Assumed Identity

by David R. Morrell

  “Gracias.” Hurry, Buchanan thought. His legs were losing their strength.

  With even greater care, she tapped keys on the computer and waited for the printer, which also seemed in slow motion, to dislodge the ticket.

  But at last Buchanan had it, saying “Gracias” again, turning away, pulling the suitcase, inching again through the crowd, this time toward the X-ray machine and the metal detector at the security checkpoint. He felt as if he struggled through a nightmare in which he stood in mud and tried to walk. His vision dimmed for a moment. Then a sudden surge of adrenaline gave him energy. With effort, he used his left hand to lift the suitcase onto the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt and proceeded through the metal detector, so off balance that he almost bumped against one of its posts. The detector made no sound. Relieved that the security officers showed no interest in him, Buchanan took his suitcase from the opposite end of the conveyor belt, set it with effort on the floor, and patiently worked his way forward through the crowd. The heat intensified his headache. Whenever someone bumped against his right shoulder, he needed all his discipline not to show how much pain the impact caused him.

  Almost there, he thought. Two more checkpoints and I’m through. He stood in a line to pass through a customs inspection. Mexico was lax about many things but not about trying to stop ancient artifacts from being smuggled out of the country.

  The haggard customs agent pointed at Buchanan’s suitcase. “Abralo. Open it.” He didn’t look happy.

  Buchanan complied, his muscles in agony.

  The agent pawed through Buchanan’s clothes, glowered when he didn’t find anything suspicious, then gestured dismissively.

  Buchanan moved onward. Only one more checkpoint, he thought. Emigration. All I have to do is hand in my tourist card, then pay the fifteen-dollar exit fee.

  And hope that the emigration officer doesn’t have a police sketch of me.

  As Buchanan moved tensely through the crowd, he heard a slight commotion behind him. Turning, he saw a tall American shove his way past an Hispanic woman and three children. The American had a salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a gaudy, red-and-yellow-splotched shirt. He held a gym bag and muttered to himself, continuing to push ahead, causing a ripple in the crowd.

  The ripple spread toward Buchanan. Trapped by people on every side, he couldn’t avoid it. All he could do was brace himself as a man was nudged against another man, who in turn was nudged against Buchanan. Buchanan’s legs were so weak that he depended on the people around him to keep him steady, but when the ripple struck him, he suddenly found that the person ahead of him had moved forward. Shoved against his back, Buchanan felt his knees bend and reached ahead to grab for someone to steady him. But at that moment, another ripple in the crowd nudged against his left shoulder. He fell, his mind so dazed that everything seemed a slow blur. When his right shoulder struck the concrete floor, the pain that soared from his wound changed his impression, however, and made everything fast and sharply focused. Sweat from his forehead spattered the concrete. He almost screamed from the impact against his wound.

  He struggled to stand, not daring to attract attention. As he came to his feet and adjusted the serape over his wound, he peered ahead through the crowd and noticed that officers at the emigration checkpoint seemed not to have cared about what had happened, concentrating only on collecting tourist cards and exit fees.

  He came closer to the checkpoint, breathing easier when he didn’t see a police sketch on the counter. But the terminal was so stifling that sweat oozed from his body, slicking his chest and his arms, beading on his palms.

  He wiped his left hand on his slacks, then reached in his shirt pocket and gave the officer a yellow card and the fifteen-dollar exit fee. The officer barely looked at him as he took the card and the money. At once, though, the officer paid more attention, squinted, frowned, and raised his hand. “Pasaporte, por favor.”

  Why? Buchanan thought in dismay. He didn’t compare my face to a sketch. Hell, I don’t even see a sketch that he can refer to. If there is a sketch, it’s back in the emigration office. But after looking at so many faces, surely the officer can’t have a clear memory of the sketch. Why on earth is he stopping me?

  Buchanan used his left hand to surrender the passport. The officer opened it, compared the photograph to Buchanan’s face, read the personal information, and frowned again at Buchanan. “Señor Grant, venga conmigo. Come with me.”

