The Marching Season

corridor, fired through the wall and the door.
    Each bedroom on the wing was connected to the adjoining room by a communicating doorway. Michael ran to the doorway and entered the next room. He repeated the move twice more, until he found himself in the Chinese bedroom.
    Outside, in the corridor, he could hear Spencer, breathing heavily, obviously in pain. Michael crossed the room and leaned against the wall next to the doorway.
    Spencer fired a short burst from the Uzi, splintering the door, and kicked it open. As he stepped into the room Michael struck him in the side of the head with the butt of his Browning.
    Spencer buckled but did not fall.
    Michael hit him a second time.
    Spencer fell to the floor, and the Uzi tumbled from his grasp.
    Michael leaped on top of him, clutching Spencer's throat with one hand and holding the Browning to his head with the other. Outside in the corridor he could hear the clatter of the approaching SAS men.
    "Don't move a fucking muscle," Michael said.
    Spencer tried to throw him off. Michael pressed the barrel of the Browning into the wound in Spencer's shoulder. Spencer screamed in pain and lay still.
    Two SAS men pounded into the room, guns trained on
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    Spencer. Graham Seymour arrived a few seconds later. Michael ripped the balaclava from Spencer's head. He smiled as he recognized the face.
    "Oh, my goodness," Michael said, looking at Graham. "Look who we have here."
    "Gavin, darling," Graham said lazily. "So glad you could drop by."
    Rebecca Wells watched it all unfold from the blind in the North Wood. The gunfire had ended, and the night was filled with the sound of distant sirens. The first police cars raced along the entrance road, followed by a pair of ambulances. The men had walked straight into a trap, and it was her fault.
    She tried to control her anger and think clearly. The British had certainly been watching them the entire time. There were probably agents in the campgrounds, agents who had followed her as she reconnoitered Hartley Hall. She understood that she had few options now. If she went back to the caravan or tried to hide in the North Wood, she would be arrested.
    She had three hours before first light—three hours to get as far from the Norfolk Coast as possible. The Vauxhall was no good; it was back at the caravan, almost certainly being watched by the police.
    If she was to escape Norfolk, she had only one choice.
    She had to walk.
    She picked up her rucksack. Inside was her money, her maps, and her Walther automatic. Norwich lay twenty miles to the south. She could be there by midday. She could purchase a change of clothing, check into a hotel to clean herself up, buy hair dye at a chemist, and change her appearance. From Norwich
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    she could take a bus farther south to Harwich, where there was a large European ferry terminal. She could take an overnight ferry to Holland and be on the Continent by morning.
    She removed the gun from her rucksack, pulled on her hood, and started walking.
    MARCH
    29
    AMSTERDAM « PARIS
    Amsterdam was a city Delaroche loved, but not even Am-sterdam, with its gabled houses and picturesque canals, could lift the gray fog of depression that had settled over him that winter. He had taken a flat in a house overlooking a small canal running between the Herengracht and the Singel. The rooms were large and airy, with vaulted windows and French doors that opened onto the water, but Delaroche kept the blinds drawn except when he was working.
    The flat was bare except for his easels and his bed and a large chair near the French doors where he sat and read late into most evenings. Two bicycles were propped against the wall in the entrance hall, an Italian sport racer, which he used for long rides in the flat Dutch countryside, and a German-made mountain bike for the cobblestones and bricks of central Amsterdam. He refused to keep them in the lockup outside the house as the rest of the tenants did; there was a huge black market for stolen bicycles
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    in Amsterdam, even for the rickety one-speed coasters that most people rode. His mountain bike would not have survived more than a few minutes.
    Uncharacteristically, he had grown obsessed with his own face. Several times each day he would go into the bathroom and stare at his reflection in the glass. He had never been a vain man, but he hated what he saw now, because it offended his artistic sense of proportion and symmetry. Each day he