The Marching Season by Daniel Silva Read Free Book Online Page B

sleeping. Michael pulled on a leather jacket and climbed out onto the deck. Whitecaps beat against the prow of the ferry, sending sea spray over the gunwales. It was bitterly cold, but the hood of the car was warm with engine heat. Michael climbed up and sat down, hands shoved into his coat pockets. Shelter Island lay before him across the Sound, blacked out except for a large summerhouse at the mouth of Dering Harbor, which burned with clean white light. Cannon Point.
    When the ferry docked, Michael climbed back inside and started the engine. "I was watching you, Michael," Elizabeth said, without opening her eyes. "You were thinking about it, weren't you?"
    There was no point lying to her. He was thinking about it— the night a year earlier when a former KGB assassin, code-named October, had tried to kill them both at Cannon Point.
    "Do you do it often?" she said, interpreting his silence as confirmation.
    "When I'm on the ferry, looking at your father's house, I can't help it."
    "I think about it all the time," she said distantly. "Every morning I wake up, and I wonder if this will be the day: the day it all goes away. But it never does."
    "It takes time," Michael said, then added, "a lot of time."
    "Do you think he's really dead?"
    "October?"
    "Yes."
    "The Agency thinks so."
    "What about you?"
    50 Daniel Silva
    "I'd sleep better if a body turned up somewhere, but it won't."
    They passed through the Victorian cottages and clapboard shops of Shelter Island Heights and raced along Winthrop Road. Dering Harbor shone in the moonlight, empty except for Douglas Cannon's sloop, Athena, clinging to her mooring, prow turned to the wind. Michael followed Shore Road into Dering Harbor village and a moment later drew to a halt at the gate of Cannon Point.
    The night security guard stepped out of the hut and shone a light over the car. Douglas was spending several thousand dollars a month on security since the assassination attempt. The Agency had offered to pay a portion of the expense, but Douglas, forever leery of the intelligence community, bore all the cost himself. Michael followed the gravel drive through the property and stopped outside the front door of the main house. The senator was waiting for them on the steps, wearing an ancient yellow sailing coat, his retrievers frolicking at his feet.
    It was The New Yorker that first likened Douglas Cannon to Pericles; while he usually professed some mild embarrassment at the comparison, he did nothing to dispel it. He had inherited enormous wealth and decided quite early in life that the prospect of merely adding to his fortune depressed him greatly. Instead, he devoted himself to his first love, which was history. He taught at Columbia and wrote books. His vast apartment on Fifth Avenue was a gathering place for writers, artists, poets, and musicians. Elizabeth, when she was a little girl, met Jack Kerouac, Huey Newton, and a strange little man with blond hair and sunglasses named Andy. Only years later did she realize the man had been Andy Warhol.
    The Marching Season 51
    During Watergate, Douglas realized he could no longer remain confined to the bleachers, the eternal spectator. He ran for Congress in an overwhelmingly liberal Democratic district in midtown Manhattan and entered the House as a reformer in the class of '74. Two years later he was elected to the Senate. During his four terms there he served as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Select Committee on Intelligence.
    Douglas was always something of an iconoclast, but since his retirement from the Senate, his dress and mannerisms had become more peculiar than ever. He wore nothing but tattered corduroy trousers, aged boating shoes, and sweaters that, like the man himself, were beginning to show their age. He believed that cold sea air was the secret to longevity, and he was constantly giving himself bronchial infections by sailing throughout the winter and taking himself on