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

bench and put it under his arm. Before long he was lost in crowds of commuters and allowed himself to be gently swept along in the direction of the metro. In the train carriage he pulled his woollen hat low and avoided eye contact with other passengers. It was two stops north to Şişli-Mecidiyeköy. He could have walked, but he knew that surveillance teams hated metros at rush hour, and this was an opportunity to take his first deep breath of Istanbul in full flow. From there he doubled back and walked for twenty minutes to the cemetery. He stopped once to buy water, hoping to clear his head, and then at a bus stop, just after rounding a corner, where he consulted the timetable and waited to see if anyone came after him.

The black metal gate was locked from the inside, but he was able to push his arm through the bars to slide the bolt open. August walked quickly into the cemetery in case anyone had seen him. He had no idea how to find the right gravestone. Pale crosses floated in the gloom around him at different angles, as though falling at different speeds. There were trees everywhere he turned, and the ground was uneven. A loudspeaker crackled and a nearby mosque began the call to prayer, and within seconds three or four others had joined in, each one the echo of its neighbour.

August stopped at a noticeboard and read that the cemetery had been a gift to the Protestant powers of the day, and that graves were laid out according to nationality. “Clive Scrivener” certainly sounded more English than Swedish or Dutch. He followed a stone path around the high external wall at a calm and unhurried pace, stopping every now and then to look at a grave and listen intently, and once he knelt down to brush away the plants obscuring a date. He had seen some terrible dead letter boxes in his time – in toilets cleaned hourly by staff who would immediately notice anything different, in the flower beds of a busy London park, in a museum filled with cameras and closed at the weekend. But whoever had selected this one had given the matter some thought. It wasn’t just that he was being sent to the English section of an international cemetery – something that would need very little explanation if he was challenged – rather it was that in a busy city this was one of the few places almost guaranteed to be empty. It was somewhere a person could pause for a few minutes, or pull up the weeds that crowded a headstone, or plant a flower or two. Communicating an exact location would be as simple as passing on a locker number in a train station.

It took a while to find it. Second row down from the east wall, in loving memory of clive albert scrivener, 3rd engineer, who died at sea, 1845–1872. The date was wrong, but the name was a match. August walked the adjoining rows one more time to see if there was a similar name, but ended up in the same place. The stone itself was grey, knee-high, leaning backwards, the earth around it filled with weeds. A crack ran along one edge of the base.

He looked around, stepped off the path and knelt down. The surrounding earth had not been visibly disturbed. Some of the weeds were thick and high enough to conceal an item from anyone walking past. He explored the crack with his fingertips, he ran his hands over the earth, he even shuffled backwards to widen his search. There was nothing there. Had he made a mistake? Clive Albert Scrivener, b. 1930, according to the paperback. Why was the date different? There had been plenty of time on the plane for 34c to get it right, and the sort of person who checked on his bag in the overhead locker that many times would have made sure he copied it down correctly. August looked around for rubbish – a chocolate bar wrapper, a cigarette packet – that might conceal a small item. It came to him suddenly. What if it wasn’t a mistake? 34c had been cleverer than he had thought. 1930 wasn’t a date: it was a time. 34c hadn’t planned to collect a message – he was meeting someone. August looked at his watch.

“What are you doing?”

He hadn’t even heard the sound of footsteps. He started to turn around.

“Keep looking forward,” the man said. His voice was deep and quiet and uninterruptible. And then: “Remember what we discussed.”

All that time spent admiring the choice of location and August hadn’t stopped to consider there might be a vantage point from which someone could watch the grave.

“I expected you more than thirty minutes ago.” The man’s accent was Arab but his English was perfect, as though he had lived there at some point. “Your flight was not delayed. So tell me, why are you late?”

August didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know 34c’s name, where he was from, what languages he spoke, whether he had an accent. He couldn’t claim to be in the cemetery by chance – the man would have seen the way he had stepped off the path and searched the ground around the gravestone.

“You look … different,” the man said. “Thinner. Older.”

August thought quickly. He was either there because he was 34c or because he had taken 34c’s place.

“Answer me.”

“I haven’t been eating.” It was the only possible choice. Say as little as possible, he thought, keep your voice low and quiet. “Because of the stress.” All those sibilants, it made him sound drunk. And then, in case they had agreed to use a code: “My head’s all over the place. I haven’t slept for three days, I can’t remember whether I’m coming or going.”

The man considered his answer in silence. Uninterruptible, unhurriable – August couldn’t stop his mind reaching for observations, such as that this