Assumed Identity

by David R. Morrell

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Buchanan stared at the entrance.

  Midnight.

  One o’clock. People frowned toward him, whispering.

  By two o’clock, he knew that she wouldn’t be coming.

  What in God’s name had happened to her? She needed his help. Why hadn’t she let him prove he loved her?

  15

  He packed his bag and dropped a signed checkout form on the bed. At 3:00 A.M., no one saw him leave the hotel through a service exit. Stepping out of shadows onto Lafayette Street, he hailed a taxi.

  “Where to, suh?” The driver looked wary, as if a man carrying a suitcase at 3:00 A.M. might be a threat.

  “An all-night car-rental agency.”

  The driver debated briefly. “Hop in. It’s kinda late to be takin’ a trip.”

  “Isn’t it, though.”

  He slumped in the backseat, thinking. It would have been easier to fly to where he needed to go. But he didn’t want to wait until morning and catch the first plane to his destination. For one thing, the major, the captain, and Alan might arrive earlier than they’d said they would and intercept him. For another, because he didn’t have enough cash to buy an airplane ticket, he’d need to use a credit card. But the only credit card he had was in Brendan Buchanan’s name. That would leave a paper trail for the major, the captain, and Alan to follow.

  This way, while he’d still have to use a credit card to rent a car, there’d be no record of where he was planning to drive. The paper trail would end right here in New Orleans. And with luck, the major, the captain, and Alan would accept that he’d decided to do what he’d told them and disappear. In a perfect world, they would consider this a reassuring gesture and not a threat. To direct their thinking, he’d written a note about his determination to disappear, had sealed the note in an envelope addressed to Alan, and had left it on the hotel room’s bed, beside the signed checkout form.

  “Here we are, suh.”

  “What?” He roused himself and looked out the taxi’s side window, seeing a brightly lit car-rental office next to a gas station.

  “If I was you, suh, I’d take it easy drivin’. You look beat.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be fine.”

  But I’d better look more alert when I rent the car, he thought.

  He paid the driver and didn’t show the effort with which he carried his bag into the office, where the bright lights hurt his eyes.

  A weary-looking spectacled man shoved a rental agreement across the counter. “I’ll need to see your credit card and your driver’s license. Initial about the insurance. Sign at the bottom.”

  He had to look at the credit card he’d set on the counter to see which name he was using. “Buchanan. Brendan Buchanan.”

  If only this headache would ease off.

  Juana.

  He had to find Juana.

  And there was only one place he could think to start.

  16

  “It’s been taken care of,” Raymond said.

  Seated at the rear of the passenger compartment of his private jet, Alistair Drummond peered up from a report he was reading. The fuselage vibrated softly as the jet streaked through the sky. “Specifics,” he said.

  “According to a radio message I just received,” Raymond said, “last night, the director of Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History was killed in a car accident near the National Palace in Mexico City.”

  “Tragic,” Drummond said. Despite his age, he didn’t show the strain of having flown to a business meeting in Moscow, then to another in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia before his present transatlantic flight back to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, all within forty-eight hours. “Do we have evidence that Delgado was responsible?”

  “The man Delgado ordered to do it is on our payroll. He’ll implicate Delgado if we ask him, provided we guarantee he won’t be punished.”

  “We?” Drummond asked.

  “I meant you.”

  “Your confusion of pronouns troubles me, Raymond. I’d hate to think that you consider me an equal.”

  “No, sir, I don’t. I won’t make the mistake again.”

  “Has his successor been chosen?”

  Raymond nodded.

  “An executive favorable to our cause?”

  Raymond nodded again. “And money will make him more so.”

  “Good,” Drummond said, his voice brittle, one of the few signs of his age. “We no longer need the woman, even if we find her. The leverage she provided against Delgado isn’t necessary any longer now that we have another way to put pressure on him. In all probability, Delgado will be Mexico’s next president, but not if we reveal his crimes. Let him know we have proof that he ordered the death of the Institute’s director, that his political future continues to depend on me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then, when he becomes president, I’ll have even more influence.”

  “All the influence you need.”

  “Never,” Drummond corrected him.

  “Perhaps, then, you do need the woman.”

  The old man scowled, his wrinkles deepening so much that his true age began to show. “I almost lost everything because of her. When your operatives find her . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Make certain they kill her on sight.”

  NINE

  1

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Buchanan arrived by nightfall. He’d driven west on Route 10 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, past numerous small towns into Texas, toward Beaumont and Houston and finally . . .

  His headache, combined with the pain in his side, had forced him to rest several times along the way. At Beaumont, he’d rented a hotel room in midmorning so that he could shave and shower and sleep for a couple of hours. The hotel clerk had looked puzzled when he checked out at noon. That was no good, attracting attention like that. It wasn’t any good, either, that his scarcity of cash forced him to use his credit card to rent the room. Now there was a further paper trail, although by the time Alan, the major, and the captain traced him to the hotel, he’d be long gone, and they still wouldn’t know his destination. Sure, if they checked the records of his past assignments, they might guess it, but he’d had a great many assignments in the six years since he’d known Juana, and it would take them quite a while to make the connection between her, New Orleans, and San Antonio. By then, he’d be somewhere else.

  He ate takeout food while he drove, hamburgers, french fries, po’boys, tacos, anything to give him fuel, washing it down with plenty of Coca-Cola, relying on the soft drink’s calories and caffeine to maintain his energy. Three times, he pulled off the busy highway and napped at a rest stop. He parked the rented Taurus near the toilet facilities so that the noisy coming and going of vehicles and travelers would prevent him from sleeping too deeply, for he knew that if he did truly sleep, he wouldn’t waken until the next day.

