Assumed Identity

by David Morrell

  Five o'clock.

  Six o'clock.

  Seven o'clock.

  The room was in darkness. Buchanan kept staring, seeing nothing.

  Tommy was dead.

  And he had killed him.

  Blood.

  He'd clutched Tommy's stake-impaled body, trying to tug him free.

  Tommy's cheeks had been terribly pale. His breathing had sounded like bubbles. His moan had been liquid, as if he were gargling. But what he gargled hadn't been salt water. It had been.

  Blood.

  'Hurts. Hurts so bad.'

  'Tommy, oh, God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.'

  Push him.

  Just horsing around.

  Didn't think Tommy would lose his balance and fall.

  Didn't know anything was down in the pit.

  A construction site. A summer evening. Two brothers on an adventure.

  'Hurts so bad.'

  'Tommy!'

  'Doesn't hurt anymore.'

  'Tommy!'

  So much blood.

  When Buchanan was fifteen.

  Still catatonic, sitting bolt-straight on the sofa, staring at the darkness, Buchanan felt as if a portion of his mind were raising arms, trying to ward off the terrible memory. Although he was chilled, sweat beaded his brow. Too much, he thought. He hadn't remembered in such detail since the days and nights before Tommy's funeral and the unendurable summer that followed, the guilt-laden, seemingly endless season of grief that finally had ended when.

  Buchanan's mind darted and burrowed, seeking any protection it could from the agonizing memory of Tommy's blood on his clothes, of the stake projecting from Tommy's chest.

  'It's all my fault.'

  'No, you didn't mean to do it,' Buchanan's mother had said.

  'I killed him.'

  'It was an accident,' Buchanan's mother had said.

  But Buchanan hadn't believed her, and he was certain that he'd have gone insane if he hadn't found a means to protect himself from his mind. The answer turned out to be amazingly simple, wonderfully self-evident. Become someone else.

  Dissociative personality. Buchanan imagined himself as his favorite sports and rock stars, as certain movie and television actors whom he idolized. He suddenly became a reader - of novels into which he could escape and become the hero with whom he so desperately wanted to identify. In high school that autumn, he discovered the drama club, subconsciously motivated by the urge to perfect the skills he would need to maintain his protective assumed identities, the personas that would allow him to escape from himself.

  Then after high school, perhaps to prove himself, perhaps to punish himself, perhaps to court an early death, he'd joined the military, not just any branch, the Army, so he could enter Special Forces. The name said it all - to be special. He wanted to sacrifice himself, to atone. And one thing more - if he saw enough death, perhaps one death in particular would no longer haunt him.

  As the man who called himself Alan had indicated, Buchanan's Special Operations trainers realized what a prize they had when their computer responded to a survey by choosing Buchanan's profile. A man who desperately needed to assume identities. An operative who wouldn't be wearied but on the contrary would flourish for long periods under deep cover.

  Now they were stripping away his barriers, taking away his shields, exposing the guilt that had compelled him to be an operative and that he had managed to subdue.

  Buchanan? Who the hell was Buchanan? Jim Crawford was a man he understood. So was Ed Potter. And Victor Grant. And all the others. He'd invented detailed personal backgrounds for each of them. Some of his characters were blessed (in Richard Dana's case literally, for Dana believed that he was the recipient of the grace of God as a born-again Christian). Others carried burdens (Ed Potter's wife had divorced him for a man who earned more money). Buchanan knew how each of them dressed (Robert Chambers was formal and always wore a suit and tie). He knew which kinds of music each liked (Peter Sloane was crazy about country and western), and which foods (Jim Crawford hated cauliflower), and which types of women (Richard Dana liked brunettes), and which types of movies (Brian MacDonald could watch Singin' in the Rain every night of the week), and.

  Who the hell was Buchanan? It was significant that Buchanan and his controllers always thought of him in terms of his last name. Impersonal. Objective. After eight years of having impersonated -correction, of having been - hundreds of people, Buchanan had no idea of how to impersonate himself. What were his speech mannerisms? Did he have a distinctive walk? Which types of clothes, food, music, et cetera, did he prefer? Was he religious? Did he have any hobbies? Favorite cities? What came naturally?

  Christ, he hadn't been Buchanan in so long that he didn't know who Buchanan was. He didn't want to know who Buchanan was. The story of the donkey between the two bales of hay was his story. He was caught between the identity of Victor Grant, who was dead, and the identity of Don Colton, who wasn't formed. With no way to turn, with nothing to help him choose whom to be, he was paralyzed.

