Assumed Identity

by David Morrell

  But he'd also spent a lot of time in the suburbs, in one of which -Castle Hills - Juana's parents had lived. Juana had used a cover name so that an enemy could not have found out who her parents were and gone to San Antonio to question them about her supposed husband. There'd been no need and in fact it would have been disruptive for Buchanan to meet her parents. He knew where they lived, however, and he headed straight toward their home, making a few mistakes in direction but surprising himself by how much he remembered from his previous visit there.

  Juana's parents had a two-story brick and shingled house fronted by a well-tended lawn that had sheltering oak trees. When Buchanan parked the rented Taurus at the curb, he saw that lights were on in what he gathered was the living room. He got out of the car, locked it, and studied his reflection that a street light cast on the driver's side window. His rugged face looked tired, but after he combed his hair and straightened his clothes, he at least appeared neat and respectable. He was still wearing the brown sport coat that he had taken from Ted's room back in New Orleans. Slightly too large for him although not unbecomingly so, it had the advantage of concealing the handgun that he'd tucked behind his belt at his spine before he got out of the Taurus.

  He glanced both ways along the street, out of habit watching the shadows for any sign that the house was under surveillance. If Juana were in trouble as the postcard and her failure to meet him suggested, if she were on the run - which would explain why she hadn't shown up at Caf‚ du Monde - there was a possibility that her enemies would watch her parents in case she contacted them in person or telephoned and inadvertently revealed where she was. The Juana who'd been in the military would never have let anyone know the name and location of her parents. But a great deal could have happened in the intervening six years. She might have foolishly trusted someone enough to give that person information that was now being used against her, although being foolish had never been one of Juana's characteristics.

  Except maybe for falling in love with Peter Lang.

  The street suggested no threat. There weren't any vehicles parked on this block. No one was loitering at a corner, pretending to wait for a bus. Lights in the other houses revealed what appeared to be normal family activity. Someone might have been hiding in bushes, of course, although in this neighborhood where everybody seemed to take pride, a prowler on long-term surveillance wouldn't be able to hide easily, especially from the German shepherd that a man was walking on a leash along the opposite sidewalk. Still, that was assuming the man with the dog was not himself on surveillance.

  Buchanan took just a few seconds to register all this. From someone else's point of view, he would have seemed merely a visitor who'd paused to comb his hair before walking up to the house. The night was mild, with the fallen-leaf fragrance of autumn. As he stopped on the brick porch and pushed a button, he heard not only the doorbell but the muted sound of a laughtrack on a television sitcom. Then he heard footsteps on a hardwood floor, and a shadow appeared at the window of the front door.

  A light came on above him. He saw an Hispanic woman - in her late fifties, with shoulder-length, black hair and an appealing oval face - peer out at him. Her intense, dark eyes suggested intelligence and perception. They reminded him of Juana, although he didn't know for sure that this woman was Juana's mother. He had never met her parents. There was no name on the mailbox or beneath the doorbell. Juana's parents might have moved during the past six years. They might even have died. When he arrived in San Antonio, Buchanan had been tempted to check a phone book to see if they still lived at this address, but by then he was so anxious to reach the house that he hadn't wanted to waste even a minute. He would know soon enough, he'd told himself.

  An amateur might have phoned from New Orleans, and if he managed to contact Juana's parents, that amateur might have tried to elicit information from them about whether Juana was in trouble. If so, he would have failed, or the information he received would have been suspect. Most people were gullible, but even a fool tended to hold back when confronted by personal questions from a stranger using a telephone, no matter how good that stranger's cover story was. A telephone was a lazy operative's way of doing research. Whenever possible, face-to-face contact was the best method of obtaining information, and when the military had transferred Buchanan for training at the CIA's Farm in Virginia, Buchanan had quickly acquired a reputation as being skilled at, what was called in the trade, elicitation. His instructor's favorite assignment had been to send his students into various local bars during Happy Hour. The students were to strike up conversations with strangers, and in the course of an hour, they had to gain the trust of those strangers to such a degree that each stranger would reveal the day, month, and year of his birth as well as his social-security number. Experience had proved to the instructor that such personal information was almost impossible to learn in a first-time encounter. How could you invent a casual question that would prompt someone you'd never met to blurt out his social-security number? More than likely, your question would result in suspicion rather than information. All of the students in the class had failed. Except for Buchanan.

  The Hispanic woman unlocked the door and opened it, although she didn't release the security chain. Speaking through the five-inch gap in the door, she looked puzzled. 'Yes?'

  'Se¤ora Mendez?

  'Si.'

  'Perdone. I know it's late. My name's Jeff Walker, and I'm a friend of your daughter.' Buchanan used the Spanish he'd learned at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California when he'd been preparing for his mission into Mexico. 'I haven't seen her in several years, and I don't know where she lives. I'm visiting town for a couple of days, and. Well, I hoped that she was around. Can you tell me where to find her?'

