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

his rucksack, glance at it and then feign a cough in order to put it into his mouth and swallow it. As the wheels hit the runway he covered his face with his hands and moved his lips as though in prayer.

It was all for nothing. Two men in cheap suits stood at the end of the gangway, watching the passengers enter the terminal. August saw the confusion in their eyes, and it registered for the first time that he and 34c were the same height and build, with the same dark hair, even if they were a good ten years apart in age. The two men examined a piece of paper and settled on 34c, following him closely, more concerned with control than discretion. As they turned a corner another three policemen standing to one side looked up and started walking in their direction. At that point even 34c realized what was going to happen. He stopped to tie his shoelace and made a sudden dash for a nearby bathroom door. The two men following him were slowed by the passengers streaming past. When they came out one of them was carrying 34c’s rucksack and the other one was holding him by the elbow. There was a red mark on his face and he looked as though he might cry.

August watched the group disappear through a narrow grey door in the corner of the arrival hall. He had to be quick – the bathroom wouldn’t stay empty for long. Inside, six cubicles, cisterns behind wall panels, no signs of interference. Anything flushed away would be long gone by now. A padlocked storage cupboard. The ceiling panels were too high to push loose without a broom or a mop handle, even standing on a toilet seat. The bin was a slot in the far wall. He rolled up his sleeve and pushed down through damp bundled paper towels until his fingers touched something. He was surprised – he hadn’t expected this. Did he really want it back, along with whatever trouble it was about to get him into?

He waited until he was on the train into the city. The inscription from his wife was still there. And on page 26, newly written in the margin, “Clive Albert Scrivener”, on page 173, “Feriköy cemetery, Abide-i Hürriyet Cd.”, and on page 210, “b. 1930”.

August was working again.

3

It was crazy, what he was planning to do. Whatever he might have told himself, August hadn’t really stopped to consider the possibility that 34c had been released, or allowed to make a phone call, or persuaded to talk, or that the reason he had been picked up in the first place was that the police knew all along exactly what he was planning to do. His attempt to conceal the name and address of the cemetery in the margins of the book must surely mean something was supposed to happen there, something he wanted to keep secret from the Turkish authorities. And it wouldn’t take an expert to point out that the people still on the side of Islamic State in 2016 weren’t doctors and engineers and teachers – the early nation builders. They were the ones who had seen the Jordanian pilot, the Yazidi slave markets and the balaclava, and they had thought: yes. It was crazy from every angle. But August, who intended to deal with his grief by throwing himself down every rabbit hole he passed, thought: it’s just a dead letter box. How much trouble can you get into with a dead letter box?

The problem was that he was still drunk. He had sobered up a bit by having three cups of coffee at the airport, by eating a cheese sandwich on the train, by not drinking any more gin. He sat on a narrow bed in the two-star Hotel Turkish Delight, a towel wrapped around his waist, his room higher than it was long or wide, like a matchbox tipped onto its end. It looked as though he was made of rib and muscle and shadow. Far above him a dusty bulb swayed, casting barely enough light for him to study the map of Istanbul spread out on the faded black and white floor tiles. He found Feriköy cemetery in the neighbourhood of Şişli and looked for the nearest metro station. It would be safer than taking a bus, given that he was unfamiliar with routes and prices. There should be nothing that linked him to this journey, nothing that stood out – no phone, no bank card, no interaction with a city employee who might later remember a tall foreigner with a stoop who slurred his words and didn’t understand the coins in his pocket. He dressed in dark colours, ran a comb through his hair and slipped on the stairs on his way down to the lobby. All that free advice on the plane about drinking and here he was going out drunk. At least gin didn’t smell.

A dozen or so cats watched as he emerged unsteadily. His hotel, its once-grand facade the colour of dried mustard, was by some measure the most dilapidated building in a narrow street taken over by coffee bars, fashion boutiques and a costume shop promoting a discount on superheroes. The door slammed shut and a shower of fine grit settled on his shoulders. The rusted scaffolding over the entrance, he understood, was not there to facilitate repairs so much as to catch pieces of falling masonry. He set off through a series of steep alleyways, on cobbles glazed by rain. Parked cars and vans were tucked in tight along the edges, allowing him the opportunity to step out and see whether anyone was following him. He stood for a while to watch a solitary man working patiently on a piece of furniture in the depths of a dimly lit workshop. As he approached Taksim Square the streets filled with evening shoppers and people returning home. He found a Turkish newspaper on a