  Self-defense made the difference - protective instincts. Sitting rigidly in the quiet, dark room, he heard a noise, the scrape of a key in the front door's lock. A portion of his mind jolted him. His body was no longer cold and numb. His lethargy drained, dispelled by adrenaline.

  The doorknob creaked. As someone in the outside hallway slowly pushed the door open, the glare of fluorescent lights spilling in, Buchanan was already off the sofa. He darted to the left and disappeared into the darkness of the bedroom. He heard the flick of a switch and stepped back farther into the bedroom as light filled the living room. He heard a metallic scratch as someone removed the key from the lock. He heard a soft thunk as the door was gently shut.

  Cautious footsteps made a brushing sound as they inched across the carpet.

  He tensed.

  'Buchanan?' The voice was familiar. It belonged to the portly man who called himself Alan. But the voice sounded wary, troubled. 'Buchanan?'

  Uneasy, Buchanan didn't want to respond to that name. Nonetheless he showed himself, careful to keep partially in the shadows of the bedroom.

  Alan turned, his expression a mixture of concern and surprise.

  'Don't you believe in knocking?' Buchanan asked.

  'Well.' Alan rubbed his right hand against his brown-checkered sport coat, awkward. 'I thought you might be sleeping and.'

  'So you decided to make yourself at home until I woke up?'

  'No,' Alan said. 'Uh, not exactly.'

  'Then what exactly?' The man was normally confident to the point of being brusque, but now he was behaving out of character. What was going on?

  'I just thought I'd check on you to make sure you were all right.'

  'Well, why wouldn't I be?'

  'You, uh, you were upset in the car and.'

  'Yes? And what?'

  'Nothing. I just. I guess I made a mistake.'

  Buchanan stepped completely from the darkness of the bedroom. Approaching, he noticed Alan direct his gaze furtively, nervously, toward a section of the ceiling in the far right corner.

  Ah, Buchanan thought. So the place is wired - and not just with microphones.

  With hidden cameras. Needle-nosed.

  Yesterday when Buchanan had arrived, he'd felt relieved to have reached a haven. There'd been no reason for him to suspect the intentions of his controllers and hence no reason for him to check the apartment to see if it was bugged. Later, after last night's conversation with Alan, Buchanan had felt disturbed, preoccupied by the postcard, by the unexpected echo of one of his lives six years ago. It hadn't occurred to him to check the apartment. What would have been the point? Aside from the man who called himself Alan, there was no one to talk to and thus nothing for hidden microphones to overhear.

  But video surveillance was a different matter. And far more serious, Buchanan thought. Something about me spooks them enough that they want to keep extremely close tabs on me.

  But what? What would spook them?

/>   For starters, being catatonic all afternoon and half the evening. I must have scared the hell out of whoever's watching me. They sent Alan down to see if I'd cracked up. The way Alan keeps pawing at his sport coat. After I bruised his arm this morning, he's probably deciding whether I'm disturbed enough that he'll have to draw his handgun.

  Meanwhile the cameras are transmitting every move I make.

  But Alan doesn't want me to know that.

  Buchanan felt liberated. The sense of being on-stage gave him the motivation he needed to act the part of himself.

  'I knocked,' Alan said. 'I guess you didn't hear me. Since you're not supposed to leave the apartment, I wondered if something had happened to you.' Alan seemed less nervous now that he'd come up with a believable cover story. He gestured with growing confidence. 'That injury to your head. Maybe you'd hurt it again. Maybe you'd slipped in the shower or something. So I decided to let myself in and check. I debrief operatives here a lot, so I always have a key.'

  'I guess I ought to be flattered that you care.'

  'Hey, you're not the easiest guy to get along with.' Alan rubbed his right elbow. 'But I do my job and look after the people assigned to me.'

  'Listen,' Buchanan said. 'About what happened in the car this morning. I'm sorry.'

  Alan shrugged.

  'A lot's been happening. I guess I'm having trouble getting used to not being under pressure.'

  Again Alan shrugged. 'Understandable. Sometimes an operative still feels the pressure even when it's gone.'

  'Speaking of which.'

  'What?'

  'Pressure.'

