This way, then.”
Chapter 15
He turned and Bern followed him to a corner of the twilight near the windows that overlooked the city. In the near distance, downtown, one of the city’s several satellite clusters of skyscrapers rose in the night sky. They went down one step to a grouping of armchairs and sofas that went right up to the glass wall. Mondragon sat in an armchair, his head and feet in shadow, a band of soft light falling obliquely across the middle of his elegantly attired body. Bern chose a chair at an angle to Mondragon.
From the surrounding shadows, the young woman appeared and set a drink on a short black acrylic pedestal at Mondragon’s elbow. She bent down, her lovely face disappearing into the shadow with Mondragon’s wraith. Bern heard the hissing of sibilants as she whispered. It was an odd tableau, two beautifully attired bodies, their heads lost in lightless, silent communion.
Then the young woman straightened up and walked out of the room.
“It’s ironic,” Mondragon said, “that you are a forensic artist.. . considering.” He paused, then gestured toward the area behind Bern where the clear acrylic display boxes held their fine sculptures. “What do you think of my exhibition?”
“Beautiful,” Bern said. “Extraordinarily well done.”
“These are my favorites,” Mondragon said. “I have others, nearly fifty altogether.”
“Who sculpted them?”
“God.” A soft aspirated laugh came from the shadow. “Those are real faces,” Mondragon said.
Real faces. Bern couldn’t help glancing toward the darkened space where the softly illuminated display cases floated in the murk. As he recalled the stippled texture of the skin and the delicate vermilion borders of the lips, a sense of the bizarre crept into the room.
“Plastination,” Mondragon said. “Plastination.”
“Gunther von Hagens?” Bern asked.
“Exactly.” Mondragon was pleased that Bern knew who the man was. “He invented the process, replacing the water and fat in a specimen with a variety of polymers that render the tissue permanently preserved in a state of near reality. The process is rather complex. Von Hagens did not prepare these particular ones. They were done by someone with a more artistic sensitivity, a familiarity with aesthetics. She improved on the more crude medical specimens that are usually associated with von Hagens’s work.”
Though Bern was nearly as intimate with cadavers as a pathologist or a mortician, this display of faces struck him as ghoulish. Perhaps it was the motivation for the display, rather than the actual display itself, that was slightly creepy.
“It’s remarkable,” Mondragon said, “how thoughtlessly we take our faces for granted.”
He paused a moment, a break signaling a change of subject.
“I don’t know who has involved you in this,” Mondragon began. “I don’t know who was responsible for sending you your brother’s skull.”
“How did you know about it, then?”
“Your brother was near the center of a complex intelligence operation,” Mondragon said. “Among the people who orbit around such an enterprise as this, everyone knows everything. And no one knows much. This isn’t a contradiction. It is, unfortunately, the reality of much of the intelligence world these days. This is why I know what has happened to you, but I don’t know who did it. Or why.”
“ Intelligence operation? What do you mean?”
“Jude was an operations officer in the CIA,” Mondragon said. “A special kind of operations officer.”
Bern was taken aback. This was a hell of a revelation. Suddenly, he was skeptical.
“And how do you happen to know all this?”
“I’m an asset to the U.S. intelligence community in… several enterprises.”
Bern didn’t know what to say. So why was he here? What was going on here? Before he could speak, Mondragon did.
“Tell me,” Mondragon said, “what do you intend to do about this?”
“Do about it?”
“Yes. Before you heard from me, where were you going to go with your knowledge, which will be confirmed by the DNA results tomorrow?”
Bern noted the positive use of the future tense, and he answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”
“I have a proposition, then,” Mondragon said. “Let me help you find out who did this.”
“Why?”
Mondragon hesitated. “Because I have suspicions, and if I’m right, then I have business with this person.”
This sounded ominous, and Bern was getting the uneasy feeling that he should have declined the invitation to this meeting.
“I don’t know that I care who did it.”
“That’s difficult for me to believe,” Mondragon said, a hint of displeasure in his voice.
Mondragon studied him. It was a little disturbing to see so much of the man’s eyeballs. With no eyelids, he couldn’t blink, and Bern realized that the spritzing was also intended to supply moisture to his eyes.
“Your brother was involved in a part of that agency that didn’t even exist a year ago,” Mondragon said, reaching for his tall cocktail glass and bringing it to his lips. His eyeballs swiveled downward as he drank. Very deliberately, he set the glass on the short pedestal, and his eyeballs jerked back to Bern.
“He used to be a case officer in South America, but in the recent reorganization of things, some people with special talents were shifted to new… clandestine operations. Have you ever heard of the Triple Border region of South America?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s that area where the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together. Jungle. Everything there is untamed-the animals, the vegetation, the people. Two cities have sprung up out of the jungle there, one on either side of the wide Parana River: Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil. Ciudad del Este has been around for thirty years and has always been a retreat for smugglers and murderers and anyone seeking the comfort of a society of outcasts.
“The area has prospered as a refuge for international terrorists and criminals. Today, commerce is flourish- ing there: There are over two hundred thousand peo- ple, shopping malls, apartment buildings. Everything. And everything is lawless. Chaos lives there, and she is thriving.”
Mondragon stopped and spritzed his face, and again the mist dazzled momentarily in the angle of the dim lights, then disappeared.
“The underworld there-if one can distinguish such a thing in such a place-is run by Asians and Middle Eastern criminals. There are tens of thousands of Muslims there, among them Hezbollah terrorists. But they are not alone. This lawless place is the refuge of Hamas, as well, and the Aryan Nations. And the IRA. And Colombian rebels. This place is the lair of the scourge of the earth. They fester there, breed there, give birth there.”
Mondragon picked up his glass again, drank, and put it back. There was a moment when his head came into the dim light, and the horror of his butchered face was shocking in the surrounding elegance. His eyes and lips were startlingly out of place in the featureless mass of moist, decorticated flesh.
“U.S. intelligence has known about this cesspool for a decade, but it wasn’t a primary concern. Just something they kept their eyes on. Now, of course, it seems more important to them. The Hezbollah element there being the most important of all.
“Your brother was involved in an operation that was trying to locate a Hezbollah operative named Ghazi Baida. Baida is a terrorist strategist, and increasingly reliable intelligence has placed him in various cities throughout Latin America in the last ten months: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Asuncion, and… Ciudad del Este.
“The U.S. intelligence community was very alarmed about these reports, and they initiated an intense search