  Buchanan tried to look respectfully puzzled. “Por que?” he asked. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  The officer squinted harder and pointed toward Buchanan’s right shoulder. Buchanan looked and showed no reaction, despite his shock.

  Crimson soaked his serape. What he’d thought was sweat was actually blood trickling down his arm, dripping from his fingers. Jesus, he thought, when I fell on my shoulder, I must have opened the stitches.

  The officer gestured toward a door. “Venga conmigo. Usted necesita un medico. You need a doctor.”

  “Es nada. No es importante,” Buchanan said. “It’s nothing. A small injury. The bandage needs to be changed. I’ll fix it in the bathroom and still have time to catch my plane.”

  The officer placed his right hand on his holstered pistol and repeated, this time sternly, “Come with me now.”

  Buchanan obeyed, walking with the officer toward a door, trying to look relaxed, as if it were perfectly natural to have blood streaming from his shoulder. He had no hope of fleeing, certain that he’d be stopped before he could push his way through the crowd and reach an exit from the terminal. All he could do was try to bluff his way out, but he doubted that the explanation he was concocting would satisfy the officer after the officer got a look at the wound on his shoulder. There’d be questions. Plenty of questions. And perhaps the police sketch would have arrived by then, if it hadn’t already. For sure, he would not be on the 12:50 flight to Miami. So close, he thought.

  4

  Unlike the United States, where a suspect is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, Mexico bases its laws on the Napoleonic Code, in which a suspect is guilty until proven innocent. Prisoners are not warned that they have a right to remain silent or told that if they cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided. There is no habeas corpus, no right to a speedy trial. In Mexico, such notions are ludicrous. A prisoner has no rights.

  Buchanan shared a mildewed, flea-infested, leaky-roofed, pocked-concrete cell that was twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide with twenty other foully clothed prisoners in what amounted to the tank for thieves and drunkards. To avoid bumping into anyone and causing an argument, Buchanan made sure he stayed in one place with his back to the wall. While the others took up every space on the floor, sleeping on soiled straw, he sank down the wall until he dozed with his head on his knees. He waited as long as he could before using the open hole in a corner that was the toilet. Mostly, despite his light-headedness, he struggled to remain on guard against an attack. As the only yanquí, he was an obvious target, and although his watch and wallet had been taken from him, his clothes and in particular his shoes were better than those of any other prisoner—hard to resist.

  As it happened, a great deal of time Buchanan wasn’t in the cell, and the attacks didn’t come from his fellow prisoners but from his guards. Escorted from the cell to an interrogation room, he was pushed, tripped, and shoved down stairs. While being questioned, he was prodded by batons and beaten with rubber hoses, always in places where clothes would hide the bruises, never around the face or skull. Why his interrogators retained this degree of fastidiousness, Buchanan didn’t know. Perhaps because he was a U.S. citizen and fears about political consequences made them feel slightly constrained. They nonetheless still managed to injure his skull when it struck concrete after they knocked over the wooden chair to which they had tied him. The pain—added to the pain from the gash he’d received when he’d struck the dinghy while swimming across the channel at Cancún—made him nauseous and created a worrisome double vision. If
a doctor hadn’t redressed and restitched his wounded shoulder at Mérida’s jail, he probably would have died from infection and loss of blood, although of course the doctor had been supplied not out of compassion but simply for the practical reason that a dead man couldn’t answer questions. Buchanan had encountered this logic before and knew that if the interrogators received the answers they wanted, they would feel no further necessity to provide him with medical courtesies.

  That was one reason—the least important—for his refusal to tell his interrogators what they wanted. The reason, of course, was that to confess would have been a violation of professional conduct. In refusing to talk, Buchanan had three advantages. First, his interrogators were employing clumsy, brutal methods, which were easier to resist than the precise application of electrical shock combined with such inhibition-reducing drugs as sodium amytal. Second, because he was already weakened by the injury to his head and the wound in his shoulder, he had a tendency to pass out quickly while being tortured, his body supplying a kind of natural anesthesia.

