Assumed Identity (1993) (63 page)

'Now, months later, she disappears.' Holly frowned. 'And your friend who sometimes provided security for her disappears as well. What happened two weeks ago? What's going on?'

'I don't think it happened two weeks ago.'

Holly didn't move for a moment. Then she straightened.

'I think it happened on the yacht,' Buchanan said.

'What happened? I still don't-'

'The photocopies of the recent articles you gave me don't reproduce the pictures very well. But this page from yesterday's Washington Post has clear photographs. A shot of Maltin at his news conference. A recent shot of Maria Tomez during one of her infrequent public appearances. Dark glasses. Concealing hat.'

'Tell me what you're getting at.'

'It looks like Maria Tomez had some work done on her jaw line. It's just a little different. And the ridges on her collar bone are a little different,' Buchanan said.

'A nose job's one thing,' Holly said. 'But changing a jaw line? Altering ridges on a collar bone? That's major reconstructive work.'

'Exactly,' Buchanan said. 'This last photograph. I don't think it's Maria Tomez. The more I look at it. the more I'm sure it's Juana impersonating her.'

Chapter 7.

'But how is such a thing possible?' Sounding frustrated, Holly drove rapidly along the busy expressway. Headlights blazed in the opposite lanes. 'Sure, Montgomery had a double in the Second World War. Movie stars use doubles all the time. These days, theatrical makeup is so realistic that actors can believably change their appearance. But Montgomery wasn't showing up at society charity benefits. As far as the movies go, cameras can play a lot of tricks. This is different. We're talking about a critically acclaimed opera singer. I don't care how good the makeup was, no one could imitate that once-in-a-generation voice.'

'But Juana didn't have to,' Buchanan said, still frozen by the implications of what he'd discovered.

Holly steered quickly around a truck and drove faster.

'The newspaper articles are emphatic,' Buchanan said. 'Maria Tomez retired from performing after she finished the cruise on Drummond's yacht. She went into seclusion in New York, except for brief public appearances, none of which involved singing. In some of these articles, she complains about having had pneumonia, about recurring laryngitis. The reporters note that her voice was hoarse. Since that's the one thing Juana couldn't have faked, she removed the problem by pretending to have problems with her voice. Otherwise, both women are Hispanics, with the same general build and facial characteristics. Maria Tomez kept changing her appearance in gradual ways, after all, so if Juana didn't look absolutely like her, it wouldn't have attracted attention. It would have been just another case of how Maria Tomez continued to change. As long as Juana's special makeup guaranteed that the similarities far outnumbered the differences. How many people know Maria Tomez intimately? Her ex-husband, whom she refused to see. Her other business contacts, whom she shut out after she retired. Her entourage, which she apparently changed after the cruise. Alistair Drummond, who continued to see her after the cruise and accepted her as Maria Tomez. We're talking about a woman who guarded her privacy to begin with. All Juana had to do was take a few phone calls from time to time, complain about a cold, appear briefly in public, get her picture in the paper, and no one would suspect that she wasn't the person she pretended to be.'

'Except you.' Holly steered around another vehicle, squinting from the glare of headlights. 'You suspected.'

'Because I had a reason to suspect. Because I'd seen the makeup room in Juana's house. Because I became more struck by Juana's resemblance to Maria Tomez as I looked at the photographs. Juana was on my mind, so I made the connection. What she did was brilliant. I can't get over what a genius she was at impersonating. I could never have done the equivalent.'

'The question is, why?' Holly said. 'Why did Juana impersonate her?'

'One common denominator is Alistair Drummond. The retirement, the need for seclusion, came after the cruise on Drummond's yacht. Drummond accepted Juana as Maria Tomez, and it was someone working for Drummond who paid Frederick Maltin to stop talking to reporters about his ex-wife. The disappearance. I think I understand,' Buchanan said quickly.

The tone in his voice made Holly shiver. 'What?'

'There were two disappearances.'

'Two?'

