Assumed Identity Read online

  Buchanan proceeded across the room, noting the dust on the sofa and the coffee table, further evidence that Juana hadn't been here in some time. He glanced into the kitchen, turned on its light, and assessed its neat appearance, its minimum of appliances. Remote, austere, the place gave Buchanan a sense of loneliness. It made him feel sorry for her.

  Down a hallway, the first door he came to - on the left, facing the river - was an office. When Buchanan turned on the overhead light, he saw that here, too, everything was kept to a minimum: a metal filing cabinet, a swivel chair, a wooden table upon which sat a computer, a laser printer, a modem, a telephone, a goose-neck lamp, a yellow note pad, and a jar filled with pencils and pens. Otherwise, the room was bare. No rug. No pictures. Impersonal.

  He wondered what the sniper would be thinking in the misty darkness outside. How would the man react as he watched various lights come on in the house? Despite the instructions that the man had been given, would he come down to investigate?

  Buchanan opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and immediately two things became important to him. The first was that each file had a stiff folder with hooks on each side that suspended the file rigidly on metal tracks along each side at the top of the drawer. The second was that the files were arranged alphabetically but that the files in A to the middle of D were bunched together, separated by a slight gap from the rest of the files that continued D through to L. The rigid hooks on each side of the neighboring files prevented them from expanding to fill the gap. Obviously, one of the D files had been removed. Possibly Juana had done it. Possibly an intruder who'd been searching as Buchanan was. No way to tell.

  Buchanan opened the second drawer, found the files marked M through to Z, and noticed a slight gap where a 'I file appeared to have been removed. D and T. Those were the only two apparent omissions. Buchanan thought about it as he opened the bottom drawer and discovered a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The basic necessities, he thought.

  What did Juana do for a living? Her parents had said that she was involved in private security. That kind of work would be a logical progression from what Juana had done in military intelligence. But private security could mean anything from doing risk assessments to installing intrusion detectors to providing physical protection. She might be a freelance or work for a major corporation.

  He shut the bottom drawer, reopened the top one, and began to read some of the files. A pattern became obvious. Juana's principal activity had been to act as a protective escort for business women, female politicians and entertainers, or the wives of their male equivalents, primarily when they traveled to Spanish-speaking countries or to cities in America that had a sizeable Hispanic population. The logic was clear. A protector had to blend with the local population. Because Juana was Hispanic, she would lose considerable effectiveness in an environment in which her Latin facial characteristics and skin color attracted attention. There wasn't any point in her working in Africa, the Orient, the Mideast or northern Europe, for example. For that matter, even some of the northern United States. But Spain and Latin America were ideal for her. With that kind of travel, it wasn't any wonder that she stayed away from home for months at a time. Possibly her absence could be easily explained. Possibly she was merely on an assignment.

  Then why the postcard? Why did she need my help?

  Something to do with a job she was on? She might have wanted to hire me.

  The notion that her interest in him would have been professional and not personal made Buchanan feel hollow. But only for a moment. He quickly reminded himself that a request for professional help would not have required so unusual and secretive a means of contacting him.

  And snipers wouldn't be lying in wait to kill her.

  No. Juana was in trouble, and even if she'd been away on a lengthy assignment, she wouldn't have neglected to phone her parents, certainly not for nine months in a row. Not willingly.

  Something was stopping her. Either she wasn't physically capable of doing it, or else she didn't want to risk involving her parents in what had happened to her.

  At the back of each file, Buchanan found itemized statements, copies of bills submitted and checks received. He learned that Juana's business had been quite successful. She'd been earning fees that ranged from five thousand dollars for consultations to ten thousand dollars for two-week escort jobs to a hundred thousand dollars for a two-month protective assignment in Argentina. A note in the file indicated that there had evidently been some shooting in the latter case. Protection was a demanding, sophisticated occupation for those who knew what it truly entailed. The best operatives were paid accordingly. Even so, Juana had been unusually successful. Buchanan made a rough estimate that she'd been earning close to a half-million dollars a year.

  And living this simply, paradoxically without security devices? What had she been doing with the money? Had she been saving it, investing it, planning to retire in her mid-thirties? Again, Buchanan had no way to tell. He searched the office but didn't find a bank book, a statement from a brokerage firm, or any other sign of where she might have placed her money. Now that he thought about it, there hadn't been any mail outside or on the coffee table. Juana must have told the post office to hold it for her. Or else her parents had been picking it up. Before they'd come out here tonight, Anita had mentioned that she and Pedro sometimes drove out to inspect the place. Buchanan made a mental note to ask them about her mail, about whether she ever received statements from financial institutions.

