David Morrell - Assumed Identity

by Assumed Identity(lit)

  The man swallowed. 'Yes.'

  Buchanan got out of the van, left the doors open, and gestured for Pedro and Anita to come over.

  Pedro started to say something in Spanish.

  Buchanan stopped him. 'No. We have to speak English. I want to make sure that these men understand every word.'

  Pedro looked confused.

  'You're going to have a busy day watching them,' Buchanan said. 'I want you to find a place where this van won't be conspicuous. Maybe in back of one of your garages.' He explained his conversation with the prisoners. 'Let them go at sunset.'

  'But.'

  'Don't worry,' Buchanan said. 'They won't bother you. In fact, they'll be leaving town. Won't you?' he asked the first man.

  The first man swallowed again and nodded.

  'Exactly. Now all I need is for you to tell me if you have a check-in schedule,' Buchanan said. 'Is there anybody you have to phone at a specific time to let your employer know there hasn't been trouble?'

  'No,' the man said.

  'You're sure? You're negotiating for your life. Be very careful.'

  'We're supposed to phone only if we have a question or something to report,' the man said.

  'Then let's wrap this up.' Buchanan's legs were rubbery from pain and fatigue. He turned to Pedro and Anita. 'I need something to eat. I need a place to sleep.'

  'We'd be honored to have you as a guest,' Anita said.

  'Thanks, but I'd prefer that you don't have any idea where I am.'

  'We'd never tell.'

  'Of course not,' Buchanan said, not bothering to correct her, knowing that Pedro and his wife didn't have the faintest idea of how vulnerable they would be to torture. 'The less you know about any of this, the better, though. As long as these men realize you can't tell them anything, you're safe. Just keep the bargain I made. Release them at sunset. Meanwhile, on our way into town, I need to pick up my car. My bag's in the trunk.'

  'What happens later? After you rest?' Pedro asked.

  'I'm leaving San Antonio.'

  'To where?'

  Buchanan didn't answer.

  'Are you going to Philadelphia? To find the people who hired these men? The people you spoke to on the phone?'

  Buchanan still didn't answer.

  'What happened at Juana's house?'

  'Nothing,' Buchanan said. 'Pedro, drive the van while I stay in back and watch these men. Anita, follow in the jeep.'

  'But what about Juana?'

  'You have my word. I'll never give up.'

  19

  The Yucatan peninsula.

  McIntyre, the sunburned, leathery foreman of the demolition crew, lay feverish and helpless on a cot in the log building that his men had constructed when they'd first arrived at the site. Dense trees and shrubs had still covered the ruins back then. The ruins themselves had still been here. Sanity had still prevailed.

  Now, as it took all of McIntyre's strength for him to use his good arm to wipe sweat from his brow, he wished from the depths of his soul that he had never agreed to his damnable contract with Alistair Drummond. The considerable fee - a greater sum that he'd ever received for any assignment - had been irresistible, as had the equally considerable bonus that Alistair Drummond had promised if the project were successfully completed. McIntyre had worked all over the world. In the course of his career, his nomadic existence had resulted in two divorces, in his being alienated from two women he loved and two sets of children he adored. All because of McIntyre's urge to conquer the wilderness, to put order where there was chaos. But this assignment had required him to destroy order and create chaos, and now he was being punished.

  The earth itself seemed infuriated by the obscenity that McIntyre and his crew had caused to happen here. Or maybe it was the gods in whose honor the ruins had been constructed. An odd thought for him, McIntyre realized. After all, he had never been religious. Nonetheless, as his death approached, he found that he was increasingly thinking about ultimates. What he would once have called superstition now seemed to make perfect sense. The gods were angry because their temples and shrines had been desecrated.

  Destroy the ruins, Drummond had commanded. Scatter them. His word be done. And with each dynamite blast, with each crunch of a bulldozer, with each hieroglyph-covered block of stone dumped into a sinkhole, the earth and the gods beneath had protested. Periodic tremors had shaken the camp. Their duration had lengthened. And with the increased tremors had come a further horror, myriad snakes escaping from holes and fissures in the ground, a pestilence of them, only to be controlled by spraying kerosene and scorching the earth, further despoiling it. A pall of smoke hung over the devastated ruins.

  For a time, the snakes had seemed everywhere, but as the tremors had stopped, the snakes had simultaneously vanished. No longer disturbed, they'd returned to their underground nests.

  'Not in time, however. At least for McIntyre. The previous day, just before sunset, he had reached into a tool box to get a wrench and felt a sharp, burning pain just above his right wrist. Compelled by fear, rushing toward the medical tent, he barely had a glimpse of the tiny snake that slithered from the tool box and into a hole. The camp physician, an unshaven man who always seemed to have a cigarette in his mouth and whiskey on his breath, had injected McIntyre with antivenom and disinfected the puncture wounds, all the while assuring McIntyre that he'd been very lucky inasmuch as the fangs had missed the major blood vessels in his arm.

