The Reluctant Hero (5 page)

It became quickly apparent that Ta’argistan didn’t register on the British radar. It hadn’t been part of the Empire, didn’t have a vote in any assembly in Brussels and wasn’t likely to come to Britain’s assistance if she was invaded by Iceland. There was no Ta’argi embassy in London, no British embassy in Ta’argistan. And when, stretching his wings, he called the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, he was promised by the receptionist that someone would call back, but they never did. Ta’argistan wasn’t part of the American empire, either.

Harry glanced at his watch. 11.17 a.m. Not even daylight in Washington, DC. No help there, then. His frustration grew. It was easier being lost in the Columbian jungle than chopping his way through the distractions of the holiday season.

It was at this point that the dog returned, accompanied by its owner, who was dragging behind her a community support officer, a doleful man wrapped in a fluorescent jacket and brandishing a notebook.

‘That’s him,’ she cried, pointing a finger of accusation with the merciless passion of a Grand Inquisitor.
The sparrow that had been foraging on Harry’s table flew away in distress.

The PCSO approached. He was in his late fifties and had the air of a man who in a previous life might have been a quality inspector at a ball-bearing factory. He also bore an excessively cropped moustache that bristled with attitude. ‘Good morning, sir. This lady says you’ve been manhandling her dog.’ His moist, pink nostrils flared in disapproval.

‘I’m afraid you are mistaken. I never touched it.’

‘No – but his friend!’ she interjected.

‘Never met the man before. A Frenchman, I think.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone, sir?’

‘Said he had a plane to catch.’

‘Do you mind if I take a few personal details, then?’ the officer replied, bringing forth his notebook.

‘I do rather. In a bit of a hurry. But so should you be. Isn’t that him, on the far side of the lake?’ Harry waved towards a figure that could just be made out across the frozen waters, an entirely innocent stranger who happened to have silver hair and be wearing a black overcoat.

‘Yes, that’s him. Come on!’ the dog owner cried, dragging the bemused beast behind her as she set off in pursuit, its eyes bulging once more as the collar tightened around its neck. With a mean glint in his eye and a bristle of disappointment, the PCSO detached himself from Harry and went after her.

Harry stirred. He had already come to the conclusion
that she was one of those implacable women who would be back, demanding her rights to vengeance. He could sense some ridiculous headline being squeezed out of it all; the tabloids would always oblige, and he would find himself pilloried for an act only a little less despicable than child molestation. He was achieving nothing here, chasing shadows. It was time to move on.

As he looked out across the grey, ice-pinched park, he wondered what it was like up in the mountains of Ta’argistan. Not pleasant, he assumed, but he didn’t know, and his ignorance made him feel impotent. He sighed. He knew he would have to swallow a bitter pill. He needed Roddy Bowles.

Harry had got it right. It wasn’t much fun in Ta’argistan right now, even in its capital city, Ashkek. It was a town built with too much concrete, in too much of a hurry and with too little imagination, a place where the winds whistled down from the gaunt, grey mountains to scour every corner. And the cells of the ancient central prison in what was simply called the Castle had no heating.

There was one empty cell. It had been vacated a few hours before by Prisoner 7217, and he wouldn’t be coming back. Ever. A cell that stank of shit and rats and damp and mould, and despair.

It was into this cell that they threw what was left of Zac Kravitz.

Roddy Bowles didn’t want to see Harry. Understandable, perhaps, on New Year’s Day, but there was form between them, no outright confrontation but an implicit and unambiguous awareness developed over the years that the chemistry between them would never be right. Bowles not only didn’t want to see him but would have preferred never to have anything to do with him, yet Harry had insisted. With reluctance that wasn’t entirely covered by a veneer of politeness, Bowles had submitted.

He was a politician in his early fifties, small, lean, with greying hair cropped unfashionably short which revealed that he was thinning behind. Bowles hadn’t made it centre stage in Westminster; a stint as a junior minister had come to an untidy end when the
Evening
Standard
had uncovered some compromising business arrangements allegedly undertaken by his wife, after which he’d devoted his career to cheering from the wings, where he had worked hard to keep one step ahead of the script. He’d spent his time spotting whose star was rising and who was standing on the unsteady trapdoor of life, applauding all the time, even as the bolt on the trapdoor was being withdrawn. His efforts had got him a knighthood long before it was due – he claimed it was for personal services to the Prime Minister, but if you asked him what those services were, he would smile and tap his nose as if you had no right to know. In truth, he’d got his K because he’d nagged in the right places, and they’d hoped that granting it would keep him quiet.

