The Reluctant Hero Read Online Free PDF

he hit the pillows, blindly, in rage, the anger was pushed aside by despair and remorse, which hurt even more. Harry grabbed the pillow and buried his head in it to hide his tears.
    He lay still for many minutes, trying to find a route to safety through the war that had broken out within his mind. Somewhere outside, above the streets of Mayfair and in a night made endless day by wasted lights, seagulls who had swapped cliff face for roof tops bickered and pranced. It seemed as though they were mocking him, but it came nowhere close to how much Harry mocked himself. A man can spend a lifetime arguing about the balance between honour, duty, position, reputation, those things by which others measure him, but in the end it’s what’s inside that matters.
    Harry sat up in bed once more. ‘Fuck you, Zac,’ he said quietly, before heading for the shower.

CHAPTER TWO
    New Year’s Day had set in misty and frozen, as bleak as the year it had left behind. The sky was low, like beaten tin, and the air filled with tiny needles of ice. As Harry stepped out around the Serpentine, the lake at the heart of Hyde Park, he left a trail of dragon’s breath in his wake. He kicked out at a pebble, which scuttled for many feet across the persistent ice before disappearing into dark, reluctant water.
    He had sat on his patience for as long as he could before calling d’Arbois. That had been shortly before eight, an hour that on such a day would normally have caused outrage, but they were both members of the 24/7 club, both Europeans who had grown used to the fact that events which shaped their world nowadays occurred in distant parts and different time zones. It was God’s revenge on the imperialists. Anyway, as the French Foreign Minister had recently been overheard muttering, no one slept soundly while the new US Secretary of State was awake and functioning.
    ‘We need to talk. About Zac,’ Harry had said, without preliminaries.
    ‘We already have,’ a reluctant d’Arbois had replied. ‘I know very little else.’
    ‘Even so.’
    They had agreed to meet at one of the coffee shops overlooking the Serpentine. In midsummer the place would be overrun with excitable children demanding ice cream and another ride on the boats, but today it was almost deserted. They sat at one of the tables outside, wrapped to the ears in their overcoats, out of earshot of the members of the skeleton staff, unwilling to risk the remote possibility that any of them spoke much English.
    ‘Hervé, thank you,’ Harry began, acknowledging the kindness the other man was showing by disrupting his day.
    ‘It is always a pleasure to help a friend, Harry. And you sounded . . .’ He hesitated while he searched for the appropriate word. ‘Restless. That’s not like you.’
    With the words wrapped in d’Arbois’s gentle but occasionally stiff accent, Harry couldn’t tell whether the other man was expressing concern or administering a scolding – no, not a scolding, he decided. The Frenchman was a man of many sides; his judgements were usually political, rarely personal.
    ‘I wasn’t in much of a frame of mind to take on board everything you were saying last night,’ Harry said, scooping some froth from his cappuccino. ‘Run it past me again. Please.’
    The Frenchman looked out over the grey surface of the lake, his eyes settling on the naked trees at the edge of the park. With his dark cashmere overcoat and silver hair he seemed to be as one with this monochrome day. ‘There is precious little to my tale, Harry. I brought it to you only because I knew of your past liaisons with him. And I have heard nothing but snippets – fragments – in the margins of other conversations.’
    Harry didn’t need to guess too hard at what was meant. Spy talk. In Algeria, d’Arbois had come into contact with the DGSE – the Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure, the French equivalent of MI6 or the CIA – and those who were brought under its wing were