  But as McIntyre had shivered from fear and shock, he hadn't felt lucky at all. For one thing, different snake toxins required different types of antivenom, but McIntyre hadn't been able to get a good enough look at the snake that had bitten him in order to identify it. For another, even if he had been given the correct antivenom, he still desperately needed emergency care in a hospital. But the nearest major hospital was in Campeche, a hundred and fifty miles away. A road had not yet been built through the jungle to allow a vehicle to leave the ruins. The only way McIntyre could be taken to Campeche in time for the medical treatment he urgently needed was by helicopter. But two of the camp's helicopters were much farther away, in Vera Cruz getting supplies, and weren't expected back for twelve hours. The third helicopter was in camp but disabled. That was why McIntyre had been reaching into the tool box when the snake hidden there bit him - he'd been helping a mechanic to fix the chopper's hydraulic system.

  As he lay on a bunk in a corner of the camp's office, his mind seemed to float while death spread slowly through his body. Death felt suffocatingly hot, squeezing moisture from his body, soaking his clothes. At the same time, death felt unbearably cold, racking him with chills, making him wish fervently for more blankets.

  McIntyre's vision clouded. Sounds were muffled. The roar of bulldozers, the blast of explosions, the din of jackhammers seemed to come from far away instead of from the remnants of the ruins outside his office. But the one thing he listened for, the one sound he knew he couldn't fail to hear no matter how far away, was the rapid whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, and to his despair, he still had not detected it. If the chopper in camp weren't soon fixed, if the other choppers didn't soon return, he would die, and it occurred to him, making him furious despite how weak he was, that adequate medical care in camp was one of the conditions that Alistair Drummond had guaranteed. Since Drummond had failed to make good on that promise, perhaps none of the other promises would have been fulfilled either. The bonus, for example. Or the fee for the job. Maybe Drummond would have all kinds of reasons for not being able to complete the terms of the contract.

  This suspicion had obviously not occurred to any of the surviving workers. They were so eager to get out of here that they attacked the job with relentless fury. Their impatience filled them with greater anticipation of the reward they'd been guaranteed. Nothing discouraged their greed, not the tremors, not the snakes, certainly not McIntyre's impending death. They had persisted despite efforts by Indians in the area to scare them away. Those natives, descendents of the original Maya who had
built these monuments., had been so outraged by the obliteration of the ruins that they had sabotaged equipment, poisoned the camp's water, set boobytraps, attacked sentries, and in effect waged war. Responding, calling it self-defense, the workers had hunted and killed any native they found, dumping the corpses into wells in unconscious imitation of the human sacrifice once practised by the Maya. In this region untouched by civilization, the struggle had reminded McIntyre of what had happened four hundred years earlier when the Spaniards had invaded the region. The area was sealed. No outsider would ever know what had happened here. Certainly no outsider would be able to prove it. When the job was finished, all that would matter would be the results.

  Delirious, McIntyre heard the office door come open. From outside, bulldozers crunched past. Then the door was closed, and footsteps crossed the earthen floor toward this area of the office.

  A gentle hand touched his brow. 'You're still feverish.' A woman's voice. Jenna's. 'Do you feel any better?'

  'No.' McIntyre shivered as more sweat oozed from his body.

  'Drink this water.'

  'Can't.' He struggled to breathe. 'I'll throw it up.'

  'Just hang on. The mechanics are working as fast as they can to fix the chopper.'

  'Not fast enough.'

  Jenna knelt beside his cot and held his left hand. McIntyre remembered how surprised he had been to learn that the camp's surveyor-cartographer was female. He'd insisted that this was no place for a woman, but she'd soon overcome his chauvinistic attitudes, proving that she could adapt to the jungle as well as any man. She was in her forties, the same as McIntyre. She had honey-colored hair, firm-looking breasts, an appealing smile, and in the three months they'd been working together, McIntyre had fallen in love with her. He had never told her. He'd been too afraid of being rejected. If she did reject him, their working relationship would have been intolerable. But as soon as the job was completed, he had intended to.

  Stroking his left hand, Jenna leaned close, her voice interrupting his thoughts. 'But I'm betting there'll be a chopper here quicker than we can repair the one we've got.'

  'I.' McIntyre's mouth was parched. 'I don't know what.'

  'Drummond will be here soon. We'll put you in his chopper to get you to a hospital.'

  'Drummond?'

  'Don't you remember?' Jenna wiped a damp cloth across his forehead. 'We talked about this when I used the radio a half hour ago.'

  'Radio? Half hour ago?'

  'We found what Drummond wants.' Jenna spoke quickly, her voice taut with excitement. 'It was here all along. Right under our noses. We had the instructions from Drummond's translation, but we were too clever. We made the search too hard. We thought the instructions were using figures of speech, but all along, the text was meant to be taken literally. The god of darkness. The god of the underworld. The god of the pyramid. It was so damned easy, Mac. Once your men leveled the pyramid, it was so obvious why the Maya built it where they did. We found what Drummond wants.'

  TEN

  1

  Washington, D.C.

