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

turn a tall, bony, broad-shouldered, darkly dishevelled and comprehensively disgraced spy with a slight stoop and hands like shovels into someone prepared to submit calmly to the humiliations of international travel. It had to stop him crying in public.

His neighbour was still talking.

“Don’t get me started on Saudi. Men buried up to their waists, women up to their shoulders. Stones gotta be small enough that a couple of them alone won’t do the job. Dig yourself out in time, you go free, like the Hunger Games. Those are the rules.”

“I can imagine how that’d feel.”

“What’s that, buddy?”

Other transformations were less desirable: sour breath, loss of appetite, rudeness.

“I’m just saying that I can imagine how it’d feel to be trapped at the waist somewhere I’d give anything to escape from, unable to stop an endless barrage of trivial but deadly —”

“Hey. I don’t know what… Stewardess spotted you drinking from your duty-free, that’s all I’m trying to say. I’ve seen people taken to one side at the other end for not much more than that. A friendly warning. Sorry to trouble you.”

And then the guilt. He hated other people because he hated himself, or so the grief counsellor had said. Was it as simple as that? Another thing to depress him, the idea that his feelings about the world were nothing more than his feelings about himself, written across the sky.

“That came out wrong,” he said, offering his hand. “My name’s August. Truth is I can’t get by with the booze they give you on aeroplanes, I swear they water it down. Would you like some? Come on, I insist. You keep an eye out for the stewardess and I’ll… There we go. Sounds like we’ll both need something to fortify us, with all those barbarians crowding the gates of Constantinople.”

“I’m not saying… Whoa, steady on there, buddy. Got anything to mix with this?”

“It’s expensive stuff, you don’t need a mixer. Look here, it’s flavoured with liquorice, almonds, grains of —”

“Uh, okay —”

“Tell me,” said August, “it sounds like you know this part of the world pretty well.”

“I should do, I spend enough time here. Austria to Azerbaijan and everything in between.”

“Is there even a country between those two?”

“Are you joking? Hungary, Romania, let’s see, Bulgaria —”

“Oh, I thought you meant alphabetically.”

“What? No, no, on a map.”

“My money’s on ambassador, something like that.”

“Agricultural equipment, regional sales manager for the second largest firm in the US. Yourself?”

It was the first time he’d been asked that question since being fired just eight weeks earlier. Civil servant? That certainly didn’t apply any more. Between jobs, unemployed, on a career break? Former spy under investigation for breaches of the Official Secrets Act?

He watched 34c stand up four rows ahead to check for the third time that his rucksack was still in the overhead locker.

“Me?” he said. “Executive recruitment.”

With that, having decided that 34c wasn’t his responsibility, August was suddenly working again, thinking about collection, about agents, about deniability, about risk. He was imagining the operation going wrong, as he’d been trained to do, and watching from 35,000 feet the subsequent investigation running its course like a river, and building a dam here and weakening the banks there so the water would run off into unimportant fields. Espionage was a complete system, that was its chief advantage to someone in his position – someone looking for distraction. It required minimum input; he could do it without thinking. It was like one of those vacuum cleaners that works its own way discreetly around a room, taking its time and keeping things tidy, powered by the belief that this way is good and that way is bad, as universal a principle as one of those plugs that will fit any socket.

And he had been good at it, too, before it all went wrong in such spectacular fashion: gifted with tenacity, imagination, natural authority and a gently eccentric manner that put people at their ease. If it is true that most people are defined by a number of “facts” that orbit them like vague moons, like space junk, the ones that circled August, truthfully or otherwise, were as follows: that he found it impossible to sit at his desk for any period of time without removing his shoes and socks; that the bump halfway down his long nose had been acquired during a short but reasonably successful amateur career in the boxing ring; that he had once been formally reprimanded for using what was described in the official record as “language unbecoming a representative of Her Majesty’s Government” towards a senior CIA agent; that he’d had a mysteriously aristocratic upbringing, as evidenced by a surprisingly shabby collection of Savile Row suits, the ability to speak Romansh and attendance at a long succession of boarding schools; and that you didn’t want to find yourself sharing a crowded lift with him, as he was oblivious to the idea that conversation in public spaces should be limited to the blandly impersonal. More than once a colleague had got out a floor early to avoid a looming question or confession.

All that had changed on the day his wife died. Suddenly that was the only thing people knew about him – that and the fact he should be avoided where possible, because of behaviour described in a steadily increasing stream of emails to the personnel department as “taciturn, tearful and prickly”, “wilfully reckless to the point of seeking out risk” and “utterly fucking oblivious even to the idea of a management chain”.

He had written his own reference and used a clean email address for the Istanbul job, to avoid giving his former employers the opportunity to block his application. Not that he would have been too disappointed if it came to nothing. It was hard to imagine a more dead-end role than the one waiting for him on the third floor of a building in Cihangir. Give it a week and he suspected his new boss would find it hard to imagine a more