  And third, he had a script to follow, a role to play, a scenario that gave him a way to behave. The primary rule was that if captured, he could never admit the truth. Oh, he could use portions of the truth to concoct a believable lie. But the whole truth was out of the question. For Buchanan to say that, yes, he’d killed the three Mexicans, but they were drug dealers, after all, and besides he was working under cover for a covert branch of the U.S. military would have temporarily saved his life. However, that life would not have been worth much. As an object lesson to the United States for interfering in Mexican affairs, he might have been forced to serve a lengthy sentence in a Mexican prison, and given the severity of Mexican prisons, especially for yanquís, that sentence in all probability would have been the same as a death sentence. Or if Mexico released him to the United States as a gesture of goodwill (in exchange for favors), his superiors would make his life a nightmare because he had violated his pact with them.

  5

  “Victor Grant,” an overweight, bearded interrogator with slicked-back dark hair said to Buchanan in a small, plain room that had only a bench upon which the interrogator sat and a chair upon which Buchanan was tied. The round-faced, perspiring interrogator made “Victor Grant” sound as if the name were a synonym for diarrhea.

  “That’s right.” Buchanan’s throat was so dry that his voice cracked, his body so dehydrated that he’d long ago stopped sweating. One of the tight loops of the rope cut into his stitched, wounded shoulder.

  “Speak Spanish, damn you!”

  “But I don’t know Spanish.” Buchanan breathed. “At least, not very well.” He tried to swallow. “Just a few words.” Ignorance about Spanish was one of the characteristics he’d chosen for this persona. That way, he could always pretend that he didn’t know what he was being asked.

  “Cabrón, you spoke Spanish to the emigration officer at the airport in Mérida!”

  “Yes. That’s true.” Buchanan’s head drooped. “A couple of simple phrases. What I call ‘survival Spanish.’ ”

  “Survival?” a deep-voiced guard asked behind him, then grabbed Buchanan’s hair and jerked his head up. “If you do not want your hair pulled out, you will survive by speaking Spanish.”

  “Un poco.” Buchanan exhaled. “A little. That’s all I know.”

  “Why did you kill those three men in Cancún?”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anyone.”

  The overweight interrogator, his uniform stained with sweat, pushed himself up from the bench, his stomach wobbling, and plodded close to Buchanan, then shoved a police sketch in front of his face. The sketch was the same that the emigration officer at Mérida’s airport had noticed beside a fax machine on a desk in the room to which he had taken Buchanan to find out why he was bleeding.

  “Does this drawing look familiar to you?” the interrogator growled. “Ciertamente, it does to me. Dios, sí. It reminds me of you. We have a witness, a fellow yanquí in fact, who saw you kill three men in Cancún.”

  “I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Buchanan glared. “That drawing looks like me and a couple of hundred thousand other Americans.” Buchanan rested his hoarse voice. “It could be anybody.” He breathed. “I admit I was in Cancún a couple of days ago.” He licked his dry lips. “But I don’t know anything about any murders.”

  “You lie!” The interrogator raised a section of rubber hose and whacked Buchanan across the stomach.

  Buchanan groaned but couldn’t double over because of the ropes that bound him to the back of the chair. If he hadn’t seen the overweight man clumsily start to swing the hose, he wouldn’t have been able to harden his stomach enough to minimize the pain. Pretending that the blow had been worse than it was, he snapped his eyes shut and jerked his head back.

  “Don’t insult me!” the interrogator shouted. “Admit it! You lie.”

  “No,” Buchanan murmured. “Your witness is lying.” He trembled. “If there is a witness. How could there be? I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t know anything about . . .”

