‘It’s not my war,’ Knox said.

‘It’s not America’s either, really. It’s certainly not Jimmy’s. But it’s still scarred him for life. Have you ever been injured for the causes you believe in, Richard?’

It was another surprisingly direct question, and one Knox had been asked before. The first time had been over a bottle of wine in a restaurant on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris twenty-two years ago by another high-born Brit. A man who wasn’t all that dissimilar from Northcott, and who had become one of Knox’s closest friends—a friend Knox thought about every day even though he’d been dead for seven years.

‘A couple of times.’ Knox thought about the old gash across the top of his head a delirious, half-starved German soldier had given him during the war, and the more recent scar on his chest, put there by a kidnapped Russian scientist who had almost shot him through the heart five years ago.

‘Jimmy,’ Northcott said, ‘take your jacket off.’

Reluctantly, Furlock pulled his arms out of his jacket sleeves and shrugged it off his shoulders. He looked even more gaunt in just the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath. Knox noticed first that the T-shirt was stained with sweat and dirt, and second that Furlock’s arms were both covered in the raised welts of knife cuts and what he guessed were cigarette burns.

‘Jimmy shouldn’t be here. He should be face down in the jungle somewhere outside Saigon. But the will to live is strong, especially when there’s no bloody reason for you to die. Jimmy wouldn’t mind me saying he’s not a fighter. Violence isn’t in his soul. But he’s strong. His will carried him all the way from Dallas to the west coast. He hitched rides with people who hadn’t really wanted to help him, slept in doorways and woke up to boots in his stomach.’

Northcott sat down next to Furlock as he shifted awkwardly under Knox’s gaze.

‘His family had disowned him when he wouldn’t volunteer to be thrown on his country’s rubbish heap of a war,’ Northcott continued, smiling again at the young man. ‘But he didn’t give up. And I think it’s only fair that someone doesn’t give up on him. You might not be able to see it, Richard, but Jimmy’s damn brave.’

‘I think I do,’ Knox replied, as he quickly processed Northcott’s revelation.

The old knight wasn’t spending his retirement sneaking Russians agents over the border into America after all. He was running a secret airborne railroad to get young draft dodgers out of it.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3