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

imogen: Lawrence, please continue.

lawrence: Thank you, Imogen. Let me list a few hopefully unarguable facts. Number one: on Thursday evening, exactly one hour after meeting with WINDMILL POET, August made a withdrawal of two thousand pounds from his personal bank account. Number two: the following morning, instead of returning to Manchester as August’s contact note suggests was his intention, WINDMILL POET purchased a ticket to Cairo from the Alitalia desk at Heathrow airport. He paid in cash. His own bank account was not accessed and in any case had a balance throughout this whole episode of £172.45. Number three: WINDMILL POET’s mobile phone next appeared at Cairo airport at 1443 on the Friday. Number four: on the same day that WINDMILL POET travelled, August came to the office, wrote the report of their meeting that I have quoted from and requested one week’s emergency leave. This was granted despite the extremely short notice, in light of the recent distressing incident involving his wife – an incident that has upset everyone in the office greatly. Number five: the following day, a Saturday, August bought a last-minute ticket online and flew to Sharm El Sheikh in Sinai with Egypt Air.

daphne: So August meets WINDMILL POET, which he admits, which is all above board, and then withdraws two thousand pounds from his personal account. Is there any evidence to suggest that August met WINDMILL POET after making the withdrawal? Because that’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it, Lawrence? That August gave him the money? Any travel data, CCTV footage, phone calls, text messages, that sort of thing?

lawrence: A very interesting point. Someone of August’s experience would certainly know how to avoid leaving any trace of a meeting. He would know, for example, that both parties should avoid using phones and —

bill: That’s a no then, is it?

lawrence: Excuse me?

bill: You’re telling us there is no evidence to suggest that August had a second meeting with WINDMILL POET after withdrawing the money.

lawrence: Things are not that simple, Bill. There are no calls or texts between August and WINDMILL POET, you’re right. But there are also no calls or texts on their phones to anyone else. There’s a compelling argument to be made that the reason for this is that neither of them were in possession of their phones, that they’d both left their phones somewhere else to avoid leaving a data trail. That’s exactly what we’d expect a trained operational officer like August —

bill: So the absence of any evidence, in your view, is itself evidence that August is guilty.

lawrence: You have to admit, Bill, it would be astonishing if August had taken a phone to a meeting he wanted to keep secret.

bill: My problem with what you’re saying, Lawrence, is that you could use that logic to plug any holes in your theory. Do you follow? Whenever you don’t have evidence, you’ll turn it round and present it as evidence that August was being clever.

lawrence: It’s an assessment rather than a fact, you are quite —

bill: No, it’s not even that. An assessment is when you take facts and use them to build a theory. If you had their phones co-locating after the bank withdrawal, for example, you could assess that August gave WINDMILL POET the money. What you’re saying is nothing more than speculation.

lawrence: With all due respect, Bill, the facts are that August withdrew a large sum of cash and then WINDMILL POET made a cash purchase despite not having access to any money himself —

bill: More speculation.

lawrence: I beg your pardon?

bill: How do you know what money he had access to? This is shoddy stuff, Lawrence, and I’m not going to sit here and let it pass unchallenged.

imogen: Bill, please – let’s keep this civil.

bill: A career is on the line, Imogen. And no one is challenging this highly partisan version of events.

desmond: Bill, calm down. We hear the chap out and at the end we make up our minds.

bill: It’ll be too late by then to separate the facts from everything else.

imogen: What exactly is your objection?

bill: It’s a basic investigative fallacy that you assume the information available to you is all the information there is. If you see that someone doesn’t have money in their bank account, you assume that they don’t have money. What about cash hidden under a mattress? What about friends and relatives? What about the theory that WINDMILL POET lied to August, made up his mind to go to Egypt and borrowed the funds from a neighbour? What about the theory that seeing WINDMILL POET gave August the idea of travelling to Egypt and that he simply withdrew the cash to pay for his own holiday?

lawrence: There’s no evidence that August ever researched Egypt online as a holiday destination, and if you look at the figures, there has been a drop of over 50 per cent in the number of tourists visiting Sinai in recent years because of the security —

bill: Oh, for Christ’s sake. This is threadbare stuff.

daphne: There is a striking coincidence here, Bill, you can’t argue with that. They fly to the same country within a day of each other? Lawrence, is there anything to indicate that August went from Sharm El Sheikh to Cairo?

lawrence: Nothing solid. August’s phone remained in Sharm for the whole week. Three emails were sent from his account, on the Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday – very neatly spaced, I’m sure you will agree. They went to his parents, contained innocuous descriptions of the hotel, weather, food and so on. All displayed the IP address of the hotel. If I may add a technical footnote, however, it is relatively straightforward to set up a system whereby emails are stored and sent at a time of your choosing.

bill: I can’t believe we’re listening to this. Is there something else going on that I’m unaware of, Imogen, something that would explain why we’re here today? Are we hanging August out to dry for something completely unrelated?