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

flawless. I must do it alone, without the help of colleagues, and the blame must never fall on anyone innocent.

He took a deep breath. He wondered whether he was being naive or disloyal, whether he’d have the courage when the time came, whether he’d even find anything that met all his requirements. But the next day he picked up the transcript of an intercepted phone call between a prolific radicalizer and a prostitute, and from that moment nothing would ever be the same again.

18

It was hard not to feel a little uneasy in hotel corridors, August thought. That sense of scurrying confinement, and all those people lurking just out of sight, and the interminable build-up to the encounter with the person approaching, as though you were jousting knights and only one of you could pass unharmed. It was harder still if you were about to do something that could get you arrested.

A middle-aged European man in tennis whites brushed past with a curt nod. August heard a door open and close ten paces behind him.

The vizier had insisted it would be straightforward.

“We have his key. A sister who works there got it for us. No one will question a European in a big hotel like this. Once you are inside the room look for evidence of what he wants to buy, his shopping list, who are his contacts. Maybe we can find the people in Istanbul who are helping him and deal with them afterwards. Leave no sign that you were there. A phone is buried in a blue plastic bag in our usual meeting place. The edge of the bag can be seen above the ground. The room key is in there too. Fill in the hole afterwards and put some leaves and dirt over the top. The phone does not have a SIM card but the camera works and the battery is charged. Take pictures of what you find in the room and then meet me in the usual place tonight at eleven o’clock to hand it back. Do not be late. Is this understood? Good. Wait in the lobby at seven. We have been told he has an engagement elsewhere this evening. Read a newspaper, drink a coffee – like any other guest. I will call you when he leaves.”

August was seated in a corner of the lobby at half past six. Just before seven he watched the Iranian emerge from one of the four lifts, dressed in the same grey suit and black shoes he had been wearing the last time. His leather briefcase was clutched to his chest.

The phone rang six minutes later.

“We are following him,” the vizier said. “Wait for five minutes and then begin. I will call you if he returns in the direction of the hotel. No mistakes this time.”

August took the lift to the eighth floor and walked the corridors until he understood the layout and the CCTV coverage. He climbed one flight of stairs. An elderly Japanese couple were shepherding three young children ahead of them towards the lifts; August stood aside to let them pass. He walked a full circuit to confirm the layout was the same as the floor below. There was a “do not disturb” sign on the door to room 907. He knocked softly, waited for five seconds and then held the key card against the reader. Using the corner of his shirt he turned the handle and suddenly he was inside.

Darkness, silence. He counted down from twenty. Nothing in the key slot on the wall to his right. Once his eyes had adjusted he pushed open the bathroom door to confirm it was empty and stepped into the bedroom to do the same. If this was a trap he wanted whatever was coming next to happen in the dark. He put on a cap and a pair of gloves, set his watch to vibrate in five minutes, turned on the light and began.

The wardrobe first. The safe was locked. The hotel slippers, dressing gown and laundry bag had not been used. Three clean shirts and one pair of black trousers. Enough underwear for a week. There was a room-service receipt on the bedside table for that same day, just three hours earlier: a bowl of pasta, a selection of pastries, sparkling water. A three-day-old Turkish newspaper in the bin by the bed, a crumpled food wrapper, a banana peel, a ticket to Unalan and a pair of socks with a hole in the right toe. The bedcovers were rumpled, but when he pulled them back August saw that the bottom sheet was clean and pulled tight; he wondered whether the man had slept somewhere else, or if the cleaner had been interrupted halfway through making it. Nothing under the pillows or the mattress. On the far bedside table a napkin was tucked under the phone with two Turkish mobile numbers in pencil. There was a receipt on the armchair for a fax sent to an Iranian number from the hotel’s business centre that afternoon and a catalogue of cleaning products from a company in Ankara, with something scribbled in Farsi on one of the pages. The bathroom was empty other than a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste of the kind handed out by airlines.

His watch vibrated. He took a cotton bud from his pocket, swabbed the toothbrush and placed it in a clean plastic bag. He wrote down the two phone numbers. Making sure everything was as he had found it, he left the room and took the stairs all the way down to the lobby.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t taken any photographs. He hadn’t even handled the phone the vizier had given him, in case there were fingerprints on it. The truth was he had carried out the search not because the vizier had told him to but because it had given him the opportunity he was looking for to collect intelligence for Lawrence and his colleagues, so that when he