Assumed Identity (1993) (3 page)

Bartenev pivoted toward the phone on the table beside the sofa. 'Hello,' he said, casting a shadow against the window.

'Go to hell, you Goddamned Russian.'

As the window shattered inward, Bartenev's wife screamed. Bartenev did not. The bullet that struck his skull and mushroomed within it killed him instantly. The bullet burst out the back of his head, spraying blood across the flying glass.

Chapter 3.

Houston, Texas.

The space shuttle, Atlantis, was on the second day of its current mission. a no-problem launch, an all-systems-go performance so far. and Albert Delaney felt bored. He wished that something would happen, anything to break his tedious routine. Not that he wanted excitement exactly, because he associated that word with a crisis. The last thing NASA needed was more foul-ups and bad publicity, and at all costs, another Challenger disaster had to be avoided. One more like that and NASA would probably be out of business, which meant that Albert Delaney would be out of a job, and Albert Delaney preferred boredom any day to being unemployed. Still, if anybody had told him when he'd been accepted by NASA that his enthusiasm for what he assumed would be a glamorous career would all too quickly change to tedium, he'd have been incredulous. The trouble was that NASA prechecked the details of a mission so often, testing and retesting, going over every variable, trying to anticipate every contingency that by the time the mission occurred, it was anticlimactic. No, Albert Delaney didn't want excitement, but he certainly wouldn't have minded an occasional positive surprise.

A man of medium height and weight, with average features, in that cusp of life where he'd stopped being young but wasn't yet middle-aged, he'd noticed that more and more he'd been feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled. His existence was ordinary. Predictable. He hadn't yet reached the stage of his syndrome where he was tempted to cheat on his wife. Nonetheless he was afraid that what Thoreau had called 'quiet desperation' might drive him to do something stupid and get more excitement than he'd bargained for by ruining his marriage. Still, if he didn't find some purpose, something to interest him, he didn't know if he could rely on his common sense.

Part of his problem, Albert Delaney decided, was that his office was at the periphery of NASA headquarters. Away from the mission-control center, he didn't have the sense of accomplishment and nervous energy that he imagined everyone felt there. Plus, even he had to admit that being an expert in cartography, geography, and meteorology (maps, land, and weather, as he sometimes put it bluntly) seemed awfully dull compared to space exploration. It wasn't as if he got the chance to examine photographs of newly discovered rings around Saturn or moons near Jupiter or active volcanoes on Venus. No, what he got to do was look at photographs of areas on earth, sections that he'd looked at dozens of times before.

It didn't help that the conclusions of the research he was doing had already been determined. Did photographs from space show that the alarming haze around the earth was becoming worse? Did high-altitude images indicate that the South American rain forest continued to dwindle due to slash-and-burn farming practices? Were the oceans becoming so polluted that evidence of the damage could be seen from three hundred miles up? Yes. Yes. Yes. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to come up with those conclusions. But NASA wanted more than conclusions. It wanted specifics, and even though the photographs that Albert Delaney examined would eventually be sent to other government agencies, it was his job to make the preliminary examination, just in case there was something unique in them so that NASA could get the publicity.

The shuttle's current mission was to deploy a weather satellite over the Caribbean Sea and perform various weather-related observations and experiments as well as transmit photographs. The photograph currently in front of Delaney showed a portion of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. For several years, a blight had been attacking the palm trees in that area, and one of Delaney's jobs was to determine how far the blight had spread, something that could easily be seen in the photographs since the sick, denuded trees created a distinct, bleak pattern. The theory was that substantial loss of vegetation in the Yucatan would disturb the oxygen,'carbon-dioxide ratio in the area and affect weather patterns just as the disappearance of Brazil's rain forest did. By measuring the area of blight and factoring that information with temperature and wind variations in the Caribbean, it might be possible to predict the creation of tropical storms and the direction of hurricanes.

