David Morrell - Assumed Identity

by Assumed Identity(lit)

  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.'

  6

  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 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 Holly 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 five 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.

  Juana. He couldn't waste time caring about himself. He'd done too much of that for too long. He needed to care about someone else. Juana. He had to find her. Had to help her.

  7

  The telephone rang at eight in the evening. Precisely on time. Good. Buchanan sat up in bed and reached for the phone, answering with a neutral voice. 'Hello.'

  'Mike?' The deep, sensuous female voice was unmistakably Holly's.

  'Yes. Where are you?'

  'I'm using a house phone in the lobby. Do you want me to come up? What's your room number?'

  'At the moment, it's three-twenty-two. But I want you to go to five-twelve. And Holly, you have to do it in a certain way. Take the elevator to the third floor. Then use the stairs to go up to the fifth. Anybody watching the numbers above the elevator in the lobby will assume that you didn't go any farther than the third floor.'

  'On my way.' Tension strained her voice.

  Buchanan broke the connection and pressed the button for the hotel operator, telling her, 'Please, don't put through any phone calls until eight tomorrow morning.'

  He left the light on, picked up his travel bag, walked out of the room, put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, made sure that the door was locked behind him, and headed toward the fire stairs. As he started toward the fifth floor, he heard the elevator stop behind him on the third.

  Holly arrived at room 512 a minute after he did. The room was registered to Charles Duffy. It and Mike Hamilton's room had been rented using Charles Duffy's credit card. Buchanan had told the check-in clerk that Mike Hamilton would be arriving soon. After showering and changing, he'd gone back down to the lobby, waited until the clerk who'd checked him in was off on an errand, and then had checked in again with a different clerk, this time as Mike Hamilton.

  When Buchanan turned from letting Holly in and relocking the door, she surprised him, dropping her camera bag and a briefcase onto a chair, putting her arms around him, holding him tightly.

  She was trembling.

  Buchanan wondered if she were putting on an act, trying to seem more distraught than she actually was.

  'How do you stand living this way?' She spoke against his shoulder.

  'What way? This is normal.' He responded to her embrace.

  'Normal.' Her voice dropped.

  'It's just stage fright.' He smelled her perfume.

  She stepped away, looking depressed. 'Sure.' As rain pelted against the window behind the closed draperies, she took off her wet London Fog hat and overcoat, then listlessly shook her hair free.

  Buchanan had forgotten how red her hair was, how green her eyes.

  She wore a sand-colored, linen pant suit, a scooped, white T-shirt, and a brown belt. The outfit complimented her height and figure, the flow of her hips and breasts.

  He felt attracted to her, remembered how her breasts had felt against him, and forced himself to concentrate on business.

  'I wanted a room where we wouldn't be disturbed if the men following you decided to barge in,' he explained. 'This way, if they talk to the desk clerk, they'll think they know where you are and who you're seeing.'

  'That part I understand.' Holly slumped on the Victorian sofa. 'But what I don't understand is why you told me to pretend to make a call from a pay phone at the National Portrait Gallery. Who was I supposed to be talking to?'

  'Mike Hamilton.'

  Holly ran her fingers through her hair and didn't seem to follow his logic.

  'Otherwise how were you supposed to know Mike Hamilton wanted to meet you here?'

  'But.' She frowned. 'But you'd already told me as I came out of the metro station.'

  'The people following you didn't know that. Holly, you have to remember: in this business, everything's an act. You want your audience to know only what's necessary for you to maintain an illusion. Suppose I'd just let you go back to work and then had phoned you and told you to meet me here. Your phones are tapped. This hotel would have been staked out fifteen minutes after I completed the call. They'd have found out who Mike Hamilton was. Regardless of the switch in the rooms, you and I would be being questioned right now.'

  'Nothing you do is uncalculated.'

  'That's how I stay alive.'

  'Then how do I know I'm really being followed? How do I know that this business in the park and at the Metro station isn't just a charade to frighten me into cooperating with you and staying away from the story?'

