A light came on above him. He saw an Hispanic woman-in her late fifties, with shoulder-length black hair and an appealing oval face-peer out at him. Her intense dark eyes suggested intelligence and perception. They reminded him of Juana, although he didn’t know for sure that this woman was Juana’s mother. He had never met her parents. There was no name on the mailbox or beneath the doorbell. Juana’s parents might have moved during the past six years. They might even have died. When he arrived in San Antonio, Buchanan had been tempted to check a phone book to see whether they still lived at this address, but by then he was so anxious to reach the house that he hadn’t wanted to waste even a minute. He would know soon enough, he’d told himself.
An amateur might have phoned from New Orleans, and if he managed to contact Juana’s parents, that amateur might have tried to elicit information from them about whether Juana was in trouble. If so, he would have failed, or the information he received would have been suspect. Most people were gullible, but even a fool tended to hold back when confronted by personal questions from a stranger using a telephone, no matter how good that stranger’s cover story was. A telephone was a lazy operative’s way of doing research. Whenever possible, face-to- face contact was the best method of obtaining information, and when the military had transferred Buchanan for training at the CIA’s Farm in Virginia, Buchanan had quickly acquired a reputation as being skilled at what was called in the trade elicitation. His instructor’s favorite assignment had been to send his students into various local bars during happy hour. The students were to strike up conversations with strangers, and in the course of an hour, they had to gain the trust of those strangers to such a degree that each stranger would reveal the day, month, and year of his birth, as well as his Social Security number. Experience had proved to the instructor that such personal information was almost impossible to learn in a first-time encounter. How could you invent a casual question that would prompt someone you’d never met to blurt out his Social Security number? More than likely, your question would result in suspicion rather than information. All of the students in the class had failed-except for Buchanan.
The Hispanic woman unlocked the door and opened it, although she didn’t release the security chain. Speaking through the five-inch gap in the door, she looked puzzled. “Yes?”
“Senora Mendez?”
“
“
Juana’s mother studied him with suspicion. However, her suspicion seemed tempered by an appreciation that he was using Spanish. Juana had told him that while her parents were bilingual, they much preferred speaking Spanish and they felt slighted when whites whom they knew spoke Spanish forced them to speak English.
“
“
Juana’s mother continued to study him with suspicion. Buchanan was certain that if he hadn’t been speaking Spanish and if he hadn’t mentioned Fort Sam Houston, she wouldn’t have listened to him this long. He needed something else to establish his credibility. “Do you still have that dog? The golden retriever? What was his name? Pepe. Yeah. Juana sure loved that dog. When she wasn’t talking about baseball, she was talking about him. Said she liked to take Pepe out for a run along the river when she wasn’t on duty.”
The mother’s suspicion began to dissolve. “No.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The dog. Pepe. He died last year.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, Senora Mendez. Losing a pet can be like. . Juana must have taken it hard.”
“You say your name is Jeff Walker?”
“That’s right.” Buchanan made sure to stand straight, as if his character retained habits of bearing from when he’d been in the military.
“I don’t remember her mentioning you.”
“Well, six years is a while ago. Juana certainly told me a lot about you. The way I hear it, you make the best chicken fajitas in town.”
The mother smiled slightly. “Those were always Juana’s favorite.” The smile became a frown. “I would remember you if I’d met you before. Why didn’t Juana ever bring you to the house?”
I’ve got another “why,” Buchanan thought with growing concern. Why so many questions? What the hell’s going on?
4
Two blocks along the street, a small gray van was parked in front of a house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn. The van had been parked there for several days, but the neighbors had not been troubled by its presence. On the contrary, they felt reassured because the van’s driver, a private detective, had paid a visit to everyone who lived on that block and had explained that recent vandalism in the neighborhood had prompted a security firm with clients in the area to dispatch a guard to keep a watch on several homes in the district, particularly the vacant house, which seemed a natural target for vandals. If the neighbors had telephoned the number on the business card that they were given, a professional-sounding secretary would have told them that what the private detective had said was correct. The man did work for the firm. What the secretary would not have said, of course, was that she was speaking from an almost-empty one-room downtown office, and that the security firm had not existed two weeks ago.
The private detective’s name was Duncan Bradley. He was twenty-eight years old. Tall and slim, he almost always wore sneakers and a cotton sweat suit, as if he expected at any moment to play basketball, his favorite leisure activity. He preferred so informal an outfit because it was comfortable during lengthy stakeouts, and this particular stakeout-already lengthy-promised to become even longer.
He and his partner were working twelve-hour shifts, which meant that the van, the windows of which were shielded so that no one could see in, had to be equipped with cooking facilities (a microwave) and toilet facilities (a Porta Potti). The cramped working conditions also meant that the van had needed to be customized in order to comfortably accommodate Duncan Bradley’s six-foot-eight-inch frame. Thus all the seats had been removed from the back and replaced by an extralong mattress clamped to a plank and tilted upward on a fifteen-degree angle so that Duncan, who constantly lay upon it, didn’t need to strain his neck by his persistent need to keep looking up.
What he looked at was the monitor for a miniature television camera that projected from the van’s roof and was hidden by the cowling of a fake air vent. This camera, a version of the type used in assault helicopters, had considerable magnification ability, so it was able to show the license plate of a car parked two blocks farther along the street, a blue Ford Taurus with Louisiana license plates. This camera also had state-of-the-art night-vision capability, and thus, although the street was for the most part in shadow, Duncan had no trouble seeing the green- tinted image of a man who got out of the Taurus, combed his hair, glanced at the neighborhood as if admiring it, and then walked toward the house. The man was Caucasian, about five-eleven, in his early thirties. He was well- built but not dramatically muscular. He was dressed casually, unremarkably. His hair was of moderate length, neither long nor short. His features were rugged but not severe, just as he was good-looking, handsome, but not in a way that attracted attention.
“This is November second,” Duncan said into a tape recorder. “It’s nine-thirty at night. I’m still in my surveillance vehicle down the street from the target area. A man just showed up at the house.” Duncan proceeded to describe the car and its driver, including the Louisiana license number. “He’s not too tall, not too short. A little of
