Assumed Identity

“Anybody could look that up in a file. Does she have any allergies?”

“Senor Mendez, what’s this about? I haven’t seen her in several years. It’s very hard to remember if. .”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But I recall she had a problem with cilantro. That always surprised me, her being allergic to an herb that’s used so often in Hispanic cooking.”

“Birthmarks?”

“This is. .”

“Answer the question.”

“There’s a scar on the back of her right leg, up high, near her hip. She said she got it when she was a kid, climbing over a barbed-wire fence. What’s next? Are you going to ask me how I saw the scar? I think I made a mistake. I think I shouldn’t have come here. I think I should have gone to some of Juana’s friends to see if they knew where I could find her.”

As Buchanan turned toward the door, Juana’s mother said sharply, “Pedro.”

“Wait,” the father said. “Please. If you’re truly a friend of my daughter, stay.”

Buchanan studied him, then nodded.

“I asked you those questions because. .” Pedro seemed in turmoil. “You’re the fourth friend of Juana to ask where she was in the past two weeks.”

Buchanan didn’t show his surprise. “The fourth. .?”

“Is she in trouble?” Anita’s voice was taut with anxiety.

“Like you, each of them was white,” Pedro said. “Each was male. Each hadn’t seen her in several years. But unlike you, they didn’t have any personal knowledge about her. One of them claimed that he’d served with her at Fort Bragg. But Juana was never assigned to Fort Bragg.”

That was wrong, Buchanan knew. Although Juana’s cover military assignment had been at Fort Sam Houston, her actual assignment had been through Fort Bragg. But her parents would never have known that because Juana would never have broken cover to tell them. So they naturally thought that the man who had claimed to be Juana’s friend was lying when he claimed that he’d known Juana at Bragg. Quite the contrary: The man was telling a version of the truth. Whoever he was, he knew Juana’s background in detail. But he had made a mistake in assuming that her parents would also know it.

Juana’s father continued. “Another supposed friend claimed that he had known Juana at college here in San Antonio. When I asked which one, he looked confused. He didn’t seem to know that she had transferred from Our Lady of the Lake University to St. Mary’s University. Anyone who knew her well would have known that information.”

Buchanan mentally agreed. Somebody had fucked up and skimmed through her file instead of reading it in detail.

“The third supposed friend,” Pedro said, “claimed that, like you, he had dated her when they worked together here at Fort Sam Houston, but when we asked why we had never met him-since Juana brought most of her boyfriends to see us- he didn’t have an explanation. At least, you did, just as you actually seem to know personal things about her. So I will ask you again. . Jeff Walker. . is our daughter in trouble?”

Juana’s mother waited, clutching the sides of her dress.

Buchanan had a difficult, quick decision to make. Pedro was inviting him into their confidence. Or maybe Pedro was offering bait. If Buchanan admitted his true intentions, Pedro might very well suspect that Buchanan was yet another impersonator sent by Juana’s enemies to find her.

He decided to take the gamble. “I think so.”

Pedro exhaled as if he was finally hearing what he wanted, even though the knowledge dismayed him.

“I knew it,” Juana’s mother said. “What kind of trouble? Tell us. We’ve been worried to death about. .”

“Anita, please, no talk about death.” Pedro squinted toward Buchanan and repeated the question that his wife had asked. “What kind of trouble?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here,” Buchanan said. “Last week, I received a message that she needed to see me. The message was vague, as if she didn’t want anyone else to read it and figure out what she was telling me. But I could figure it out. She desperately needed help. There’s a place in New Orleans that was special to us. Without mentioning it, she asked me-begged me, really-to meet her there at the same time and date we’d last been there. That would have been at eleven P.M. on Halloween. But she didn’t show up that night or the night after. Obviously, something’s wrong. That’s why I came here. Because you were the only people I could think of to try to establish contact with her. I figured that you of all people would have some idea what was going on.”

Neither Pedro nor Anita said anything.

Buchanan gave them time.

“No,” Anita said.

Buchanan gave them more time.

“We don’t know anything,” Anita said. “Except that we’ve been worried because she hasn’t been behaving normally.”

“How?”

“We haven’t heard from her in nine months. Usually, even when she’s on the road, she phones at least once a week. She did say she’d be away for a while. But nine months?”

“What does she do for a living?”

Pedro and Anita looked uncertain.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s something to do with security,” Pedro said.

“National security?”

“Private security. She has her own business here in San Antonio. But that’s as much as Juana told us. She never discussed specifics. She said that it wouldn’t be fair to her clients. She couldn’t violate their confidence.”

Good, Buchanan thought. She stayed a pro.

“All right,” he said, “so she hasn’t been in touch in nine months. And suddenly several men who claim to be old friends of hers show up to ask if you know where they can find her. What else isn’t-?”

Abruptly Buchanan noticed that Juana’s parents were looking at him differently. Their gaze was harder, more wary, their need to confess their concerns about their daughter now tempered by renewed suspicion about him. The risk he’d taken had finally caught up to him. His remark about the other men who’d come looking for her had prompted Juana’s parents to associate him with those men.

But he was troubled by something else. The intensity of his headache had made him temporarily relax his guard. If an enemy was trying to find Juana and if that enemy was impatient enough to send three different men to ask Juana’s parents about where she could be found, might not that enemy have gone further in an effort to learn what the parents knew? Might not that enemy have. .?

“Excuse me. May I use your bathroom?”

Pedro’s suspicion made him look surly. He nodded grudgingly. “It’s down the hall. The first door on the left.”

“Thank you.”

Buchanan stood, feigning self-consciousness, and went along the hallway. In the bathroom, which was bright, white, and extremely ordered, he locked the door, strained to get some urine from his bladder, flushed the toilet, and turned on the sink to wash his hands.

He left the water running, silently opened the medicine cabinet, found a nail file, and used it to unscrew the wall plate to the light switch. Taking care not to touch the wires, he unscrewed the switch from its cavity in the wall and pulled it out to study what was behind.

His discovery increased the nausea that his headache caused. A miniature microphone-transmitter was attached to the wires. Because most people felt that a bathroom gave them privacy, that was the room they’d least likely suspect had a bug, hence the first room that Buchanan always checked. And because Mrs. Mendez kept this bathroom scrupulously clean, about the only place in the room where she wouldn’t find a bug was behind the light switch, a spot favored by professional eavesdroppers. The phones were probably miked, as well.

Okay, Buchanan thought. Here we go.

He shut off the water, the sound of which he had hoped would conceal the noise he’d made when he