David Morrell - Assumed Identity

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 Cancun, or when he’d injured his head while he made his escape, swimming across the channel. Perhaps when he’d been tortured in Merida 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.

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.

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.