Assumed Identity

15

Slowly, Buchanan turned his head.

A man stood in the doorway: mid-thirties, five foot ten, 150 pounds. His hair was sandy and extremely short. His face, like his build, was thin, but not unhealthily so; something about him suggested he was a jogger. He wore cowboy boots, jeans, a saddle-shaped belt buckle, a faded denim shirt, and a jeans jacket. The latter was slightly too large for him and emphasized his thinness.

“Find what you’re looking for?” The man’s flat mid-Atlantic accent contrasted with his cowboy clothes.

“Not yet.” Buchanan lowered his hands from where he’d been massaging his temples. “I’ve still got a few places to check.”

I locked the door after I came in, he thought. I didn’t hear anybody follow me. How did-?

This son of a bitch hasn’t been watching from outside. He’s been hiding somewhere in the house.

“Such as?” The man’s hands stayed by his side. “What places haven’t you checked?”

“The computer records.”

“Well, don’t let me hold you up.” The man’s cheeks were dark with beard stubble.

“Right.” Buchanan pressed the computer’s ON button.

As the computer’s fan began to whir, the man said, “You look like hell, buddy.”

“I’ve had a couple of hard days. Mostly, I need sleep.”

“I’m not having any picnic, hanging around here, either. Nothing to do but wait. Where I bunked.” The man pointed toward the next room down the hall. “Weird. No wonder the woman had it locked. Probably didn’t want her parents to see what she had in there. At first, I thought it was body parts.”

“Body parts?” Buchanan frowned.

“The stuff in that room. Belongs in a horror movie. Fucking bizarre. You mean you weren’t told?”

What in God’s name is he talking about? Buchanan wondered. “I guess they didn’t figure I needed to know.”

“Seems strange.”

“The stuff in that room?”

“No. That you weren’t told,” the man said. “If they sent you out here to take another look for something to tell us where the target is, the first thing they’d have done was prepare you for weird shit.”

“All they mentioned was the files.”

“The computer’s waiting.”

“Right.” Buchanan didn’t want to take his gaze away from the assassin, but he wasn’t being given a choice. If Buchanan didn’t seem to care about business, the man would become more suspicious than he already seemed.

Or maybe the man’s suspicion was only something that Buchanan imagined.

On the computer screen, the cursor flashed where a symbol asked the user what program was to be activated.

“What’s your name?” the killer asked.

“Brian MacDonald.” Buchanan immediately reverted to that identity, the one he’d assumed prior to becoming ex-DEA operative Ed Potter and going to Cancun, where all his recent troubles had started.

Brian MacDonald was supposed to have been a computer programmer, and in support of that identity, Buchanan had received instruction in that subject.

“Having trouble getting into the computer?” the killer asked. “It didn’t give me any trouble when they ordered me to erase a couple of files. You know about that, right? They told you I erased a couple of files?”

“Yes, but those files aren’t what interest me.”

The cursor kept flashing next to the program-prompt sign. Juana’s printed-out files had not been in a spread-sheet format but, rather, in standard prose paragraphs.

A word-processing program. But which one?

Buchanan-MacDonald typed DIR. At once the disk drive made clicking sounds, and a list of the symbols for the computer’s programs appeared on the screen.

One of those symbols was WS, the abbreviation for a word-processing program known as WordStar.

Buchanan-MacDonald exited the list of the computer’s programs and typed WS after the symbol that asked him what program he wanted. The computer’s hard-disk drive made more clicking sounds. A list of other files appeared on the screen.

DIRECTORY OF DRIVE C:

A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \

J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ Q \ R \

S \ T \ U \ V \ W \ X \ Y \ Z \

AUTOEXEC.BAK.1k AUTOEXEC.BAT.1k

Buchanan-MacDonald knew that AUTOEXEC.BAK was a precautionary backup for AUTOEXEC.BAT, a program that allowed the computer’s user to switch from one file to another. The designation.1k merely indicated the small amount of memory space that this program used. As for the alphabetical series, Juana had evidently subdivided her clients’ files into subdirectories governed by the first letter of each client’s last name.

Or so Buchanan guessed. At the moment, he was intensely preoccupied by the presence of the man in the doorway. The killer’s breathing seemed to have become loud, strident, as if he was disturbed by something.

“Having problems?” the killer asked. “Don’t you know what to do next? Do I have to show you?”

“No,” Buchanan said. If he’d been alone, he would have accessed the subdirectories for D and T. But he didn’t dare. If the killer had erased files in those subdirectories as he’d earlier mentioned, the man would wonder why Buchanan was interested in those same groups of names.

