Read Online The Marching Season by Daniel Silva - Free Book Online Page A

beloved inn had been turned upside down. The award-winning dining room had been transformed into something called a “filing center.” The beautiful oak tables had given way to hideous rented banquet tables shrouded in white plastic. A team from the telephone company had installed fifty temporary lines. Another team had emptied the fireside lounge and turned it into a broadcast center. Thick cable snaked through the stately halls, and a portable satellite dish stood on the front lawn.
    The network news television crews arrived in the early evening, some from New York, some from Washington. Jake Ash-croft got so angry he took to his room and stayed there, sitting in a yoga posture and repeating the Serenity Prayer. The producers were bleary-eyed and foul-tempered. The cameramen looked like fishermen from Greenport—beefy and bearded, with clothes that appeared to be army surplus. They played poker past midnight and drained the bar of beer.
    At first light the Secret Service fanned out across the island. They established static posts at both ferry crossings and checkpoints on every road leading to Cannon Point. Sharpshooters took up positions on the roof of the old house, and bomb-sniffing German shepherds prowled the broad lawns, terrifying the squirrels and the white-tailed deer. The television crews descended on the marina at Coecles Harbor like a raiding party and rented every boat they could lay their hands on. Prices skyrocketed overnight. The crew from CNN had to settle for a leaky twelve-foot Zodiac, for which they paid an astonishing five hundred dollars. A pair of Coast Guard cutters stood watch in Shelter Island Sound. At nine-thirty the chartered bus bearing the White House press corps arrived at the Manhanset Inn. The reporters staggered into Jake Ashcroft’s plundered dining room like refugees at a processing center.
    And so everything seemed to be in place shortly after 10 A.M. when the muffled thump-thump-thump of a helicopter rotor could be heard from the direction of Little Peconic Bay. The day had dawned overcast and damp, but by midmorning the last of the clouds had burned away, and the east end of Long Island sparkled in the brilliant winter sun. An American flag flapped in the wind on Chequit Point. A huge banner saying welcome president BECKWITH lay on the roof of the Shelter Island Yacht Club, so the chief executive could read it as the helicopter passed overhead. Crowds of islanders lined Shore Road, and the high school band played a spirited if disjointed rendition of “Hail to the Chief.”
    Marine One passed over Nassau Point and Great Hog Neck. It swept low over the waters of Southold Bay, then over land once more at Conkling Point. The crowd on Shore Road caught first sight of the President’s helicopter as it hovered over Shelter Island Sound. The waterborne network news crews aimed their cameras at the sky and began rolling. Marine One floated over Dering Harbor, the beat of the rotor making ripples on the surface of the water, then set down on the lawn of Cannon Point, just beyond the bulkhead.
    Douglas Cannon was waiting there, along with Elizabeth and Michael and his two retrievers. The dogs raced forward as James and Anne Beckwith disembarked from the helicopter, dressed for the country in pressed khakis and hunter-green English waterproof jackets.
    A small group of reporters—the so-called tight pool—had been allowed onto the property to witness the arrival. “Why are you here?” shouted a leather-lunged correspondent from ABC News.
    “We just wanted to spend some time in the country with an old friend,” the President shouted back, smiling.
    “Where are you going now?”
    Douglas Cannon stepped forward. “We’re going to church.”
    First Lady Anne Beckwith—or Lady Anne Beckwith, as she was known among Washington’s chattering classes—was visibly taken aback by the senator’s remark. Like her husband, she was a borderline atheist who detested the weekly journey across