‘Hello, Roddy. Apologies for bothering you,’ Harry said as the door to the Bowles’ apartment opened.

‘Never mind, never mind. You’re always welcome, you know that,’ Bowles responded, making light of the fact that never once had the two of them shared so much as a cup of tea together. ‘Come in.’

He led the way into his top-floor apartment, situated in a mansion block in the heart of Belgravia. Harry had expected to find a low-ceilinged, almost mean attic as was typical in these old Victorian buildings, but walls had been taken out and ceilings raised to construct a remarkably large, welll-it reception room. It was furnished in simple but elegant style, with comfortable modern sofas, fresh flowers and a wonderful Georgian desk with a view over Eaton Square. The walls carried not the usual clutter of political cartoons and self-serving publicity photographs but some fine Impressionist paintings, and Harry also spotted an ancient Roman green glass pitcher on the desk and something on a side table that might have been out of Damien Hirst’s stable. The place had been kitted out with remarkable taste and an open mind. So unlike the rest of Roddy. There was also a woman’s coat thrown over the back of one of the chairs.

‘The curator of my pictures,’ Bowles explained, sensing the imperceptible rise in Harry’s eyebrow. ‘We’re thinking of bringing up some new canvases I’ve acquired from the country. She’s, er . . . in the bathroom.’ It sounded like a confession. Time to move on.
‘You said you had something urgent you wanted to discuss. I’m intrigued.’

Bowles indicated a seat for Harry, and sat down opposite him, as though conducting an interview. He was wearing a double-breasted blazer and it was buttoned. Harry remembered that Julia had always harboured doubts about men who wore such jackets and kept them buttoned, even when sitting at home on a sofa. She said they hid more than a man’s bulging gut.

‘Roddy, you’re leading a parliamentary group to Ta’argistan.’

‘Yes, in three days’ time.’

‘I’d like to come with you.’

Bowles appeared bemused. ‘But . . . why?’

‘Lots of reasons. I’m curious. All this talk about Asia forging a brave new world – I want to see a bit of it myself.’

Bowles chuckled, like a tutor with a confused child. ‘Yes, but Ta’argistan at this time of year is a pretty remorseless place. Even in the capital they can’t guarantee power supplies. A bloody icebox, I can tell you. God knows why they suggested we go at this time of year, but that’s why it’s only four days. You’d be better off in the Caribbean or Courchevel – anywhere, in fact.’ ‘

I’m not looking for a holiday. And I suppose . . . well, let me be frank. It’s the anniversary of Julia’s death. Could do with getting away somewhere completely different, take my mind off things. So I’d like to be part of your group.’

‘And I’d love to have you, Harry, be glad of your support, and if I could help I most certainly
would
,’ Bowles replied, banging his fist on his knee for emphasis, ‘but the Ta’argis are an inflexible lot, no imagination. Still polishing Joe Stalin’s boots. And they’ve been very clear that they can only accommodate five of us. And since they’re footing the bill—’

‘My bills aren’t a problem.’

‘Maybe so, but the arrangements and accommodation are. Five, they have said, and five it will have to be.’

‘Surely you can squeeze another one in.’

‘Out of my hands, I’m afraid. We’re already fully subscribed. I’ve got that twerp Bobby Malik, Sid Proffit – what an old buffer he is. There’s Ian McKenzie to make up the Scottish quota and Martha Riley for decoration. A rum lot, I’ll agree, but also a full house. I’d love to have you on board, Harry, a man with your qualifications, but . . .’ He spread his hands wide in surrender to the facts. ‘I’m so very sorry.’ The words were syrup, but there was no disguising the stone that lay beneath.

The noise of someone moving about crept from a room nearby. Bowles rose to his feet, the interview at its end. ‘Wish I could ask you to stay for coffee but, as you can see, I’m tied up at the moment.’

Or likely to be later, if the rumours were true. He might bring his paintings up from the country, but never his wife.