“But what I want to do next,” Buchanan said, “is get something for this damned headache.” Slowly, he stood, using his left hand to massage the back of his neck. “Does the woman have any aspirin around here?”

The killer stepped slightly backward. He still kept both hands at his sides, not yet fully alarmed. But Buchanan, his heart pounding, had a sense that a crisis was about to explode.

Or it might have been that the man wasn’t stepping backward defensively but, rather, to let Buchanan go past him and into the bathroom.

It was extremely hard to know.

“Bufferin,” the killer said. “The medicine cabinet. Top shelf.”

“Great.”

But the man stepped out of the way yet again as Buchanan approached him, and obviously this time he was making sure that Buchanan didn’t come within an arm’s length of him.

The bathroom-across from the computer room-was dusty. White walls. White floor. White shower curtain. Simple. Basic.

Buchanan had no choice except to pretend to look for the aspirins, even though his headache was the last thing he now cared about. He opened the medicine cabinet.

And heard a buzz. Surprised, he stared down at the cellular phone that he had taken from the van and attached to the left side of his belt. He’d taken that phone instead of the one in the Jeep because the Jeep’s phone wasn’t portable. This way, if Pedro and Anita needed to get in touch with Buchanan, they could use a second phone, a nonportable one, that was part of the surveillance van’s instrument panel. Now Pedro or Anita was evidently calling him to warn him about something.

Or maybe the call was from the surveillance team’s controllers in Philadelphia.

Buchanan couldn’t just let it keep ringing. That would arouse even more suspicion.

But as he reached to unhook the phone from his belt, he saw motion in the hallway. The killer appeared, and now he, too, had a cellular phone. He must have gotten it from the room where he’d been hiding.

He didn’t look happy.

“Funny thing,” the killer said. “I never heard of Brian MacDonald. I just called Duncan’s van to make sure everything about you is on the up and up, and damned if your phone doesn’t respond to his number, which tends to suggest that your phone is actually Duncan’s phone, which makes me wonder why in hell-”

While the killer talked, keeping his left hand around the cellular phone, he moved his right hand beneath his jeans jacket. As Buchanan had noticed, the jacket was slightly too large, a logical reason for which would be that the killer had a holstered handgun beneath it.

“A coincidence,” Buchanan said. “You’re calling Duncan while somebody else is calling me. I’ll show you.” He used his left hand to reach for the phone.

The killer’s eyes focused on that gesture.

Simultaneously Buchanan shoved his right hand back beneath his sport coat, drawing his pistol from behind his belt.

The killer’s eyes widened as he yanked his own pistol from beneath his jeans jacket.

Buchanan shot.

The bullet hit the man’s chest.

Although the man was jolted backward, he still kept raising his weapon.

Buchanan’s second bullet hit the man’s throat.

Blood flew.

The man was jolted farther backward.

But his reflexes made his gunhand keep rising.

Buchanan’s third bullet hit the man’s forehead.

The impact knocked the man over. His gunhand jerked toward the ceiling. His spastic finger pulled the trigger. The pistol discharged, blowing a hole in the hallway ceiling. Plaster fell.

The man struck the hardwood floor in the computer room. He shuddered, wheezed, and stopped moving. Blood pooled around him.

Buchanan hurried toward the fallen man, aimed his pistol toward the man’s head, kicked his gun away, and checked for life signs.

The man’s eyes were open. The pupils were dilated. They didn’t respond when Buchanan shoved his fingers toward them.

Quickly, Buchanan searched the man’s clothes. All he found were a comb, coins, a handkerchief, and a wallet. He set the wallet on the table and hurried to get a small area rug that he’d seen in the living room. After rolling the body onto the rug, he pulled the rug along the hallway, through the living room, and toward a back door in the kitchen.

The oppressive night concealed him. Shivering, his skin prickling from the river’s dampness, Buchanan tugged the body across a screened porch, down three steps, and toward this deserted section of the river. He eased down the bank, found a log, hunched the body over it, shoved the log into the current, and watched as the body slipped off as soon as the current grabbed the log. The two objects drifted away, at once out of sight in the darkness. Buchanan threw the area rug as far as he could into the river. He took out the man’s gun, which he’d put beneath his belt, and threw it out into the river as well, obeying the rule of never keeping a weapon whose history you don’t know. Finally, he took out the killer’s cellular phone along with the three empty shell casings from his own semiautomatic-he’d picked them up as he left the house-and threw them toward where the gun had splashed. He stared toward nothing, took several deep breaths to calm himself, and hurried back to the house.