  Juana's mother studied him with suspicion. However, her suspicion seemed tempered by an appreciation that he was using Spanish. Juana had told him that while her parents were bilingual, they much preferred speaking Spanish and they felt slighted when whites whom they knew spoke Spanish forced them to speak English.

  'Conoce a mi hija?'

  'Si,' Buchanan continued in Spanish. 'I know your Juana. We were in the military together. I knew her when she was stationed here at Fort Sam Houston.' That had been one of Juana's cover assignments. Although she had worked with Army Intelligence and was affiliated with Special Forces at Fort Bragg, her ostensible assignment had been with the 5th Army headquarters here in San Antonio. 'We got along real well. Several times we went out together. I guess you could say. Well, we were close. I wish I'd kept in touch with her. But I was overseas for a while and. I'd sure like the chance to say hello.'

  Juana's mother continued to study him with suspicion. Buchanan was certain that if he hadn't been speaking Spanish and if he hadn't mentioned Fort Sam Houston, she wouldn't have listened to him this long. He needed something else to establish his credibility. 'Do you still have that dog? The golden retriever? What was his name? Pepe. Yeah. Juana sure loved that dog. When she wasn't talking about baseball, she was talking about him. Said she liked to take Pepe out for a run along the river when she wasn't on duty.'

  The mother's suspicion began to dissolve. 'No.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'The dog. Pepe. He died last year.'

  'Oh. I'm sorry to hear that, Se¤ora Mendez. Losing a pet can be like.Juana must have taken it hard.'

  'You say your name is Jeff Walker?'

  'That's right.' Buchanan made sure to stand straight, as if his character retained habits of bearing from when he'd been in the military.

  'I don't remember her mentioning you.'

  'Well, six years is a while ago. Juana certainly told me a lot about you. The way I hear it, you make the best chicken fajitas in town.'

  The mother smiled slightly. 'Those were always Juana's favorite.' The smile became a frown. 'I would remember you if I'd met you before. Why didn't Juana ever bring you to the house?'

  I've got another 'why', Buchanan thought with growing concern. Why so
many questions? What the hell's going on?

  4

  Two blocks along the street, a small, gray van was parked in front of a house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn. The van had been parked there for several days, but the neighbors had not been troubled by its presence. On the contrary, they felt reassured because the van's driver, a private detective, had paid a visit to everyone who lived on that block and had explained that recent vandalism in the neighborhood had prompted a security firm with clients in the area to dispatch a guard to keep a watch on several homes in the district, particularly the vacant house, which seemed a natural target for vandals. If the neighbors had telephoned the number on the business card that they were given, a professional-sounding secretary would have told them that what the private detective had said was correct. The man did work for the firm. What the secretary would not have said, of course, was that she was speaking from an almost empty, one-room, downtown office, and that the security firm had not existed two weeks ago.

  The private detective's name was Duncan Bradley. He was twenty-eight years old. Tall and slim, he almost always wore sneakers and a cotton sweat suit as if he expected at any moment to play basketball, his favorite leisure activity. He preferred so informal an outfit because it was comfortable during lengthy stakeouts, and this particular stakeout - already lengthy - promised to become even longer.

  He and his partner were working twelve-hour shifts, which meant that the van, the windows of which were shielded so that no one could see in, had to be equipped with cooking facilities (a microwave) and toilet facilities (a porta-potty). The cramped working conditions also meant that the van had needed to be customized in order to comfortably accommodate Duncan Bradley's six-foot-eight-inch frame. Thus all the seats had been removed from the back and replaced by an extra-long mattress clamped to a plank and tilted upward on a fifteen-degree angle so that Duncan, who constantly lay upon it, didn't need to strain his neck by his persistent need to keep looking up.

  What he looked at was the monitor for a miniature television camera that projected from the van's roof and was hidden by the cowling of a fake air-vent. This camera, a version of the type used in assault helicopters, had considerable magnification ability so that it was able to show the license plate of a car parked two blocks farther along the street, a blue Ford Taurus with Louisiana license plates. This camera also had state-of-the-art, night-vision capability, and thus, although the street was for the most part in shadow, Duncan had no trouble seeing the green-tinted image of a man who got out of the Taurus, combed his hair, glanced at the neighborhood as if admiring it, and then walked toward the house. The man was Caucasian, about five-foot-eleven, in his middle thirties. He was well-built but not dramatically muscular. He was dressed casually, unremarkably. His hair was of moderate length, neither long nor short. His features were ragged but not severe, just as he was good-looking, handsome but not in a way that attracted attention.

  'This is November second,' Duncan said into a tape recorder. 'It's nine-thirty at night. I'm still in my surveillance vehicle down the street from the target area. A man just showed up at the house.' Duncan proceeded to describe the car and its driver, including the Louisiana license number. 'He's not too tall, not too short. A little of this, a little of that, not too much of one thing or another. Could be something, could be nothing. I'm monitoring audio surveillance.'

