The Marching Season

public. Still, a fair amount was known about him, or at least suspected, within the walls of Brownstown. He was a hard man, once a senior officer in the Ulster Volunteer Force, a man who had done time in the Maze for killing Catholics.
    Kyle Blake watched the lead item on the Nine O'Clock News.
    A telephone call was received a few moments ago by the BBC
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    from a Protestant group calling itself the Ulster Freedom Brigade. The group is opposed to the Good Friday peace accords. It claimed responsibility for the attacks and vows to continue its campaign of terror until the agreement is nullified.
    Kyle Blake felt no need to go on watching, so he stood in an open doorway leading into an unkempt garden, smoking one in an endless stream of cigarettes. The air smelled of wet pastures. Blake tossed the cigarette butt into a flower bed overgrown with weeds and listened to the reaction of an expert on Northern Ireland from London's University College. He closed the door and shut off the television.
    He walked into the kitchen and made a series of brief telephone calls while his wife of twenty years, Rosemary, washed the dishes from supper. She knew what her husband did—there were no secrets between them, except precise operational details of his work—and so the coded conversations over the telephone seemed perfectly normal. 1 m going out.
    Rosemary took a scarf from the hook and tied it round his neck, looking carefully at his face, as though seeing it for the first time. He was a small man, only slightly taller than Rosemary, and chain smoking had left him thin as a long-distance runner. He had watchful gray eyes set deeply in his face and cadaverous cheekbones. His slight frame disguised a body of immense strength; when Rosemary took him in her arms she could feel the knotted muscles of his shoulders and back.
    "Be careful," she whispered into his ear.
    Blake pulled on a coat and kissed her cheek. "Keep the door locked, and don't wait up."
    28 Daniel Silva
    Kyle Blake was a printer by trade, and the family's only vehicle, a small Ford van, bore the name of his Portadown shop. Reflex-ively, he checked the undercarriage for explosives before getting in and starting the engine. He drove through the Brownstown estate. The giant face of Billy Wright, the fanatic Protestant killer murdered by Catholic gunmen in the Maze prison, stared from the side of a terraced house. Blake kept his eyes straight ahead. He turned onto the Armagh Road and followed a British troop carrier toward central Portadown.
    He switched on Radio Ulster, which was running a special bulletin on the claim of responsibility by the Ulster Freedom Brigade. The RUC had declared security alerts in sections of County Antrim and County Down. Motorists were warned to expect delays due to roadblocks. Other places have traffic updates on the radio, Kyle Blake thought; Ulster has security alerts. He switched off the radio, listening to the wipers beat a steady rhythm against the rain.
    Kyle Blake had never been to university, but he was a student of Northern Ireland's history. He laughed when he read that the troubles of the province began in 1969; Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the north of County Armagh for centuries. Empires had risen and fallen, two world wars had been fought, man had gone to the moon and back, but nothing much had changed in the gentle hills and glens between the rivers Bann and Callon.
    Kyle Blake could trace his roots in County Armagh back four hundred years. His ancestors had come from the Scottish Highlands during the great colonization of Ulster that began in 1609. They fought alongside Oliver Cromwell when he landed in Ulster to put down Catholic rebellions. They took part in the massacres of Catholics at Drogheda and Wexford. When Cromwell seized Catholic farmlands, Blake's ancestors planted the fields
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    and made the land their own. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sectarian violence raged in Armagh, members of the Blake clan joined the Peep O'Day Boys, so named because they descended on Catholic homes just before dawn. In 1795 the Blakes helped form the Orange Order.
    For nearly two centuries the Orangemen of Portadown had marched to the parish church at Drumcree on the Sunday before July 1—the anniversary of William of Orange's victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. But the previous summer—the first marching season