A Sentimental Traitor Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rivals would say she was more guilty than the terrorists themselves. It would bring an end to her career,
to EATA, to all her dreams. And where was the benefit in that?
    She couldn’t speak out, yet she knew she couldn’t simply leave the matter. Pity’s sake, she wasn’t a monster. Despite the glow from the gas heater above her head, her
hands began to tremble with cold, and the long trail of cigarette ash dropped helplessly to the floor.
    Concentrate, damn you, don’t drown in cheap emotion! But what to do? She had to rise above it, remember there was a bigger game being played here. The European Union needed time to take
more solid shape, there were bound to be growing pains, weren’t there? She believed passionately in that dream, of Europe, as one, united, renewed. That’s why she had come here. And
there was always a price to be paid for dreams.
    She’d sat outside the coffee shop so long that the light was beginning to fade. A sparrow hopped onto the table, watching carefully, cheekily, bobbing its head several times before darting
forward to grab the crumbs of biscuit that lay in the saucer and fluttering away with its evening meal. But she saw nothing, except what was playing in her mind. Only when the cigarette had burned
so low that it scorched her fingers did she come back to reality. And reality, she had always believed, was what you made it. She took one final lungful of tobacco before pulling out her phone and
scrolling through her list of contacts.
    ‘Hamish, this is Patricia Vaine,’ she said when at last a man’s voice answered. ‘I need to see you. This evening.’
    Her fingernails tapped impatiently on the glass tabletop as she soaked up the man’s protest.
    ‘No, Hamish, I’m afraid you’re going to have to disappoint your wife and be a little late for that dinner, no matter whom she’s invited.’ Whom, never who; she was
always careful to use the correct pronoun, even when it seemed a little clumsy. ‘Why? My dear Hamish, because you’re a journalist. And you’re just about to get a story. Rather a
big one. Perhaps the biggest of your dull and undistinguished career.’

    ‘Mr Jones?’
    The bar steward raised an eyebrow. Harry looked at his watch, inspected his empty glass with a frown, as though it were a museum exhibit, then nodded. He’d intended to wait until his
friend arrived, but ‘Sloppy’ was late and Harry’s spirits low.
    He’d spent much of the afternoon on the banks of the Thames, watching the recovery of the wreckage. The river wasn’t particularly deep at this point but the hours of daylight were
short, the navy divers could work only at low tide and the visibility was zero. Often they had to use their fingertips to work out what they had encountered, and there were still bodies unaccounted
for. It made for slow progress. Aviation fuel was leaking and the tide swirled the pollution back and forth.
    They recovered the flight data and cockpit voice recorders first, from the tail section that was still sticking grotesquely from the water. Then it was the failed engine, dredged from the dark
mud, and after that the tail itself, its colours made more brilliant and grotesque by the beams of a thousand spotlights as it was grappled by a floating crane onto one of the barges moored
alongside, and slowly brought towards a low-loader lorry from the Joint Air Recovery and Transport Squadron. As it was hoisted onto the flatbed it swung to and fro, and seemed to take for ever to
be manoeuvred into place and made secure. Whenever it twisted, even a little, a stream of dark, filthy water gushed out, spattering around, like blood.
    As a matter of course it was treated as a crime scene, but the police didn’t bother trying to restrict those tens of thousands who came to watch. Tower Bridge was closed, as was St
Katherine’s Dock alongside, and for their own safety the air space above was denied to news helicopters, but for the rest the river provided the most