  One-thirty in the afternoon. As soon as Buchanan got off the TWA flight from San Antonio, he headed toward the first row of pay phones he saw in the terminal at National Airport. He'd managed to get some sleep during the five-hour, several-stop trip. The naps, combined with the additional four hours of sleep he'd gotten the night before at a motel near San Antonio's airport, had given him back some energy, as had a carbohydrate-rich breakfast at the airport and another on the plane. His wounds still hurt. His head still ached. But he felt more alert than he had in days, adrenaline pushing him. He was traveling as Charles Duffy. He felt in control again.

  A man answered Holly's phone at The Washington Post, explained that she was on another line, and asked who was calling.

  'Mike Hamilton.'

  That was the name Buchanan had told Holly he would be using to contact her. He had to assume that the colonel and Alan would have her under surveillance, watching for any sign that she didn't intend to keep her agreement with them. If she seemed intent on pursuing the story, if she gave indications that she had not surrendered all of her research, there was a strong chance they would move against her. For certain, if the colonel and Alan found out that Buchanan remained in contact with her, that would be enough to arouse their suspicions to a deadly level. Even if Holly weren't in danger, Buchanan couldn't afford to use his real name. The colonel and Alan would be searching for him.

  That thought made Buchanan uneasy as he waited for Holly to come on the line. His nervousness wasn't caused by concern about his safety. Rather he was nervous because he wondered about his motives. What did he think he was doing? You didn't just leave a top-secret, undercover, military operation as if you were quitting a job at Domino's Pizza. For eight years as a deep-cover operative and for three years prior to that, Buchanan had followed every order. He was a soldier. It was his job to be obedient. He'd been proud of that. Now suddenly his discipline had snapped. He'd walked away, not even toward the future but into the past, not as himself but as one of his characters.

  Hey, buddy, he told himself, it's not too late. You'd better get back in line and with the program. Phone the colonel. Tell him you made a mistake but you're better now. Tell him you'll do whatever he wants. You'll be an instructor. You'll stay out of sight. Anything.

  But a stronger thought insisted.

  Have to find Juana.

  He must have said that out loud because a woman's voice was suddenly speaking to him on the telephone. 'What? I didn't hear what you said. Mike? Is that you?'

  The throaty, sensuous voice belonged to Holly.

  Buchanan straightened. 'Yeah, it's me.' Before leaving San Antonio this morning, he'd called Holly's apartment to make certain she was in Washington, to insure he didn't make the trip for nothing. Six-thirty in Texas had been seven-thirty along the Potomac. She'd been awake and about to go to work when she'd picked up the phone rather than let her answering machine take the message. Assuming that her phone was tapped, he'd used the name Mike Hamilton and made tentative arrangements to meet her.

  'Is our late lunch still on?' she now asked.

  'If your schedule's free.'

  'Hey, for you, it's always free. I'll meet you in McPherson Square.'

  'Give me forty minutes.'

  'No rush.'

  'See you.' Buchanan put the phone back on its hook. The conversation had gone perfectly. Sounding natural, it had nonetheless contained the words 'no rush,' the code they'd chosen in New Orleans to indicate that Holly did not sense a threat. 'See you' was Buchanan's equivalent message.

  He picked up his small bag, turned from the phone, and joined a mass of passengers that had just gotten off another flight. Both National and Dulles airports were under constant surveillance from various government agencies. Some of the surveillance was a throwback to the Cold War. Some of it was due to a practical need to know which travelers of importance were showing up unexpectedly in the nation's capital. A lot of it had to do with the increasing conviction that Mideastern terrorists were poised to make their long-postponed assault on the United States.

  Buchanan had no reason to suspect that the colonel would have operatives watching the airport in case he passed through. After all, logic suggested that Washington would be one of the places Buchanan wanted most to avoid. Besides, his paper trail would have led the colonel's operatives to San Antonio by now. Before leaving Texas, Buchanan had left his car at an office of the company from which he'd rented it. That would be the dead end of the paper trail. The colonel's people would assume that Buchanan had flown out of San Antonio since the car-rental office was near the airport. But they would have no way of knowing that Buchanan had used Charles Duffy's name and credit card to rent the motel room and buy a plane ticket to Washington.

  The only risk Buchanan took in the airport was that someone would notice him by accident, but that would happen only if he drew attention to himself, and he wasn't about to get that careless. Buchanan
-Lang-Duffy-Hamilton blended skillfully with fellow travelers, exited into a drab, damp afternoon, got into a taxi, and headed toward downtown Washington. The terminal had not been a threat.

  But McPherson Square would be another matter.

  2

  In New Orleans, before Holly had gone back to Washington, Buchanan had explained to her that if he phoned and suggested they get together, she was to choose a public place in the area. The place had to be part of her routine. ('Do nothing conspicuous.') It had to have numerous entrances. ('So we don't get trapped.') And it had to be dependable in terms of not being closed at unpredictable hours. ('I was once told to meet a man at a restaurant that had burned down the day before. Nobody on the team advising me had checked the location to make sure the rendezvous site was viable.')