Chapter 21
The twin towers known as Residencial del Bosque faced Avenida Ruben Dario and the sixteen-hundred-acre Bosque de Chapultepec (the Woods of Chapultepec), a sprawling park in the heart of Mexico City. Once the site of the palace of the Aztec poet-king Nezahualcoyotl, Chapultepec was now the home of Los Pinos, the palatial residence of the Mexican president.
Designed by the U.S. architectural firm of Cesar Pelli amp; Associates, the postmodern towers were the most expensive residential structures in the city. Constructed of alternating bands of dark glass and terracotta tile and brick, they were home to some of Latin America’s richest men, and it was rumored that many of them had acquired their fortunes by dubious means and maintained them by the same.
The walled compound had the requisite gated security service, but the real protection was in the hands of the men in dark suits and sunglasses who lingered in the shade of the trees along the boulevard and the surrounding wooded streets. With their automatic weapons casually slung underneath the open lapels of their shiny suits, they smoked with passive faces. Like blind serpents at the mouth of a den, they sensed danger without having to see it.
Even at night, Vicente Mondragon could see the lights of the presidential palace from his twenty-ninth-floor suite near the top of the second tower. He always felt different in Mexico, even after being there for only a few hours. In Mexico he was more alert, more aware of the depths of the water he swam in.
He had arrived in the late afternoon, before Paul Bern had even left Austin. Like the president, he had choppered to the helipad at the Residencial del Bosque from his private airstrip on the southwestern edge of Santa Fe. Now he was standing at the display case of one of his plastinized faces, which were exhibited in the same manner as those in Houston, floating in pools of soft light, scattered across the breadth of the shadowy room.
Lex Kevern, looking uncomfortable but stubborn, sat in the typical gloomy twilight of the Mondragon residence, his thick body filling one of Mondragon’s lush leather armchairs.
“You hang on to those videotapes of that girl,” Kevern said. “If those things get out to some damned underground porn circuit, I’ll kill you myself.”
There was a whisking sound as Mondragon spritzed the raw front of his head, the mist dazzling and falling through the pale light from the display case.
“He didn’t even fight it,” Mondragon said. “When he saw those pictures, it was all over.”
“Yeah, okay,” Kevern said.
“Does that worry you?”
“You mean because he didn’t kick up a fuss? If he’s like Jude, he wouldn’t. You had him by the dick-no use wasting his energy. But my guess is he won’t forget what you’ve done to him. If I were you, I’d be ready to do the right thing with those pictures when this is all over.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know, Vicente. Why wouldn’t you?”
Mondragon leaned in closer to the face. This one happened to be a Spaniard, a poor but beautiful young woman from Tarifa who had died of a blood disease. She sold her face for the price of the remaining mortgage on her mother’s grim little cottage facing the Strait of Gibraltar. The old woman had sat at a window there, looking toward Tangier, mooning over her youthful years in Morocco. Mondragon remembered most of the stories connected to the faces, and this one especially, because it was so pitiful. This girl could have been a film star, or at least a damned good mistress.
He straightened up and went over and stood near Kevern in a dark pocket of the room
“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Mejia. If somebody found out about Jude, what about her?”
“Well, we’ve been over that, haven’t we, Vicente?” Kevern’s scratchy voice sounded strained. “What’s the matter? You forgetting how to think like a Mexican? Look, she’s deeper than Jude. He was out there, pushing it. She was doing what Mexicans think women ought to do, taking her clothes off. How many men in this goddamned country have a piece of ass on the side? And how many of these women do you suspect of being clandestine CIA operatives? Hell, she’s playing a role that makes her as common as a damned street vendor. She’s not going to be at the top of anybody’s list.”
He paused and then added, “She and Jude were as good as a damn team could get. She’s played this as smart as I’ve ever seen it played. And it’s hard to say which one of them had the biggest balls.”
“Okay, fine. But she didn’t like this idea with Bern,” Mondragon said. “Can you be sure she’s going to stay with it?”
He watched Kevern, knowing the question would irritate him, and knowing that Kevern didn’t like it when he stood in the darkness. He would much rather see Mondragon’s goggling eyes and his isolated lips stuck onto the hamburger that used to be his face than for Mondragon to stand hidden in the dark. Mondragon wasn’t quite sure why this bothered Kevern so much, but once he discovered that it did, he did it as often as he could.
“You know what, Vicente? You wouldn’t understand,” Kevern said. “A guy like you.”
Kevern was sitting forward in the leather chair, his hefty shoulders as wide as a bull’s, his forearms on his knees, the thick fingers of his big hands interlaced. Mondragon could see Kevern staring at the shadow where his head was hidden, and he sensed Kevern’s aggravation.
“This is unfinished business for her now,” Kevern explained. “She’s feeling stuff like loyalty and determination… and a sense of doing the right thing. She knows damn well the risk to her and Paul Bern in a cock- up scheme like this, but she’s gonna put that out of her head. And you know why she’s gonna put that out of her head? Because she’s disciplined. And she’s loyal. And because she lies awake at night wondering what in the fuck Ghazi Baida’s going to do if he gets his hands on a safe, reliable underground connection into the States. She cares about shit like that.”
Mondragon waited without responding. In that brief monologue, Kevern had exposed more of himself than he had ever done in the eight years of their association. It was a telltale sign of the pressure he was feeling. Kevern had never let it show before, and this brief outburst-by Kevern’s standards-was all that he was going to let show now. He fell silent.
Mondragon waited a few beats before he said, “And what do you do now?”
“Wait,” Kevern rasped.
“What do you think the odds are that Baida knows who was behind the Tepito killings?”
“Nil.”
“Maybe he suspects something.”
“Sure he does. People like that are suspicious. Guys like him, they never bend down to get a drink of water.”
Mondragon wasn’t going to ask him what that meant. Kevern was full of those kind of Americanisms, mixed in with operational lingo. He used to be worse, but Mondragon had told him to stop it.
Kevern grunted in his chair and shrugged his beefy shoulders.
“It was a drug hit,” Kevern said, jutting his chin forward and stretching his thick neck as if his tie was too tight. Only he wasn’t wearing a tie. “I do know that’s the story that his man took back to him. I haven’t heard rumors that it was anything but a narco hit, and the street is pretty reliable about that sort of thing. If something else had been out there, something with more credence, it would’ve come around to me.”
Mondragon turned away, walked to the glass wall, and looked out over Mexico City. He could see Kevern in the reflection of the dark glass. He spritzed his face.
“I think it’s been too long,” he said, his voice bouncing off the glass. “He suspects something. If you lose an entire cell, you think somebody was inside. It’s been six weeks.” He shifted the focus of his eyes and picked up his own eyeballs gawking back at him. His lips floated alone, unattached.
“He lives in a spooky world,” Kevern grunted. “He has his people, runs his traps like the rest of us. Like I said, he sent his guy up here. People disappear in his world all the time. Can’t know everything. You live that life, you live with uncertainty. You acclimate.”
“Jude had already had three meetings with Baida when Khalil killed him. How was he going to deal with Jude’s sudden disappearance? Or Ahmad’s?”
