David Morrell - Assumed Identity

He’d bought a paperback novel before boarding the train at Washington’s Union Station, but he barely glanced at it while the train continued south. He just kept massaging his forehead, partially because of pain and partially because of concentration, while he stared out the window at intermittent towns and cities, hills and farmland.

Peter Lang. He had to remember everything about him. He had to become Peter Lang. Pretending to be a pilot wasn’t a problem, for Buchanan was a pilot. It was one of several skills that he’d acquired while he was being trained. Almost without exception, the occupations he pretended to have were occupations with which his employers had arranged to give him some familiarity. In a few cases, he had genuine expertise.

But what was a problem was reacquiring Peter Lang’s attitude, his mannerisms, his personality. Buchanan had never kept notes about his numerous characters. To document an impersonation was foolish. Such documents might eventually be used against him. On principle, a paper trail was never a good idea. So he’d been forced to rely on his memory, and there had been many assignments, especially those in which he was meeting various contacts and had to switch back and forth between identities several times during one day, when his ability to recall and adapt had been taxed to the maximum. He’d suffered the constant worry that he would switch characters unintentionally, that he would behave like character X in front of a contact when he was supposed to behave like character Y.

Peter Lang.

Buchanan had been in New Orleans, posing as a charter pilot who worked for an oil-exploration company, supposedly flying technicians and equipment to various sites in Central America. His actual mission, however, had been to fly plainclothes Special Forces advisers to secret airfields in the jungles of Nicaragua, where they would train Contra rebels to battle the Marxist regime. A year earlier, in 1986, when Eugene Hasenfus had been shot down over Nicaragua while attempting to drop munitions to the rebels, Hasenfus had told his captors that he assumed he had been working for the CIA. The trouble was that the United States Congress had specifically forbidden the CIA to have anything to do with Nicaragua. The resultant media exposure created a political scandal in which the CIA repeatedly denied any connection with Hasenfus. Since intermediaries had been used to hire him and since Hasenfus later repudiated his story, the CIA avoided blame, but Nicaragua continued to be a sensitive political subject, even though President Reagan had subsequently issued an executive order that overrode the congressional ban on U.S. aid to the Contras. However, the resumption of aid was not supposed to include American soldiers on Nicaraguan soil attempting to topple the Nicaraguan government. Inasmuch as blatant military interference was potentially an act of war, the soldiers Buchanan flew to Nicaragua were, like Buchanan, dressed in civilian clothes. Also like Buchanan, they had false identities and could not be traced to the U.S. military.

Because New Orleans and Miami were the two cities most associated with covert aid to the Contras, investigative journalists showed great interest in private firms that sent aircraft to Latin American countries. A plane scheduled to deliver legitimate merchandise to El Salvador, Honduras, or Costa Rica might make an unscheduled, illegal stop in Nicaragua, leaving men instead of equipment. Any journalist who could prove this unauthorized degree of U.S. military involvement would be a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Thus Buchanan had had to be especially careful about establishing his cover. One of his techniques had been to ask his employers to provide him with a wife, a woman who was in business with her husband, who liked to fly and could speak Spanish, who would ideally be Hispanic and who would thus not attract attention if she flew with her husband on his frequent trips to Latin America. Buchanan’s intention was to deceive curious journalists into doubting that he had connections with Nicaragua. After all, they might think, who’d be callous enough to fly his wife into a war zone?

The wife his employers had supplied to him was indeed Hispanic. A spirited, attractive woman named Juana Mendez, she’d been twenty-five. Her parents were Mexicans who’d become U.S. citizens. A sergeant in Army Intelligence, she’d been raised in San Antonio, Texas, a city that Buchanan’s persona, Peter Lang, claimed as his hometown as well. Buchanan had spent several weeks in San Antonio prior to his assignment in order to familiarize himself with the city, lest someone test his cover story by trying to manipulate him into saying things about San Antonio that weren’t accurate. Juana’s constant presence with him would make it more difficult for anyone to question him about San Antonio. If he didn’t know the answer, if he hesitated, Juana would answer for him.

Being Peter Lang had been one of Buchanan’s longest assignments-four months. During that time, he and Juana had lived together in a small apartment on the second story of a quaint clapboard building with ornate wrought-iron railings and a pleasant flower-filled courtyard on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter. Both he and Juana had known the dangers of becoming emotionally involved with an undercover partner. They had tried to make their public gestures of affection strictly professional. They had done their best not to be affected by their enforced private intimacy, eating together, combining laundry, using the same bathroom, sharing the same sleeping quarters. They didn’t have intercourse. They weren’t that undisciplined. But they might as well have, for the effect was the same. Sexual activity was only a part-and often a small part, and sometimes no part-of a successful marriage. In their four months together, Buchanan and Juana portrayed their roles so well that they finally admitted awkwardly to each other that they did feel married. In the night, while he’d listened to her softly exhale in sleep, he had felt intoxicated by her smell. It reminded him of cinnamon.

Shared stress is a powerful bonder. On one occasion, during a firefight in Nicaragua, Buchanan would never have been able to reach his plane and maneuver it for a takeoff from the primitive airstrip in the jungle if Juana hadn’t used an assault rifle to give him covering fire. Through the canopy of his slowly turning aircraft, he had watched Juana run from the jungle toward the passenger door he had opened. She had whirled toward bushes, fired her M-16, then raced onward. Bullets from the jungle had torn up dirt ahead of her. She had whirled and fired again. Revving the engines, he had managed to get the plane in position and then had raised his own M-16 to shoot through the open hatch and give her covering fire. Bullets had struck the side of the plane. As she lunged toward the hatch, he’d released the brakes and started across the bumpy clearing. She’d scrambled in, braced herself at the open hatch, and fired repeatedly at the jungle. When she emptied her weapon, she’d picked up his, emptying it as well. Then grabbing a seat belt so she wouldn’t fall out, she had laughed as the plane bounced twice and rose abruptly, skimming treetops.

To depend on someone for your life makes you feel close to that person. Buchanan had experienced that emotion in the company of men. But that four-month assignment had been the first time he had felt it with a woman, and in the end, he was a better actor than he wanted to be, for he fell in love with her.

He shouldn’t have. He struggled desperately with himself to repress the feeling. Nonetheless, he failed. Even then, he didn’t have sex with her. Despite powerful temptation, they didn’t violate their professional ethics by getting physically involved. But they did break another rule, one that warned them not to confuse their roles with reality, although Buchanan didn’t believe in that rule. His strength as an imposter was precisely that he did confuse his roles with reality. As long as he was portraying someone, that person was reality.