Assumed Identity

“Here we are, suh.”

“What?” He roused himself and looked out the taxi’s side window, seeing a brightly lit car-rental office next to a gas station.

“If I was you, suh, I’d take it easy drivin’. You look beat.”

“Thanks. I’ll be fine.”

But I’d better look more alert when I rent the car, he thought.

He paid the driver and didn’t show the effort with which he carried his bag into the office, where the bright lights hurt his eyes.

A weary-looking spectacled man shoved a rental agreement across the counter. “I’ll need to see your credit card and your driver’s license. Initial about the insurance. Sign at the bottom.”

He had to look at the credit card he’d set on the counter to see which name he was using. “Buchanan. Brendan Buchanan.”

If only this headache would ease off.

Juana.

He had to find Juana.

And there was only one place he could think to start.

16

“It’s been taken care of,” Raymond said.

Seated at the rear of the passenger compartment of his private jet, Alistair Drummond peered up from a report he was reading. The fuselage vibrated softly as the jet streaked through the sky. “Specifics,” he said.

“According to a radio message I just received,” Raymond said, “last night, the director of Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History was killed in a car accident near the National Palace in Mexico City.”

“Tragic,” Drummond said. Despite his age, he didn’t show the strain of having flown to a business meeting in Moscow, then to another in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia before his present transatlantic flight back to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, all within forty-eight hours. “Do we have evidence that Delgado was responsible?”

“The man Delgado ordered to do it is on our payroll. He’ll implicate Delgado if we ask him, provided we guarantee he won’t be punished.”

“We?” Drummond asked.

“I meant you.”

“Your confusion of pronouns troubles me, Raymond. I’d hate to think that you consider me an equal.”

“No, sir, I don’t. I won’t make the mistake again.”

“Has his successor been chosen?”

Raymond nodded.

“An executive favorable to our cause?”

Raymond nodded again. “And money will make him more so.”

“Good,” Drummond said, his voice brittle, one of the few signs of his age. “We no longer need the woman, even if we find her. The leverage she provided against Delgado isn’t necessary any longer now that we have another way to put pressure on him. In all probability, Delgado will be Mexico’s next president, but not if we reveal his crimes. Let him know we have proof that he ordered the death of the Institute’s director, that his political future continues to depend on me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, when he becomes president, I’ll have even more influence.”

“All the influence you need.”

“Never,” Drummond corrected him.

“Perhaps, then, you do need the woman.”

The old man scowled, his wrinkles deepening so much that his true age began to show. “I almost lost everything because of her. When your operatives find her. .”

“Yes, sir?”

“Make certain they kill her on sight.”

NINE 1

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

Buchanan arrived by nightfall. He’d driven west on Route 10 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, past numerous small towns into Texas, toward Beaumont and Houston and finally. .

His headache, combined with the pain in his side, had forced him to rest several times along the way. At Beaumont, he’d rented a hotel room in midmorning so that he could shave and shower and sleep for a couple of hours. The hotel clerk had looked puzzled when he checked out at noon. That was no good, attracting attention like that. It wasn’t any good, either, that his scarcity of cash forced him to use his credit card to rent the room. Now there was a further paper trail, although by the time Alan, the major, and the captain traced him to the hotel, he’d be long gone, and they still wouldn’t know his destination. Sure, if they checked the records of his past assignments, they might guess it, but he’d had a great many assignments in the six years since he’d known Juana, and it would take them quite a while to make the connection between her, New Orleans, and San Antonio. By then, he’d be somewhere else.

He ate takeout food while he drove, hamburgers, french fries, po’boys, tacos, anything to give him fuel, washing it down with plenty of Coca-Cola, relying on the soft drink’s calories and caffeine to maintain his energy. Three times, he pulled off the busy highway and napped at a rest stop. He parked the rented Taurus near the toilet facilities so that the noisy coming and going of vehicles and travelers would prevent him from sleeping too deeply, for he knew that if he did truly sleep, he wouldn’t waken until the next day.

He had to keep moving. He had to get to San Antonio and begin the urgent process of finding out what had happened to Juana. Why had she failed to meet him? What trouble had caught up to her? Despite his pain and confusion, he had sufficient presence of mind to ask himself if he was overreacting. A promise made six years ago to a woman whom he hadn’t seen since then. A plea for help in the form of a cryptic postcard.

Maybe the postcard didn’t mean what he thought. Did it make sense for Juana to contact him after so long a time? And why him? Wasn’t there anyone else whom she could ask for help?

What made him the logical choice?

He didn’t have answers. But this much he knew for certain: Something had happened to him.

Something terrifying.

He tried to establish when it had begun. Perhaps when he’d been shot in Cancun, or when he’d injured his head while he made his escape, swimming across the channel. Perhaps when he’d been tortured in Merida and had struck his head on the concrete floor. Or possibly later when he’d been stabbed and had again struck his head.

The more he considered those possibilities, he didn’t think that they were the source of his fear, however. No doubt they were contributing factors. But as he analyzed the past weeks, as he replayed his various traumas, one incident disturbed him more than any.

The trauma had not been physical. It had been mental.

It threatened his sense of identity.

Or rather, multiple identities. During the past eight years, he had been more than two hundred people. On some days, he had impersonated as many as six different people while attempting to recruit a series of contacts. During the past two weeks, he’d been confused for Jim Crawford and had identified with Peter Lang while he’d impersonated Ed Potter and Victor Grant and Don Colton and. .