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

for a prosecution, but I have no doubt at all you were our Robin Hood. Come on, you can admit it now. My favourite was probably the Russian diplomat, just in terms of amusement value, but for sheer chutzpah it’d have to be the Norwegian thing. I mean, leaking intelligence to a foreign government inside the building? Hats off, August. The only question I have is why you did it all, why you ruined what could have been an impressive career. Was someone else involved? Was it a Chinese plan to weaken our defences from within? I imagine you felt like one of those plucky World War II saboteurs, running around with a rucksack full of dynamite trying to put cracks in dams and bring down bridges. For a while we wondered whether you were in it with Jonas Worth. The two of you worked together briefly, didn’t you? Now there’s a motive I can understand – trying to save his father. I can’t imagine what he went through. But you?”

His phone beeped and he took it from his pocket to read a message.

“Good,” he said, looking at his watch and smiling. “It’s all coming together nicely. Now, how about that dinner? I took the liberty of booking a table for half seven. You a steak man?”

“How did you find out about it?” said August.

“What, your faked job reference?”

“The plot.”

“I’ll tell you over dinner.”

“Tell me now.”

“Did you hear all that chain of command stuff a minute ago?” said Lawrence. “Well, this is your chance —”

“I’m curious, I’ll admit that. But not enough to sit through a whole dinner with you.”

“And if I tell you that you haven’t got a choice?”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? With steak knives on the table?”

Lawrence laughed nervously. “Maybe I should book a Chinese restaurant,” he said.

“I’d happily kill you with a chopstick.”

The colour drained from Lawrence’s face and he took a quick step towards the door. “Very funny. The property agent will be coming in any minute now.”

“If I buried you out here, they’d never find your body.”

Lawrence turned the door handle and the room filled with cold air.

“All right, August, suit yourself. Go back to your shitty hotel and eat a Pot Noodle if that’s what you want. Just remember what we’ve agreed today, and what will happen if you don’t play ball. I’ll call you tomorrow. Make sure you pick up.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“Why do you keep asking that? I don’t know exactly – probably by going through the books.”

“What books?”

“What’s wrong with you, August? You said you knew what this was about.” He ground his cigarette into the floor with the heel of an expensive shoe. “Beatrice is stealing money from the British government, plenty of it, and I want you to get us the proof.”

It was all August could do not to start laughing again.

15

Lawrence was right, August and Jonas had worked in the same team for just under a year, but August had never felt he’d known him well. He doubted anyone in the office had. It was partly Jonas’s shyness, which could be painful to observe and often revealed itself as a formality that kept people at arm’s length. It didn’t help that he always wore a suit and tie – and in an office that surprised visitors by straining with every sinew towards the casual, as though to compensate for the dreadful seriousness of the challenge it faced. And there was the way he would gather up dozens of files and disappear for hours at a time, only to return knowing everything that was in them – every name and code name, every beat of the intelligence case, even most of the telephone numbers. It made his colleagues mildly uncomfortable.

They had first met long before that. A twenty-three-year-old August had wandered by chance into a meeting of the Cambridge University chess society and taken a chair across from the only person without an opponent. He soon realized why that was the case. August had started playing against adults on the outdoor boards in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park at the age of fourteen, during a long summer holiday, and at boarding school he had hustled more than a few fellow students out of their pocket money over wet weekends when there was little else to do. But that first game with Jonas lasted a few seconds under four minutes, and they were able to fit another six games into the hour that remained before the hall was taken over by the Christian Union. By the end of term August was able to keep Jonas at bay for sixteen minutes. They never talked while they played, though, and when he went overseas for Christmas – his parents lived in Hong Kong at the time – August realized he barely knew anything about Jonas, other than that he looked like a young D. H. Lawrence, rode around on an old Raleigh and often forgot to remove his bicycle clips.

After Cambridge it was more than ten years before they saw each other again, in the queue for the office coffee bar, and a game was quickly arranged. It soon became a weekly occurrence. In a corner of the staff canteen, their plates pushed to one side, they would play on a pocket chess set belonging to Jonas, largely indifferent to the conversations that hummed around them, conversations about useless bosses, blocked toilets, inadequate pay and office romances. August’s best performance, one month to the day before Jonas’s father was kidnapped, resulted in a game lasting an entire lunch break.

There was more to their relationship than that, but not much. On two or three occasions they’d had a drink together in a pub, and on a rainy Sunday in late summer one year August had invited him for lunch with Martha. Most of what he knew about Jonas, he reflected afterwards, he learned during that meal, with no chessboard to act as a surrogate for conversation. Martha somehow