David Morrell - Assumed Identity

“That’s really swell. Listen, buddy, I know it’s getting late, but I haven’t seen you in I can’t remember when. What do you say? Have you eaten yet? Do you feel like getting together?”

“No,” Buchanan said, “I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Well, why don’t I come over?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Great, Don. Can’t wait to see you. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes. Think about where you want to eat.”

“Someplace that’s dark and not too crowded. Maybe with a piano player.”

“You’re reading my mind, Don, reading my mind.”

“Be seeing you.” Buchanan set down the phone and massaged his aching temples. The man’s reference to postcards and his own reference to a piano player had been the recognition sign and countersign that the note he’d destroyed at the Library of Congress had told him to use if he was contacted. His debriefing would soon begin.

Yet another.

His temples continued to ache. He thought about washing his face but first drank his glass of bourbon.

Fifteen minutes later, precisely on schedule, the doorbell rang. Buchanan peered through the door’s security eye and saw a fortyish, short-haired, portly man in a brown-checkered sport coat. The voice on the phone had not been familiar, so Buchanan wasn’t surprised that he’d never seen this man before, assuming that the voice on the phone belonged to this man. All the same, Buchanan had hoped that one of the controllers he’d dealt with previously would show up. He’d been through too many changes.

He opened the door warily. After all, he couldn’t take for granted that the man was his contact. But the man immediately allayed his suspicions by using the same cheery tone that Buchanan had heard earlier. “Don, you look fabulous. In your postcards, you didn’t say you’d lost weight.”

“My diet didn’t agree with me. Come on in, Alan. I’ve been thinking, maybe we shouldn’t go out to eat. I’m not in the mood for a piano player.”

“Whatever.” The man who’d earlier identified himself as Alan, undoubtedly a pseudonym, carried a metal briefcase into the apartment and waited while Buchanan locked the door. Then the man’s demeanor changed, as if he was an actor who’d stepped out of character when he walked off a stage. His manner became businesslike. “The apartment was swept this afternoon. There aren’t any bugs. How are you feeling?”

Buchanan shrugged. The truth was, he felt exhausted, but he’d been trained not to indicate weakness.

“Is your wound healing properly?” the man asked.

“The infection’s gone.”

“Good,” the man said flatly. “What about your skull? I’m told you hit it on a-”

“Stupid accident,” Buchanan said.

“The report I received mentioned a concussion.”

Buchanan nodded.

“And a skull fracture,” the man said.

Buchanan nodded again, the movement intensifying his headache. “A depressed skull fracture. A small section of bone on the inside was pushed against the brain. That’s what caused the concussion. It’s not like I’ve got a crack in the bone. It’s not that serious. In Fort Lauderdale, I was kept in the hospital overnight for observation. Then the doctor let me go. He wouldn’t have let me go if-”

The portly man who called himself Alan sat on the sofa but never took his gaze from Buchanan. “That’s what the report says. The report also says you’ll need another checkup, another CAT scan, to find out if the bruise on your brain has shrunk.”

“Would I be walking around if my brain was still swollen?”

“I don’t know.” The man continued to assess Buchanan. “Would you? Agents from Special Operations have a can-do attitude. Problems that would slow someone else down don’t seem to bother you.”

“No. The mission comes first. If I think an injury impairs my ability to perform the mission, I say so.”

“Commendable. And if you thought you needed some time off, you’d say that, too?”

“Of course. Nobody turns down R and R.”

The man didn’t say anything, just studied him.

To change the subject as much as to relieve his curiosity, Buchanan asked, “What happened in Fort Lauderdale after I left? Was the situation dealt with to everyone’s satisfaction? Were the photographs-?”

The man lowered his gaze, worked the combination locks on his briefcase, and opened it. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” The man pulled out a folder. “We have some paperwork to take care of.”

Uneasy, Buchanan sat across from him. His instincts troubled him. It might have been the consequence of fatigue, or perhaps it was due to the aftermath of stress. For whatever reason, there was something about the man’s attitude that made Buchanan uncomfortable.

And it wasn’t just that the man was brusque. In his eight years of working deep cover, Buchanan had dealt with controllers of various types, some of whom had a manner that would disqualify them from a popularity contest. But being personable wasn’t a requirement for the job. Being thorough was, and sometimes there wasn’t time to say things politely, and it wasn’t smart to establish a relationship with someone whom the odds were you would never see again.

Buchanan had learned that the hard way over the years. In his numerous assumed identities, he’d occasionally found that he felt close to someone, to Jack and Cindy Doyle, for example. As much as he guarded against that happening, nonetheless it sometimes did, and it made Buchanan feel hollow after he moved on. Thus he could readily understand if this controller didn’t want to conduct the debriefing on anything but an objective, unemotional basis.

That wasn’t it, though. That wasn’t what made Buchanan feel uncomfortable. It was something else, and the best he could do was attribute it to his experience with Bailey, to an instinct that warned him to be extra cautious.

“Here’s my signed receipt,” the portly man who called himself Alan said. “Now you can give me Victor Grant’s ID.”

Buchanan made a snap decision then. He didn’t trust this man. “I don’t have it.”

“What?” The man looked up from the receipt.

“I had to abandon the ID in the car when I drove it into the water in Fort Lauderdale. . so the authorities would have a way to identify the driver after they couldn’t find a body. . so they’d decide Victor Grant was dead.”

“Everything? You left everything? ”

“Driver’s license. Credit card. Social Security card. The works. I had to leave them in a wallet in a jacket so they wouldn’t float away. And I had to leave all of them. The police would have thought it strange if all they found was a driver’s license.”

“But the passport, Buchanan. I’m talking about the passport. You wouldn’t have left the passport. You know that’s the ID we care about. Anybody with a brain can arrange to get a fake driver’s license. Who cares if the cops get their hands on it? But a fake passport, a first-class fake passport, hell, better than that because the passport blank came from the State Department. If the police had an expert study that passport, there’d be all kinds of questions that the people at State couldn’t answer. And then maybe the questions would come in our direction.”

“I had to leave it,” Buchanan lied. The passport was, in fact, in the bedroom, in a small travel bag that he’d bought along with a toilet kit and a few spare clothes before leaving Florida. The travel bag also contained the handgun that Jack Doyle had given him. Buchanan wasn’t about to tell this man about the handgun, either.

He continued, “If the authorities did a thorough investigation of Victor Grant, they’d find out I’d been in Mexico. They’d find out I’d shown my passport down there. So they’d have to ask themselves, Where is it now? They’ve got my wallet. They’ve got my suitcase-I left it in the trunk of the car. They’ve got all of Victor Grant’s possessions. Except they don’t have his body and they don’t have his passport? No way. A good detective might decide that Victor Grant faked his death, then walked away with his passport, the only identification he’d need if he wanted to get out of the country. But since I left the passport in the jacket with my wallet, the authorities have one less detail to trouble them.”