Assumed Identity

14

A little after one in the morning, Pedro warned Buchanan that they were about a mile from Juana’s home.

“Close enough. Stop right here,” Buchanan said.

After Anita pulled up behind them, he got out of the van, told Anita to wait with Pedro, and drove Tucker’s Jeep Cherokee over a murky rise, proceeding the rest of the way along a winding, partially wooded road. His headlights revealed mist drifting in from the river. They also showed new streets and the start of construction on houses for a new subdivision.

Juana won’t like that.

What you mean is, you pray to God that she’s still alive so she’ll be able not to like it.

Pedro and Anita had described the house, which for the present was one of a very few along this section of the river, so Buchanan had no trouble finding it. Wooden and single-story, on stilts in case of flooding, it reminded him more of a cabin than a house as he passed a cottonwood tree and stopped in the gravel driveway. Quaint, rustic. If Juana’s dog had still been alive, Buchanan imagined how much Juana would have enjoyed running with it along the river.

. . had still been alive.

Man, you sure are thinking about death a lot.

You bet, with a sniper watching me from God-knows-where.

Buchanan’s back felt tense as he opened the screened porch and approached the main door. With the mist coming in from the river, the sniper might not have been able to recognize the car whose headlights had veered toward the house. What if he came down to investigate?

Play the scenario you described to him, Buchanan thought.

He picked the two dead-bolt locks and entered, smelling the must of a building that had not been occupied for quite a while. Feeling vulnerable even in the darkness, he shut the door, locked it, felt along the wall, and found a light switch. A lamp came on, revealing a living room that had a bookshelf, a television, a VCR, and stereo equipment but very little furniture, just a leather sofa, a coffee table, and a rocking chair. Obviously Juana hadn’t spent much time here. Otherwise, she would have paid more attention to its furnishings. Also, few furnishings suggested that she seldom had company.

Buchanan proceeded across the room, noting the dust on the sofa and the coffee table, further evidence that Juana hadn’t been here in some time. He glanced into the kitchen, turned on its light, and assessed its neat appearance, its minimum of appliances. Remote, austere, the place gave Buchanan a sense of loneliness. It made him feel sorry for her.

Down a hallway, the first door he came to-on the left, facing the river-was an office. When Buchanan turned on the overhead light, he saw that here, too, everything was kept to a minimum: a metal filing cabinet, a swivel chair, a wooden table upon which sat a computer, a laser printer, a modem, a telephone, a gooseneck lamp, a yellow notepad, and a jar filled with pencils and pens. Otherwise, the room was bare. No rug. No pictures. Impersonal.

He wondered what the sniper would be thinking in the misty darkness outside. How would the man react as he watched various lights come on in the house? Despite the instructions that the man had been given, would he come down to investigate?

Buchanan opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and immediately two things became important to him. The first was that each file had a stiff folder with hooks on each side that suspended the file rigidly on metal tracks along each side at the top of the drawer. The second was that the files were arranged alphabetically but that the files in A to the middle of D were bunched together, separated by a slight gap from the rest of the files that continued D through to L. The rigid hooks on each side of the neighboring files prevented them from expanding to fill the gap. Obviously, one of the D files had been removed. Possibly Juana had done it. Possibly an intruder who’d been searching as Buchanan was. No way to tell.

Buchanan opened the second drawer, found the files marked M through Z, and noticed a slight gap where a T file appeared to have been removed. D and T. Those were the only two apparent omissions. Buchanan thought about it as he opened the bottom drawer and discovered a Browning 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. The basic necessities, he thought.

What did Juana do for a living? Her parents had said that she was involved in private security. That kind of work would be a logical progression from what Juana had done in military intelligence. But private security could mean anything from doing risk assessments, to installing intrusion detectors, to providing physical protection. She might be a free-lance or work for a major corporation.

