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

list of suspects with officers not involved in the case, we would like to pursue this same course of action. We have among the British intelligence community some very experienced, intelligent, intuitive and discreet individuals. Allow us to harness their abilities in order to find our traitor.

9. We await a decision from Private Office.

ENDS

17

It had started in 2011, at the end of August’s first full year working for the government. On that first occasion it was a lock-up in Walthamstow. His agent produced a key in the first minute of their meeting, threw it excitedly onto the table and explained that he’d been asking around as instructed for somewhere to store a few bikes – notionally stolen, in reality borrowed from a police robbery team – and a Somali guy at the mosque had offered up a corner of his garage in return for fifty quid. What got the agent excited was that the brother wore the rolled-up trousers of the Salafi and was rumoured to hang around with members of Al Muhajiroun.

August was less convinced that this added up to anything significant, and decided that a quick – not to mention off-the-books, unauthorized, unwarranted and thoroughly illegal – search would determine whether it was worth arguing that the office should investigate the matter properly, given the number of high-priority operations running elsewhere. That summer there had been arrests almost every week and staff were working round-the-clock shifts. A drive past the brightly lit row of garages made it clear that without additional resources there was no way of doing it covertly, and so that same evening, after tasking his agent to call the Somali and confirm he was elsewhere, August bought a fluorescent jacket, a torch and a pair of work boots. He filled a clipboard with headed paper printed from the website of a local pest-control company. He expected to be in and out within five minutes. What he didn’t expect was to find a box of ball bearings behind a loose brick, or a Tesco bag filled with salt and vinegar crisps, a loaf of white bread, three tins of beans and a bottle of beer. It was only the scratches on the bottle cap that made him lean in more closely, into a smell so pungent that he didn’t need to open the bottle to realize it had been refilled with something quite different to beer.

He had no choice but to report his discovery immediately, even though he didn’t know what the bottle contained, or who had put it in the bag, or whether there was a plausible reason for its presence. There would be clues in the garage owner’s criminal record, if he had one, in his social media accounts, internet browsing history, recent travel and contact with known extremists, all of which the office could assess within minutes. August could do nothing on his own.

But when he went in to file a fabricated report claiming it was the agent who had discovered the items, August found the operations room fizzing with the news that an unidentified male had just entered an east London lockup at the centre of a day-old, top-of-the-grid investigation into a network of IS sympathizers. There were so many operations running that news of this one had passed him by. He stood at the back of the room, his heart racing, watching looped, grainy footage from a camera of a tall, dark-haired, white male in a fluorescent jacket opening the garage door, pulling it shut behind him and then emerging four minutes later only to disappear down an alleyway and into a neighbouring council estate. It was the key that got them worked up. Whoever he is, the team leader argued, he’s part of it, he’s got their trust. And we have absolutely no idea who he is.

It was luck that stopped him being identified, fired, possibly even arrested. Half the CCTV cameras in the estate had been smashed, and the covert camera – installed in a rush the night before – had been too far away to capture a good likeness, especially in the dark, especially through the beaded curtain of rain. Whoever the man was, he hadn’t used public transport to exit the area. Staff of the utility, property, construction and cleaning companies canvassed by police didn’t recognize his picture. An examination of phone data proved inconclusive. None of which meant that the investigative team stopped looking for him. If anything the search intensified, especially when the case went to court and the defendant’s lawyers claimed it was the unidentified male who had planted the ball bearings and the bottle, not their client, along with the bundle of copper wiring and alkaline torch batteries the police later found taped to a roof beam. Much was made of the fact that the man with the key was white. The jury took less than an hour to reach a verdict of not guilty. The lawyers made a speech on the steps of the court in which they mentioned Guantánamo Bay and the Birmingham Six and accused the state of fabricating evidence against vulnerable members of a minority community.

The same lawyers weren’t quite so conspicuous two months later when their client was arrested on a bus in possession of three knives and the address of a senior army officer. August spent a long time reflecting on the fact that the man had only been caught because a fellow passenger had called the police hotline to report an African acting funny on the top deck.

He came very close to stopping there. There was no way he could justify what he’d done. He’d only broken the rules to prove to Martha he wasn’t an automaton who merely followed orders, that he was capable of making his own decisions even when the price of disobedience was high. From the very beginning of their relationship she’d found it difficult to accept what he did for a living. That deceit was hardwired into it, that it knocked