Assumed Identity

toward her through the smoke, she had realized that Drummond would never have agreed to waste the resources of the helicopter to take a dying man from the camp. “He’ll be dead before he gets to the hospital. We don’t have time. Make him as comfortable as possible,” Drummond would have said. As it was, what he did say was, “Bury him where the natives can’t get to him. No, I’ve changed my mind. Burn him. Burn them all.”

“All” were the natives who’d been exterminated in their attempts to stop the desecration of their sacred land. Jenna had been certain she was going insane when she realized that a massacre had taken place. She’d known of tribes that were exterminated in South America, in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. But it had never occurred to her that portions of Mexico were equally remote and that communication with the outside could be so minimal that no one “in the world” would have any idea of what was happening here. By the time word leaked out, there’d be no evidence of the atrocity. And who was going to talk? The workers? By acquiescing to the slaughter, by accepting obscenely huge bonuses, they were implicated in the slaughter. Only a fool would break the silence.

Now, standing in the camp’s log-walled office, remembering how Mac had writhed feverishly on a cot in the corner, she listened numbly to final commands from Drummond about the charts she had prepared.

“Above all”-Drummond’s aged voice was filled with phlegm-“the extent of the true discovery must be made to dwarf the archaeological ones. There’ll be photographs, of course. But your charts will be given primary attention.”

At that moment, the door opened, and Raymond came in, wearing jungle clothing, holding a rifle, his face sooted from smoke, his shirt crimson with blood. “If there are more, I can’t find them.”

“But a different kind of enemy might be coming here. I think he’s hunting us,” Drummond said.

Raymond straightened, challenged. “Who?”

“A dead man.”

Raymond furrowed his brow.

“Charles Duffy,” Drummond said. “Do you recognize the-?”

“Yes, he was hired to watch the target’s home in San Antonio. To deal with her if she arrived. He disappeared from the house three nights ago.”

“He’s no longer missing,” Drummond said. “His body washed up on a bank of the San Antonio River. He’d been shot. The authorities say he had no identification. One of the men you hired was able to get a look at the body in the morgue, however, and has no doubt that it’s Duffy. But Mr. Duffy is remarkable,” Drummond continued. “While dead, he used his credit card to fly from San Antonio to Washington, D.C. He stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. For a portion of the next day, he stayed at the Dorset Hotel in Manhattan. After that, he and a companion flew to Miami, where they rented a car.”

Raymond brooded. “I don’t understand the Washington connection, but the Dorset isn’t far from the target’s apartment in Manhattan.”

“And from the ex-husband. He was paid a visit by a man and a woman the day before yesterday. They interrupted the agreed-upon payment to him.”

“Maltin knows nothing,” Raymond said. “All you paid him for was to stop attracting attention to the target’s disappearance.”

“Nothing?” Drummond looked furious. “Maltin knew it was I who paid him. That’s what the man and woman learned from him. The woman so far hasn’t been identified, although she has red hair and she claimed to work for the Washington Post, but the man’s description matches that of the same man who interfered with surveillance on the home of the target’s parents.”

“Buchanan?” Raymond scowled.

“Yes. Buchanan. Now think. What’s the Miami connection?” Drummond snapped.

“The yacht. It’s south of there. In Key West.”

“Exactly,” Drummond said. “The captain reports that three crew members brought a woman aboard yesterday afternoon. A woman with red hair.”

“She must have been helping Buchanan. Checking ways to sneak aboard.”

Drummond nodded. “I have to assume he knows something about the tape. And I have to assume that he’ll keep coming closer. Intercept him. Kill him.”

“But where would I find him?”

“Isn’t it obvious? What’s the next link in the chain?”

“Delgado.”

“Yes. Mexico City. I just received word from my contacts at Miami International Airport that a man calling himself Charles Duffy bought two airline tickets to Mexico City. The helicopter will have you there by this afternoon.”

TWELVE 1

MEXICO CITY

The unregulated exhaust from countless smoke-belching factories and ill-maintained automobiles burning leaded fuel was trapped by a thermal inversion above the mountain-surrounded metropolis and made the air in the largest and fastest-growing city in the world virtually unbreathable. Buchanan’s throat felt scratchy. He began to cough as soon as he and Holly got tourist cards and left Juarez International Airport. His eyes burned from the haze-so dense that if not for its acrid smell and biting taste it might have been thought to be mist. The air conditioner in the taxi they hired wasn’t working. Nonetheless, he and Holly closed their windows. Better to swelter inside the cab than to breathe the noxious atmosphere outside.

It was 9:15. They’d managed to drive from Key West to Miami in time to catch an 8:00 A.M. United flight to Mexico City. Because of a time-zone change backward, the duration of the flight had actually been two hours and fifteen minutes, and after eating a cheese-and-onion omelet supplied by the airline, Buchanan had been able to doze. For too long now, his schedule had been erratic. His exhaustion worsened. His headache continued to torture him.

So did the bitterness he felt toward Holly. Against his instincts, he had actually begun to trust her. As she’d pointed out to him, she had saved his life, and in other ways she’d been of considerable help. But he needed to keep reminding himself that she was a reporter. In the stress of his search for Juana, he’d already indirectly revealed too much about his past. More, it made him angry to think that this woman whom he had allowed to get close to him had been sent by Alan to destroy him.

For her part, Holly remained silent, as if understanding that anything she said would be misinterpreted, as if knowing that her presence would be tolerated only if she didn’t draw his attention to her.

“The National Palace,” Buchanan told the cabdriver in Spanish, and the words were similar enough to English that Holly understood, although she didn’t ask why they were going to a palace instead of to a hotel. Or maybe the National Palace was a hotel. She didn’t know. She’d never been to Mexico City before. As it turned out, their destination was neither a hotel nor a palace but Mexico’s center of government.

Even in the dense haze of pollution, the site was impressive. Amid congested traffic, an immense square was flanked by massive buildings, two of which were cathedrals. The National Palace itself was renowned for its arches, pillars, and patios.

After leaving the taxi, Buchanan and Holly passed through a crowd and entered the National Palace’s vestibule, where large colorful murals lined the main staircase and the first-floor corridors. The murals, by Diego Rivera, conveyed the sprawling history of Mexico from the era of the Aztecs and Maya, to the invasion by the Spaniards, to the mixture of races, the numerous revolutions, and ultimately an idealized future in which Mexican peasants worked happily and coexisted gloriously with nature. Given the pollution outside, that idealized future was obviously a long way off.

Buchanan stopped only a moment to assess the murals. He’d become more intense, more driven, as if he was controlled by a terrible premonition and didn’t dare waste even a second. In a noisy, echoing corridor, he spoke to a guide and was directed toward a door down the hall. There, in a gift shop, Buchanan ignored books and