THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page B

squeezing and twisting.'
    Wroughton was gone.
    Bart stood in the corridor and gasped. Little spurts of breath bubbled on his lips. He mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he had composed himself, when his breathing was regular, he went back down the corridor. The noise from the room bayed at him. His host barked in his ear, 'Not got a glass, Bart? More champagne? Or are you going to hang around for a bit and have something better?'
    A nod and a wink . . . Bart smiled weakly. He was looking for the hostess. A guest, a woman in a bright floral dress, tried to intercept him and he started to hear her query on the best preventive tablets for diarrhoea, but he slipped her his card, pointed to his surgery number and moved on. He saw Bethany, Miss Jenkins, her hand easily on her hip, talking to oil people.
    The hostess said, 'Not going yet, Bart, surely not? It's just warming up.' He said he had a call-out, embellished the excuse with a casual mention of septicaemia, and thanked her for a wonderful party, quite lovely.
    Bart drove the mile back to his own compound, and his own three-bedroomed villa, which cost him the riyal equivalent of twenty-two thousand pounds in annual rental and which he could comfortably afford. In the daytime he used a chauffeured car but at night, a short journey through light traffic, he drove himself. The security men at the gate recognized his Mitsubishi four-wheel drive, waved to him and let him through. Two more parties were blaring out over the compound lawns. He let himself inside the darkened villa. Nothing of his life adorned his home, no pictures, no photographs, no ornaments, no mementoes from his past. Even the cat, the sole centre of affection in Bart's life, mutual love, couldn't help him escape from the place he hated.
    Wroughton left. He knew he had the whispered reputation of a sexual goat, but he would not have made a pass at the nurse with the ghastly accent, Falkirk or East Kilbride. His conquests were with wives mature enough to maintain discretion. The reputation was never proven. He headed for his bachelor apartment in the diplomatic quarter. As the station chief attached to the embassy, Eddie Wroughton was allocated an armour-plated Land Rover Discovery with bullet-proof windows, but the plates inside the bodywork and the reinforced glass beside him, through which he looked on to the deserted road, would only have been noticed by an expert.
    He despised men like Samuel Bartholomew; one of the hardships of his life as a senior officer of the Secret Intelligence Service was the requirement to deal with first-degree scum. But against the hardships there were purple moments when he gloried in his work. Saudi Arabia was a class posting, interesting intellectually, challenging and, above all, a stepping-stone to greater things.
    He always left an expatriate party before the alcohol was served.
    He left before the 'champagne' was exhausted, before the home brew was offered, or the 'brown tea' was poured - usually ostentatiously
    - from a china teapot, most often Jack Daniel's but sometimes Johnnie Walker and always taken neat. It would have been bad for his career, probably terminal, if a party he was attending where alcohol was available was raided by the mutawwa, the zealots of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
    He always went home early . . . If he needed to drink, the bottles were in the sideboard of his apartment's living room, premises protected by diplomatic immunity, and in the safe of his embassy office.
    Few knew him. Only the wives he bedded, the most valued of the agents he handled and his one friend in the Kingdom's capital could have passed a serious judgement on Eddie Wroughton. He appeared a caricature of an Englishman abroad and he played to that super-ficial image. Day and night, at work, at the ambassador's dinner table, as a guest of the princes of the ruling family or on a field trip out of the city, he wore a cream-coloured