While flying from San Antonio to Washington National, Buchanan had used an in-flight phone and Charles Duffy’s telephone credit card to call several hotels in Washington, needing to make a reservation for the night. As he’d expected, the task was frustrating. Most of the good hotels in Washington were always full. He’d started at the middle of the price scale but finally decided to try the high end, reasoning that the recession’s effect might have made extremely expensive hotels less popular. As it happened, Buchanan got lucky with the Ritz-Carlton. The early morning checkout of a Venezuelan group due to a political emergency at home had caused several rooms to be available. If Buchanan-Duffy had called a half hour later, the hotel clerk assured him, the rooms would have been spoken for. Buchanan was able to reserve two.
The Ritz-Carlton was among the most fashionable hotels in Washington. Filled with an amber warmth, designed to seem like an English hunt club, it had numerous European furnishings as well as British paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the artwork depicting dogs and horses. After Buchanan’s brief contact with Holly near the National Portrait Gallery, he had noticed that she continued to be followed but that none of her surveillance team appeared to be interested in him. Even so, he had needed to be sure and used extensive evasion techniques involving the subway, buses, and taxis to determine if he was followed. Those techniques took two hours, and Buchanan assumed that if the surveillance team had been interested in him and had managed to stay with him, they’d have picked him up by then. So he felt reasonably protected when he checked in at the Ritz-Carlton shortly after 5:00 P.M. He showered, applied new dressing and bandages to the stitches in his knife wound, changed into dry clothes from his travel bag, ate a room-service hamburger, and lay on the bed, trying to muster his energy as well as focus his thoughts.
The latter was difficult. The last two days of constant travel had wearied him, as had his activities throughout the afternoon. Eight years earlier or even last year, he wouldn’t have been this tired. But then, last year he hadn’t been nursing two wounds. And he hadn’t been suffering from a persistent, torturous headache. He’d been forced to buy another package of Tylenol, and he wasn’t a fool-he knew that the headache could no longer be treated as a temporary problem, that it had to be related to the several injuries to his skull, that he needed medical attention. All the same, he didn’t have time to worry about himself. If he went to a doctor, he’d probably end up spending the next week under hospital observation. Not only would a stay in the hospital be a threat to him, keeping him in one place while his hunters tracked him down, but it would increase the danger for someone else.
Juana. He couldn’t waste time caring about himself. He’d done too much of that for too long. He needed to care about someone else. Juana. He had to find her. Had to help her.