phosphorescent wake that something in the water had made. Or perhaps it was only his imagination.
Like hell.
Breathing heavily from pain, he wanted to slump onto the sand, to rest, but he heard the blaring rise and fall of more police sirens, and he knew that he didn’t dare remain in the open, even in the darkness, so he mustered discipline, drew from the depths of his resolve, and turned his back to the bridge, staggering away from the channel, proceeding along the curve of the beach, studying the glow at the rear of the various hotels.
3
Here, as at Club Internacional, the beach was deserted, tourists preferring to go to bed early or else to party at Cancun’s many night spots. Buchanan chose a hotel that didn’t have an outdoor bar behind it and trudged from the sand. Remaining in the shadows, he found a lounge chair beneath a palm tree and slumped. There were other chairs, but what had attracted him to this particular chair was that a guest had left a towel on it.
He slipped the belt from the top of his right shoulder, pressed the folded towel over his wound, and looped the belt several times over the towel, securing it tightly, attempting to make a pressure bandage. Although the towel became wet and dark in places, it seemed to reduce his loss of blood. For how long, he couldn’t tell. Right now, all he wanted to do was rest.
But there was too much to do.
He unlooped the laces that attached his deck shoes to his right wrist. The canvas of his shoes was pliant because of the water. It shouldn’t have been difficult putting them on his feet. But doing so and lacing them were among the hardest tasks he’d ever attempted.
His skull throbbed from its impact against the dinghy. The sharp pain remained as severe. Gingerly raising his left hand to his wet hair, he touched a gash and felt a large area of swelling. The water in his hair prevented him from determining if the gash was bleeding and, if so, how much.
At the same time, the salt in the water had severely aggravated the pain in his wounded right shoulder. That injury, too, was swollen. It pulsed against the pressure bandage. In addition, disturbingly, the fingers of Buchanan’s right hand trembled.
He told himself that the trembling must be the result of the trauma to his shoulder or of the struggle with the first twin and his subsequent swim across the channel. Relief after stress. Something like that. Hey, when you exercise with weights, he reminded himself, your hands sometimes shake afterward. Sure.
But only his right hand trembled, not both of them, and the fingers seemed to have a will of their own. He couldn’t help worrying that something serious was wrong.
Move. You’re acting like you’ve never been in a firefight before.
With effort, he stepped closer to the back of the hotel, leaving the shadows of the beach, moving warily onto concrete, passing more palm trees, approaching muted lights around a small oval swimming pool.
The pool, surrounded by tropical bushes and patio furniture, was deserted. Staying close to the cover of shrubs, Buchanan reached the first dim overhead light, where he noticed that his wet shoes left prints on the concrete. He noticed as well that his shirt and pants still dripped water. What interested him most, though, was that the blood on his clothes had been rinsed away. A small blessing in a night of disasters. As soon as his shirt and pants dried, they wouldn’t attract attention. But the blood on the towel strapped to his shoulder would certainly make people look twice.
He needed something to loop over his shoulder and conceal the towel. A jacket would be ideal, but the only way he could think to get one was by breaking into a room, and that was out of the question. Oh, he could pick a lock with ease if he had the equipment, which in this case he didn’t, but only amateurs smashed windows and caused a disruption, which in this case he’d be forced to do.
So what
The pain from his injured skull aggravated the pain in his wounded shoulder. The combination was excruciating. Again he felt dizzy.
While he still had strength, he had to hurry.
He veered to the left toward a tunnel. Concrete stairs led up to the right toward the rooms on the upper floors. But his interest was directed inside the tunnel toward stairs on the left that went down. He couldn’t imagine that a hotel with as impressive a design as this would be crude enough to lodge tourists below ground. So the only reason the hotel would have rooms down there would be for storage and maintenance.
He squinted at his digital Seiko watch, the sort of timepiece he’d decided an ex-DEA officer would wear. It was still functioning after his swim, and when he pressed a button on the side, the LED display showed 11:09. This late, he doubted that the maintenance staff would still be working. He listened carefully for any voices or footsteps that might echo up the stairwell. Hearing none, he started down.
His rubber-soled deck shoes made almost no sound on the stairs. At a platform, the stairs reversed direction and took him to a dimly illuminated corridor. It smelled moldy and damp. The odor would be a further reason for workers not to remain down here. Peering cautiously from the bottom of the stairwell, seeing no one at either end of the corridor, he stepped from cover, proceeded arbitrarily to the right, came to a metal door, listened, heard no sound behind it, and turned the knob. It was locked.
He continued to another door, and this time after he listened and tried the knob, he exhaled as the knob moved. Slowly pushing the door open, he groped along the inside wall, found a light switch, and flicked it on, relaxing when he saw that the room was unoccupied. The light bulb that dangled from the ceiling was as sickly a yellow as those in the corridor. The room was lined with metal shelves upon which tools and boxes had been stored. A small rusted metal desk was wedged in one corner, and on the desk-
— despite his pain, Buchanan felt a surge of excitement-
— sat a black rotary telephone.
He shut the door, locked it, and picked up the phone. His heart pounded as he heard a tone. He quickly dialed a number.
A man answered. Buchanan’s case officer. To be near Buchanan at this phase of the mission, he’d rented an apartment in the mainland part of Cancun. Normally, he and Buchanan communicated by means of coded messages left at prearranged dead-drop locations on a predetermined schedule. Rarely, because of the risk of electronic eavesdropping, did they speak on the telephone, and only then between preselected pay phones. Never, while Buchanan was under deep cover, had they met. Buchanan had access to a protective backup team if he suspected he was in danger, but given the paranoia of the men he’d arranged to meet tonight, it had been decided that the benefit of the backup team’s presence in and around Club Internacional would be offset by the danger that the drug distributors and
What worse could happen? Oh, something worse could happen, all right. The Mexican police could capture him, and his superiors could be implicated in three murders. He had to disappear.
“Yes,” Buchanan’s case officer said.
“Is that you, Paul?”
“I’m sorry. No one by that name lives here.”
“You mean this isn’t. .?” Buchanan gave a telephone number.
“You’re not even close.”
“Sorry.”
Buchanan hung up and rubbed his throbbing forehead. The number he’d given his controller was a coded message for which an expanded translation would be that the mission had to be aborted, that an absolute disaster had occurred, that he’d been injured, was on the run, and had to be extracted from the area as soon as possible. By prior agreement, his case officer would try to rendezvous with Buchanan ninety minutes after Buchanan’s call. The rendezvous location was on the mainland in downtown Cancun, outside a cantina near the intersection of Tulum and Coba avenues. But every plan had to allow for contingencies, had to have numerous alternate agendas. So if Buchanan didn’t make the rendezvous, his case officer would try again at eight tomorrow morning outside a coffee
