The Marching Season

asked for a 2 P.M. wake-up call.
    Retirement had not robbed Michael of a healthy professional paranoia. For five minutes he inspected the room, turning over lamps, opening closet doors, tearing apart the telephone and then carefully reassembling it. He had performed the same ritual in a thousand hotel rooms in a hundred different cities. Only once had he ever found a bug—a Soviet-made museum piece crudely attached to the telephone of a hotel room in Damascus.
    His search turned up nothing. He turned on the television and watched the morning news on the BBC. Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam has vowed that the new Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Freedom Brigade, will never be allowed to destroy the Good Friday accords. She has called on the chief constable of the RUC, Ronnie Flanagan, to redouble his efforts to capture the leaders of the terrorist group. Michael shut off the television and closed his eyes, still dressed in the clothes he had worn on the flight. He slept fitfully, wrestling with his blanket, sweating in his clothing, until the telephone screamed. For an instant he thought he had been transported behind the Iron Curtain, but it was only the flaxen-haired Polish girl at the front desk, gently informing him it was two o'clock.
    He ordered coffee, showered, and dressed in jeans, bucks, black mock-turtleneck sweater, and blue blazer. He hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and left a telltale in the jamb.
    86 Daniel Silva
    Outside, the sky was the color of gunpowder, and cold wind bent the trees in Hyde Park. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, knotted the scarf at his throat, and he started walking, first along Knightsbridge, then the Brompton Road. He spotted the first watcher: balding, mid-forties, leather jacket, stubble on his chin. Anonymous, ordinary, unthreatening, perfect for pavement work.
    He ate an omelette in a French cafe in the Brompton Road and read the Evening Standard. A leader of the Muslim fundamentalist group Hamas had been assassinated in Egypt. Michael read the article once, then read it a second time, and thought about it some more as he walked to Harrods. The balding watcher was gone, and a new one was in his place—same model but wearing a forest-green Barbour coat instead of a leather jacket. He entered Harrods, paid an obligatory visit to the shrine to Dodi and Diana, and then took the escalator up. The man in the Barbour jacket followed him. He purchased a Scottish sweater for Douglas and a pair of earrings for Elizabeth. He went downstairs again and meandered through the food hall. A new watcher was trailing him, a rather attractive young woman in jeans, combat-style boots, and a tan quilted jacket.
    Night had fallen, and with it came a windblown rain. He left the Harrods bag at the desk of his hotel and flagged down a taxi. For the next hour and a half he moved restlessly about the West End—by taxi, Underground, and bus—through Belgravia, May-fair, Westminster, and finally Sloane Square. He walked south until he reached Chelsea Embankment.
    He stood in the rain, looking at the lights of Chelsea Bridge. It had been more than ten years since the night Sarah Randolph was shot on this spot, but the image of her death played out in his thoughts as if it were on videotape. He saw her, walking toward him, long skirt dancing across buckskin boots, the Embankment shining with river mist. Then the man appeared,
    The Marching Season 87
    the black-haired man with brilliant blue eyes and a silenced automatic—the KGB assassin Michael knew only as October, the same man who had tried to murder Michael and Elizabeth on Shelter Island. Michael closed his eyes as Sarah's exploding face flashed through his thoughts. The Agency had assured him that October was dead, but now, after reading the account of the assassination of Ahmed Hussein in Cairo, he was not so certain.
    "I think I'm being followed," Michael said, standing in the window overlooking Eaton Place.
    "You are being followed," Graham Seymour said. "The Department flagged your passport. You were a very naughty boy the last time you paid a visit to our fair island. We picked you up this morning at Heathrow."
    Michael accepted a tumbler of Scotch from Graham and sat down in the wing chair next to the fire. Graham Seymour opened an ebony cigarette box on the coffee table and took out two Dunhills, one for himself and one for Michael. They sat in silence, two old chums who have told each other every story