The movement had been there for about a minute. She just hadn’t paid attention to it. It was so common that she took it dismally for granted. But now turning, she saw a black man with a cardboard sign that said I’LL WORK FOR FOOD approach a woman who was hurrying through the park. The black man said something to her. The woman shook her head with force and kept hurrying. The black man continued through the park. The rain had begun to streak the inked letters on his sign so that now it read, I ORK OR OOD.
Holly felt a pang of sympathy as the black man approached another hurrying pedestrian, a man this time, who strode quickly on as if the beggar were invisible. Now the black man’s sign began to droop.
Oh, hell, at least one good thing will come out of this, Holly thought. She reached in her camera bag, took a dollar from her wallet, and handed it to the man as he came to her. She felt so dejected that she would have given him more, just to heighten her spirits, but she kept remembering Buchanan’s instruction not to do anything unusual. A dollar at least was better than a quarter.
“Thank you, ma’am.” What he said next startled her. “Mike Hamilton says you’re being watched.”
Holly’s pulse faltered. “What?”
“You’re to go over to the Fourteenth Street entrance to the Metro. Take the train to . . . Metro Center. Go out the east doors. Walk toward the . . . yes . . . the National Portrait Gallery. He’ll be in touch.”
Pocketing the dollar Holly had given him, the black man moved on.
Holly’s instinct was to rush after him, to ask for a more detailed explanation, to question him about how Buchanan had known she was being watched.
But her instinct was totally wrong, she knew, and she fiercely repressed it, ignoring the black man’s retreat, acting as if he was an inconvenient interruption, glancing around as if still in hopes that the person she waited for would arrive. She didn’t dare act immediately after speaking to the man. If so, whoever was watching her might suspect that she’d been given a message.
She waited. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Drops of water fell from the brim of her hat. What was the most natural thing to do? To check all around her one more time, then shake her head with annoyance and walk away.
She headed back toward work, then stopped as if she had a better thought, and changed direction, moving in the opposite direction toward the Fourteenth Street entrance to the Metro. Certainly the conflict she acted out was true to what she was feeling. Two days ago, Buchanan had scared her during their talk on the paddlewheeler in New Orleans. He had made the potential threat to her seem disturbingly vivid. Because of the story she was researching. The story about him. Seeing the deadly conviction in his eyes had made Holly feel cold. This man had killed. The men he worked with had killed. They didn’t operate by any rules that Holly understood. A Pulitzer Prize wouldn’t be any consolation to her in the grave.
But what about journalistic responsibility? What about the courage of being a professional? Holly had dodged those issues by postponing her decisions, by telling herself that if she waited for further developments, the story might get even better. She hadn’t walked away from the story; she was merely letting it cook. Sure. Then why was she so terrified because Buchanan had gotten in touch with her? What did he want? If she was the reporter she’d always believed she was, she ought to be eager. Instead, she had the feeling a nightmare was starting.
Ten minutes later, amid the echoing rumble of trains behind her, she climbed the congested stairs from Metro Center, exited onto noisy, traffic-glutted G Street, and walked through the rain toward the huge Greek Revival quadrangle that housed the National Portrait Gallery. Despite the weather, the sidewalk was crowded, people hurrying. And here, too, there were indigents, wearing tattered, rain-soaked clothes, asking for quarters, food, work, whatever, or sometimes holding signs that announced their need.
One of them had a sign identical to that of the black man in the park: I’LL WORK FOR FOOD. She started to pass.
“Wait, Holly. Give me a quarter,” the indigent said.
To hear him call her by name shocked her as if she’d touched an exposed electrical wire. Overwhelmed, she stopped, managed to make herself turn, and saw that the stooped man in the tattered clothes and droopy hat with grime on his face was Buchanan.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Don’t talk, Holly. Just give me a quarter.”
She fumbled for her wallet in her camera case, obeying, liking the way he said her name.
Buchanan kept his voice low. “Drummond. Tomez. That’s all I have. No first names. The sort of people who’d need protection. Find out everything you can about possible candidates. Pretend to make a pay-phone call at the gallery. Meet me at eight tonight. The Ritz-Carlton. Ask the hotel operator to connect you with Mike Hamilton’s room. Have you got that? Good. Keep moving.”
All the while, Buchanan held out his hand, waiting for Holly to give him the quarter. He took it, saying louder, “Thanks, ma’am. God bless you,” turning to an approaching man, saying, “Can you spare a quarter, just a quarter?”
Holly kept moving as Buchanan had instructed, proceeding toward the National Portrait Gallery, hoping that she looked natural. But although she managed to keep her pace steady, her mind swirled from fear and confusion.
5
The large blue helicopter cast a streaking shadow over the dense Yucatán jungle below. In the rear compartment, Alistair Drummond’s scowl became so severe that its wrinkles added years, making him look the eighty-something that he was. He’d been sitting rigidly straight, but now, with each piece of information that Raymond told him, Drummond sat even straighter. His brittle voice managed to be forceful despite the whump-whump-whumping roar of the aircraft’s engine. “Brendan Buchanan?”
