How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

a handful of experience and trade it for a moment’s distraction. Without stopping to think he walked through the gates and past the warehouse, turning right and out of sight at the end.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, other than that he had to find out what the grey warehouse was used for. He passed a vehicle workshop, its metal shutter half-open and a radio playing pop music far inside. Further along, two men were loading a van with water-stained cardboard boxes. Uncollected rubbish huddled in doorways. There was a sign in Turkish outside the last building before the road, and the window was clean enough in places for him to see a desk and chair, two filing cabinets and a long trestle table. There were dozens of keys hanging on a wooden board in the corner and three cigarette butts in the ashtray on the desk. When he opened the door he could smell that one of them had been recently put out. It might be a management office of some kind, he thought, because of its location, because of the keys. There were no papers on the desk. He tried the drawers and found a file of what looked like invoices or receipts, along with boxes of uncut keys and a broken torch. A sudden gust of wind slammed the door shut and on the back he saw a map, held in place by two nails of different sizes. He recognized the route he had walked, and the different units, and he saw the word “mekanik” written in pencil inside a small box. Other words he didn’t recognize or understand. He was still studying the map when the door opened, forcing him backwards, and two men stepped into the office.

They looked around to see what had been stolen. The first man was short and broad; thick white stubble squeezed like garlic from the square press of his chin. The man behind him looked the more thoughtful of the pair. He adjusted his glasses and extended a thin, tentative hand over his friend’s shoulder and into the charged atmosphere of the room, as though testing the temperature of bathwater. It didn’t make sense, he knew that, what they could see in front of them – it didn’t make sense at all. And he wanted to slow things down before it all got out of hand. He wanted to say to his friend: this isn’t what you think. All right, the man’s unshaven, he’s junkie-thin, he’s got dead eyes. He doesn’t look worried, that’s for sure, which means he’s probably done this sort of thing before. And the desk drawers are wide open, and units on the estate have been robbed three times in the last month, which we’re getting blamed for, and he’s got absolutely no reason to be in here on his own. But that coat’s not cheap. And I can see from here there are no keys missing. And he might be dark, but he’s definitely not one of those thieving Syrian rats. And look, if you were going to do something you should have done it by now, because he’s already moved his feet like he knows what he’s doing, and his arms are as long as broom handles, and —

But it all happened too quickly. The first man lowered his head and lifted his fists and charged forward. There was an audible crack and he stumbled backwards with a hand pressed to his nose as though dragging himself into an alleyway. Then the stranger in the long coat wasn’t there any more. What was there, the man in the doorway could see now that he had a moment to breathe, now that he was able to adjust his glasses, was the new toolbox they’d just bought last week, and the mobile phone charging on the table, the one worth a bit of money even with a broken screen, as if any more proof was needed that this hadn’t been just another robbery.

10

That evening August sat in a bar and drank half a bottle of raki while he wrote a message for the vizier. There was no way he could pass on any information of genuine value. He couldn’t describe the target’s crude attempts at anti-surveillance, because 34c wouldn’t have knowledge of such things, and he couldn’t pass on any intelligence the vizier might find useful – he couldn’t give him a single fact that might conceivably help him plan whatever he had in mind. August knew that much, however fiercely he might have craved distraction. He had his limits.

He also had a plan, or so he would have claimed if anyone had asked him. He would have pointed out that he didn’t have enough information to take the matter to the embassy, at least not yet, that if he turned up at their door, a disgraced former spy sacked for disobedience, dishonesty, treachery – whichever word they were using – with an implausible story about a man in a cemetery asking him to follow another man, they would have given it no more than a cursory glance and put it to one side. What else could they do? Could he provide a single fact to validate his story? Far better to let things develop, he thought, and inform them once he had something solid. The plot was still very much in the planning stages, and he was well placed to find out more. Besides, he was getting somewhere. The target was Iranian, he knew that much. And the warehouse in the industrial park was used to store chemicals, at least according to the map on the back of the office door. What was that if not progress?

It wasn’t until he left the bar that he realized how much he’d drunk. He felt warm, giddy, tearful, off balance. If it hadn’t been a short walk to the cemetery, he might have gone back to his hotel to sleep it off. But the vizier had