Assumed Identity

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 this, a little of that, not too much of one thing or another. Could be something, could be nothing. I’m monitoring audio surveillance. ”

Duncan lowered the tape recorder and turned up the volume on an audio receiver, then adjusted the earphones he was wearing. The receiver corresponded with several miniature microphone-transmitter units that Duncan had hidden in the phones and light switches of every room in the target house. The units were tapped into the house’s electrical system and thus had a permanent source of power. They were programmed to transmit on an FM band that wasn’t used in San Antonio, so the transmission wouldn’t interfere with television or radio reception in the house and possibly make the occupants suspicious.

The day he’d been given this assignment, Duncan had waited until the targets were both out of the house. They’d made things easy for him by doing so after supper, when the neighborhood was dark. Followed by Duncan’s partner, the targets had driven to a shopping mall, and if they’d decided to return sooner than anticipated, Duncan’s partner had a cellular phone with which he could have transmitted a warning beep to the pager that Duncan wore. Of course, Duncan had not depended on the good fortune that the targets had left the house unattended while it was dark. If necessary, he could have entered the unoccupied house during daylight by posing as an employee of the lawn-care company that the targets hired to maintain their property. No neighbor would have thought it unusual for a man wearing a lawn-care uniform and carrying an insectspray canister the size of a fire extinguisher to check the bushes at the side of the house and then to proceed intently around to the back. Duncan had invaded the house through a patio door, picking its lock in fifteen seconds, installing all the microphones within forty minutes.

In the van, dials on the receiver’s console allowed him to adjust the sound level from each transmitter. The equipment also permitted Duncan to record the sound from each transmitter onto separate tapes. He hadn’t been doing much recording, however. In the two weeks since he’d had this assignment, he’d heard nothing but what seemed to be normal household conversation. If the occupants were using a private code to communicate secret information, Duncan had detected no indication of it. Phone calls had been the usual neighborhood chitchat. Dinner talk had mostly been about the husband’s extremely successful car-repair business. At night, the couple watched a lot of television. They hadn’t had sex as long as Duncan had been listening.

For most of this evening, Duncan had been listening to the laugh track on a string of TV situation comedies. Now, when he heard the doorbell and the husband telling the wife to answer it, he activated a bank of tape recorders and lowered the volume of the transmitter in the living room, at the same time raising the volume of the transmitter in the front hallway.

Duncan understood Spanish. It was one of the reasons that he’d been assigned to this house, and right from the start of the conversation, he felt charged. Because right from the start, the stranger, who said his name was Jeff Walker, asked about Juana Mendez. Baby, we are in business now, Duncan thought. We are finally getting some action. While he eagerly listened and adjusted dials and made sure that the tape machines were recording every word, he simultaneously pushed a button on his cellular telephone. The number he needed to call had been programmed into the phone.

“You know my daughter?” Mrs. Mendez was saying in Spanish.

The man who called himself Jeff Walker was explaining that he’d known Juana in the military, at Fort Sam Houston.

With the cellular phone pressed against his left ear, Duncan heard it buzz.

The man who called himself Jeff Walker was talking about a dog that Juana Mendez had owned. Whoever this guy was, he certainly seemed to know her.

The cellular phone buzzed a second time.

Now Jeff Walker was carrying on about how Juana had bragged about her mother’s chicken fajitas.

You’re laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you, buddy? Duncan thought.

Abruptly someone answered the phone, a smooth male voice absorbing the cellular static. “Tucker here.”

“This is Bradley. I think we’ve got ignition.”