“An instructor for Army Special Forces, assigned to Fort Bragg. He rented a car in New Orleans and drove to San Antonio to visit the woman’s parents. Our sentry there called to say that Buchanan used the name Jeff Walker when he claimed he was a friend of their daughter and asked if they knew where she was.”
“Is he a friend?” Drummond squinted through his thick glasses. “Why would he use an alias? Obviously, he’s hiding something. But what? What does he want with the woman?”
“We don’t know,” Raymond said. “But the two men assigned to watch the Mendez house are missing now. So is one of the men assigned to the target’s house outside San Antonio. His partner found recent blood beneath a carpet and a bullet hole in the ceiling. It would be foolish not to make the connection between Buchanan’s appearance and their disappearance. If he shows up again, I’ve given orders to have him killed.”
Drummond’s ancient frame trembled. “No. Cancel that order. Find him. Follow him. Maybe he’ll lead us to her. Did they work together at Fort Bragg? Learn his connection with her. He might know places to look that we haven’t imagined.”
6
While flying from San Antonio to Washington National, Buchanan had used an in-flight phone and Charles Duffy’s telephone credit card to call several hotels in Washington, needing to make a reservation for the night. As he’d expected, the task was frustrating. Most of the good hotels in Washington were always full. He’d started at the middle of the price scale but finally decided to try the high end, reasoning that the recession’s effect might have made extremely expensive hotels less popular. As it happened, Buchanan got lucky with the Ritz-Carlton. The early morning checkout of a Venezuelan group due to a political emergency at home had caused several rooms to be available. If Buchanan-Duffy had called a half hour later, the hotel clerk assured him, the rooms would have been spoken for. Buchanan was able to reserve two.
The Ritz-Carlton was among the most fashionable hotels in Washington. Filled with an amber warmth, designed to seem like an English hunt club, it had numerous European furnishings as well as British paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the artwork depicting dogs and horses. After Buchanan’s brief contact with Holly near the National Portrait Galle
ry, he had noticed that she continued to be followed but that none of her surveillance team appeared to be interested in him. Even so, he had needed to be sure and used extensive evasion techniques involving the subway, buses, and taxis to determine if he was followed. Those techniques took two hours, and Buchanan assumed that if the surveillance team had been interested in him and had managed to stay with him, they’d have picked him up by then. So he felt reasonably protected when he checked in at the Ritz-Carlton shortly after 5:00 P.M. He showered, applied new dressing and bandages to the stitches in his knife wound, changed into dry clothes from his travel bag, ate a room-service hamburger, and lay on the bed, trying to muster his energy as well as focus his thoughts.
The latter was difficult. The last two days of constant travel had wearied him, as had his activities throughout the afternoon. Eight years earlier or even last year, he wouldn’t have been this tired. But then, last year he hadn’t been nursing two wounds. And he hadn’t been suffering from a persistent, torturous headache. He’d been forced to buy another package of Tylenol, and he wasn’t a fool—he knew that the headache could no longer be treated as a temporary problem, that it had to be related to the several injuries to his skull, that he needed medical attention. All the same, he didn’t have time to worry about himself. If he went to a doctor, he’d probably end up spending the next week under hospital observation. Not only would a stay in the hospital be a threat to him, keeping him in one place while his hunters tracked him down, but it would increase the danger for someone else.
Juana. He couldn’t waste time caring about himself. He’d done too much of that for too long. He needed to care about someone else. Juana. He had to find her. Had to help her.
7
The telephone rang at eight in the evening. Precisely on time. Good. Buchanan sat up in bed and reached for the phone, answering with a neutral voice. “Hello.”
“Mike?” The deep, sensuous female voice was unmistakably Holly’s.
“Yes. Where are you?”
“I’m using a house phone in the lobby. Do you want me to come up? What’s your room number?”
“At the moment, it’s three twenty-two. But I want you to go to five twelve. And Holly, you have to do it in a certain way. Take the elevator to the third floor. Then use the stairs to go up to the fifth. Anybody watching the numbers above the elevator in the lobby will assume that you didn’t go any farther than the third floor.”
“On my way.” Tension strained her voice.
Buchanan broke the connection and pressed the button for the hotel operator, telling her, “Please, don’t put through any phone calls until eight tomorrow morning.”
He left the light on, picked up his travel bag, walked out of the room, put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, made sure that the door was locked behind him, and headed toward the fire stairs. As he started toward the fifth floor, he heard the elevator stop behind him on the third.
Holly arrived at room 512 a minute after he did. The room was registered to Charles Duffy. It and Mike Hamilton’s room had been rented using Charles Duffy’s credit card. Buchanan had told the check-in clerk that Mike Hamilton would be arriving soon. After showering and changing, he’d gone back down to the lobby, waited until the clerk who’d checked him in was off on an errand, and then had checked in again with a different clerk, this time as Mike Hamilton.