'It wasn't Maria Tomez but Juana who disappeared a few weeks ago. Drummond's doing his damnedest to find her. Why? Because if I'm right, nine months ago Maria Tomez never got off Drummond's yacht. That was Juana, and Drummond doesn't want anyone to know about the switch.'

Holly clenched the steering wheel. 'What in God's name happened on that yacht?'

Chapter 8.

LaGuardia Airport. To get there, they'd used Holly's car rather than a taxi because after checking out of the Dorset, they didn't want to attract attention by leaving her car in the hotel's garage for an indefinite period. At the airport's parking ramp, however, it wasn't unusual for cars to be left for quite a while.

They'd been forced to rush. They had needed luck with reservations and traffic. Nonetheless they'd managed to get two tickets on the last flight out of LaGuardia for Miami, and although they got to the boarding gate with only seconds to spare, that didn't matter. The point was, they were on the plane.

During the flight, both were too tense to sleep. They had no appetite. Still, they ate the lasagne the airline served, needing to maintain their strength.

'Your itinerary. Cancun, Merida, and Fort Lauderdale,' Holly said.

'I've never admitted to being in any of those places,' Buchanan told her.

'But the rest aren't in doubt. Washington, New Orleans, San Antonio, Washington again, New York, now Miami and points south. All in two weeks. Hanging around with you could be exhausting. And this is normal for you.'

'Better get used to it.'

'I think I'd like that.'

Back at the Dorset, Buchanan had wondered if the home port for Drummond's yacht would be the same as the city where Drummond's corporate headquarters were located. Knowing that all large vessels were required to file a float plan indicating the length and itinerary of an intended voyage, he had phoned the coast guard in San Francisco. However, the officer on duty told him that the yacht was based somewhere else - they didn't have a float plan for it. Buchanan had then phoned the National Association of Insurance Underwriters at its main offices in Long Beach, California. Eight p.m. east-coast time had been five p.m. west-coast time. He made contact just before the office closed.

'My name's Albert Drake.' He pretended to be agitated. 'My brother, Rick, works on. God, I can't remember. The Poseidon. That's it.' Buchanan knew the name from the research Holly had given him. 'Alistair Drummond owns it. A two-hundred-foot yacht. But Rick didn't leave an itinerary. Our mother's had a stroke. I have to get in touch with him, but I don't know how else. The coast guard suggested.'

Large vessels require such large amounts of insurance that the underwriters for the insurance companies insist on knowing where those vessels are at all times. As soon as Drummond's yacht reached a new berth, its captain was obligated to report his location to the insurance officials.

Chapter 9.

Key West.

After arriving in Miami past midnight, Buchanan and Holly used Charles Duffy's credit card to rent a car and began the 150-mile drive south along the Florida keys. During the trip, they stopped for take-out coffee and alternated driving while the other dozed, mercury-vapor lights along the extensive forty-two bridges of the Overseas Highway hurting their eyes and adding to their fatigue.

It was just before dawn when they arrived at their destination, the southernmost community in the continental United States. Key West, only four miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, had a permanent population of almost thirty thousand. One of the last bastions of the counterculture in America, the sand-and-coral island remained synonymous with the unorthodox life style of Hemingway, who had once lived there and whose home - with its numerous cats supposedly descended from the novelist's original pets - was a national historic landmark. The town's atmosphere and architecture were an exotic blend of Bahamian, West Indian, and Cuban influences. It was known for its deep-sea fishing and its tropical foods. There was a U.S. naval air station. John James Audubon once had been in residence, also Harry Truman. The singer-novelist Jimmy Buffet was its most famous current spokesman.

But there was only one thing in Key West that Buchanan cared about, and after he and Holly caught a few more hours of sleep at a cheap motel that accepted cash in advance (he was getting nervous about using Charles Duffy's credit card), they cleaned up, ate, then got to business. An hour's stroll around the crowded harbor, where they bought sandals, short-sleeved pullovers, and cut-off jeans so they wouldn't be conspicuous, gave Buchanan ample chance to pose seemingly casual questions to vendors and fishermen. Soon he and Holly were able to stand on the wharf, lean forward against the railing, breathe the humid, tangy, salt air, and study their target.

