David Morrell - Assumed Identity

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.

The large blue helicopter cast a streaking shadow over the dense Yucatan 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 dis appearance. 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.”

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 Gallery, 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.