The Marching Season

Helen said. "Some beastly American who writes about serial killers. How many different ways can you illustrate a serial killer? I produce a cover, we send it across the Atlantic, and the agent in New York rejects it. So bloody frustrating sometimes." She looked at Michael, and her bright green eyes
    The Marching Season 93
    turned suddenly serious. "My God, I'm being such a crashing bore. How's Elizabeth?"
    Michael looked at Graham. He gave a nearly imperceptible nod. Graham routinely flaunted the regulations of the Security Service by telling Helen too much about his work.
    "Some days are better than others," Michael said. "But overall she's doing fine. We've turned the apartment and the Shelter Island house into fortresses. It helps her sleep better at night. And then there are the children. Between her work and the twins, she has little time to dwell on the past."
    "Did she really kill that German woman—oh, God, Graham, what was her name again?"
    "Astrid Vogel," Graham put in.
    "Did she really do it with a bow and arrow?"
    Michael nodded.
    "My God," Helen murmured. "What happened?"
    "Astrid Vogel followed her into the guest cottage, where you and Graham stayed a couple of years ago. Elizabeth hid in the bedroom closet. One of her old bows was there. She was a champion archer when she was a girl, just like her father. She did what she had to do to survive."
    "What happened to the other assassin, this October fellow?"
    "The Agency received reports through channels it trusted that October is dead, that he had been killed by the men who hired him to kill me because he had failed."
    "Do you believe it?" Helen asked.
    "I thought it was remotely possible once," Michael said. "But now I don't believe it at all. In fact, I'm almost certain October is alive and working again. This assassination in Cairo—"
    "Ahmed Hussein," Graham put in, for Helen's benefit.
    "I've read the eyewitness accounts carefully. I can't explain it, but it just feels like him."
    94 Daniel Silva
    "Didn't October always shoot his victims in the face?" "He did, but if he's supposed to be dead, it makes sense that he would have to alter his signature."
    "What do you plan to do?" Graham asked.
    "I'm booked on the first flight to Cairo tomorrow morning."
    10
    CAIRO
    Michael arrived in Cairo early the following afternoon. As in Britain, he entered the country on his true passport and was granted a two-week tourist visa. He sliced his way through the madness of the airport arrival lounge—past Bedouins with all their worldly possessions crammed inside wilting cardboard boxes, past a bleating cluster of goats—and waited twenty minutes at the taxi stand for a rattletrap Lada sedan. He smoked cigarettes to cover the stench of exhaust pouring into the backseat. Michael found Cairo intolerably hot in summer, but die winters were remarkably pleasant. The air was warm and soft, and a desert wind chased puffy white clouds around an azure sky. The road from the airport was jammed with poor Egyptians trying to take some pleasure in the good weather. Entire families sprawled in the grassy median around picnic lunches. The taxi driver spoke to Michael in English, but Michael wanted to see whether his skills had atrophied, so he answered him in rapid Arabic. He told
    96 Daniel Silva
    the driver he was a Lebanese businessman, living in London, who had fled Beirut during the war. For a half hour they talked of Beirut in the old days, Michael in flawless Beirut-accented Arabic, the driver in the accent of his Nile Delta village.
    Michael was bored with the Nile Hilton—and sick of the turmoil of Tahrir Square—so he took a room at the Inter-Continental, a sandstone-colored edifice looming over the Cor-niche that, like all newer buildings in Cairo, bore the scars of dust and diesel fumes. He lay by the rooftop pool, drinking warm Egyptian beer, his mind flowing from one thought to the next, until the sun vanished into the Western desert and the evening call to prayer started up—first one muezzin, a very long way off, then another, and another, until a thousand recorded voices screamed in concert. He forced himself out of his chaise lounge and went to the railing overlooking the river. A few faithful drifted toward the mosques, but mostly Cairo continued to churn beneath him.
    At five o'clock he went to his room, showered, and dressed. He took a taxi a short distance up the river to a restaurant called Paprika, next to the towering headquarters of the state-run