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the house had lulled them into believing that even if the sergeant major did get in the house, they would easily hear him and get to him before he got to their twenty-two-year-old classmate who was posing as the prime minister.
    They were wrong. In workmanlike fashion, Ian moved from room to room of the large, rustic lodge, waiting for his opportunities. The first floor guard on his routine patrol rounded the corner to the dining room into the waiting arms of the sergeant major. It was over immediately. As the disconcerted trainee sat down on the floor, Ian gave him the patented “evil eye” that all trainees over the past twenty-one years had tried to avoid at all costs.
    The last guard proved to be even simpler. He obviously didn’t think it would ever come down to him versus the mock assassin. But it did, and he never knew what hit him. As Sgt. Maj. Ian McKay plucked the red flag from the hat of the “prime minister” and transmitted to the entire teamthat the exercise had culminated in his “assassination,” each trainee was well aware that they had just been had by one of the best field operatives in the Western world. Maybe the best.
    Ian’s debrief of the group was scathing. Adjectives like lazy, stupid, and worthless, coupled with a significant variety of expletives, made the highly skilled trainees feel like children.
    “Your collective inability to sense danger is uncanny,” Ian growled. “You’ve got to be aware of your surroundings. You have to anticipate when danger is most likely. Every one of you treated today’s exercise like a walk through Hyde Park. I am disgusted by your lack of progress.”
    Then Ian broke into a smile and said, “But you’re the best goddamned group of young recruits I’ve had in years. Your mistakes today were common. Six weeks from now, you won’t make the same mistakes. You’ll be a finely tuned unit that will make your country proud. Now get cleaned up. Tonight we go to town before we begin our final training push. Let’s meet outside the barracks at 18:30.”
    The trainees let out a collective cry of joy. They were getting out, albeit for only one night, of their self-imposed prison.
    Later that night, as Sgt. Maj. Ian McKay and his group of highly skilled trainees sat in the Angry Dog Pub slugging back pint after pint of ales and lagers, a very different event was transpiring in Dallas, Texas. Sen. Will Hawkins stood at a podium in the family compound’s library announcing his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. As hundreds of television cameras transmitted this news around the world, a small TV in the Angry Dog Pub in western Wales was showing the announcement.
    Ian McKay was staring at the telly in a slightly dazed state of drunken bliss when he momentarily felt a hint of familiarity. What was it about the man on the screen? He felt as if he knew him.
    Then all at once it came back to him. He stood, silently pointing at the screen, knocking over his bar stool. While that got everyone’s attention, no one knew what he knew.
    That was the man who had killed his little brother so long ago.

nine
    T
he Dallas Free Press
was one of the premier newspapers in the country. With the early ’90s demise of its mortal enemy,
The Dallas Times Herald
, the
Free Press
had established a newspaper monopoly in a market with roughly five million captive readers. Robert Chambers was the editor-in-chief and publisher of the
Free Press
. Though small in stature at only 5′5″, he made up for that lack of first impression with his fiery personality and determination.
    Chambers was used to getting his way. On this beautiful September morning, in his weekly staff meeting, what Chambers wanted was for Greg Larson, his extremely independent Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, to cover from start to finish the presidential run of Dallas’s own William S. Hawkins.
    As the staff discussed the merits of an ongoing feature story of this type,