  'You don't. And I can't prove it to you. Correction. That's wrong. I can prove it to you. But the proof might get you killed.'

  'There. You're doing it again,' Holly said. 'Trying to frighten me.' She crossed her arms and rubbed them as if she were cold.

  'Have you eaten?' Buchanan asked.

  'No.'

  'I'll order you something from room service.'

  'I don't have any appetite.'

  'You've got to eat something.'

  'Hey, fear's good for losing weight.'

  'How about some coffee? Or tea?'

  'How about telling me what the names you gave me have to do with my story?'

  'They don't,' Buchanan said.

  'What
? Then why did you get in touch with me? Why did you put me through all this, being followed and passing secret messages and-?'

  'Because I didn't have any choice. I need your help.'

  Holly jerked her head up. 'You need my help? What could possibly-?'

  'Drummond and Tomez. People important enough to need protection. What did you find out about them?'

  'Why do you need to know?'

  'It's better if you don't know anything about-'

  'Bullshit,' Holly said. 'Since I met you on the train to New Orleans, you've been playing games with my mind. Everything has to be your way, and you're damned good at manipulating people into doing it. Well, this is one time that isn't going to happen. If you need my help, there has to be something in it for me. If it isn't about the story I was working on, what is it about? Maybe I can use that as a story. Quid pro quo, buddy. If I have to give up something, I want to get something in return.'

  Buchanan studied her, then feigned reluctance. 'Maybe you're right.'

  'Jesus, you are really something. You never stop acting. I get the impression you meant to tell me all along, but this way it looks like you're doing me a favor instead of the other way around.'

  Buchanan slowly grinned. 'I guess you're too smart for me. How about that coffee?'

  'Tea. And if you're going to tell me a story, I think I feel my appetite coming back.'

  8

  'It concerns the woman I told you about in New Orleans,' Buchanan said after ordering food. 'The friend who sent me a message asking for help. The one I was supposed to meet at Caf‚ du Monde. Except she didn't show up.'

  Holly nodded. 'Your former lover.'

  'No. I told you we were never lovers.' Buchanan brooded. 'In fact, I think that's when a lot of my problems started. Because I didn't commit to her.' He remembered how much he had wanted to, how much he had denied himself for the sake of duty.

  Holly's face didn't change expression. But her eyes did, narrowing, assessing him.

  'One of the last things I told her,' Buchanan said, 'was that she couldn't be in love with me because she didn't know me - she only knew who I pretended to be.'

  Holly's eyes narrowed more. 'It certainly seems you never stop acting. For example, right now. I can't tell if this is the truth or more manipulation.'

  'Oh, it's the truth. Even if you don't believe it, it's the truth. This is one of the most honest things you'll ever hear from me. I want to help her because I want to be the person I was when I knew her. I want to choose to be somebody and to stay that somebody. I want to stop changing. I want to be consistent.'

  'Because of all the people you impersonated?'

  'I told you I don't know anything about-'

  'Don't act so defensive. I'm not trying to get you to admit to anything. You want to stop changing? Why make it so complicated? Why be somebody else? Why not be yourself?'

  Buchanan didn't answer.

  'You don't like yourself?'

  Buchanan still didn't answer.

  'This woman, what was her name?'

  Buchanan hesitated. All his instincts and training warned against revealing information. He prepared to lie.

  Instead he told the truth. 'Juana Mendez.'

  'When you knew her, I'm assuming you were on an assignment together.'

  'You know what you can do with your assumptions.'

  'No need to get touchy.'

  'Since the first time I spoke to you, I have never revealed confidential information. Everything I've said about my background has been hypothetical, a "what if scenario. As far as you're concerned, I'm an instructor in military special operations. That's all I've ever admitted to. This has nothing to do with the story you abandoned. I want that understood.'

  'As I said, no need to get touchy.'

  'After you left New Orleans.' He told her about his drive to San Antonio, his discovery that both Juana's and her parents' homes were under surveillance, and his search of Juana's records. He omitted all reference to the man he'd killed. 'Drummond and Tomez. The files for those names were the only ones that seemed to be missing. Juana was a security specialist. I have to assume those people were clients.'

