“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.
“I’ve got to tell you, though,” Gordon said. “You have to rein in Mondragon. The group’s more indulgent these days about the contractors we deal with, but I’d say that Mondragon pushes the limit of their indulgence.”
Kevern strung out a long grunt under his breath, as if he were straining at something.
“And I’m really going to worry about the limit of their indulgence,” he said.
“Listen to me.” Gordon lowered his voice and leaned forward. “These people sit on the NSC, for Christ’s sake. You do something stupid, you bring them blowback, and they’ll hang you out to dry so fast, your nuts will shrivel up like they were freeze-dried.”
Kevern’s thick neck seemed to swell even thicker when he was holding in his temper.
“Cobalt-sixty,” he grunted slowly. “Cesium-one-thirty-seven. Plutonium. And that’s just the little stuff. But I doubt if Baida’s even bothering to put anything together at that level. We’ve been through this… shit”-he shook his head-“how many times? Intel points to something bigger. We think he’s been at it-what, nearly two years? That points to a significant scheme, something complex. Complex means big.
“I’d piss off a whole army of NSCs to get Paul Bern next to Ghazi Baida, because the alternative is just too fucking freaky. And if Mondragon can help me do that, I don’t much care who he shits on in the process, and I care even less about some Washington fatties’ limits of indulgence.”
This was precisely the kind of situation that drove Gordon mad. The intelligence about Ghazi Baida was grim and scary, like the rumors of a beast lumbering through the night in your direction. If you don’t act on the rumor and it turns out to be a reality, then you’re screwed and people will die in numbers so large that it will change the way historians will write about the century.
But if you do act, you do so with the full knowledge that the only way to stop the beast coming after you is to send your own beast out into the night to meet him. And your beast has to be fed and nurtured and indulged and treated in the same way you’d treat a friend or someone you respected. You have to collude with him, and abet. You have to get close enough to him to feel his warmth and smell his breath. And you have to do all of that knowing full well that he isn’t any different from or any better than the beast you are sending him out to meet. Except that your beast doesn’t want to eat you, and the other one does.
“Look,” Gordon said, “all I’m saying is that you’ve got a reputation, Lex. Reputations have a way of gaining weight. When you get too heavy for those guys to carry, when it’s just not worth the effort to them anymore, they’ll cut you loose.” He paused. “Just don’t let Mondragon take it too far. There are limits.”
“Not for Ghazi Baida,” Kevern said evenly.
Gordon said nothing more. They’d been in this circle too many times to count, each taking his respective side and pushing it as far as he could. It made for constant tension. Maybe some people would call it balance, neither side giving anything to the other, but both of them keeping the other from indulging in extremes. It was exhausting, unrelenting, never ending.
He shifted his weight, and the subject.
“Tell me something,” Gordon said. “Just for my own curiosity: How in the hell did you get Jude’s skull?”
“One of the Koreans,” Kevern said. “Before he got killed in the drug raid, we had the opportunity to put him through a little questioning. Turns out he’d dumped the bodies himself. Him and his buds. He took us out to a garbage dump in Nezahualcoyotl.”
Kevern hesitated a beat, just enough for you to notice something if you were perceptive, but he kept it tough.
“There he was”-he shrugged-“all crumpled up under an old truck radiator and some other shit. The feral dogs had been at him. And the possums and cats. He was kind of scattered around. We got what we could. At first, we didn’t believe the damn slope, didn’t think it was him. And then we found his head. Rats had cleaned it slick, but they hadn’t chewed on it. It was weird. Clean as a lab specimen. I knew the key dental markers, so…
“We shot the slope right there and left him where Jude had been. Kind of a swap. Made the rats happy.”
“Shit,” Gordon said. He took another drink. “And the woman who took the skull to Bern?”
“Paid and gone.”
Gordon was going over all of it in his head again. Hell, he hadn’t stopped going over it from the moment he first heard the plan from Kevern. When he presented it to the group the first time, they were dumbfounded; then the more they thought about it, the more it began to seem like a crazy kind of possibility to them. Especially in light of the potential horrors of the alternatives.
One of the deciding factors in favor of letting Kevern go ahead with it had been his successes in the past. He had that much of a reputation. He also had another kind of reputation. These were the things the group had weighed, and in the end, they went with the devil they knew, as wild as he was, because the devil they didn’t know was just too appalling to imagine.
“And the idea… of doing it this way?” Gordon asked. “Sending him his brother’s skull-”
“I told you,” Kevern said. “The idea was to get the guy emotionally invested before we approached him. He’s a forensic artist, Gordy. We wanted him to puzzle it out, rev up his curiosity. We wanted him motivated and steaming under his own momentum before we approached him.”
“I know, I know, I remember that, but what if it just scares the hell out of him instead?”
Kevern shook his head. “No. Won’t happen. We think he’s too much like his brother. What if you’d done that to Jude? You have any doubt about what would’ve happened?”
“But let’s just ask ourselves this: What if he isn’t convinced?” Gordon said.
Kevern leveled his eyes at Gordon. “Mondragon will convince him.”
And that was exactly what Gordon had warned Kevern about. Jesus H. Christ, putting a psycho in charge of psy ops. Gordon looked across the table and held his tongue. With a sense of resignation, he decided to let Kevern go with it. In twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most, they would know. He would let it go that far.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “What about Jude’s partner? Mejia’s going to have to prep Bern, right? I’m guessing this is creating a little stress.”
“Mejia’s got guts. That’s why we went through the big ordeal in the beginning, remember? These were two of the best people that ever went through training at the Farm. There’re damn few like them. Mejia will do what’s got to be done, and what’s got to be done comes from me. Mejia’s on board.”
Where did these people come from? Gordon had monitored the five-month training ordeal that these two officers had gone through in preparation for Heavy Rain. At the time, it had seemed over-the-top, and Gordon had chalked that up to the overzealous, gung ho types at the Farm. That was their deal; he left it up to them.
But now it seemed that the extreme psychological preparations had been right on target. He didn’t want to think what was waiting for Mejia and Bern as they tried to salvage the operation in the wake of Jude Lerner’s death.
“One last thing, Lex.” Gordon lifted his scotch and finished it off. He put down the empty glass and then