  Buchanan felt it in his abdomen. He pointed toward the bathroom, went in, shut the door, and emptied his bladder.

  He assumed that the bathroom, like the other rooms in the apartment, would have a needle-nosed camera concealed in a wall. But whether he was being observed while he urinated made no difference to him. Even if he had felt self-conscious, he would never have permitted himself to show it.

  And even if his bladder hadn't insisted, he would still have gone into the bathroom.

  As a diversion.

  Because he needed time to be away from Alan. He needed time to think.

  13

  Here's the postcard I never thought I'd send. I hope you meant your promise. The last time and place. Counting on you. PLEASE.

  Buchanan stepped from the bathroom, its toilet flushing. 'Last night you mentioned something about R and R.'

  Alan squinted, suspicious. 'That's right.'

  'Well, you call this being on R and R? Being caged in here?'

  'I told you Don Colton's supposed to be invisible. If you start wandering in and out, the neighbors will think you're him, and when the next Don Colton shows up, they'll get suspicious.'

  'But what if I'm out of here? Me. Buchanan. A furlough. I haven't had one in eight years. Who'd notice? Who'd care?'

  'Furlough?'

  'Under my own name. Might do me some good to be myself for a change.'

  Alan cocked his head, squinting, nonetheless betraying his interest.

  'Next week, I'm supposed to go back to that doctor,' Buchanan said. 'By then, maybe your people and the colonel will have decided what to do with me.'

  'I don't have the authority to make that decision alone.'

  'Talk with the colonel,' Buchanan said.

  Alan continued to look interested. 'Where would you go? Since you don't have a passport, it can't be out of the country.'

  'I wouldn't want to leave the country anyhow. Not that far. South. New Orleans. Two days from now is Halloween. A person can have a damned good time in New Orleans on Halloween.'

  'I heard that,' Alan said. 'In fact, I heard that a person can have a damned good time in New Orleans anytime.'

  Buchanan nodded. His request would be granted.

  But he wouldn't be going as himself.

  No way, he thought.

  He'd be stepping back six years.

  He'd be reinventing himself to be the person he was then. A hundred lifetimes ago.

  A once-happy man who liked jazz, mint juleps, and red beans with rice.

  A charter pilot named Peter Lang who'd had the tragic love affair of his life.

  14

  Here's the postcard I never thought I'd send.

  SEVEN

  1

  Pilots - especially when being a pilot is not their true occupation and they need to establish an assumed identity - ought to fly. Instead Buchanan-Lang took the train to New Orleans.

  That method of travel had several advantages. One was that he found it relaxing. Another was that it was private inasmuch as he'd been able to get a sleeper compartment. Still another was that it took a while, filling the time. After all, he didn't have anything to do until Halloween the next evening. Certainly he could have spent the day sight-seeing in New Orleans. But the fact was, he was quite familiar with New Orleans, its docks, the French Quarter, the Garden District, Lake Pontchartrain, Antoine's restaurant, Preservation Hall, and most of all, the exotic cemeteries. Peter Lang had a fascination with exotic cemeteries. He visited them whenever he could. Buchanan didn't allow himself to analyze the implications.

  However, the major reason for taking the train instead of flying was that there wasn't any metal detector and X-ray security at train stations. Thus he could bring the Beretta 9-millimeter pistol that Jack Doyle had given him in Fort Lauderdale. It was wedged between two shirts and two changes of underwear, along with Victor Grant's passport, next to the toilet kit in the small, canvas, travel bag that Buchanan had been carrying with him since Florida. As his confusion about his employers and about himself continued to aggravate him, he was grateful that he'd lied about the passport and that he hadn't told anyone about the handgun. The passport and the gun gave him options. They allowed him potential freedom. That he'd never before lied to a debriefer should perhaps have troubled him. It should perhaps have warned him that he was more disturbed than he realized, that the blow to his head had been more serious than he knew. But as he sat next to the window of his locked compartment, listening to the clack-clack-clack of the wheels on the rails, watching the brilliant autumn colors of the Virginia countryside, he persistently rubbed his aching head and was grateful that he hadn't tried to conceal the handgun somewhere in Don Colton's apartment. If he had, the cameras would have exposed him. As it was, his story had evidently been convincing. Otherwise his controllers wouldn't have given him money as well as ID in his real name and then have allowed him to take this brief trip.

  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.

  2


  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 plainclothed Special Forces advisors 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.