Assumed Identity

the toilet. Mostly, despite his light-headedness, he struggled to remain on guard against an attack. As the only yanqui, he was an obvious target, and although his watch and wallet had been taken from him, his clothes and in particular his shoes were better than those of any other prisoner-hard to resist.

As it happened, a great deal of time Buchanan wasn’t in the cell, and the attacks didn’t come from his fellow prisoners but from his guards. Escorted from the cell to an interrogation room, he was pushed, tripped, and shoved down stairs. While being questioned, he was prodded by batons and beaten with rubber hoses, always in places where clothes would hide the bruises, never around the face or skull. Why his interrogators retained this degree of fastidiousness, Buchanan didn’t know. Perhaps because he was a U.S. citizen and fears about political consequences made them feel slightly constrained. They nonetheless still managed to injure his skull when it struck concrete after they knocked over the wooden chair to which they had tied him. The pain-added to the pain from the gash he’d received when he’d struck the dinghy while swimming across the channel at Cancun-made him nauseous and created a worrisome double vision. If a doctor hadn’t redressed and restitched his wounded shoulder at Merida’s jail, he probably would have died from infection and loss of blood, although of course the doctor had been supplied not out of compassion but simply for the practical reason that a dead man couldn’t answer questions. Buchanan had encountered this logic before and knew that if the interrogators received the answers they wanted, they would feel no further necessity to provide him with medical courtesies.

That was one reason-the least important-for his refusal to tell his interrogators what they wanted. The reason, of course, was that to confess would have been a violation of professional conduct. In refusing to talk, Buchanan had three advantages. First, his interrogators were employing clumsy, brutal methods, which were easier to resist than the precise application of electrical shock combined with such inhibition- reducing drugs as sodium amytal. Second, because he was already weakened by the injury to his head and the wound in his shoulder, he had a tendency to pass out quickly while being tortured, his body supplying a kind of natural anesthesia.

And third, he had a script to follow, a role to play, a scenario that gave him a way to behave. The primary rule was that if captured, he could never admit the truth. Oh, he could use portions of the truth to concoct a believable lie. But the whole truth was out of the question. For Buchanan to say that, yes, he’d killed the three Mexicans, but they were drug dealers, after all, and besides he was working under cover for a covert branch of the U.S. military would have temporarily saved his life. However, that life would not have been worth much. As an object lesson to the United States for interfering in Mexican affairs, he might have been forced to serve a lengthy sentence in a Mexican prison, and given the severity of Mexican prisons, especially for yanquis, that sentence in all probability would have been the same as a death sentence. Or if Mexico released him to the United States as a gesture of goodwill (in exchange for favors), his superiors would make his life a nightmare because he had violated his pact with them.

5

“Victor Grant,” an overweight, bearded interrogator with slicked-back dark hair said to Buchanan in a small, plain room that had only a bench upon which the interrogator sat and a chair upon which Buchanan was tied. The round-faced, perspiring interrogator made “Victor Grant” sound as if the name were a synonym for diarrhea.

“That’s right.” Buchanan’s throat was so dry that his voice cracked, his body so dehydrated that he’d long ago stopped sweating. One of the tight loops of the rope cut into his stitched, wounded shoulder.

“Speak Spanish, damn you!”

“But I don’t know Spanish.” Buchanan breathed. “At least, not very well.” He tried to swallow. “Just a few words.” Ignorance about Spanish was one of the characteristics he’d chosen for this persona. That way, he could always pretend that he didn’t know what he was being asked.

“Cabron, you spoke Spanish to the emigration officer at the airport in Merida!”

“Yes. That’s true.” Buchanan’s head drooped. “A couple of simple phrases. What I call ‘survival Spanish.’ ”

“Survival?” a deep-voiced guard asked behind him, then grabbed Buchanan’s hair and jerked his head up. “If you do not want your hair pulled out, you will survive by speaking Spanish.”

“Un poco.” Buchanan exhaled. “A little. That’s all I know.”

“Why did you kill those three men in Cancun?”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anyone.”

The overweight interrogator, his uniform stained with sweat, pushed himself up from the bench, his stomach wobbling, and plodded close to Buchanan, then shoved a police sketch in front of his face. The sketch was the same that the emigration officer at Merida’s airport had noticed beside a fax machine on a desk in the room to which he had taken Buchanan to find out why he was bleeding.

“Does this drawing look familiar to you?” the interrogator growled. “Ciertamente, it does to me. Dios, si. It reminds me of you. We have a witness, a fellow yanqui in fact, who saw you kill three men in Cancun.”

“I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Buchanan glared. “That drawing looks like me and a couple of hundred thousand other Americans.” Buchanan rested his hoarse voice. “It could be anybody.” He breathed. “I admit I was in Cancun a couple of days ago.” He licked his dry lips. “But I don’t know anything about any murders.”

“You lie!” The interrogator raised a section of rubber hose and whacked Buchanan across the stomach.

Buchanan groaned but couldn’t double over because of the ropes that bound him to the back of the chair. If he hadn’t seen the overweight man clumsily start to swing the hose, he wouldn’t have been able to harden his stomach enough to minimize the pain. Pretending that the blow had been worse than it was, he snapped his eyes shut and jerked his head back.

“Don’t insult me!” the interrogator shouted. “Admit it! You lie.”

“No,” Buchanan murmured. “Your witness is lying.” He trembled. “If there is a witness. How could there be? I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t know anything about. .”

Each time the interrogator struck him, it gave Buchanan a chance to steal opportunities, to wince, to breathe deeply and rest. Because the police had already taken his watch and wallet, he didn’t have anything with which to try to bribe them. Not that he thought a bribe would have worked in this case. Indeed, if he did try to bribe them, under the circumstances his gesture would be the same as an admission of guilt. His only course of action was to play his role, to insist indignantly that he was innocent.

The interrogator held up Buchanan’s passport, repeating with the same contemptuous tone, “Victor Grant.”

“Yes.”

“Even your passport photograph resembles this sketch.”

“That sketch is worthless,” Buchanan said. “It looks like a ten-year-old did it.”

The interrogator tapped the rubber hose against the bandage that covered the wound on Buchanan’s shoulder. “What is your occupation?”

Wincing, Buchanan told him the cover story.

The interrogator tapped harder against the wound. “And what were you doing in Mexico?”

Wincing more severely, Buchanan gave the name of the client he supposedly had come here to see. He felt his wound swell under the bandage. Every time the interrogator tapped it, the injury’s painful pressure increased, as if it might explode.

“Then you claim you were here on business, not pleasure?”

“Hey, it’s always a pleasure to be in Mexico, isn’t it?” Buchanan squinted toward the rubber hose that the interrogator tapped even harder against his wound. From pain, his consciousness swirled. He would soon pass out again.

“Then why didn’t you have a business visa?”

Buchanan tasted stomach acid. “Because I only found out a couple of days ahead of time that my client wanted me to come down here. Getting a business visa takes time. I got a tourist card instead. It’s a whole lot easier.”