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 hunt 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 she 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 5:00 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 was 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 pantsuit, a scooped white T-shirt, and a brown belt. The outfit complemented 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
“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 under interrogation 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
“There. You’re doing it again,” Holly said. “Trying to frighten me.” She crossed her arms and rubbed them as if she was cold.
“Have you eaten?” Buchanan asked.
