“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh. Did you send them what you promised?”
“. . Not yet.”
“Do it.”
“It’s just that. . It’s such good material. I hate to. .
“Do it,” Buchanan repeated. “Don’t make them angry.”
“But giving up the story makes me feel like a coward.”
“There were plenty of times when I did things rather than think of myself as a coward. Now those things don’t seem worth it. I have to keep on the move. The best advice I can give you is. .” He wanted to say something reassuring but couldn’t think of anything. “Stop worrying about bravery and cowardice. Follow your common sense.”
He hung up, left the pay phone, got quickly into the rented Taurus, and returned to the busy highway, squinting from the painful sunlight that now was low in the west ahead of him. Even the Ray-Bans he’d bought at noon in Beaumont didn’t keep the sun’s glare from feeling as if a red-hot spike had been driven through each eye and into his skull.
Follow your common sense?
You’re good at giving advice. You don’t seem to want to take it, though.
3
Shortly after 9:00 P.M., he drove from the low, grassy, often wooded, rolling plains of eastern Texas and entered the lights of San Antonio. Six years ago, when he’d been researching the character of Peter Lang, he’d spent several weeks here so he wouldn’t be ignorant about his fictional character’s hometown. He’d done the usual touristy things like visiting the Alamo (its name was a Spanish word, he learned, which meant “cottonwood tree”), as well as the restored Spanish Governor’s Palace, the San Jose Mission, and La Villita, or The Little Village, a reconstructed section of the original eighteenth-century Spanish settlement. He spent a lot of time at Riverwalk, the Spanish-motif shopping area along the landscaped banks of the San Antonio River.
But he’d also spent a lot of time in the suburbs, in one of which-Castle Hills-Juana’s parents had lived. Juana had used a cover name so that an enemy could not have found out who her parents were and gone to San Antonio to question them about her supposed husband. There’d been no need- and in fact it would have been disruptive-for Buchanan to meet her parents. He knew where they lived, however, and he headed straight toward their home, making a few mistakes in direction but surprising himself by how much he remembered from his previous visit there.
Juana’s parents had a two-story brick-and-shingled house fronted by a well-tended lawn that had sheltering oak trees. When Buchanan parked the rented Taurus at the curb, he saw that lights were on in what he gathered was the living room. He got out of the car, locked it, and studied his reflection, which a streetlight cast on the driver’s side window. His rugged face looked tired, but after he combed his hair and straightened his clothes, he at least appeared neat and respectable. He was still wearing the brown sport coat that he had taken from Ted’s room back in New Orleans. Slightly too large for him, although not unbecomingly so, it had the advantage of concealing the handgun that he’d tucked behind his belt before he got out of the Taurus.
He glanced both ways along the street, out of habit watching the shadows for any sign that the house was under surveillance. If Juana was in trouble, as the postcard and her failure to meet him suggested, if she was on the run-which would explain why she hadn’t shown up at Cafe du Monde-there was a possibility that her enemies would watch her parents in case she contacted them in person or telephoned and inadvertently revealed where she was. The Juana who’d been in the military would never have let anyone know the name and location of her parents. But a great deal could have happened in the intervening six years. She might have foolishly trusted someone enough to give that person information that was now being used against her, although being foolish had never been one of Juana’s characteristics.
Except maybe for falling in love with Peter Lang.
The street suggested no threat. There weren’t any vehicles parked on this block. No one was loitering at a corner, pretending to wait for a bus. Lights in the other houses revealed what appeared to be normal family activity. Someone might have been hiding in bushes, of course, although in this neighborhood where everybody seemed to take pride, a prowler on long-term surveillance wouldn’t be able to hide easily, especially from the German shepherd that a man was walking on a leash along the opposite sidewalk. Still, that was assuming the man with the dog was not himself on surveillance.
Buchanan took just a few seconds to register all this. From someone else’s point of view, he would have seemed merely a visitor who’d paused to comb his hair before walking up to the house. The night was mild, with the fallen-leaf fragrance of autumn. As he stopped on the brick porch and pushed a button, he heard not only the doorbell but the muted sound of a laugh track on a television sitcom. Then he heard footsteps on a hardwood floor, and a shadow appeared at the window of the front door.
A light came on above him. He saw an Hispanic woman-in her late fifties, with shoulder-length black hair and an appealing oval face-peer out at him. Her intense dark eyes suggested intelligence and perception. They reminded him of Juana, although he didn’t know for sure that this woman was Juana’s mother. He had never met her parents. There was no name on the mailbox or beneath the doorbell. Juana’s parents might have moved during the past six years. They might even have died. When he arrived in San Antonio, Buchanan had been tempted to check a phone book to see whether they still lived at this address, but by then he was so anxious to reach the house that he hadn’t wanted to waste even a minute. He would know soon enough, he’d told himself.
An amateur might have phoned from New Orleans, and if he managed to contact Juana’s parents, that amateur might have tried to elicit information from them about whether Juana was in trouble. If so, he would have failed, or the information he received would have been suspect. Most people were gullible, but even a fool tended to hold back when confronted by personal questions from a stranger using a telephone, no matter how good that stranger’s cover story was. A telephone was a lazy operative’s way of doing research. Whenever possible, face-to-face contact was the best method of obtaining information, and when the military had transferred Buchanan for training at the CIA’s Farm in Virginia, Buchanan had quickly acquired a reputation as being skilled at what was called in the trade elicitation. His instructor’s favorite assignment had been to send his students into various local bars during happy hour. The students were to strike up conversations with strangers, and in the course of an hour, they had to gain the trust of those strangers to such a degree that each stranger would reveal the day, month, and year of his birth, as well as his Social Security number. Experience had proved to the instructor that such personal information was almost impossible to learn in a first-time encounter. How could you invent a casual question that would prompt someone you’d never met to blurt out his Social Security number? More than likely, your question would result in suspicion rather than information. All of the students in the class had failed-except for Buchanan.
The Hispanic woman unlocked the door and opened it, although she didn’t release the security chain. Speaking through the five-inch gap in the door, she looked puzzled. “Yes?”
“Senora Mendez?”
“Si.”
“Perdone. I know it’s late. My name’s Jeff Walker, and I’m a friend of your daughter.” Buchanan used the Spanish he’d learned at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, when he’d been preparing for his mission into Mexico. “I haven’t seen her in several years, and I don’t know where she lives, I’m visiting town for a couple of days, and. . Well, I hoped that she was around. Can you tell me where to find her?”
Juana’s mother studied him with suspicion. However, her suspicion seemed tempered by an appreciation that he was using Spanish. Juana had told him that while her parents were bilingual, they much preferred speaking Spanish and they felt slighted when whites whom they knew spoke Spanish forced them to speak English.