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

disobedience and betrayal for which we assess with a high level of confidence August DRUMMOND was responsible. Of course, there may well be others.

8. Whatever office wags will soon be saying, it is in our view no more than an ironic footnote that WORTH and DRUMMOND were contemporaries at Cambridge.

Charles Remnant

Head of Gatekeeping

2

“You want to keep an eye on your drinking, buddy,” said the man in the seat next to him. “They might call it a bridge between East and West but these days it’s tilting towards Mecca, if you know what I mean.”

Three cups of gin, half a bag of peanuts and two visits to the toilet to get a better look at the young man four rows ahead in 34c and August Drummond still hadn’t finished cataloguing everything that was bothering him. People didn’t understand, his neighbour certainly didn’t understand: drinking wasn’t leisure in this context, drinking was work. Drinking was making sense of things, it was transformation – of details into observations, of randomness into patterns. 34c’s unfamiliarity with the workings of an overhead locker, for example, or the old socks and the new shoes, or the way he took a copy of Foreign Affairs from his bag, peeled off the plastic and raced through the pages in a matter of minutes, astonished by all those words. Drinking was alchemy and magic was all around him. How else could you explain the fact that he was floating at 35,000 feet?

“Erdogan, now he’s your traditional strongman.” He lowered his voice and leaned towards August. “Locks up journalists, protestors, politicians, even schoolteachers. Make no mistake, he’s turning the clock back.”

August closed his eyes and imagined the scene: 34c waiting until his mum was watching TV downstairs – a comedy, that way he could hear her laughing, if it was EastEnders or Emmerdale he wouldn’t have a clue until she appeared on the landing. Clothes laid out on the bed, duvet ready to pull down like a shutter if the floorboard creaked. His suit still smelled of vomit from those three months working on nightclub doors but everyone knew the only kind of suit that got stopped at airports was a tracksuit. He’d bought it one size too big, had a whole programme of protein shakes and dawn workouts planned, but the job spat him out ten pounds lighter, what with all the fights, the banter about white boy jihadis, the jokes girls make. He’d use his mum’s razor at first light, take the beard off, apply some wax to his new haircut. It’d be a while before it stopped feeling weird putting his hand up and finding nothing there. Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and a second-hand Fodor’s from 2007 he bought from a market stall for 50p. Look, what’s your problem, the books said, I’m just a tourist. If he’d had the money he would have bought ten, put the matter beyond doubt. I’ve always wanted to visit the Bosphorus, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the thingy Sophia. Built in AD 537, it was originally a Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica. Beautiful.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t drink, buddy, Istanbul’s a party town. I’m just saying you need to be aware of the local customs. I once heard of a fella got chased by a mob for having a couple of Friday beers on the wrong street corner.”

August picked up his book and read:

Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them – not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“Live and let live, that’s my motto. But they’ve got a rule for everything, that’s the problem, and I mean everything: alcohol, pork, women, cartoons – you name it. Who would have thought anyone needed a rule about cartoons, for Christ’s sake? And heaven help any of us if we cross the line, even if we’re not Muslims, even if we didn’t know there was a line there in the first place.”

A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched – whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie.

That was it, that was another thing. Deploy in a secret capacity for the first time and you will feel that everyone is watching you. You will see surveillance everywhere; the most innocent of encounters will be freighted with suspicious intent. And if you think everyone is watching you, August thought, you will want to look your best, especially if you are a young man engaged in something you believe to be heroic, and so without knowing it, while those around you are taking advantage of the gloom to loosen their belts and pick their noses, you will adopt the expression you use when wanting to look your best, for Facebook or Tinder – in this case: jaw clenched, brow furrowed, shoulders raised and pushed forward to broaden the trapezius, deltoids and latissimus dorsi. If 34c had been wearing a necktie he’d have been making sure every few minutes that it was just so.

August was fortunate not to have the same problem himself. The impulse to be a hero had stopped on the day of his wife’s death, four months earlier, like a frequency jammed by an enemy he didn’t know he had but who was suddenly everywhere, armed to the teeth with weapons that made him ache in ways he had never dreamed possible. He refilled his plastic cup. The alcohol might have done its job – he could close the file on 34c, it was no longer his responsibility to worry about such things – but still more transformation was required. That was the problem with alcohol: it didn’t know when to stop. In his case it had a long to-do list, filled with items such as grief, regret and anger. It had to