The Marching Season

assignment to a Mossad assassination team. In September 1997 the Mossad had tried to kill a Hamas man named Khaled Meshal in Amman. The attempt
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    failed, and two Mossad agents were arrested by Jordanian police. Rather than risk another embarrassing failure, Monet had turned to the Society to eliminate Ahmed Hussein.
    "I have assigned the job to the same operative who carried out the contracts on Colin Yardley and Eric Stoltenberg after the TransAtlantic affair," the Director said. "He is preparing to leave for Cairo, and I expect that in a few days Ahmed Hussein will be quite dead."
    "Excellent," Monet said. "Our intelligence indicates that the Middle East peace process cannot survive another serious blow. If the operation is a success, the Occupied Territories will explode. Arafat will have no choice but to pull out of the talks. I expect that the peace process will be only a bad memory by the end of this winter."
    There was another round of restrained applause.
    "The next item on the agenda is an update on our efforts to foster conflict between India and Pakistan," the Director said, looking down at his papers. "The Pakistanis are having a bit of trouble with their medium-range missiles, and they've asked for our help working out the bugs."
    The meeting ended just after dawn.
    The council member code-named Picasso rode in a chauf-feured Range Rover across the flat rose-colored plain separating the High Atlas Mountains from Marrakech. Picasso had entered Morocco on a false passport bearing the name Lisa Bancroft. The real passport was locked in the safe of her room at the five-star La Mamounia Hotel. Returning to the room later that morning, she punched in the code, and the safe door popped open. The passport was there, along with some cash and jewelry.
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    Her flight wasn't for six hours, enough time to bathe and sleep for an hour or so. Picasso removed the items from the safe, undressed, and lay down on the bed. She opened the passport and looked at the photograph.
    Funny, she thought, I don't look much like Picasso.
    7
    SHELTER ISLAND, NEW YORK
    The White House advance team arrived Saturday morn-ing and booked every available room at the Manhanset Inn, a wedding-cake Victorian hotel in the Heights overlooking Dering Harbor. Jake Ashcroft, a burned-out investment banker who had purchased the hotel with a single year's bonus, was politely asked by White House staff to keep the matter confidential. The President's visit was strictly private, they explained, and he wanted as little attention as possible. But Shelter Island is an island, after all, with an island's appetite for gossip, and by lunchtime half the place knew the President was coming to town.
    By midafternoon Jake Ashcroft was beginning to fear it was all a nightmare. His beloved inn had been turned upside down. The award-winning dining room had been transformed into something called a "filing center." The beautiful oak tables had given way to hideous rented banquet tables shrouded in white plastic. A team from the telephone company had installed fifty
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    temporary lines. Another team had emptied the fireside lounge and turned it into a broadcast center. Thick cable snaked through the stately halls, and a portable satellite dish stood on the front lawn.
    The network news television crews arrived in the early evening, some from New York, some from Washington. Jake Ash-croft got so angry he took to his room and stayed there, sitting in a yoga posture and repeating the Serenity Prayer. The producers were bleary-eyed and foul-tempered. The cameramen looked like fishermen from Greenport—beefy and bearded, with clothes that appeared to be army surplus. They played poker past midnight and drained the bar of beer.
    At first light the Secret Service fanned out across the island. They established static posts at both ferry crossings and checkpoints on every road leading to Cannon Point. Sharpshooters took up positions on the roof of the old house, and bomb-sniffing German shepherds prowled the broad lawns, terrifying the squirrels and the white-tailed deer. The television crews descended on the marina at Coecles Harbor like a raiding party and rented every boat they could lay their hands on. Prices skyrocketed overnight. The crew from CNN had to settle for a leaky twelve-foot Zodiac, for which they paid an astonishing five hundred dollars. A pair of Coast Guard cutters stood watch in Shelter Island Sound. At