1

Michael Schaeffer had not killed anyone in years, and he was enraged at the fact that he’d had to do it again tonight. He drove the big black sedan along the deserted, winding British lane toward the south under the lightless sky, keeping his speed near the limit of his ability to control the car. Strapped upright with the seat belt in the passenger seat beside him was a man with a small, neat bullet hole through the side of his head. In the rear seats two more men with more pronounced firearm wounds were strapped upright. In the trunk of the car—he still thoughttrunk even though everyone around him saidboot—was another corpse that had bled profusely and was wrapped in a tarp. The sun would rise in a few hours, and he would have to be rid of this car and far away from it before then. He went over his memory of the way this had happened. It had started with a normal conversation with his wife, Meg.

Meg’s family had kept a house near the Royal Crescent in Bath for a couple of centuries, and Bath was where she and Michael had met decades ago and still lived for most of the year. Each spring, she would pick a day when it was time for their retreat from Bath. One day a few weeks ago, she’d had her laptop open on the big Regency desk in her study when he walked in.

Meg had already checked what she called “migration day”—the end of the spring semester in the academic schedules of American universities. She usually began with the ones in and around Boston. During the winter, Boston held over 250,000 students, and each summer a great many of them would be heading for England, most of them stopping in Bath, population 84,000. She used American students as bellwethers, because their movements were predictable, but there would also be hordes from other countries.

“I’ve checked the spring-semester exam schedules. It’s off to Yorkshire no later than May fifth this year.” She meant the family’s historic home, the old estate a dozen miles outside the city of York. York was also a destination for tourists and students in the summer, but the house was off the main routes and was not the best historical example of anything or the site of an important battle or a Roman ruin.

“Got it,” said Michael. “I should be able to pack a razor and a toothbrush by then.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be reminded. Many times.”

Whenever they stayed in the Yorkshire house, they slept in the second-floor bedroom remodeled in the 1650s for the earl of that generation and his wife and last modernized five years ago. It was one of eight large chambers for the family, but Meg and Michael were childless and the older members of her family had died years before. The lower level of the old house had been designed for public functions: a central dining hall, a big kitchen and pantry behind it, a drawing room, and a library—all modernized in the 1630s, over stone laid in the 1300s, and refurnished many times since then. The top t