A Sentimental Traitor Read Online Free Page A

glibly assumed Harry was better
protected than most Members of Parliament – he was independently and almost indecently wealthy, had a thumping parliamentary majority and every year received a personalized Christmas card
from the Queen, yet he took none of this for granted. So he sat in his darkened study, with light cast from a solitary desk lamp, working and reworking every word.
    ‘Harry, you going to be long?’
    He looked up. Jemma was leaning against the doorjamb, yawning. A wisp of thick marmalade hair tumbled across her forehead and she was clad in nothing but a towel. Even in silhouette the effect
was exceptionally distracting, the sort of woman men found difficult in describing without using their hands.
    ‘Five minutes, Jem,’ he said, returning to his typescript.
    ‘Make them short minutes,’ she suggested, dropping her towel before turning back to the bedroom.
    He rewrote a couple of lines, marking corrections with his Parker Duofold, then reread the whole thing once more, but it was late, his brain too tired, he couldn’t catch the subtleties or
the pace. Part of him, the obsessive part, said it needed another few minutes, one last look, his career depended on it, but instead he screwed the cap back firmly onto his pen and put it to one
side. It was Christmas, dammit, time to follow his star, or at least the trail of light that led towards the bedroom.
    Avenue de Cortenbergh, Brussels
    The lights were still blazing on the fifth floor of the anonymous office building, a block down from the Park du Cinquantenaire. That was unusual. This was the European Quarter,
the heart of government, where officials administered an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Atlantic and up as far as the Arctic Circle, although many of them had fled Brussels and
already returned to their homes for Christmas. In any event, the business of running the Union of Europe was meant to be regular and methodical, it wasn’t supposed to be in need of unexpected
late nights.
    Even more surprisingly, the lights were coming from EATA – the European Anti-Terrorist Agency. Not that EATA was like the CIA or MI6, or those thugs at the FSB in Moscow; it was a relative
infant in the intelligence game, no teeth, no claws, no spies wandering abroad with poison-tipped umbrellas or exploding toothpaste. The remit of EATA was simple, its task was to gather information
about matters of public security and put it in a form that their busy bosses could digest. Other intelligence agencies joked that most of the job consisted of pasting up press cuttings and could
better be done by circulating The Week magazine or the Wall Street Journal , but European bureaucracy never willingly took a short cut. Or worked a late night.
    Midnight struck, the avenue grew silent except for the passing of an occasional street-cleaning truck. The park was deserted, its trees bowing their bare branches, the birds asleep. Yet still
the lights in EATA burned. That could mean but one of two possibilities. Either the cleaners had been very careless. Or something was going very badly wrong.

 
CHAPTER TWO
    All politics is image, and throughout his career Ben Usher had tried to build the appearance of a Man with the Common Touch. That’s why he and his entourage had flown
back home on a scheduled flight, which made communication difficult, and in business class, which made sleep well-nigh impossible. When eventually he touched down at Heathrow he was tired and knew
he had already lost control of events. Not a good place to be.
    His car was waiting at the foot of the aircraft stairs to whisk him away, avoiding the media melee that was waiting for him. Usher wasn’t hiding, merely finding the space to collect his
thoughts; he knew there would be an even larger pack of hounds waiting for him at Downing Street, and he was old enough to remember the fate of Jim Callaghan, another Prime Minister who had
returned from sunnier shores during troubled times.