The blight had definitely spread much farther than photographs of the Yucatan taken last year indicated. Delaney placed a transparent, scale-model map over the photograph, aligned topographical features, recorded measurements, and continued to another photograph. Perhaps it was his need for a break in his routine. Perhaps it was his need to be surprised. For whatever reason, he found that he was examining the photographs far more diligently than usual, paying attention to matters that weren't related to the palm-tree blight.

Abruptly something troubled him, a subconsciously noticed detail, a sense that something was out of place. He set down the photograph he was examining and went back to the one he'd just finished looking at. Frowning, he concentrated. Yes, he thought. There. At once he felt a stimulating flow of adrenaline, a warming in his stomach. That small area in the bottom left corner of the photograph. Those shadows among the denuded palm trees. What were those shadows doing there?

The shadows formed almost perfect triangles and squares. But triangles and squares did not exist in nature. More, those shadows could be made only by sunlight that struck and was blocked by objects above the ground. Large objects. Tall objects. Normally, shadows didn't pose a mystery. Hills made them all the time. But these shadows were in the Yucatan's northern lowlands. The descriptive name said it all. Lowlands. There weren't any hills in that region. Even if there were, the shadows they cast would have been amorphous. But these were symmetrical. And they occupied a comparatively wide area. Delaney made quick calculations. Thirty square kilometers? In the middle of an otherwise dramatically flat section of the Yucatan rain forest? What the hell was going on?

Chapter 4.

'For our final report, something old discovered by something new. Computer-enhanced photographs received from the space shuttle, Atlantis, have revealed what appears to be a large area of unsuspected Mayan ruins in a remote section of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. The rain forest in that region is so dense and inaccessible that it could take months before a preliminary assessment of the ruins can be completed, but a spokesperson for the Mexican government indicated that the apparent scope of the ruins suggests that they have the potential to rival the pyramids, palaces, and temples at legendary Chichen Itza. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so we move on - into the past. This is Dan Rather. For CBS news, good evening.'

Chapter 5.

The Virgin Islands.

The visitor noted that several more artifacts - figurines, ceramics, and masks - had been added to the collection. All were authentic, expensive, and illegally obtained examples of ancient Mayan craftsmanship. 'The woman disappeared.'

'What?' The old man, who'd been distracted as he attached an intravenous line to a needle in his arm, snapped his head up. 'Disappeared? You assured me that wasn't possible.'

'I believed it wasn't,' the fair-haired man said. His tone was somber. 'She was being paid so well and treated so lavishly that I thought it highly unlikely she would want to leave.'

The old man glowered, his thin body rigid with fury. Seated in a leather chair in the main cabin of his two-hundred-foot-long yacht, flanked by displays of his current passion, Mayan art, he stretched his gaunt frame to its maximum. His gaze intensified by his glasses, his pinched expression emphasized by his thick, white hair, he dominated the cabin, even though he wasn't tall. 'Human nature. Damn it, that's always been your problem. You're excellent when it comes to tactics. But your emotional range is so limited that you don't understand.'

'She was lonely,' the pleasant-faced man said. 'I anticipated that possibility. My people were watching her in case she attempted to do something foolish. Her maid, her butler, her chauffeur, the doorman at her condominium building in Manhattan - all of them worked for me. Every exit from that building was constantly watched. On those rare occasions when she had permission to leave it, she was followed.'

'And yet,' the old man rasped, his nostrils flaring with angry sarcasm,'she managed to disappear.' His white hair contrasted with the pewter tint of his skin, which in turn was emphasized by the gray of his robe, the left sleeve of which was rolled up to admit the intravenous tube leading into his arm. 'You. I blame you.' He pointed his bony, right index finger. 'Everything depends on her. How in God's name did this happen?'

The well-dressed man gestured in frustration. 'I don't know. My people don't know. It happened last night. Between two a.m. when the maid last saw her and noon when the maid decided to check on her, the woman managed to get out of the condo and the building. We have no idea how. When I learned what had happened, I decided I'd better report to you in person rather than use the telephone. I caught the first available flight.' He gestured toward the starboard windows of the cabin and the numerous other yachts in St Thomas' hotel-rimmed, sunset-tinted harbor.

