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

ready to go, more excited than I’ve ever been, and then suddenly I get nervous that I’m going to mess up and let you down, let everyone down, and I… I…”

He didn’t have any words left.

“Do you trust me?” the vizier asked, his voice a whisper in August’s ear.

“Yeah, well —”

“Close your eyes.”

He could feel warm breath on the back of his neck.

“‘I was appointed to rule you but I am not the best among you,’” the vizier murmured. There was something sweet and rotten on his breath. “‘If you see me acting truly, then follow me. If you see me acting falsely, then advise and guide me.’ Do you know these words? Not a single one of us is perfect – not your vizier, not your sultan. We all do things we wish we did not do.”

He put his hands lightly on August’s shoulders.

“My brother, I want you to stop drinking. Let me explain why this is so important. Once upon a time there was a man. An ordinary man, certainly, like many thousands of others. He worked hard and made his parents very proud. He studied engineering at university and went to work for a company in a foreign country. He was a happy man – he was married, he had two little girls, he was a success. What else could a man wish for? Then his father died and he moved home with his family to look after his mother. He started to work for his government, first of all in the development of techniques to refine crude petroleum, and then as the director of a research laboratory. Much later on, given his experience, he was the obvious person to help his government in the development of certain … capabilities, shall we say, to be used by friends across the region. He could have said no. He could have retired, he could have gone overseas again, he could have become a respected professor at his old university. Instead he left his family behind in Tehran and has been living in Damascus for the last two years, helping the Syrian regime develop chemical weapons to be used against innocent women and children. In those two years, as far as we know, he has never set foot outside the country, but all of a sudden he arrives in Istanbul. Now can you see what an opportunity we have been given? Can you see how important what you are doing is to us? Do you understand why you must stop drinking?”

His arms encircled August in a fierce embrace that contained within it the threat of huge and catastrophic violence.

“This man must die,” he whispered, his mouth next to August’s ear. And then, so softly that afterwards August couldn’t be completely sure he’d heard it right: “And you are going to kill him.”

11

They had met on a flight to the Gulf six years earlier, in 2010, just a few months after August had completed his basic training. He had only spoken to her because his trip had been planned at the last minute and he hadn’t been given an opportunity to practise his cover story. The job required a cold start, an approach out of the blue, exploiting whatever opportunity for conversation might arise, whether it was a request for directions, a joke over the breakfast buffet or simply the offer of a cigarette outside a bar, and he had been taught the importance of warming up beforehand on unimportant people. The worst thing would be for your first words to the target to be the first words you had exchanged with a stranger all day. And she looked like a challenge – intense, bookish, cocooned in a pea-green woollen coat like someone whose stop was coming up well before everyone else’s, her pretty face held delicately between two gleaming beetle-black headphones as though she was practising dictation rather than slowly filling in a crossword puzzle on the folding table in front of her.

He reached over and tapped her newspaper. “Fourteen across might be ‘Francis’. First name of American novelist —”

She was able to squeeze a surprising amount of attitude into the simple act of lifting a headphone from her ear.

“You seem to be avoiding fourteen across,” he said. “I think it’s ‘Francis’. Author of Tender Is the Night.”

“Mmm. Seven letters. It could be ‘disturb’.”

“Interesting. It doesn’t really fit the clue though.”

“But it does apply in a more general sense, don’t you think?” she said, smiling.

“To the occasion, you mean?”

“Or, I don’t know, ‘disrupt’, ‘prevent’, ‘bedevil’.”

“If only there was a hyphen,” he said. “There are a few four-three combinations that might also work. What are you listening to?”

She sighed, turned away and allowed the headphone to settle back into place over her ear. He couldn’t let it end like that. What if his target turned out to be just as difficult? Better to push through the hedgerow of her objections and afterwards pick out the thorns, pull the grass from his hair, than to do it for the first time with his target. After all, she didn’t matter. What she thought of him didn’t matter one little bit.

He waited until the meal was served. Having watched her eat a tiny pot of crème brûlée and leave the rest, he balanced his dessert on the edge of her tray. She looked at it and raised an eyebrow.

“Two words,” he said. “Five-eight.”

She looked out of the window while she thought about it.

“‘Burnt offering’?” she suggested finally.

“I had in mind ‘peace offering’, but to be honest, ‘burnt offering’ is much better.”

He talked too much and too quickly in that first conversation, in the hope that she’d find it impossible to return to her headphones once she’d heard about the limp his dachshund had developed, his parents’ difficulties with the central heating during their first winter in the Lake District, the demanding schedule of meetings he had ahead of him in his capacity as representative of a small academic publisher based in the Oxfordshire countryside.