The Reluctant Hero by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

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 andmind, 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 histormentors, 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.
    ‘Where . . . where am I?’ he muttered feebly as his tongue snagged on a loose tooth.
    The guard looked at him, and for a moment Zac thought he saw pity in his eyes.
    ‘What does it matter?’ the guard said sadly. ‘You won’t be here long.’
    The names spilled by Bowles as members of his group included one Harry knew well. Ian McKenzie, a Scotwith a parliamentary seat in Kent, was one of nature’s enthusiasts, a rare creature