched her eyes. “If I’d known you were coming to ask me that question,” she added, “I would’ve made up a most wonderful lie for you, dear boy, something that would have made you happy.”

  Chapter 12

  After visiting for another hour or so, Bern left Gina’s in a taxi, leading her to believe that he was headed to the airport to fly back to Austin. She would have insisted he stay with her if she had known he was going to be in Houston overnight, but he wanted to be alone. He went to a pharmacy, where he bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic razor, and shaving cream. Then he checked into a hotel overlooking the West Loop Freeway.

  He stood at the window, watching the traffic going north and south in the blistering heat of the summer afternoon, and thought about his situation. He was caught up in something very weird here. He had no doubts now that the genetic testing was going to confirm that the skull was indeed that of his twin brother. That was a huge leap of logic, he knew, but something told him it was inevitable.

  He remembered Becca Haber saying that her husband (was he really?) had been an “orphan. Abandoned. Parents unknown.” Now Bern had discovered that his own origins were exactly the same. He could not believe that this was a coincidence.

  What about Becca herself? How much of her lie was a lie? What part of it was truth? The thing that concerned him about all of this was that someone was orchestrating it—if not Becca, then someone else. If someone wanted him to know that he had a twin brother who was now dead, why would they do it this way? What was this approach going to achieve that couldn’t also have been achieved by simply coming to him and telling him?

  According to Gina’s story, Bern must have been separated from his brother at birth, because the hospital documents made no reference to another child. Or perhaps there had been two children left at the hospital, but someone there—or at child protective services—decided to split up the two boys and falsified the documents. Maybe they’d thought it would be easier to put the boys up for adoption as singles rather than as a pair. Was that sort of thing done? It seemed improbable, although conceivable.

  Or had his biological mother separated the brothers at birth? And the reasons why she might have done such a thing could be endless.

  Picking up the ballpoint pen and notepad from the hotel desk, he sat and jotted down these questions and others, then looked at them, as if staring at them would bring some clarity to the bizarre problems that they presented.

  Did someone want him to investigate his brother’s death? Had he been murdered? Who would have known about the twins? Someone at the hospital. Someone at child protective services. His biological mother? Or his father? Again, why wouldn’t whoever was behind all this just come to him and reveal the truth and ask for his help? It seemed unnecessarily perverse to do it the way it was being done.

  Or maybe none of these questions came even remotely close to what was happening. Maybe he had been swept into an unimaginable situation, as bizarre and unbelievable to him as Alice’s aphasia had been to Becca Haber when he had tried to explain it to her. He could imagine now how she must have felt.

  He stood up from the desk and went down the hall to get a bucket of ice. From the minibar, he took a miniature bottle of gin and some tonic and made a drink. No lime. He really wished he had a lime. He stared out the windows again. The freeway was packed now as the rush-hour traffic began to build up.

  Picking up the telephone, he called home and listened to his voice mail. Several messages, though none from Becca Haber. But there was a curious one. A man’s voice. He said only, “Important that you call me,” then gave a number. No name. Houston area code.

  Bern was beginning to lose patience with apparent coincidences. He took another drink of gin, picked up the telephone again, and dialed the number.

  “Hello.”

  “Who is this?” Bern asked.

  There was a momentary pause and then the man said, “Hello, Paul. How odd that you are in Houston.”

  “Who is this?” Bern repeated.

  “Vicente Mondragón,” the man said. “I knew your brother.”

  It was a strange moment. Though Bern had convinced himself that the skull that he had reconstructed in Austin was indeed that of his brother, to hear this idea—never before even imagined by him—confirmed so casually by a stranger was disorienting.

  “I’m sorry,” Mondragón said. “I know you must be horribly confused by what is happening to you. I would like to explain some of it to you, if I may. Can you meet with me this evening?”

  Bern felt a flurry of emotions, some of which he couldn’t explain. On the one hand, he was eager to talk to this man, but on the other, he was furious at being jerked around like this, and, rightly or wrongly, he immediately blamed this Mondragón for it. Also he was, irrationally, angry at the sound of Mondragón’s voice, which was mellow and sophisticated. But there was also something else about it, too, a hint of a speech impediment. That, and an air of the imperious.

  “Where? When?”

  “I’ll have someone pick you up at eight-thirty.”

  “Just give me an address. I’ll be there.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to insist,” Mondragón said.

  Chapter 13

  Washington, D.C.

  It was already dark as Gordon pulled into the parking lot of a low-dollar motel on Jefferson Davis Highway near Reagan International. He locked his car and went inside, where he found Kevern in the stale gloom of the cocktail lounge. He had commandeered a relatively quiet corner, despite the creepy piped-in music. Gordon quickly ordered a scotch and soda and Kevern tapped the tabletop for another one of whatever he was having. Gordon just wanted to get it over with.

  “When’s your flight?” he asked.

  Kevern looked at his thick wrist.

  “Coupla hours.” He was wearing a white guayabera, and his hairy, muscular forearms rested on the table.

  “Okay,” Gordon said. “You’ve got your clearance for your jump start. The Bern deal’s a go. But I’m telling you, they broke into a collective sweat before they checked off on it. Lots of discussion, some of it heated. Lots of agonizing.”

  Kevern nodded.

  Gordon stared at him in the silly, moony light of the lounge. Expressway atmo. Jesus.

  Kevern asked, “So . . . how’d you handle Mondragón’s Tepito thing?”

  Gordon didn’t flinch. “I didn’t.”

  Kevern was a sphinx, but Gordon knew that he understood the implications of two of Gordon’s decisions. One, he’d given Kevern the break he wanted. The drug hit in Tepito was the official stor
y and would remain the official story. If the Heavy Rain group had learned the truth, they would have pulled the plug on the operation. Two, the only way Gordon was able to push through the Bern operation was by not telling the group that Kevern had already initiated it six weeks earlier.

  Gordon had covered for Kevern twice and had lied to the group twice by omission. Kevern owed him. But there was a flip side.

  “Now, give me the downside,” Kevern said.

  Gordon didn’t even offer a preface.

  “If either the Tepito slaughter or your six-week jump on the Bern operation ever come to light,” Gordon said, “I’ll deny I knew anything about it. I’ll swear to that in court. I’ll swear to that before a special intelligence panel. I’ll sign documents to that effect. You stepped out into the void all alone on this one, Lex, and whatever happens to you as a result, you’ll have to deal with all by yourself.”

  Kevern’s expression was a mixture of sobriety and sour amusement.

  “Well, I appreciate it, Gordy,” Kevern said. The irony of his remark wasn’t lost on Gordon. “That’s one of the benefits of being up here in Washington, isn’t it?”

  Gordon waited for the explanation that he knew Kevern wanted to lay out for him.

  “I mean,” Kevern said, “you think this little scheme just might work after all, don’t you? Fuckin’ twisty, you think. Twisty and, by God, maybe a real possibility. And if it does work, well, then all the talk up here is, ‘Goddamn, old Gordy, he’s an ace. You want a clandestine op to go sweet, get Gordy. Hell, let’s promote him.’

  “On the other hand, if this thing goes south, well, nobody can blame you. Your man got killed, for Christ’s sake. And then you had the nuts to get innovative to try to save the thing. Hell, heroic effort. Slap on the back.”

  Kevern wasn’t smiling. Gordon wasn’t going to respond. He’d learned a long time ago about the interpretive possibilities of silence. He took a drink of the scotch.

  Kevern, still not smiling, took a drink of whatever he was having.

  Gordon could taste the lingering essence of scotch at the back of his sinuses.