Free The Marching Season by Daniel Silva Page B

as the boat entered Korfos Bay and docked at Chora. He waited until everyone had left the boat before disembarking.
    He had purchased a used Volvo station wagon for days when it was too cold and rainy to cycle. The Volvo was waiting in a deserted lot at the ferry terminal. Delaroche opened the rear door and placed his things in the back compartment: a large flat case containing his canvases and his palette, a smaller case with his paints and his brushes. He climbed inside and started the engine.
    The drive northward to Cape Mavros took only a few minutes; Mykonos is a small island, about ten miles by six miles, and there was little traffic on the road because of the season. The moonscape terrain passed through the yellow cone of the headlamps—treeless, barren, the rough features smoothed over by thousands of years of human habitation.
    Delaroche pulled into the gravel drive outside the villa and climbed out. He had to lean hard on the door to close it in the wind. Whitecaps glowed on Panormos Bay and the Ionian Sea beyond. Delaroche followed the short walkway to the front door and shoved his key in the lock. Before opening the door, he withdrew a Beretta automatic pistol from the shoulder holster beneath his leather jacket. The alarm chirped softly as he stepped inside. He disarmed the system, switched on the lights, and moved through the entire villa, room by room, until he felt certain no one was there.
    He was hungry after painting all day, so he went into the kitchen and made supper: an omelette of onions, mushrooms, and cheese, a plate of Parma ham, roasted Greek peppers, and bread fried in olive oil and garlic.
    He carried his food to the rustic wooden dining table. He switched on his laptop computer, logged onto the Internet, and read newspapers while he ate. It was quiet except for the wind rattling the windows overlooking the sea.
    When he was finished reading he checked his E-mail. There was one message, but when he called it up on his screen it appeared as a meaningless series of characters. He typed in his password, and the gibberish turned to clear text. Delaroche finished eating his supper while he studied the dossier of the next man he would kill.
    Jean-Paul Delaroche had lived in France most of his life, but he was not French at all. Code-named October, Delaroche had been an assassin for the KGB. He had lived and operated exclusively in Western Europe and the Middle East, and his mission had been simple: to create chaos within NATO by inflaming tension within the borders of its member nations. When the Soviet Union collapsed, men like Delaroche weren’t absorbed by the KGB’s more presentable successor, the Foreign Intelligence Service; he went into private practice and quickly became the world’s most sought-after contract killer. Now, he worked for just one person, a man he knew only as the Director. For his services he was paid one million dollars a year.
    Sea fog hung over the cliffs the following day as Delaroche rode a small Italian motor scooter along the narrow lane above Panormos Bay. He took lunch at the taverna in Ano Mera: fish, rice, bread, and salad, with olive oil and wedges of hard-boiled egg. After lunch he walked through the village to the fruit market. He purchased several melons and placed them in a large paper sack, which he held between his legs as he rode to a deserted patch of track in the barren hills above Merdias Bay.
    Delaroche stopped the motor scooter next to an outcropping of rock. He took a melon from the bag and placed it on a ledge of the rock, so it was approximately level with his own head. Next, he removed three more melons and placed them along the pathway about twenty yards apart. The Beretta hung in a shoulder holster beneath his left arm. He drove about two hundred meters down the path, stopped, and turned around. He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled on a pair of black leather gloves.
    A year earlier, during his last assignment, the man he had been hired to