time he got there, Jude was gone for good.
“His parents still live there?”
“Only his mother,” she said. “His father, a doctor, died a few years ago.”
Susana turned and walked across the room and stood in the doorway of Jude’s bedroom, looking in, her body turned three-quarters away from Bern. From that angle, he couldn’t really see the expression on her face, but her posture said a lot. Even the baggy shirttail hanging over her skirt didn’t hide the shape of the woman in Jude’s drawings.
“The truth was,” she said, her back still to him, “Jude was more likable when he was pretending to be someone else than he was when he wasn’t.” She turned around. “When he was Jude Lerner, he was very, very complicated. Lerner seemed to require a certain kind of complexity in order to operate, a complexity that Jude carried around with him like a sack of rocks.
“But when he was Jude Teller-Teller was his cover name-he was so busy funneling his psychology and energy into being that other man-and it was a hell of a job-that he was actually… endearing. Jude was very graceful in deceit. It suited him perfectly.”
Bern was suddenly alert. Now she was sounding like a woman instead of an intelligence officer. But she didn’t allow herself to go too far with that. The discipline was intact. She shook her head wearily.
“Come on,” she said. “I need to show you something.”
Chapter 20
He followed her into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. She gathered her skirt and got down on her knees in front of the sink.
“Come on. Get down here,” she said.
Bern dropped to his knees and watched as she got down on her elbows and moved under the sink. He did the same. She pointed to the four-inch-high baseboard on the wall.
“These two nail heads here,” she said. “Press them simultaneously with one hand while you lift here with the other.”
A two-foot section of the baseboard folded up on hidden hinges, revealing a compartment and two handles. She pulled on one of the handles and a metal tray slid out revealing four CDs lying flat and layered back at angles so that the front edges of all four CDs were visible. She retrieved two CDs and then pushed in the drawer and closed the hinged baseboard.
“Every time you take something out,” she said as they backed out from under the sink, “close it. Otherwise, you may forget you left it open, or be interrupted and have no time to run in here and do it.”
They went into the bedroom, where she opened a nightstand and took out a laptop and crawled onto the bed with it. She opened it and powered up.
“Always use the computer in here in the bedroom. Anyone coming to see you will have to cross the whole studio from the landing, and that’ll buy you time to ditch what you’re doing.”
She tapped in the security code, and while she was waiting for it to clear, she continued explaining.
“The CDs are a complete library of everything pertaining to the case. One of the things you’ll read about is how Jude worked his way into the cell run by a guy named Khalil Saleh. Jude used being an artist as a cover, along with a second life as a smuggler of pre-Columbian artifacts. That’s how he finally got to meet Ghazi Baida.
“It was arranged for Jude to fly to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, in the Triple Border region, to meet an unnamed man who was interested in his smuggling operation. We knew from other intelligence that this was probably a feeler from Baida’s people.
“On the first trip, Jude was left alone in a bar full of noisy parrots near the Parana River waterfront. Soon, a man of Middle Eastern descent appeared and introduced himself as Mazen Sabella. He said that he represented the man Jude had come to meet, but before that meeting could take place, Mazen needed to ask Jude a few questions.
“They talked for nearly two hours, entirely in Spanish.” She stopped. “You don’t speak Spanish.”
“Not much. No, hardly any.”
She didn’t waste her time being exasperated by that.
“The man was polite, but thorough. He explored Jude’s life through a series of questions that seemed more like a casual conversation between friends than a vetting. By the time the guy left, he had very skillfully extracted a bundle of leads he’d use in the inevitable background check. But no one claiming to be Baida ever showed at the bar.”
Susana kept one eye on the screen and slapped in a few more codes on the keyboard.
“A month later, another meeting was set up. Again Jude flew down. Another bar on the waterfront. Again Sabella arrived. Again they spoke in Spanish, and the major point of the discussion this time was the structure and operation of Jude’s smuggling route. The guy posed a series of hypothetical situations involving unexpected events, asking how Jude would handle them. It seemed that every possible scenario was played out. Then Sabella excused himself, saying that his boss would appear within the half hour. But Baida never came. Finally, Jude left the bar and flew home.
“Two weeks later, Jude was summoned again. Jude sent word back that everyone in Ciudad del Este could go fuck themselves, especially Sabella, who had been lying to him, and the guy who never showed up. Ahmad said, No, no, no, this time it was guaranteed he would meet Baida. The meeting place was the lobby of a small and smelly hotel in the oldest part of the city. Jude said the place reeked of raw sewage, had a jungle of potted palms in its rancid lobby, hosted the largest amber roaches in Latin America, and employed the most beautiful whores on the globe.”
Susana made this last remark with as much gravity as she had the rest of it. There was no attempt to make light of it.
“This time, a guy he’d never seen before walked into the lobby,” Susana said. “He went over to Jude with a smile on his face and said in impeccable English, ‘I hear you’ve grown impatient with us. That’s understandable.’ He extended his hand and said, ‘I’m Ghazi Baida.’”
“Wait a minute,” Bern said. “Why didn’t Jude recognize him from your files? You’ve got to have pictures, don’t you?”
“Yeah, we do. But they’re at least a decade old.”
“It’s not that hard to age them.”
“Right, and we’d done that. But we weren’t sure it was doing us any good. We had pretty good intelligence that Baida had cosmetic surgery about four years ago in Zurich, but we’d never been able to confirm it. So we weren’t sure who the hell we were looking for.”
“And this was your confirmation.”
“That’s right. And the alterations were significant.”
“And then Jude made drawings.”
“Very detailed ones.” After a couple more taps on the keys, she turned the laptop around for him to see the screen. “Ghazi Baida,” she said.
Jude had done four frontal drawings of Baida in four different styles, smoothly blended, smooth controlled, sketchy controlled, and sketchy hatching. Below each picture were active toggles that would take you to variations in each of the styles: profiles, three-quarter views, smiling, with beard, with glasses, with mustache, thin, heavy, and several combinations of these variations. Bern toggled through the variations.
“These are very good,” he said. “Very good.”
Susana pulled one of the pillows from under the bedspread, jammed it against the wall, and sat back against it, one leg drawn up, the other stretched out on the bed.
“Only three people have seen these drawings,” she said. “You make the fourth.”
He didn’t say anything, but he kept staring at the sketches. He looked at the way Jude had handled his materials, how he had switched pencils, used the long side of the lead, used the point, laid on some chalk here and there. Very subtly, he had given Baida a kindly appearance. Is that what he had seen?
“What about their conversations?” he asked.
