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

in which he would have the opportunity later on to impress her with his sharp mind, or make her laugh at the clever jokes he pulled out of nowhere, like a knotted string of silk handkerchiefs from a magician’s sleeve. It was the most important piece of operational work he had ever planned. But then she stepped onto the busy street, wrapped in her pea-green coat and looking more beautiful than he remembered.

She turned when he called out her name.

“Five letters,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s a crossword clue. Five letters.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t —”

“No, I’m sorry, it’s just a lame joke.” Christ, what was he thinking? “We met last week on —”

“Come on, Tom, give me a clue at least.”

“Oh, a popular greeting.”

“Ah, okay, hello to you too.” She smiled. “I’m not sure this is a viable long-term form of communication,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He had a plan. He always had a plan. That this was a coincidence, that he had just come from a meeting around the corner, that they should grab a coffee sometime so he could begin the impossible process of dismantling the edifice of his lies. It would take a while but there was no rush.

But instead of any of that, he surprised himself by saying, “I wanted to see you again.”

“Well.” She looked hard at him. “I’m not sure if that’s charming or creepy. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour on the other side of the park. Do you want to walk with me? We’ll be in public the whole time, in case you come down on the side of creepy.”

Beneath a cathedral ceiling of winter trees he told her everything. He told her about growing up overseas, about the boarding schools, about the fights, about how a lonely little boy had learned that getting expelled was one way of forcing his parents to come back from abroad. He told her he was a spy and explained what that really meant. It was an unforgivable breach. His employers would have withdrawn his security clearance on the spot had they known. High above them a slice of lemon moon bobbed in the sky.

“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I want to buy you a coffee.”

“You must take your coffee seriously. This is the most intense preamble to a first date I can remember.”

And, later on: “I don’t much like the sound of what you do.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’m not sure I like it myself.”

“Please don’t lie to me again. Is there anything else?”

He realized he hadn’t told her his name.

“I’ll call you Gus,” she said.

“No one calls me that.”

“It’ll be your new alias. Is that what you call it? Just for us.”

Everything afterwards happened so quickly. They were inseparable within weeks and engaged within months. And then a German lorry took a corner too fast, and now August was like a pincushion, stuck with a thousand needles of grief and regret and anger, and it was dark, and he was running across uneven ground, and somewhere a gun was about to go off.

12

file excerpt from investigation into august DRUMMOND

INKWELL/046

top secret

foia exempt

from:Datato:Gatekeepingsubject:Possible new INKWELL incidentdate:31 October 2014

Charles,

Your presentation on Op INKWELL and the insider threat at last week’s SMG conference was much appreciated. It was also very timely, as we’ve just uncovered something decidedly peculiar that may or may not be a new piece of the puzzle. I hesitate to go any further than that in my assessment – I recall that the two incidents you’re looking at under INKWELL are very different from each other (apart from the fact that they both took place at the beginning of October, albeit one year apart, and they share a possible “Robin Hood” motivation), making it difficult to judge whether the same individual is responsible for them both. You may soon conclude that the information below only serves to muddy the waters further.

In the course of our routine monthly review of the office’s communication data holdings, one of my analysts has found an alert created on 1 October this year by persons unknown using open-source software that appears to trigger some sort of warning system. In short, when the mobile phone of individual A comes within one mile of the residence of individual B, our systems have been programmed to send a text message to an unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile (located somewhere in the area of Waterloo station) that in turn sends another text message to the mobile of individual B. The message that individual B receives states: “Be careful. Curtis is on his way to your house right now. From a friend.” This alert has been triggered on three occasions in the past month.

We’ve done a bit of digging. It turns out that individual B is a long-standing female Iranian agent and that individual A is her British ex-boyfriend, about whom she has made numerous complaints of stalking and harassment over the last year. The handlers have spoken to the agent and she says that she had assumed the text messages came from someone close to her ex-boyfriend who was trying to warn her. It didn’t occur to her that the wording was identical each time. On all three occasions she was able to leave her house before he arrived.

As I said, it’s a peculiar one. Putting to one side the “Robin Hood” angle (forgive me – I know you hate people using this term and I’ve used it twice), the incident obviously involves a monumental breach of the law and will have to be reported to the Data Commissioner at the first opportunity. The Intelligence and Security Committee will no doubt wish to be informed as well, but I’ll leave that to Private Office to take forward.

The individual responsible might have taken steps to disguise their involvement, but it’s clear there will be opportunities for your team to make investigative headway. The number of people with access to the administrative account is between 25