He shut the bottom drawer, reopened the top one, and began to read some of the files. A pattern became obvious. Juana’s principal activity had been to act as a protective escort for businesswomen, female politicians and entertainers, or the wives of their male equivalents, primarily when they traveled to Spanish-speaking countries or to cities in America that had a sizable Hispanic population. The logic was clear. A protector had to blend with the local population. Because Juana was Hispanic, she would lose considerable effectiveness in an environment in which her Latin facial characteristics and skin color attracted attention. There wasn’t any point in her working in Africa, the Orient, the Mideast, or northern Europe, for example. For that matter, even some of the northern United States. But Spain and Latin America were ideal for her. With that kind of travel, it wasn’t any wonder that she stayed away from home for months at a time. Possibly her absence could be easily explained. Possibly she was merely on an assignment.

Then why the postcard? Why did she need my help?

Something to do with a job she was on? She might have wanted to hire me.

The notion that her interest in him would have been professional and not personal made Buchanan feel hollow-but only for a moment. He quickly reminded himself that a request for professional help would not have required so unusual and secretive a means of contacting him.

And snipers wouldn’t be lying in wait to kill her.

No. Juana was in trouble, and even if she’d been away on a lengthy assignment, she wouldn’t have neglected to phone her parents, certainly not for nine months in a row. Not willingly.

Something was stopping her. Either she wasn’t physically capable of doing it or else she didn’t want to risk involving her parents in what had happened to her.

At the back of each file, Buchanan found itemized statements, copies of bills submitted and checks received. He learned that Juana’s business had been quite successful. She’d been earning fees that ranged from $5,000 for consultations, to $10,000 for two-week escort jobs, to $100,000 for a two-month protective assignment in Argentina. A note in the file indicated that there had evidently been some shooting in the latter case. Protection was a demanding, sophisticated occupation for those who knew what it truly entailed. The best operatives were paid accordingly. Even so, Juana had been unusually successful. Buchanan made a rough estimate that she’d been earning close to half a million dollars a year.

And living this simply, paradoxically without security devices? What had she been doing with the money? Had she been saving it, investing it, planning to retire in her mid-thirties? Again, Buchanan had no way to tell. He searched the office but didn’t find a bankbook, a statement from a brokerage firm, or any other sign of where she might have placed her money. Now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any mail outside or on the coffee table. Juana must have told the post office to hold it for her. Or else her parents had been picking it up. Before they’d come out here tonight, Anita had mentioned that she and Pedro sometimes drove out to inspect the place. Buchanan made a mental note to ask them about her mail, about whether she ever received statements from financial institutions.

At once the room appeared to sway, although actually it was his legs that caused the effect. They were wobbly. Exhausted, he sat in the tilt-back chair and rubbed his throbbing temples. The last time he’d slept through the night had been forty-eight hours ago, but that had been in the hospital, and even then his sleep had not been continuous, the nurses waking him intermittently to check his vital signs. Since then, he’d slept for a few hours at the motel in Beaumont, Texas, and had a few naps at freeway rest stops en route to San Antonio. The knife wound in his side ached, its stitches making him itchy. The almost-healed bullet wound in his shoulder ached as well. His eyes were gritty from lack of sleep.

The files, he thought. Whoever was concerned enough to want to find Juana and kill her would have searched her home in hopes of discovering a clue about where she was hiding. If they wanted to kill her because she knew too much about them, they would have searched for and removed any evidence that linked her with them.

A name that begins with D. Another that begins with T. Those had been the two files that were obviously missing. Of course, the files might not be missing at all. Juana might have caused the gap in the sequence of the files when she replaced two files, scrunching a group of other files together in order to make room, leaving a space where her fingers had been.

But I’ve got to start somewhere, Buchanan thought. I have to assume that two files are missing and that they’re important. He leaned back in the chair, hearing it creak, thinking that the pages in the files looked like computer printouts, wondering if the files might be in the computer.

And realized that the creak he had heard had not been from the chair but from the hallway.