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

He told her his name was Tom and she told him her name was Martha. To put her at ease, he intended to mention a girlfriend at the first opportunity, but for some reason the right moment never came up. Together they worked out the last three clues to her crossword. He learned that she had one tattoo she regretted and two she loved. She told him about an argument she’d had with her brother in which he’d slapped her. She explained her work for a charity that campaigned on behalf of detained journalists and showed him pictures of a protest she had helped organize outside the Bakırköy women’s prison in Turkey, where a number of writers and activists were being held. It was aeroplanes, it was their fault – they left him giddy. It was an unreal world of cotton wool and pastel blue that made the grounded realities of work and weather seem unimportant. The first sign that something was wrong came when she told him she was travelling to visit a friend. To his surprise, her words landed like a well-thrown javelin, sticking unexpectedly and unignorably into the mud and the dirt of his heart. She resisted his attempts to find out who this friend was.

Afterwards he could remember every word of their conversation. They were indelible, like her tattoos. He regretted all of his, for their clumsiness, and loved all of hers, repeatedly, as he failed to sleep that night in his hotel bed. It was too late for sentiment, he knew that. It was possible, in his line of work, to build a professional relationship on a foundation of lies – that betrayal was painless, that the other side would never find out, that all it would take was one little favour and that would be the end of it. Over time a skilled case officer could gently tap loose the rotten brickwork and replace it with something more robust, and by the time that was done it was usually in the interests of both parties not to draw attention to the changes. Any lingering spores of mistrust could be covered up by a bonus, an expensive dinner, a visit from the chief. But August had built a large and complex lie that could not be repurposed. He had given a different name, he had described a different career, a different background, a different family – he had described a different person. She hadn’t really even met him, if he was honest. It was obvious. He couldn’t see her again.

It was when he finally approached his target, two days later, that he realized she had done something to him that would have to be set right: she had made him bad at his job. She had also made him bad at sleeping and bad at eating, not that that was as important as the rest of it, the thinking, the concentrating, the talking – all things that mattered quite a lot if you wanted to recruit a Palestinian professor in the same small city where the Israelis had very publicly assassinated a Hamas official less than a year earlier. August’s objective was to make first contact with the target, establish a reason for them to stay in touch and gently float the seed of an idea that might later grow into a financial opportunity. In the process he should take no risks.

He couldn’t imagine a clumsier performance; he was glad his instructors weren’t there to watch. It was the first time his target had been alone, and he was leaving early the following morning. There were three empty seats between them at the hotel bar. The professor was in his early sixties, his long bald head shaped like an olive. He wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses low on his nose to read the magazine in front of him. When loud music and clapping erupted in the lobby, they both turned to see a large wedding party, led by the bride and groom, streaming through the doors. The professor sighed, folded his magazine and looked for the bartender.

“Rather him than me,” said August quickly. This might be his only chance. He knew his target had been married twice, was currently single and had recently spent what savings he had on his youngest daughter’s university fees. “The bigger the wedding, the quicker the divorce – that’s my theory. From the looks of it, they won’t last the year.” He kept his eyes on the bartender, who smiled and shook his head as though August had ordered a cocktail he didn’t know how to make. There was no reaction from the professor.

Now that he had started, August had little choice but to keep going. He wouldn’t be able to manufacture another chance encounter without it looking decidedly odd. “One more, please,” he said, pushing his glass forward. “This brings back bad memories,” he said, waving towards the wedding party in the lobby. “The worst thing about two publishers getting divorced is dividing up the books. It took us longer to sort that out than it did the house and the car.” No reaction from the target, but at least the bartender offered something. “We are closing in ten minutes,” he said, placing the drink on a coaster. “That’s fine,” August said. “I’ve got a meeting at the university in the morning, so an early night is no bad thing.”

And that should have been it. A positively underwhelming performance; it turned out he had played all his good shots and run his legs into the ground on the practice court with Martha. These things often didn’t work, he knew that, because the target was in a bad mood or suspicious or hard of hearing or had spent all day with other people and just wanted five minutes of peace and quiet. It was also true that August had come across as the worst kind of barroom bore, wanting to complain about marriage and other people’s happiness to anyone