When Buchanan turned from letting Holly in and relocking the door, she surprised him, dropping her camera bag and a briefcase onto a chair, putting her arms around him, holding him tightly.
She was trembling.
Buchanan wondered if she was putting on an act, trying to seem more distraught than she actually was.
“How do you stand living this way?” She spoke against his shoulder.
“What way? This is normal.” He responded to her embrace.
“Normal.” Her voice dropped.
“It’s just stage fright.” He smelled her perfume.
She stepped away, looking depressed. “Sure.” As rain pelted against the window behind the closed draperies, she took off her wet London Fog hat and overcoat, then listlessly shook her hair free.
Buchanan had forgotten how red her hair was, how green her eyes.
She wore a sand-colored pantsuit, a scooped white T-shirt, and a brown belt. The outfit complemented her height and figure, the flow of her hips and breasts.
He felt attracted to her, remembered how her breasts had felt against him, and forced himself to concentrate on business.
“I wanted a room where we wouldn’t be disturbed if the men following you decided to barge in,” he explained. “This way, if they talk to the desk clerk, they’ll think they know where you are and who you’re seeing.”
“That part I understand.” Holly slumped on the Victorian sofa. “But what I don’t understand is why you told me to pretend to make a call from a pay phone at the National Portrait Gallery. Who was I supposed to be talking to?”
“Mike Hamilton.”
Holly ran her fingers through her hair and didn’t seem to follow his logic.
“Otherwise, how were you supposed to know Mike Hamilton wanted to meet you here?”
“But . . .” She frowned. “But you’d already told me as I came out of the Metro station.”
“The people following you didn’t know that. Holly, you have to remember: In this business, everything’s an act. You want your audience to know only what’s necessary for you to maintain an illusion. Suppose I’d just let you go back to work and then had phoned you and told you to meet me here. Your phones are tapped. This hotel would have been staked out fifteen minutes after I completed the call. They’d have found out who Mike Hamilton was. Regardless of the switch in the rooms, you and I would be under interrogation right now.”
“Nothing you do is uncalculated.”
“That’s how I stay alive.”
“Then how do I know I’m really being followed? How do I know that this business in the park and at the Metro station isn’t just a charade to frighten me into cooperating with you and staying away from the story?”
“You don’t. And I can’t prove it to you. Correction. That’s wrong. I can prove it to you. But the proof might get you killed.”
“There. You’re doing it again,” Holly said. “Trying to frighten me.” She crossed her arms and rubbed them as if she was cold.
“Have you eaten?” Buchanan asked.
“No.”
“I’ll order you something from room service.”
“I don’t have any appetite.”
“You’ve got to eat something.”
“Hey, fear’s good for losing weight.”
“How about some coffee? Or tea?”
“How about telling me what the names you gave me have to do with my story?”
“They don’t,” Buchanan said.
“What? Then why did you get in touch with me? Why did you put me through all this, being followed and passing secret messages and—?”
“Because I didn’t have any choice. I need your help.”
Holly jerked her head up. “You need my help? What could possibly—?”
“Drummond and Tomez. People important enough to need protection. What did you find out about them?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“It’s better if you don’t know anything about—”
“Bullshit,” Holly said. “Since I met you on the train to New Orleans, you’ve been playing games with my mind. Everything has to be your way, and you’re damned good at manipulating people into doing it. Well, this is one time that isn’t going to happen. If you need my help, there has to be something in it for me. If it isn’t about the story I was working on, what is it about? Maybe I can use that as a story. Quid pro quo, buddy. If I have to give up something, I want to get something in return.”
Buchanan studied her, then feigned reluctance. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Jesus, you are really something. You never stop acting. I get the impression you
meant to tell me all along, but this way it looks like you’re doing me a favor instead of the other way around.”
Buchanan slowly grinned. “I guess you’re too smart for me. How about that coffee?”
“Tea. And if you’re going to tell me a story, I think I feel my appetite coming back.”
8
“It concerns the woman I told you about in New Orleans,” Buchanan said after ordering food. “The friend who sent me a message asking for help. The one I was supposed to meet at Café du Monde. Except she didn’t show up.”
Holly nodded. “Your former lover.”
“No. I told you we were never lovers.” Buchanan brooded. “In fact, I think that’s when a lot of my problems started. Because I didn’t commit to her.” He remembered how much he had wanted to, how much he had denied himself for the sake of duty.
Holly’s face didn’t change expression. But her eyes did, narrowing, assessing him.
“One of the last things I told her,” Buchanan said, “was that she couldn’t be in love with me because she didn’t know me—she only knew who I pretended to be.”
Holly’s eyes narrowed more. “It certainly seems you never stop acting. For example, right now. I can’t tell if this is the truth or more manipulation.”
“Oh, it’s the truth. Even if you don’t believe it, it’s the truth. This is one of the most honest things you’ll ever hear from me. I want to help her because I want to be the person I was when I knew her. I want to choose to be somebody and to stay that somebody. I want to stop changing. I want to be consistent.”
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