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

would be my guess, Sherlock. Listen, I started telling him how Turkey’s changed, all the years I’ve been going there. He comes across pretty nervous, must be the flying thing, like you. He’s a tourist – I could hardly shut him up about the places he’s going to visit: the Blue Mosque, Topkapı, the spice bazaar. He’s from Trafalgar Square in London. Is that good enough? Now listen to this.” He leaned towards August and lowered his voice. “I told him the book was a gift from the writer’s crazy wife, what was her name, Zorba, Zelda, something like that. Anyway, I spun him a story about her last night in the asylum before she topped herself. Puts the value of the book through the roof. His lucky day, though, because I need cash for a cab. You should have heard me, I’ve got her stuck in the tower of this castle, thunder and lightning outside, she uses a bed sheet to fashion a noose —”

“Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

“Then the rafter breaks but it’s too late, she’s writhing in agony as the staff rush in —”

“I get the picture.”

“They can’t bring her back, they search for a suicide note but the only thing they find is this crazy inscription about —”

“Jesus Christ,” said August, “I’ll give you ten dollars to stop talking too, how about that?”

“Hey, what’s your fucking problem?” His neighbour pulled back sharply from their conspiratorial huddle. There was a sudden, audible hush. All around them faces appeared in the gaps between seats like rows of pale fruit in a slot machine. “This was your idea, remember? Don’t look at me like that, what, you want to go back to sleep, you want to go back to your gin? What am I doing this for if you’re just snoozing? Who drinks neat gin anyway?” Even 34c was watching them now. “You want some free advice, you’re such a fucking success story, run a comb through your hair, have a shave, have a shower for Christ’s sake. You know what one of those is?”

On the plus side, had he still been in government service, August would have had to heap praise upon his agent, however talentless and unproductive he’d been. He would have had to apologize and empathize and agree that no one could have done a better job. He would have had to consider a substantial pay-off to keep him quiet.

“Tell you what, buddy,” he said, turning away and closing his eyes with a sigh. “You keep the ten dollars and we’ll call it quits.”

Perhaps there were some benefits to being on the outside after all.

You couldn’t call it sleep, what came next. Six cups of gin and his mind was nothing like the map on the screen in front of him, each thought like a country with a name and a border and his mind a pixelated plane, crossing neatly and in the straightest possible line from one to the next. Instead he roamed over a dark and illogical landscape: the songs Martha liked to sing, the last words she had said to him, the way 34c had started four films but not watched more than twelve minutes of any of them. Converts were among the fiercest people August had known – if that’s what 34c was. Often it took so much momentum to propel themselves through the thicketed objections of others and over the line that they ended up further than they had ever expected, in a place they had never imagined.

August felt some sympathy with this. In his own way he was a recent convert too. He would have been the first to admit that by that point the unsurfaced road of grief had done its bit to judder loose the nuts and bolts that held him together. But while walking an anti-surveillance route on his way to meet an agent in Green Park, six weeks after her death, ten weeks before he boarded the flight to Istanbul, he saw the same man – late thirties, short brown hair, athletic build, grey business suit – behind him on no less than three separate occasions.

Things weren’t quite the same after that, and not just because of what he went on to do. It wasn’t that the man in the grey suit had been following him. Rather, August realized that he had seen him three times because they caught the same early train to work from the same exclusive neighbourhood, because they drank the same expensive coffee, because they favoured the same well-maintained streets, because they made the same small choices about when to cross and how fast to walk and when to stop and look at something in a shop window that had caught their eye. It was a poor anti-surveillance route, that’s what the tradecraft instructors would have told him – and with some justification. Wrong time of day for that part of town, not enough stops. Your route should be able to defeat pure coincidence, which is exactly what this was. But all August could think about was that in a city of ten million people he was living in a town of thousands, one that might cover every geographical corner of the city but was as separate from it and the people who lived there as it was possible to be. It wasn’t political, this epiphany. It wasn’t about rich and poor or black and white. It wasn’t about class. It was an understanding that despite everything he had done, so much of his life still ran like a factory machine along grooves worn into the air around him by routine and conditioning. It was a conversion to the belief that he wouldn’t be free until he smashed everything around him to pieces.

The plane banked and tipped August out of his thoughts. Four rows ahead, 34c began his preparations. He stood up to open the overhead locker and August saw him take a small piece of paper from a pocket of