  He had to keep moving. He had to get to San Antonio and begin the urgent process of finding out what had happened to Juana. Why had she failed to meet him? What trouble had caught up to her? Despite his pain and confusion, he had sufficient presence of mind to ask himself if he was overreacting. A promise made six years ago to a woman whom he hadn’t seen since then. A plea for help in the form of a cryptic postcard.

  Maybe the postcard didn’t mean what he thought. Did it make sense for Juana to contact him after so long a time? And why him? Wasn’t there anyone else whom she could ask for help?

  What made him the logical choice?

  He didn’t have answers. But this much he knew for certain: Something had happened to him.

  Something terrifying.

  He tried to establish when it had begun. Perhaps when he’d been shot in Cancún, or when he’d injured his head while he made his escape, swimming across the channel. Perhaps when he’d been tortured in Mérida and had struck his head on the concrete floor. Or possibly later when he’d been stabbed and had again struck his head.

/>   The more he considered those possibilities, he didn’t think that they were the source of his fear, however. No doubt they were contributing factors. But as he analyzed the past weeks, as he replayed his various traumas, one incident disturbed him more than any.

  The trauma had not been physical. It had been mental.

  It threatened his sense of identity.

  Or rather, multiple identities. During the past eight years, he had been more than two hundred people. On some days, he had impersonated as many as six different people while attempting to recruit a series of contacts. During the past two weeks, he’d been confused for Jim Crawford and had identified with Peter Lang while he’d impersonated Ed Potter and Victor Grant and Don Colton and . . .

  Brendan Buchanan.

  That was the trouble. After disposing of Victor Grant, he’d expected to be given yet another identity. But at the Alexandria apartment, Alan had told him that there wouldn’t be a new identity, that he was being transferred from field operations, that he would have to be . . .

  Himself.

  But who the hell was that? He hadn’t been Brendan Buchanan for so long that he didn’t know who on earth Brendan Buchanan was. On a superficial level, he didn’t know such basics as how he liked to dress or what he liked to eat. On the deepest level, he was totally out of touch with himself. He was an actor who’d so immersed himself in his roles that when his roles were taken away from him, he became a vacuum.

  His profession wasn’t only what he did. It defined what he was. He was nothing without a role to play, and he realized now how brutally the realization had struck him that he couldn’t be Brendan Buchanan for the rest of his life. Thus, to escape being Brendan Buchanan, he would become Peter Lang. He would hunt for the most important person in Peter Lang’s world. And possibly in his own world, for the more he thought about it, the more he wondered how positively his life would have changed if he had stayed with Juana.

  I liked Peter Lang, he thought.

  And Peter Lang had been in love with Juana.

  2

  Past Houston, he used a pay phone outside a truck stop. It fascinated and disturbed him that the only person he cared about from Brendan Buchanan’s world was Holly McCoy. He’d known her only a few days. She was a threat to him. And yet he had an irresistible urge to protect her, to ensure that she escaped the danger she had created for herself because she had investigated him. He thought he had convinced the major, the captain, and Alan of her intention not to pursue the story. There was a strong chance they would leave her alone. But what about the colonel? Would the colonel agree with their recommendation?

  Buchanan hadn’t been lying when he’d told them that Holly had flown back to Washington, and he hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he’d made Holly frightened enough not to pursue the story. Still, he had to reinforce her resolve. Assuming that her phones would be tapped, he’d told her that he would use the name Mike Hamilton if he needed to leave a message on her answering machine or with someone at the Washington Post. As it happened, she was at the newspaper when he called there.

  “How are you?”

  “Wondering if I made a mistake,” Holly answered.

  “It wasn’t a mistake, believe me.”

  “What about your negotiations? Did they work?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Oh. Did you send them what you promised?”

  “. . . Not yet.”

  “Do it.”

  “It’s just that . . . It’s such good material. I hate to . . .

  “Do it,” Buchanan repeated. “Don’t make them angry.”

  “But giving up the story makes me feel like a coward.”

  “There were plenty of times when I did things rather than think of myself as a coward. Now those things don’t seem worth it. I have to keep on the move. The best advice I can give you is . . .” He wanted to say something reassuring but couldn’t think of anything. “Stop worrying about bravery and cowardice. Follow your common sense.”

  He hung up, left the pay phone, got quickly into the rented Taurus, and returned to the busy highway, squinting from the painful sunlight that now was low in the west ahead of him. Even the Ray-Bans he’d bought at noon in Beaumont didn’t keep the sun’s glare from feeling as if a red-hot spike had been driven through each eye and into his skull.

  Follow your common sense?

  You’re good at giving advice. You don’t seem to want to take it, though.

  3

  Shortly after 9:00 P.M., he drove from the low, grassy, often wooded, rolling plains of eastern Texas and entered the lights of San Antonio. Six years ago, when he’d been researching the character of Peter Lang, he’d spent several weeks here so he wouldn’t be ignorant about his fictional character’s hometown. He’d done the usual touristy things like visiting the Alamo (its name was a Spanish word, he learned, which meant “cottonwood tree”), as well as the restored Spanish Governor’s Palace, the San Jose Mission, and La Villita, or The Little Village, a reconstructed section of the original eighteenth-century Spanish settlement. He spent a lot of time at Riverwalk, the Spanish-motif shopping area along the landscaped banks of the San Antonio River.

  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, which a streetlight 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 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 was in trouble, as the postcard and her failure to meet him suggested, if she was on the run—which would explain why she hadn’t shown up at Café 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 fa
llen-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 laugh track 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 whether 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.