The Marching Season by Daniel Silva Page A

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.”
    “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.”

CHAPTER 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 the 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 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 Corniche 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 Egyptian television network. Paprika was the equivalent of Joe Allen in New York, a place where actors and writers came to be seen by each other and by Egyptians wealthy enough to afford the rather mediocre food. One side of the restaurant overlooked the parking lot of Egyptian television. Those were the most coveted tables in the restaurant, because sometimes patrons caught a glimpse of an actor or celebrity or senior government official.
    Michael had reserved a table on the unfashionable side of the