“Oh! Oh! Jesus!” Gordon fell back in his chair.
The Anglo slowly chokes to death on his own blood while everyone watches. The bald man says something inaudible. Someone else speaks. When it finally looks as if the Anglo is dead, the bald man suddenly plunges his knife into the Anglo’s chest and leaves it there as everyone walks out of the room. The video runs for a few minutes, recording nothing but the silence and the still bodies of the two dead men. Then the screen goes blank.
Kevern flicked off the CD player.
Gordon’s face was burning. They had reluctantly accepted the probability that Jude Lerner was dead, but this was a brutal way to have it confirmed. He stood and went over to the CD player, took out the disk, and then returned to his chair.
“Where the hell did this come from, Lex? What’s going on here?”
“Agencia Federal de Investigaciones,” Kevern said. “They’d been watching these Lebanese for the better part of a month. Didn’t even know what they had. I was down there running traps. Anything new? Anything off-the-wall? Any interesting hits? Agent said, ‘ Pues, tenemos este. ’ I said, ‘Lemme see.’” Kevern gestured toward the television. “This is what the little shit showed me.”
Gordon just shook his head. Good God Almighty.
Kevern rolled his head to the side, grunting softly. God only knew what inspired such a pantomime, or what it was supposed to convey to people.
“Mexico’s got half a million Lebanese,” Gordon said. “Why were they watching these guys?”
“Drugs, my man said.”
“Just drugs?”
“S’what he said.”
“They didn’t know about their ties to Hezbollah?”
“I don’t think they did.”
“So who did they think the gringo was?”
Kevern shrugged. “Some guy trying to make a buck. They were puzzled by the ‘Spy! Spy!’ thing. They had run it by the DEA, which couldn’t ID the gringo.”
Lebanese had begun immigrating to Mexico during the nineteenth century, and today they were a culturally significant force there, representing some of the country’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. As an ethnic subgroup, they were thoroughly integrated into the Mexican social fabric. They were as invisible as the Irish are in the United States, and they presented the same problems to the intelligence community in Mexico as the Irish would in the United States if the IRA suddenly decided it was their moral and religious obligation to kill as many Americans as possible by any means possible. Although 99.9 percent of the Irish would find the idea abhorrent, that. 1 percent who sympathized would be a hell of a problem for Homeland Security. It was the same with the Lebanese in Mexico. Those affiliated with Hezbollah were finding it easy to hide in plain sight. Racial profiling sure as hell wasn’t an issue.
Gordon said nothing. His officer was dead, and a crack Mexican intelligence team trained by the DEA and the French National Police had a digital recording of it. The problem was that Heavy Rain was operating under the radar of all foreign intelligence agencies, including that of the Mexican government. Even more serious than that, it wasn’t even known to the U.S. embassy or the CIA’s own station chief in Mexico City. This was too damned close for comfort.
“Has Mejia seen this?”
Kevern shook his head.
Well, it was all over, finally. But there was one bleak question. He looked at Kevern. “How did Khalil and Ahmad get onto Jude?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
“The bald guy?”
“Not a clue. Look, this came out of nowhere. You can see by the video that Jude didn’t have a clue when he walked in there, either. He was too good for that. If he’d smelled something, he’d never have shown up in Tepito.”
“When did you say you got this?” Gordon asked.
“’Bout a month ago,” Kevern said without a hint of apology.
Jude had been missing six weeks.
Gordon was trembling. The CD had been damned gruesome, but anger had more to do with the way he was feeling.
“You’ve had it a month,” Gordon said, and the two men stared at each other. “You’d better have a fucking good explanation,” Gordon said.
“Two thousand miles of Mexican border, Gordy,” Kevern rasped. He always sounded like he had a raw throat. “Five thousand five hundred miles of Canadian border. Two million railcars and eleven million trucks come into the country every year. Eight thousand ships make fifty-one thousand port calls every year. Five hundred million people come into our airports and seaports every year, over eight million of them illegal immigrants.” He paused for emphasis. “That’s my explanation.
“It took Jude nearly seven months to get in there, gain their confidence, meet Baida, gain his confidence- marginally,” Kevern went on. “Best guy we had, and it took damn near a year to put him in place. Hellacious effort. We don’t want to lose track of these people, Gordy. You know what’s coming out of the Triple Border area. Those guys are on the move; they’re scattering-to Sao Paulo, to Isla de Margarita in Venezuela, to Panama, to Iquique in Chile. Shit. And from those places, they’ll scatter again. The cyst is festering and pus is seeping out. We don’t have much time.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gordon said. “This was always a long shot-and it almost worked. But it was a one-off operation. Jude was the operation.” He held up the CD. “And you just showed me the end of it.”
Kevern sat very still, and Gordon saw the look in his eye, a too-still look, which put Gordon on instant alert. The son of a bitch had already done something extreme. And he had taken a month to set it up and do it.
“Get to the goddamned point, Lex.”
“Ghazi Baida’s about to get a little jolt of enlightenment,” Kevern said, grunting under his breath. “He’s about to find out that Jude’s not dead after all.”
Chapter 8
Lex Kevern was still holding the remote control for the CD player. After the television screen had gone dark, the room had returned to its cool blue glow.
But now Richard Gordon wanted to see Kevern’s face clearly. He was sitting next to a table lamp, and he reached up and turned it on. Instantly, the weak incandescent bulb threw a sallow cast over everything. Kevern’s suntan turned dark and leathery.
Heavy Rain, like many clandestine operations, was straightforward in its concept but complex in its execution. The objective was to put someone very near the inner circle of Ghazi Baida, a much-feared Hezbollah terrorist who U.S. intelligence was now placing in and out of South America’s Triple Border region. This territory, a dense jungle no-man’s-land where the Iguacu and Parana rivers meet at the converging borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, had become a lawless sanctuary for international criminals and terrorists. It was feared that Baida had targeted the United States and was laying the groundwork in the Triple Border region for operations that would be launched from bases in Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico.
A CIA operations officer, Jude Lerner, was put into play, posing as an artist from Texas and using the alias Jude Teller. He became a fixture in Mexico City’s large arts community. He began to hang out at a lap-dancing club in the Zona Rosa that was frequented by Ahmad Rahal, one of two principals in a cell that had been tied to Baida. Over time, the two men became friends, and eventually Jude let Rahal in on his little sideline: trafficking in stolen pre-Columbian artifacts.
Gordon’s people in Washington had backstopped an entire smuggling operation set up by Kevern’s people over a period of six months. They had created routes, contacts, covers, informants, buyers, everything needed to
