The Marching Season

in the orangery, here and here on the east wing, and the main service entrance here. Each night I circled the house and took note of where lights were burning. The night of the ambassador's arrival, I noticed a light burning in a bedroom for the first time here, on the first floor. I suspect Cannon is sleeping there."
    Spencer stepped forward and took over. "I want to overwhelm them. I want to create confusion. We approach separately and enter the house simultaneously at four A.M. I'll go in the front. James will enter through the orangery. Alex and Lennie will enter through the east wing, and Edward will go through the service entrance. Some of us will meet resistance. Some of us won't. As soon as you're inside, head straight upstairs to the guest bedroom. And the first one to arrive puts a bullet in the ambassador. Any questions?"
    The dinner guests began leaving just after midnight, though they were not dinner guests at all but a collection of MI 5 watchers and desk officers, actors in the illusion of Operation Kettledrum. When the last had gone, the two Special Branch bodyguards went off duty and two new officers came on. One made a cursory tour of the grounds, dressed in foul-weather gear like a North Sea fisherman. The light burned in the Chinese bed-
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    room until 1 A.M., when Michael slipped into the chamber and doused it.
    The members of the SAS team had slowly filtered into position outside the house. One lay in wait in the walled garden, another in the deer park. A third lay in the parterre, and a fourth in the cemetery next to St. Margaret's Church. The rest took up positions throughout the ground floor of the house.
    Each soldier wore infrared night-vision glasses and a miniature radio with an earpiece that would allow him to communicate with the nerve center inside the mansion. Each carried the standard-issue SAS compact submachine gun, the HK MP5, as well as a Herstal 5.7-millimeter handgun for backup. The Herstal is regarded as one of the world's most powerful handguns. It fires two-gram bullets at a muzzle speed of 650 meters per second and is capable of penetrating forty-eight layers of laminated Kevlar, the substance used in protective body armor, from two hundred meters away. Michael carried the CIA's standard-issue handgun, a high-powered Browning 9-millimeter with a fifteen-shot clip. Graham Seymour was unarmed.
    The two men waited in the control room, upstairs in the first-floor guest bedroom. The weather was playing havoc with the electronic sensing equipment. The motion detectors were sounding constantly because of the twisting of the trees and shrubbery. The high-powered directional microphones were overwhelmed with the roar of the wind and the hammering of the rain. Only the infrared video cameras were functioning properly.
    At 3:30 A.M., MI5 field agents stationed in the campgrounds around Hartley reported movement by the members of the assassination squad. The field agents did not follow the terrorists. Instead, they allowed them to proceed unhindered toward the estate.
    At 3:55 A.M., camera operators on the top floor of Hartley
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    briefly spotted two gunmen moving into position, one in the trees bordering the deer park, a second creeping across the ruins of the village toward St. Margaret's Church.
    At precisely 3:58 A.M., James Fletcher rose from his hiding place in the parterre and moved quickly along a gravel footpath toward the orangery. Before joining the Brigade, Fletcher had been a member of the Ulster Defense Association, a violent Protestant paramilitary organization. Indeed, he had been one of the group's most prolific assassins, with a half-dozen confirmed kills of IRA gunmen. He had broken with the UDA when it agreed to a cease-fire during the peace negotiations. When Gavin Spencer approached him about joining a new group, the Ulster Freedom Brigade, he had accepted without hesitation. Fletcher was virulently anti-Catholic and believed Ulster should be a Protestant province for Protestant people. He also desperately wanted to be the one to murder the ambassador, so he went into action two minutes early, disobeying Spencer's order to wait until four o'clock.
    Fletcher wore a balaclava, a black jumpsuit, and rubber-soled black athletic shoes. As he padded along the footpath, the gravel crunched softly beneath his feet. He reached the French doors and tried the latch; it was locked. He took a half step back and rammed the butt of the Uzi