The old man squinted. 'Willingness to face blame. I respect that. It's rare for a sociopath to have character. Does she have access to her bank account?'

'No. Since she was provided with all the comforts she wanted, she had no need to spend money. Hence she didn't realize that the bank statements she was shown, the ones that indicated her salary deposits, were for an account that required me to cosign for withdrawals. The money's inaccessible to her.'

'Jewelry?'

'She took it all. The diamond necklace alone is worth four-hundred-thousand dollars. In theory. But of course, the stones aren't genuine. Still, there are only certain establishments in the New York area that would have the resources to buy such an item, if it weren't a copy. And since she doesn't know it's a copy, she'll have to go to them. My people are watching those establishments.'

The old man frowned. 'Assuming she's able to obtain money, and I suspect she will, given the ingenuity she showed in escaping your people, where would she go? What can she do?'

'She'd be a fool to go back to her former patterns. She has to assume that we'll watch her relatives, her friends, and her previous business associates, that we'll tap their phones, et cetera. If she's smart, and she's proven she is, she'll go to ground. The last thing she wants is trouble from us.'

'Us?'

'From you.'

The old man gestured with a wrinkled hand, his eyes harsh with disapproval yet glinting with superiority. 'Human nature. You still haven't learned the lesson. If loneliness made her run, the one thing she won't do is go to ground. She'll want companionship. She'll want the security and satisfaction of a life that she creates, not one that's forced upon her. She won't trade one cage for another.'

'Then what will.?'

The old man stared at his intravenous line and brooded. 'She'll get help.'

'From?'

'There are only two reasons for someone to help someone else,' the old man said. 'Money and love. We can't possibly anticipate who would work for her. But I wonder if she would trust a stranger who is loyal to her only for money. I suspect that someone in her position would prefer to depend on love, or at least friendship. Who in her background has the skills to help her?'

'As I told you, her family, friends, and former contacts are under surveillance.'

'No. Look deeper. She wouldn't have fled unless she had a plan. Somewhere there's someone who knows about this sort of thing and whom she knows she can ask for help. Someone who isn't obvious. Someone she trusts.'

'I'll get started immediately.'

'You've disappointed me,' the old man said. 'Your success in Chicago and Guatemala was so encouraging that I'd arranged a reward for you. Now, I'm afraid, I'll have to withhold it.'

An intercom buzzed on a table beside the old man's chair. He pressed a button. 'I told you not to interrupt me.'

'Sheik Hazim is returning your telephone call, Professor,' a female voice said.

'Of course. I'll speak to him.' The old man rested his hand on the telephone beside the intercom. But before he picked it up, he told his visitor, his voice stern and flinty, 'Don't disappoint me again.' He adjusted the flow of red liquid that drained from an intravenous bottle into his arm - blood treated with hormones from unborn lambs. 'Find the bitch before she ruins everything. If Delgado discovers she's loose, if he discovers she's out of control, he'll go after her and possibly us.'

'I can deal with Delgado.'

'Of that, I have no doubt. Without Delgado, however, I can't do business. I can't get access to the ruins. And that would make me very unhappy. You do not want to be near me when I am unhappy.'

'No, sir.'

'Get out.'

*

PART TWO

Chapter 1.

Cancun, Mexico.

All the hotels were shaped like Mayan temples, a row of terraced pyramids along the four-lane highway dividing the sandbar that until twenty-five years ago had been uninhabited. Buchanan ignored them and the red, brick sidewalk along which, concentrating, he walked with deceptive calm. As twilight thickened into night, what he paid attention to were the disturbing proximity of tourists before and behind him, the threatening rumble and glare of traffic passing him on the right, and the ominous shadows among the palm trees that flanked the hotels on his left.