Assumed Identity

13

Here’s the postcard I never thought I’d send. I hope you meant your promise. The last time and place. Counting on you. PLEASE.

Buchanan stepped from the bathroom, its toilet flushing. “Last night, you mentioned something about R and R.”

Alan squinted, suspicious. “That’s right.”

“Well, you call this being on R and R? Being caged in here?”

“I told you, Don Colton’s supposed to be invisible. If you start wandering in and out, the neighbors will think you’re him, and when the next Don Colton shows up, they’ll get suspicious.”

“But what if I’m out of here? Me. Buchanan. A furlough. I haven’t had one in eight years. Who’d notice? Who’d care?”

“Furlough?”

“Under my own name. Might do me some good to be myself for a change.”

Alan cocked his head, squinting, nonetheless betraying his interest.

“Next week, I’m supposed to go back to that doctor,” Buchanan said. “By then, maybe your people and the colonel will have decided what to do with me.”

“I don’t have the authority to make that decision alone.”

“Talk with the colonel,” Buchanan said.

Alan continued to look interested. “Where would you go? Since you don’t have a passport, it can’t be out of the country.”

“I wouldn’t want to leave the country, anyhow. Not that far. South. New Orleans. Two days from now is Halloween. A person can have a damned good time in New Orleans on Halloween.”

“I heard that,” Alan said. “In fact, I heard that a person can have a damned good time in New Orleans anytime.”

Buchanan nodded. His request would be granted.

But he wouldn’t be going as himself.

No way, he thought.

He’d be stepping back six years.

He’d be reinventing himself to be the person he was then. A hundred lifetimes ago.

A once-happy man who liked jazz, mint juleps, and red beans with rice.

A charter pilot named Peter Lang who’d had the tragic love affair of his life.

14

Here’s the postcard I never thought I’d send.

SEVEN 1

Pilots-especially when being a pilot is not their true occupation and they need to establish an assumed identity-ought to fly. Instead, Buchanan-Lang took the train to New Orleans.

That method of travel had several advantages. One was that he found it relaxing. Another was that it was private, inasmuch as he’d been able to get a sleeper compartment. Still another was that it took a while, filling the time. After all, he didn’t have anything to do until Halloween the next evening. Certainly he could have spent the day sight-seeing in New Orleans. But the fact was, he was quite familiar with New Orleans, its docks, the French Quarter, the Garden District, Lake Pontchartrain, Antoine’s restaurant, Preservation Hall, and most of all, the exotic cemeteries. Peter Lang had a fascination with exotic cemeteries. He visited them whenever he could. Buchanan didn’t allow himself to analyze the implications.

However, the major reason for taking the train instead of flying was that there wasn’t any metal-detector and X-ray security at train stations. Thus he could bring the 9-mm Beretta pistol that Jack Doyle had given him in Fort Lauderdale. It was wedged between two shirts and two changes of underwear, along with Victor Grant’s passport, next to the toilet kit in the small canvas travel bag that Buchanan had been carrying with him since Florida. As his confusion about his employers and about himself continued to aggravate him, he was grateful that he’d lied about the passport and that he hadn’t told anyone about the handgun. The passport and the gun gave him options. They allowed him potential freedom. That he’d never before lied to a debriefer should perhaps have troubled him. It should perhaps have warned him that he was more disturbed than he realized, that the blow to his head had been more serious than he knew. But as he sat next to the window of his locked compartment, listening to the clack-clack-clack of the wheels on the rails, watching the brilliant autumn colors of the Virginia countryside, he persistently rubbed his aching head and was grateful that he hadn’t tried to conceal the handgun somewhere in Don Colton’s apartment. If he had, the cameras would have exposed him. As it was, his story had evidently been convincing. Otherwise, his controllers wouldn’t have given him money as well as ID in his real name and then have allowed him to take this brief trip.

He’d bought a paperback novel before boarding the train at Washington’s Union Station, but he barely glanced at it while the train continued south. He just kept massaging his forehead, partially because of pain and partially because of concentration, while he stared out the window at intermittent towns and cities, hills and farmland.

Peter Lang. He had to remember everything about him. He had to become Peter Lang. Pretending to be a pilot wasn’t a problem, for Buchanan was a pilot. It was one of several skills that he’d acquired while he was being trained. Almost without exception, the occupations he pretended to have were occupations with which his employers had arranged to give him some familiarity. In a few cases, he had genuine expertise.

But what was a problem was reacquiring Peter Lang’s attitude, his mannerisms, his personality. Buchanan had never kept notes about his numerous characters. To document an impersonation was foolish. Such documents might eventually be used against him. On principle, a paper trail was never a good idea. So he’d been forced to rely on his memory, and there had been many assignments, especially those in which he was meeting various contacts and had to switch back and forth between identities several times during one day, when his ability to recall and adapt had been taxed to the maximum. He’d suffered the constant worry that he would switch characters unintentionally, that he would behave like character X in front of a contact when he was supposed to behave like character Y.

Peter Lang.

2

Buchanan had been in New Orleans, posing as a charter pilot who worked for an oil-exploration company, supposedly flying technicians and equipment to various sites in Central America. His actual mission, however, had been to fly plainclothes Special Forces advisers to secret airfields in the jungles of Nicaragua, where they would train Contra rebels to battle the Marxist regime. A year earlier, in 1986, when Eugene Hasenfus had been shot down over Nicaragua while attempting to drop munitions to the rebels, Hasenfus had told his captors that he assumed he had been working for the CIA. The trouble was that the United States Congress had specifically forbidden the CIA to