THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

leaving a stained ring on the wood. He cared as little about the ring as he cared for Saudi champagne. It was always served early at Riyadh's expatriate parties - a mix of apple juice, American dry ginger and fresh mint leaves; cucumber slices floated with the ice cubes. He could have gone to a party such as this one every night of the week if he had chosen to, could have mingled with the familiar crowd of aerospace workers, oil men, medical people and their wives, and the nurses who were there for decoration. The talk around him was the usual numbingly tedious crap - the rental price of compound villas, the quality of the local workforce, the heat, the cost of imported food.
    He hadn't noticed her coming.
    'Dr Samuel Bartholomew, or Bart to the many who know me and the very few who love me.'
    He realized she had trapped him. Against the wall he had been a free agent at the party, now he was confronted. A hi-fi system played loud music, as if the combination of its beat and the alcohol-free champagne would stimulate the guests into believing they were enjoying themselves . . . She was different from the nurses and wives.

    She blocked any escape and her posture, with her feet a little apart, almost intimidated him. And it was an interruption. As he always did at the parties, he had been listening hard for little morsels of information. He sucked in trifles of indiscretion, was a carrier of tales and confidences, and his hidden existence was the sole pleasure he took from life: it gave him power. He was forty-seven years old. He had been christened Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew - his father had taken two weeks' holiday a year, one for the Guildford cricket festival, one for the annual Oval Test match, and his third given name came from the cricketer who had done something to the Australians in the year of his birth. As a schoolboy, with pudgy jowls and a slack stomach, he had detested organized sports. His maxim, then and now, was not to run if he could walk, not to walk if he could ride. Others at the party would jog on the pavements round the compound walls in the early morning before the heat became intolerable or would work out in an air-conditioned gymnasium. His late father had believed that cricket gave a man a code of decent disciplines for life - he would have turned in his grave if he had known his son traduced the trust given him.
    'I'm Bethany Jenkins.'
    'Pleased to meet you, Miss Jenkins.'
    Bart always used old-world manners . . . It was the start of his third year as a general practitioner in the Kingdom. He acted as a link man between patients with real or imagined symptoms and the expensive foreign consultants at the King Fahd Medical City, or the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, or the King Khalid Eye Hospital. He passed them on and received a cut of the fees, smoothed the way and was rewarded. He was losing the drift of a conversation to his right: two men from a British company's aerospace software division in earnest talk about the failure of in-flight radar in the Tornado strike aircraft sold to the Air Force. He tried to refocus on the conversation, but her hand was held out.
    He shook it limply, but she held his hand too tightly for him to ignore her.
    'I've booked an appointment with your secretary for a couple of day's time. I'm up from the south, going on to Bahrain tomorrow, a bit of shopping, then I'm coming to see you before I go back down.'
    'I'll look forward to it, Miss Jenkins.'

    There didn't look to be much wrong with her. She was different from the other women in the room: she was tanned hard, her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, her face below the cropped blonde hair weatherbeaten from winds and sun. Late twenties, he thought, but an obvious outdoors life had aged her skin. The other women in the room fled from exposure to the sun, anointed themselves with protective creams when they had to go out, wore headscarves and carried parasols. And she was different also in