him to see the answer ahead of the rest of the class.
“I don’t get it, Lex.”
Kevern smiled. “That’s the brilliant thing about this, Gordy. Neither will Baida.”
Kevern got to his feet and went to the battered suitcase lying on the bed. He lifted a pile of clothes and pulled out a folder, then went back and tossed it into Gordon’s lap.
Gordon saw the red border on the folder and the solid red pyramid next to the name tab. It was the coding emblem for a new category of CIA operations officer, one that was closely held by the CIA’s security system. Jude Lerner was one of the few officers whose 201 file bore the red pyramid and who also had a separate red-stripe file with a “Sequestered” limited-access classification.
But Gordon still didn’t see what was coming, and Kevern could see it on his face.
“You know what’s in his file, don’t you?” Kevern asked.
“I know my people, Lex.”
Kevern returned to his chair and fell into it with a grunt. He watched Gordon as he opened the folder and numbly began paging through it. It didn’t take him long. Kevern had red-flagged the relevant document and had paper-clipped a sheet of handwritten notes to it. Gordon didn’t even have to read the notes.
He looked up at Kevern, who wore a deadpan expression.
“You’re out of your skull,” Gordon said.
“Nice choice of words,” Kevern grunted.
“What the fuck have you done?” Gordon asked.
“I want two things from you,” Kevern said. “I want you to hold with the story that Baida’s cell went down in a drug hit.” His eyes were leveled on Gordon. “And I want you to get me clearance for the Bern operation. I’m already way down the road on this one, and we’re just about ready to jump. I want you to make it okay.”
Chapter 9
By seven o’clock the next morning, Bern was sweating heavily. Wearing only shorts and tennis shoes, he climbed over the rocks on the shoreline below the house, lugging heavy stones into a growing pile where he was preparing the foundation for a concrete quay at the water’s edge. He had been toiling on the project every morning for two months, getting up at dawn to work for a couple of hours before showering and having breakfast.
By eight o’clock, he was at his drawing board, laying down the first contour lines of a sketch of what Becca Haber hoped would prove to be a picture of her husband’s face. A little after ten o’clock, Alice and her mother arrived.
“Hey, Paul,” Dana said from the head of the stairs in the studio as the two of them came in.
“Morning!” Alice said brightly, leaving her mother and taking the stairs two at a time as she breezed past Bern on her way to the glass wall overlooking the lake. She stepped outside and leaned her elbows on the railing of the deck to watch a couple of sailboats just emerging from around the point as they left the marina.
Bern met Dana at the bottom of the steps and kissed her on the cheek.
“Wow, you smell good,” he said.
“New stuff.” She smiled.
“It gets my thumbs up,” he said. “Cup of coffee?”
“No thanks. I just wanted to say hello. The last couple of times I’ve dropped Alice off, I’ve just waved from the car. We haven’t talked all week. You doing okay?”
“Sure, fine. Listen, yesterday when you picked up Alice, did she seem a little out of sorts?”
“Yeah, I noticed that. But gosh, Paul, you know, I’ve gotten so that I take most of the surprises from her in my stride. The abnormal has become normal around our house.” She smiled ruefully, looking at Alice outside on the deck. Then she shifted her attention back to Bern. “Why, something happen?”
He told her about Alice’s exasperation with Becca Haber, and they both laughed about it.
Dana Lau was a handsome woman, the only Chinese news anchor in the South when she met Philip in Atlanta. Bern and Tess got to know her while she and Philip were still dating, and it was the beginning of a friendship that never looked back. When Alice came, it was like having their own daughter, and it even seemed to bring them all closer together.
As Alice reached middle school, she and her friends began having slumber parties at Bern’s house. Tess would take them to movies, grill burgers in the evenings on the terrace, and cook popcorn for their all-night gigglefests. They swam and played around on the little sailboat that Bern bought for them and kept in the cove. Tess adored the girls and always got a kick out of watching them stumbling through adolescence. And they all loved Aunt Tess.
After a few more minutes of visiting, Dana called bye to Alice and left, and Bern walked back to his drawing board, where Alice had already pulled up her stool and was looking at the two views of the face that had emerged from the paper in the past two hours. She was intent.
“It’s a single, very purple mix,” Alice said with some concern in her voice. She looked at Bern, frowning. “Why walk under a seen sky?”
“What’s the matter?” he asked. He was standing in front of the drawing, while Alice sat on the stool beside him. She smelled of morning freshness and a douse of perfume.
“You’re taking a lot more than a pencil would make,” she said slowly, and maybe with a tinge of agitation.
Bern looked at her. She had laid her sketch pad on a nearby table edge and had put her hands between her legs on the seat of the stool, her arms locked straight as she leaned toward the sketch. She seemed to be trying to see something she couldn’t quite make out, the way she had studied the drawing with the contradictory facial expressions that he had made for her the previous day. Then he saw her look at the drawing in a couple of the mirrors, as she had learned to do from him, and he saw a distinctive change in her eyes and brow.
“Something wrong with it?” he asked again. Unlike her reaction to the picture yesterday, when her puzzlement at what she saw had resulted in a calming fascination, the sketch on the drawing board had the opposite effect.
She hesitated, cocking her head another way. “In every certain way,” she said carefully, “it would be crazy if you put a face on it.”
The drawing was finished, although it lacked detail. It was a mistake to overrender a drawing at this point of the reconstruction process. Some things were better worked out on the actual skull. But the proportional arrangement of the different features was in place, which, for identification purposes, was the key thing. Though some individual features may be rendered entirely wrong, the face will still be recognizable if the relationship between the features, and the proportions of some of them, is accurate. It is the correct relationship of the aggregate elements of a face that is the essential ingredient in the process of recognition.
As Bern watched Alice, she slowly shrugged one shoulder defensively and unconsciously turned her head away slightly, though she was reluctant to stop looking.
“It’s a black song with eyes behind,” she said. “Not even the music, not even if you cry.” She began shaking her head no, a little at first and then a lot, and finally she pulled her gaze away from the drawing and looked hard at Bern, her expression one of deep-seated disappointment.
“I’m not want from this. Ever. No.”
She solemnly got down off the stool, picked up her sketchbook, and headed for the sofa. Bern was completely surprised at her reaction, and puzzled.
“Okay,” he said, watching her as she sat on the sofa and opened her sketch pad. “You want to watch me do the clay work, then?”
She liked the clay modeling even more than the drawing because he didn’t do it as often, and she hadn’t seen as much of it. She knew he was already working on the skull, because she had seen it set up on the next bench, the eyeballs and first strips of clay already in place around the tissue-depth markers. But she wasn’t going to have anything to do with it. She didn’t even respond. She had put her bare feet on the edge of the coffee table and was drawing in her sketchbook, which was resting against her slanted thighs.
Even more puzzled now, Bern sat on the stool to look at the drawings from her vantage point. He studied the