  'Important enough to need protecting.' Pensive, Holly walked toward the briefcase she'd set on a chair and opened it. 'I used the reference system at the Post.'

  'That's why I had to get in touch with you. I didn't have access to anyone else who could get the information I needed as quickly as you could.'

  'You know.' Holly studied him. 'Sometimes you might consider trying to impersonate somebody with tact.'

  'What?'

  'I don't delude myself that you'd go to all this trouble if you didn't have something to gain. All the same, it wouldn't have hurt you if you'd also left the impression that you found me interesting.'

  'Oh. I'm sorry.'

  'Apology accepted. But if you were this charming with Juana Mendez, it's no wonder things didn't work out.'

  'Look, I'm trying to make up for mistakes.'

  Holly didn't speak for a moment. 'Let's see if this helps. Drummond and Tomez. I had my suspicions, but I wanted to check thoroughly before I made any conclusions.'

  'Drummond is Alistair Drummond,' Buchanan said. 'I more or less figured that already. The last name brings him immediately to mind. He's rich, famous, and powerful enough to fit the profile.'

  'Agreed. I kept checking, but he's the only Drummond I think we should consider.' Holly pulled a book and several pages in a file folder out of the briefcase. 'Bedtime reading. His biography and some printouts of recent stories about him. I'd have given you his autobiography, but it's such a public-relations whitewash that for dependable information it's useless. Certainly it doesn't show any skeletons in closets, and in Drummond's case, skeletons in closets might not be a figure of speech.'

  'What about Tomez?' Buchanan asked.

  'That was harder. I'm a Frank Sinatra fan myself.'

  'What's he got to do with.?'

  'Jazz. Big bands. Tony Bennett. Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald.'

  'I still don't see what.'

  'Listened to much Puccini lately?'

  Buchanan looked blank.

  'Verdi? Rossini? Donizetti? Not ringing any bells? How about titles? La Boheme. La Traviata. Lucia di Lammermoor. Carmen.'

  'Operas,' Buchanan said.

  'Give the man a cigar. Operas. I guess you're not a devotee.'

  'Well, my taste in music.' Buchanan hesitated. 'I don't have any taste in music.'

  'Come on, everybody likes some kind of music.'

  'My characters do.'

  'What?'

  'The people I. Heavy metal. Country and western. Blue grass.

  It's just that I never got around to impersonating anybody who liked opera.'

  'Buchanan, you're scaring me again.'

  'For the past week, I've been thinking of myself as a man named Peter Lang. He likes Barbra Streisand.'

  'You really are scaring me.'

  'I told you I'm changeable.' Buchanan-Lang smiled oddly. 'But no one I've ever been had an interest in opera. If he had, believe me I'd be expert enough on the subject to give you a lecture. What does opera have to do with the name "Tomez"?'

  'Maria Tomez,' Holly said. 'The name occurred to me immediately but not as strongly as Alistair Drummond. I wanted to make sure there weren't any famous or rich or powerful people named Tomez whom I didn't know about.' Holly took another book and file from the briefcase. 'And indeed there are some, but they're not pertinent here. Maria Tomez - to quote from her press releases - is the most controversial, charismatic, and compelling mezzo soprano in the opera world today. As far as I'm concerned, she's the only candidate for your attention.'

  'What makes you so sure?'

  'Because for the past nine months Alistair Drummond and Maria Tomez have, despite the difference in their ages, been an item.' Holly paused for effect. 'And Maria Tomez disappeared two weeks ago.'

  9

  Buchanan leaned forward. 'Disappeared?' />
  'That's what her ex-husband claims. Don't you read the newspapers?' Holly asked.

  'The past few days, I haven't exactly had time.'

  'Well, this morning the ex-husband went to the New York City police department and insisted that she'd been missing for at least the past two weeks. To make sure he wasn't treated as a crank, he brought along a couple dozen newspaper and television reporters. It turned into quite a circus.'