The Traitor’s Gold by David Leadbeater

Author:David Leadbeater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Published: 2024-05-06T14:35:30+00:00

Chapter 25

It was late. Mason and the others met outside the whorehouse and decided it was time to retire to a hotel, armed with their new information. As they walked, Mason and Roxy explained it all to the others. Sally found them a four-star hotel about a twenty-minute drive away.

Once there, they split up for the night and retired to their rooms, determined to get a good rest and then resume in the morning. It had been a long day and tomorrow was already shaping up to be just as long. Mason showered and climbed into bed, drank a bottle of water and lay in the dark with his head on the pillow, staring at the ceiling. The paper-thin, yellowy curtains were closed against the night, but he could see the darkness pressing in around the edges of the window. Cars passed along the road. He could hear their rolling tyres, their exhausts. People still walked down the street, some of them shouting in languages he couldn’t understand. Somewhere, a horn honked. Further away, a siren split the night, wailing. Mason lay in the dark, listening.

These were the moments when the past intruded. These moments used to be more frequent – hourly, in fact – but ever since he’d started working with Roxy and then the others, the dreadful memories had receded. It wasn’t that he wanted them to go away for ever, to die; he just needed to be able to control them.

His friends Zach and Harry had been killed in Mosul in the war, when they’d entered a house that Mason, their captain, had already checked, and were blown up by an IED. The event had practically destroyed him; changed the entire course of his life, turned him from a soldier to practically nothing – a man who couldn’t even talk to his wife. Mason hadn’t turned to drink. He had turned introspective. The new gulf between him and his wife eventually led to an amicable divorce. Luckily, there were no children involved.

Mason ended up working for a private security firm, taking a job offered to him by an old friend, Patricia Wilde, who later sacked him and Roxy for their insubordination during the Vatican secret escapade. As Mason worked with Roxy, and later Sally, Quaid and Hassell, he’d been able to tune the old memories out, to go beyond them and focus on the job at hand. What happened to Zach and Harry made Mason believe he had to help everyone, to help atone. That was part of the reason he’d accepted the current quest – to help Luciane, and now to stop the Shadow Kings’ SED from coming after his friends after their encounters.

Mason knew he needed to accept the blame for what happened to Zach and Harry and move on, to admit that it might have been his fault, but he never meant it to happen. It was war. He had to forgive himself. At first, he’d wanted to be left alone to work by

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