  Each time the interrogator struck him, it gave Buchanan a chance to steal opportunities, to wince, to breathe deeply and rest. Because the police had already taken his watch and wallet, he didn’t have anything with which to try to bribe them. Not that he thought a bribe would have worked in this case. Indeed, if he did try to bribe them, under the circumstances his gesture would be the same as an admission of guilt. His only course of action was to play his role, to insist indignantly that he was innocent.

  The interrogator held up Buchanan’s passport, repeating with the same contemptuous tone, “Victor Grant.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even your passport photograph resembles this sketch.”

  “That sketch is worthless,” Buchanan said. “It looks like a ten-year-old did it.”

  The interrogator tapped the rubber hose against the bandage that covered the wound on Buchanan’s shoulder. “What is your occupation?”

  Wincing, Buchanan told him the cover story.

  The interrogator tapped harder against the wound. “And what were you doing in Mexico?”

  Wincing more severely, Buchanan gave the name of the client he supposedly had come here to see. He felt his wound swell under the bandage. Every time the interrogator tapped it, the injury’s painful pressure increased, as if it might explode.

  “Then you claim you were here on business, not pleasure?”

  “Hey, it’s always a pleasure to be in Mexico, isn’t it?” Buchanan squinted toward the rubber hose that the interrogator tapped even harder against his wound. From pain, his consciousness swirled. He would soon pass out again.

  “Then why didn’t you have a business visa?”

  Buchanan tasted stomach acid. “Because I only found out a couple of days ahead of time that my client wanted me to come down here. Getting a business visa takes time. I got a tourist card instead. It’s a whole lot easier.”

  The interrogator jammed the tip of the hose beneath Buchanan’s chin. “You entered Mexico illegally.” He stared deeply into Buchanan’s eyes, then released the hose so Buchanan could speak.

  Buchanan’s voice thickened, affected by the swelling in his throat that the hose had caused. “First you accuse me of killing three men.” Breathing became more difficult. “Now you blame me for failing to have a business visa. What’s next? Are you going to charge me with pissing on your floor? Because that’s what I’m going to have to do if I’m not allowed to use a bathroom soon.”

  The man behind Buchanan yanked his hair again, forcing tears from Buchanan’s eyes. “You do not seem to believe that this is serious.”

  “Not true. Take my word, I think this is very serious.”

  “But you do not act afraid.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid. In fact, I’m terrified.”

  The interrogator glowered with satisfaction.

  “But because I haven’t done what you claim I did, I’m
also furious.” Buchanan forced himself to continue. “I’ve had enough of this.” Each word was an effort. “I want to see a lawyer.”

  The interrogator stared in disbelief, then bellowed with laughter, his huge stomach heaving. “Lawyer?”

  The guard behind Buchanan laughed as well.

  “Un jurisconsulto?” the interrogator asked with derision. “Que tu necesitas está un sacerdote.” He whacked the rubber hose across Buchanan’s shins. “What do you think about that?”

  “I told you, I hardly know any Spanish.”

  “What I said is, you don’t need a lawyer, you need a priest. Because all that will help you now, Victor Grant, is prayers.”

  “I’m a U.S. citizen. I have a right to . . .” Buchanan couldn’t help it. His bladder was swollen beyond tolerance. He had to let go.

  Urinating in his pants, he felt the hot liquid stream over the seat of the chair and dribble onto the floor.

  “Cochino! Pig!” The interrogator whacked Buchanan’s wounded shoulder.

  Any second now, Buchanan thought. Dear God, let me faint.

  The interrogator grabbed Buchanan’s shirt and yanked him forward, overturning the chair, toppling him to the floor.

  Buchanan’s face struck the concrete. He heard the interrogator shout in Spanish to someone about bringing rags, about forcing the gringo to clean up his filth. But Buchanan doubted he’d be conscious by the time the rags arrived. Still, although his vision dimmed, it didn’t do so quickly enough to prevent him from seeing with shock that his urine was tinted red. They broke something inside me. I’m pissing blood.

  “You know what I think, gringo?” the interrogator asked.