David Morrell - Assumed Identity

Buchanan tried to look respectfully puzzled. “ Por que? ” he asked. “Why? Is something wrong?”

The officer squinted harder and pointed toward Buchanan’s right shoulder. Buchanan looked and showed no reaction, despite his shock.

Crimson soaked his serape. What he’d thought was sweat was actually blood trickling down his arm, dripping from his fingers. Jesus, he thought, when I fell on my shoulder, I must have opened the stitches.

The officer gestured toward a door. “ Venga conmigo. Usted necesita un medico. You need a doctor.”

“ Es nada. No es importante, ” Buchanan said. “It’s nothing. A small injury. The bandage needs to be changed. I’ll fix it in the bathroom and still have time to catch my plane.”

The officer placed his right hand on his holstered pistol and repeated, this time sternly, “Come with me now. ”

Buchanan obeyed, walking with the officer toward a door, trying to look relaxed, as if it were perfectly natural to have blood streaming from his shoulder. He had no hope of fleeing, certain that he’d be stopped before he could push his way through the crowd and reach an exit from the terminal. All he could do was try to bluff his way out, but he doubted that the explanation he was concocting would satisfy the officer after the officer got a look at the wound on his shoulder. There’d be questions. Plenty of questions. And perhaps the police sketch would have arrived by then, if it hadn’t already. For sure, he would not be on the 12:50 flight to Miami. So close, he thought.

Unlike the United States, where a suspect is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, Mexico bases its laws on the Napoleonic Code, in which a suspect is guilty until proven innocent. Prisoners are not warned that they have a right to remain silent or told that if they cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided. There is no habeas corpus, no right to a speedy trial. In Mexico, such notions are ludicrous. A prisoner has no rights.

Buchanan shared a mildewed, flea-infested, leaky-roofed, pocked-concrete cell that was twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide with twenty other foully clothed prisoners in what amounted to the tank for thieves and drunkards. To avoid bumping into anyone and causing an argument, Buchanan made sure he stayed in one place with his back to the wall. While the others took up every space on the floor, sleeping on soiled straw, he sank down the wall until he dozed with his head on his knees. He waited as long as he could before using the open hole in a corner that was the toilet. Mostly, despite his light-headedness, he struggled to remain on guard against an attack. As the only yanqui, he was an obvious target, and although his watch and wallet had been taken from him, his clothes and in particular his shoes were better than those of any other prisoner-hard to resist.

As it happened, a great deal of time Buchanan wasn’t in the cell, and the attacks didn’t come from his fellow prisoners but from his guards. Escorted from the cell to an interrogation room, he was pushed, tripped, and shoved down stairs. While being questioned, he was prodded by batons and beaten with rubber hoses, always in places where clothes would hide the bruises, never around the face or skull. Why his interrogators retained this degree of fastidiousness, Buchanan didn’t know. Perhaps because he was a U.S. citizen and fears about political consequences made them feel slightly constrained. They nonetheless still managed to injure his skull when it struck concrete after they knocked over the wooden chair to which they had tied him. The pain-added to the pain from the gash he’d received when he’d struck the dinghy while swimming across the channel at Cancun-made him nauseous and created a worrisome double vision. If a doctor hadn’t redressed and restitched his wounded shoulder at Merida’s jail, he probably would have died from infection and loss of blood, although of course the doctor had been supplied not out of compassion but simply for the practical reason that a dead man couldn’t answer questions. Buchanan had encountered this logic before and knew that if the interrogators received the answers they wanted, they would feel no further necessity to provide him with medical courtesies.

That was one reason-the least important-for his refusal to tell his interrogators what they wanted. The reason, of course, was that to confess would have been a violation of professional conduct. In refusing to talk, Buchanan had three advantages. First, his interrogators were employing clumsy, brutal methods, which were easier to resist than the precise application of electrical shock combined with such inhibition-reducing drugs as sodium amytal. Second, because he was already weakened by the injury to his head and the wound in his shoulder, he had a tendency to pass out quickly while being tortured, his body supplying a kind of natural anesthesia.

And third, he had a script to follow, a role to play, a scenario that gave him a way to behave. The primary rule was that if captured, he could never admit the truth. Oh, he could use portions of the truth to concoct a believable lie. But the whole truth was out of the question. For Buchanan to say that, yes, he’d killed the three Mexicans, but they were drug dealers, after all, and besides he was working under cover for a covert branch of the U.S. military would have temporarily saved his life. However, that life would not have been worth much. As an object lesson to the United States for interfering in Mexican affairs, he might have been forced to serve a lengthy sentence in a Mexican prison, and given the severity of Mexican prisons, especially for yanquis, that sentence in all probability would have been the same as a death sentence. Or if Mexico released him to the United States as a gesture of goodwill (in exchange for favors), his superiors would make his life a nightmare because he had violated his pact with them.

“Victor Grant,” an overweight, bearded interrogator with slicked-back dark hair said to Buchanan in a small, plain room that had only a bench upon which the interrogator sat and a chair upon which Buchanan was tied. The round-faced, perspiring interrogator made “Victor Grant” sound as if the name were a synonym for diarrhea.

“That’s right.” Buchanan’s throat was so dry that his voice cracked, his body so dehydrated that he’d long ago stopped sweating. One of the tight loops of the rope cut into his stitched, wounded shoulder.

“Speak Spanish, damn you!”

“But I don’t know Spanish.” Buchanan breathed. “At least, not very well.” He tried to swallow. “Just a few words.” Ignorance about Spanish was one of the characteristics he’d chosen for this persona. That way, he could always pretend that he didn’t know what he was being asked.

“ Cabron, you spoke Spanish to the emigration officer at the airport in Merida!”

“Yes. That’s true.” Buchanan’s head drooped. “A couple of simple phrases. What I call ‘survival Spanish.’ ”

“Survival?” a deep-voiced guard asked behind him, then grabbed Buchanan’s hair and jerked his head up. “If you do not want your hair pulled out, you will survive by speaking Spanish.”

“ Un poco. ” Buchanan exhaled. “A little. That’s all I know.”

“ Why did you kill those three men in Cancun? ”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anyone.”

The overweight interrogator, his uniform stained with sweat, pushed himself up from the bench, his stomach wobbling, and plodded close to Buchanan, then shoved a police sketch in front of his face. The sketch was the same that the emigration officer at Merida’s airport had noticed beside a fax machine on a desk in the room to which he had taken Buchanan to find out why he was bleeding.