Drummond's yacht, gleaming white against the green-blue of the Gulf of Mexico, was anchored a hundred yards off shore. Two hundred feet long, with three decks and a helicopter pad on the top (the chopper had taken off yesterday, heading south, Buchanan had been told by a fisherman), the yacht should have inspired awe but instead made Buchanan feel cold despite the eighty-five-degree temperature. The sleekly styled profile seemed threatening, like the curved tip of a massive hunting knife. The large sunning area at the stern, with windows providing a view from the upper decks, made Buchanan think of voyeurs and exhibitionists. Regardless of its resplendent white exterior, the yacht appeared cloaked in a black pall of gloom.

'Sometimes,' Holly said, 'when you're deep in thought, your eyes and face change. You look like a stranger.'

'How?'

'Solemn. Troubled.'

'Just so we understand each other, this has nothing to do with Maria Tomez,' Buchanan said. 'I want to know what happened to her, yes. But more than anything, I want to know what happened to Juana.' He turned his attention from the yacht and focused on Holly, who concentrated on his gaze, confused. 'A lot of this doesn't make sense to me. What I feel about you, for example. But I have to settle old accounts before I start new ones. After this is over, you and I can talk about what we have.'

Her red hair blowing in the wind, Holly thought about what he had said and nodded. 'I never assumed there were any guarantees. I never planned this. I got swept along. Fine. We understand each other. First things first. So now that we've found the yacht, what do we do?'

'You noticed the way I spoke to the fishermen and vendors in the area? A little conversation combined with a few well-chosen questions. The technique is called elicitation. It's the equivalent of what you'd call doing an interview. But the difference is that your subjects almost always know they're being interviewed whereas my subjects must never know. Sometimes, if they realize they're being pumped for information, their reaction can be lethal.'

Holly listened attentively.

'I thought you might be offended because I'm telling you how to do an interview,' Buchanan said.

'This whole thing's been a learning experience. Why should it stop now?'

'Good,' Buchanan said. 'Okay, elicitation.' He told her about his training, how he'd been required to practise by going into bars and striking up conversations with strangers, getting them to reveal such intimate data as their social security numbers and their birth dates, not only month but year.

'How did you manage that?' Holly asked. 'I'd have thought you were snooping.'

'I'd sit next to my target, have a few drinks, make small talk, comment on the television program that was showing above the bar, and at one point say that I'd learned something interesting today. The response, of course, would be "What?" I'd pull out my wallet and show him my forged social-security card. "These numbers all mean something," I'd say. "I thought they were assigned sequentially, but if you break down each group, you see that the numbers tell all kinds of things like when and where I was born. See, this number means I came from Pittsburgh, and this group of numbers was assigned to whoever was born in nineteen-sixty, and this number here tells which month, and. Here, I'll show you. What's your number? I'll bet you a dollar I can tell you where and when you were born."'

Holly shook her head in amazement. 'Is that really true?'

'That I was trained that way?'

'No. About the social security number.'

'What's yours? Let's see if I can tell you when and where you were born.'

Holly laughed. 'It works. You make up a place and date, and to show how wrong you are, the person you're interviewing tells you the information you want. Slick.'

'Elicitation,' Buchanan repeated. 'The art of extracting information without allowing your target to realize that you're extracting it. It's a standard method used by operatives trying to obtain military, political, and industrial secrets. It usually happens in bars, and the targets are usually assistants, secretaries, officers of lower rank, the kind of people who might feel frustrated in their positions and don't mind talking about their problems at work, provided they're stimulated with proper subtlety. A few drinks. A show of interest. One piece of information leads to another. It usually takes time, several meetings, but sometimes it can be done quickly, and in this case, it has to be because I have to find out what's happened to Juana. If she's still alive.' Buchanan's voice tightened. 'If she's still alive, I have to get the pressure off her.'