He led Harry to his door and shook his hand, a rather awkward gesture between colleagues, before propelling him out. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint,’ he lied, briskly closing the door.

‘Oh, but you haven’t,’ Harry whispered, as he headed for the stairs.

When, at last, Zac became aware, he found himself in a place that had been stripped of every shred of colour. Some pain was like that, so intense, so personal, that it tore away all subtlety from the world and left nothing but obliterating darkness and flashes of blinding, impenetrable light. He lay immobile in the filth, curled up, like a child, his hands tucked between his thighs, instinctively trying to protect those most vulnerable parts of a man’s body from any further injury. The pain they had inflicted had been, literally, unimaginable. The sort of pain that makes a man do anything, say anything, to make it stop.

And Zac had. Given them everything. Every name, every contact, everything he knew, not that there had been much.

Zac had been part of the Circuit, the name insiders gave to that expanding world of private armies that stretched from Algeria to Afghanistan, from Nigeria to Venezuela, anywhere there was a mixture of money and danger. They filled gaps where local security forces were ill-trained or under-staffed; even the US and British governments used such men to guard the outer
perimeters of some of their more exposed embassies. It was a world of mercenaries, of guns for hire. Mao Zedong had once declared that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and so did big fat profit.

Zac had been hired to help with the training of Ta’argistan’s paramilitary forces. Nothing unusual in that, it was happening all around the globe, but Zac was still that irrepressible football player, didn’t know when to stop, not until he’d been knocked clean off his feet. That had happened the day they dragged him off and accused him of sharing the sweated sheets of the wife of the most powerful man in the republic. That sort of liaison put a man way out of bounds. The President could scarcely admit to being a cuckold, so instead Zac was accused of treason, of being in contact with opposition groups and plotting the overthrow of the government. In a land of mists and suspicions, it was an accusation that took hold all too greedily. Now Zac lay shivering on a cold stone floor. He’d told them everything he knew, even things he had simply imagined, but it wasn’t enough. They thought he knew more.

They hadn’t beaten him, not at first. They’d tried to squeeze information out of him through isolation in the Castle, and humiliation, depriving him of food and clothing and of any concept of time. They had degraded him and begun to treat him ever more brutally, like an animal, and for one period of exquisite foulness even as a catamite. Torment both body and
mind, leave a man to swim in his own fear, not knowing where they might drag him next, and he will crack. Rip out the soul and the words will follow. But when he failed to give them what they wanted, what they thought he knew, the treatment had become ever more savage.

No amount of training could have prepared Zac for what came next. Name, rank and serial number didn’t get him past the first deliberately busted finger, bent back until it snapped. Every man has his breaking point, and Zac had reached his at a relatively early stage in his torture. No shame in that. Yet although he was unable to resist the physical pain, Zac still fought them, in his mind. When they’d grabbed him he’d been playing chess with an old Ta’argi at one of the concrete tables in Victory Park where grizzled chess players gathered; he loved the passion of these whiskery men, even though he didn’t understand a word of their language. Not that his interrogators saw these encounters as being innocent. As he had sat, bent in concentration over his endgame, they had clubbed him from behind, but before they dragged him away he had snatched at one of the chess pieces, the black horse. It was nothing more than a cheap wooden carving, but to Zac it became priceless. He had managed to keep it throughout all that was to come, in his clenched fist, in a pocket or a fold in his clothes, between his toes, in his mouth, anywhere. Yes, there too. The struggle to retain that chess piece became his own private battle with his
tormentors, one they didn’t even know about. It gave him a sense of control, so that when they lacerated his body and filled every pore with pain he was able to survive it, claim victory over them, so long as he could feel the small wooden horse biting into the flesh of his palm.

When he was thrown back in his cell and left in the squalor on his floor, his horse would come to life, and in his imagination he would ride it away into the mountains, to freedom, to places where it didn’t hurt any more.

How many weeks Zac had survived like this he couldn’t tell. Time no longer had any meaning, only the moment mattered. But he was aware that something had changed, he was in a new place, a different cell. This cell was deeper, danker, than any that had gone before. It was as though they had brought him to the deepest hole on earth, lit by a single bare bulb. As his eyes began to regain their focus, he looked up and saw a guard towering over him.