  At once the room appeared to sway, although actually it was his legs that caused the effect. They were wobbly. Exhausted, he sat in the tilt-back chair and rubbed his throbbing temples. The last time he'd slept through the night had been forty-eight hours ago, but that had been in the hospital, and even then, his sleep had not been continuous, the nurses waking him intermittently to check his vital signs. Since then, he'd slept for a few hours at the motel in Beaumont, Texas, and had a few naps at freeway rest stops en route to San Antonio. The knife wound in his side ached, its stitches making him itchy. The almost-healed bullet wound in his shoulder ached as well. His eyes were gritty from lack of sleep.

  The files, he thought. Whoever was concerned enough to want to find Juana and kill her would have searched her home in hopes of discovering a clue about where she was hiding. If they wanted to kill her because she knew too much about them, they would have searched for and removed any evidence that linked her with them.

  A name that begins with D. Another that begins with T. Those had been the two files that were obviously missing. Of course, the files might not be missing at all. Juana might have caused the gap in the sequence of the files when she replaced two files, scrunching a group of other files together in order to make room, leaving a space where her fingers had been.

  But I've got to start somewhere, Buchanan thought. I have to assume that two files are missing and that they're important. He leaned back in the chair, hearing it creak, thinking that the pages in the files looked like computer printouts, wondering if the files might be in the computer.

  And realized that the creak he had heard had not been from the chair but from the hallway.

  15

  Slowly Buchanan turned his head.

  A man stood in the doorway. Mid-thirties. Five-foot-ten. A hundred and fifty pounds. His hair was sandy and extremely short. His face, like his build, was thin, but not unhealthily so; something about him suggested he was a jogger. He wore cowboy boots, jeans, a saddle-shaped belt buckle, a faded denim shirt, and a jeans jacket. The latter was slightly too large for him and emphasized his thinness.

  'Find what you're looking for?' The man's flat, mid-Atlantic accent contrasted with his cowboy clothes.

  'Not yet.' Buchanan lowered his hands from where he'd been massaging his temples. 'I've still got a few places to check.'

  I locked the door after I came in, he thought. I didn't hear anybody follow me. How did-?

  This son of a bitch hasn't been watching from ou
tside. He's been hiding somewhere in the house.

  'Such as?' The man's hands stayed by his side. 'What places haven't you checked?'

  'The computer records.'

  'Well, don't let me hold you up.' The man's cheeks were dark with beard stubble.

  'Right.' Buchanan pressed the computer's ON button.

  As the computer's fan began to whir, the man said, 'You look like hell, buddy.'

  'I've had a couple of hard days. Mostly I need sleep.'

  'I'm not having any picnic, hanging around here, either. Nothing to do but wait. Where I bunked.' The man pointed toward the next room down the hall. 'Weird. No wonder the woman had it locked. Probably didn't want her parents to see what she had in there. At first, I thought it was body parts.'

  'Body parts?' Buchanan frowned.

  'The stuff in that room. Belongs in a horror movie. Fucking bizarre. You mean you weren't told?'

  What in God's name is he talking about? Buchanan wondered. 'I guess they didn't figure I needed to know.'

  'Seems strange.'

  'The stuff in that room?'

  'No. That you weren't told,' the man said. 'If they sent you out here to take another look for something to tell us where the target is, the first thing they'd have done was prepare you for weird shit.'

  'All they mentioned were the files.'

  'The computer's waiting.'

  'Right.' Buchanan didn't want to take his gaze away from the assassin, but he wasn't being given a choice. If Buchanan didn't seem to care about business, the man would become more suspicious than he already seemed.

  Or maybe the man's suspicion was only something that Buchanan imagined.

  On the computer screen, the cursor flashed where a symbol asked the user what program was to be activated.

  'What's your name?' the killer asked.

  'Brian MacDonald.' Buchanan immediately reverted to that identity, the one he'd assumed prior to becoming ex-DEA operative Ed Potter and going to Cancun, where all his recent troubles had started.

  Brian MacDonald was supposed to have been a computer programmer, and in support of that identity, Buchanan had received instruction in that subject.

  'Having trouble getting into the computer?' the killer asked. 'It didn't give me any trouble when they ordered me to erase a couple of files. You know about that, right? They told you I erased a couple of files?'

  'Yes, but those files aren't what interest me.'

  The cursor kept flashing next to the program-prompt sign. Juana's printed-out files had not been in a spreadsheet format but rather in standard prose paragraphs.

  A word-processing program. But which one?

  Buchanan-MacDonald typed DIR. At once the disc drive made clicking sounds, and a list of the symbols for the computer's programs appeared on the screen.

  One of those symbols was WS, the abbreviation for a word-processing program known as WordStar.

  Buchanan-MacDonald exited the list of the computer's programs and typed WS after the symbol that asked him what program he wanted. The computer's hard-disc drive made more clicking sounds. A list of other files appeared on the screen.