  Duncan lowered the tape recorder and turned up the volume on an audio receiver, then adjusted the ear phones he was wearing. The receiver corresponded with several miniature microphone-transmitter units that Duncan had hidden in the phones and light switches of every room in the target house. The units were tapped into the house's electrical system and thus had a permanent source of power. They were programmed to transmit on an FM band that wasn't used in San Antonio, and hence the transmission wouldn't interfere with television or radio reception in the house and possibly make the occupants suspicious.

  The day he'd been given this assignment, Duncan had waited until the targets were both out of the house. They'd made things easy for him by doing so after supper when the neighborhood was dark. Followed by Duncan's partner, the targets had driven to a shopping mall, and if they'd decided to return sooner than anticipated, Duncan's partner had a cellular phone with which he could have transmitted a warning beep to the pager that Duncan wore. Of course, Duncan had not depended on the good fortune that the targets had left the house unattended while it was dark. If necessary, he could have entered the unoccupied house during the daylight by posing as an employee of the lawn-care company that the targets hired to maintain their property. No neighbor would have thought it unusual for a man wearing a lawn-care uniform and carrying an insect-spray cannister the size of a fire extinguisher to check the bushes at the side of the house and then to proceed intently around to the back. Duncan had invaded the house through a patio door, picking its lock in fifteen seconds, installing all the microphones within forty minutes.

  In the van, dials on the receiver's console allowed him to adjust the sound level from each transmitter. The equipment also permitted Duncan to record the sound from each transmitter onto separate tapes. He hadn't been doing much recording, however. In the two weeks since he'd had this assignment, he'd heard nothing but what seemed to be normal household conversation. If the occupants were using a private code to communicate secret information, Duncan had detected no indication of it. Phone calls had been the usual neighborhood chit-chat. Dinner talk had mostly been about the husband's extremely successful car-repair business. At night, the couple watched a lot of television. They hadn't had sex as long as Duncan had been listening.

  For most of this evening, Duncan had been listening to the laughtrack on a string of TV situation comedies. Now, when he heard the doorbell and the husband telling the wife to answer it, he activated a bank of tape recorders and lowered the volume of the transmitter in the living room, at the same time raising the volume of the transmitter in the front hallway.

  Duncan understood Spanish. It was one of the reasons that he'd been assigned to this house, and right from the start of the conversation, he felt charged. Because right from the start, the stranger, who said his name was Jeff Walker, asked about Juana Mendez, and baby, we are in business now, Duncan thought. We are finally getting some action. While he eagerly listened and adjusted dials and made sure that the tape machines were recording every word, he simultaneously pushed a button on his cellular telephone. The number he needed to call had been programmed into the phone.

  'You know my daughter?' Mrs Mendez was saying in Spanish.

  The man who called himself Jeff Walker was explaining that he'd known Juana in the military, at Fort Sam Houston.

  With the cellular phone pressed against his left ear, Duncan heard it buzz.

  The man who called himself Jeff Walker was talking about a dog that Juana Mendez had owned. Whoever this guy was, he certainly seemed to know her.

  The cellular phone buzzed a second time.

  Now Jeff Walker was carrying on about how Juana had bragged about her mother's chicken fajitas.

  You're laying it on a bit thick, aren't you, buddy? Duncan thought.

  Abruptly someone answered the phone, a smooth male voice absorbing the cellular static. 'Tucker here.'

  'This is Bradley. I think we've got ignition.'

  5

  'Why didn't Juana bring me to the house?' Continuing to use Spanish, Buchanan repeated the question that Juana's mother had asked him. 'You know, I wondered that myself. I think it was because she wasn't sure if you and your husband would approve.'

  Buchanan was taking a big chance here, but he had to do something to distract her from her suspicion. Something was wrong, and he didn't know what, but he thought if he put her on the defensive about one thing, she might open up about other things.

  'Why wouldn't we approve?' Juana's mother asked. Her dark eyes flashed with barely controlled indignation. 'Because you're white? That's crazy. Half my husband's employees are white. Many of Ju
ana's high-school friends were white. Juana knows we're not prejudiced.'

  'I'm sorry. That isn't what I meant. I didn't intend to insult you. Juana told me - in fact she emphasized - that you didn't have any objection if she dated someone who wasn't Hispanic.'

  'Then why wouldn't we have approved of you?' Juana's mother's dark eyes flashed again.

  'Because I'm not Catholic.'

  '. Oh.' The woman's voice dropped.

  'Juana said you'd told her many times that was one thing you expected of her. that if she got serious about a man, he would have to be a Catholic. because you wanted to be certain that your grandchildren would be raised in the Church.'

  'Yes.' Juana's mother swallowed. 'That is true. I told her that often. Apparently you do know her well.'

  In the background, a man's gruff voice interrupted. 'Anita, who are you talking to? What's taking you so long?'

  Juana's mother glanced down the hallway toward the entrance to the living room. 'Wait here,' she told Buchanan and closed the door.

  Feeling exposed, Buchanan heard muffled words.