  DIRECTORY OF DRIVE C:

  A 't B't C't D't E't F't G't H't I't J'tK'tL'tM'tN't0'tP'tQ'tR't S't T't U't V 't W't X't Y't Z't AUTOEXEC.BAK.Ik AUTOEXEC.BAT.lk

  Buchanan-MacDonald knew that AUTOEXEC.BAK was a precautionary backup for AUTOEXEC.BAT, a program that allowed the computer's user to switch from one file to another. The designation '.Ik' merely indicated the small amount of memory space that this program used. As for the alphabetical series, Juana had evidently subdivided her clients' files into subdirectories governed by the first letter of each client's last name.

  Or so Buchanan guessed. At the moment, he was intensely preoccupied by the presence of the man in the doorway. The killer's breathing seemed to have become loud, strident, as if he were disturbed by something.

  'Having problems?' the killer asked. 'Don't you know what to do next? Do I have to show you?'

  'No,' Buchanan said. If he'd been alone, he would have accessed the subdirectories for D and T. But he didn't dare. If the killer had erased files in those subdirectories as he'd earlier mentioned, the man would wonder why Buchanan was interested in those same groups of names.

  'But what I want to do next,' Buchanan said, 'is get something for this damned headache.' Slowly he stood, using his left hand to massage the back of his neck. 'Does the woman have any aspirin around here?'

  The killer stepped slightly backward. He still kept both hands at his sides, not yet fully alarmed. But Buchanan, his heart pounding, had a sense that a crisis was about to explode.

  Or it might have been that the man wasn't stepping backward defensively but rather to let Buchanan go past him and into the bathroom.

  It was extremely hard to know.

  'Bufferin,' the killer said. 'The medicine cabinet. Top shelf.'

  'Great.'

  But the man stepped out of the way yet again as Buchanan approached him, and obviously this time he was making sure that Buchanan didn't come within an arm's length of him.

  The bathroom - across from the computer room - was dusty. White walls. White floor. White shower curtain. Simple. Basic.

  Buchanan had no choice except to pretend to look for the aspirins, even though his headache was the last thing he now cared about. He opened the medicine cabinet, found the aspirin, swallowed two and returned to the computer room. It was empty.

  He heard a buzz. Surprised, he stared down at the cellular phone that he had taken from the van and attached to the left side of his belt. He'd taken that phone instead of the one in the jeep because the jeep's phone wasn't portable. This way, if Pedro and Anita needed to get in touch with Buchanan, they could use a second phone, a nonportable one, that was part of the surveillance van's instrument panel. Now Pedro or Anita was evidently calling him to warn him about something.

  Or maybe the call was from the surveillance team's controllers in Philadelphia.

  Buchanan couldn't just let it keep ringing. That would arouse even more suspicion.

  But as he reached to unhook the phone from his belt, he saw motion in the hallway. The killer appeared, and now he, too, had a cellular phone. He must have gotten it from the room where he'd been hiding.

  He didn't look happy.

  'Funny thing,' the killer said. 'I never heard of Brian MacDonald. I just called Duncan's van to make sure everything about you is on the up and up, and damned if your phone doesn't respond to his number, which tends to suggest that your phone is actually Duncan's phone, which makes me wonder why in hell-'

  While the killer talked, keeping his left hand around the cellular phone, he moved his right hand beneath his jeans jacket. As Buchanan had noticed, the jacket was slightly too large, a logical reason for which would be that the killer had a holstered handgun beneath it.

  'A coincidence,' Buchanan said. 'You're calling Duncan while somebody else is calling me. I'll show you.' He used his left hand to reach for the phone.

  The killer's eyes focused on that gesture.

  Simultaneously Buchanan shoved his right hand back beneath his sport coat, drawing his pistol from behind his belt at his spine.

  The killer's eyes widened as he yanked his own pistol from beneath his jeans jacket.

  Buchanan shot.

  The bullet hit the man's chest.

  Although the man was jolted backward, he still kept raising his weapon.

  Buchanan's second bullet hit the man's throat.

  Blood flew.

  The man was jolted farther backward.

  But his reflexes made his gunhand keep rising.

  Buchanan's third bullet hit the man's forehead.

  The impact knocked the man over. His gunhand jerked toward the ceiling. His spastic finger pulled the trigger. The pistol discharged, blowing a hole in the hallway ceiling. Plaster fell.

  The man struck the hardwood floor in the computer room. He shuddered, wheezed, and stopped moving. Blood pooled arou
nd him.

  Buchanan hurried toward the fallen man, aimed his pistol toward the man's head, kicked his gun away, and checked for life signs.

  The man's eyes were open. The pupils were dilated. They didn't respond when Buchanan shoved his fingers toward them.

  Quickly, Buchanan searched the man's clothes. All he found were a comb, coins, a handkerchief, and a wallet. He set the wallet on the table and hurried to get a small rug that he'd seen in the living room. After rolling the body onto the rug, he pulled the rug along the hallway, through the living room, and toward a back door in the kitchen.