How to Betray Your Country Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  BESIDE THE SYRIAN SEA

  ‘A superb debut… fascinating. The writer has obviously been somewhere or something in the spy business.’

  marcel berlins,

  The Times Crime Book of the Month

  ‘Superb: an adventure from London to Lebanon to Syria and the desperate struggle for survival in the face of war and betrayal. Wolff is a new maestro.’

  simon sebag montefiore,

  Evening Standard, Best Books of 2018

  ‘A real original… trembles with realistic detail. I know we’ll hear more of him.’

  james naughtie,

  BBC Presenter of Bookclub, Radio Times

  ‘Best new spy novel by a mile. Don’t let this one pass you by if you are a fan of intelligent, complex spy thrillers.’

  paul burke,

  NB Magazine, Top Noir Novels of 2018

  ‘Wolff writes masterfully about the badlands of Beirut, suggesting that he knows what he is talking about – plots and counterplots, secret agents, ISIS, Hezbollah, the CIA and our own secret services.’

  Literary Review

  ‘Superbly written and plotted, both subtle and aware in its politics, funny and exciting, Wolff’s debut is also the most surprising and genuine novel about love you’ll read all year.’

  Morning Star

  ‘A great read with characters that are developed and multidimensional.’

  San Francisco Book Review

  ‘A British intelligence spy novel with all the classic trappings. Dare I invoke John le Carré here? That’s an awfully heavy burden to place on a debut author, but the comparison is appropriate.’

  criminalelement.com

  HOW TO BETRAY YOUR COUNTRY

  James Wolff

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  LONDON

  For L.

  Without whose belief, patience and encouragement this would never have been written.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART ONE: MONEY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  PART TWO: IDEOLOGY

  PART THREE: COERCION

  PART FOUR: EGO

  DAY 1

  DAY 2

  DAY 3

  DAY 4

  DAY 5

  DAY 6

  DAY 7

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PART ONE

  Money

  1

  INKWELL/129

  top secret

  foia exempt

  from: Gatekeeping

  to: Private Office

  subject: Re: Urgent request for INKWELL update

  date: 28 September 2016

  1. You asked to be kept informed about this most sensitive of matters.

  2. Events beyond our control brought Operation INKWELL to a sudden and violent conclusion this afternoon. We are doing what we can to restrict knowledge of the case within the Service, but the sight of an officer washing blood off his face in the toilets and trying to re-set a broken nose was unusual enough to have triggered the rumour mill. We must be realistic: staff will be talking. INKWELL has attracted considerable attention because of the regrettable characterization of the perpetrator as some sort of Robin Hood figure. There will no doubt be those advising you to issue an office-wide bulletin downplaying the incident. My own view is that this would be a waste of time. It is, after all, quite unreasonable to ask a community of spies to accept the official version of things and refrain from further enquiry, even – or perhaps especially – when it is their masters making the request.

  3. Almost four years ago to this day, you set my team the task of identifying the insider responsible for this series of most unusual security breaches, and of collecting sufficient evidence to enable a prosecution. We agreed at the time that the best deterrent to others of a similar mind would be the news that a traitor had been caught and placed behind bars.

  4. It is with regret, now this sorry episode has come to an end, that I can inform you we have been only partially successful. CPS lawyers concluded last week that there is no “smoking gun” in the attached file. Collecting evidence that would stand up in court against an officer with such extensive operational experience proved too much of a challenge, although the CPS does note the existence of a “damning (but ultimately circumstantial) collection of daggers, ropes and candlesticks” within the pages of our INKWELL file.

  5. Despite this, I remain of the firm view that INKWELL has been a model of patient and thorough investigation, and that in August DRUMMOND we have identified a grave threat to the integrity of the British intelligence community. Our strategy of confronting him this afternoon with such a detailed, compelling case is undoubtedly what forced him to accept that the game was up, which in turn triggered his violent outburst and subsequent dismissal. We may not have got the confession we wanted, and there will be those who continue to argue that other than the Egyptian episode the evidence against him is flawed, but the problem has been dealt with. And there is, I maintain in my old-fashioned way, value in the principle of keeping things quiet. I know that in our current incarnation as a counter-terrorism agency we view anything not resulting in a prison sentence as a failure, but the reputational damage ensuing from a prosecution of one of our own officers for multiple breaches of the Official Secrets Act would have been huge. We have avoided that outcome, and for this my staff should be congratulated, not least Lawrence, whom I have sent to St Thomas’ A & E to be examined for signs of concussion.

  6. There is a wider point here about the insider threat. Over the past year we have been working at full stretch dealing with reverberations from events in Beirut. While we remain some way off understanding the full scale of Jonas WORTH’s betrayal, it is surely becoming clear that we must broaden our understanding of what a British traitor might look like in this day and age. Concepts of nationality and loyalty are changing, whether we like it or not. This does not mean that we should take our eye off the traditional threat from states such as Russia and China. They will continue to recruit our officers and steal our secrets. But we must reposition our antennae. Inevitably this will require more staff and more resources, at a time when such things are at a premium.

  7. I attach for your information five key INKWELL documents (report numbers 001, 023, 046, 071 and 128) that span the years 2012 to 2016. These may prove useful as an aide-memoire in your conversations with Whitehall seniors, as they describe the five acts of disobedience and betrayal for which we assess with a high level of confidence August DRUMMOND was responsible. Of course, there may well be others.

  8. Whatever office wags will soon be saying, it is in our view no more than an ironic footnote that WORTH and DRUMMOND were contemporaries at Cambridge.

  Charles Remnant

  Head of Gatekeeping

  2

  “You want to keep an eye on your drinking, buddy,” said the man in the seat next to him. “They might call it a bridge between East and West but these days it’s tilting towards Mecca, if you know what I mean.”

  Three cups of gin, half a bag of peanuts and two visits to the toilet to get a better look at the young man four rows ahead in 34c and August Drummond still hadn’t finished cataloguing everything that was bothering him. People didn’t understand, his neighbour certainly didn’t understand: drinking wasn’t le
isure in this context, drinking was work. Drinking was making sense of things, it was transformation – of details into observations, of randomness into patterns. 34c’s unfamiliarity with the workings of an overhead locker, for example, or the old socks and the new shoes, or the way he took a copy of Foreign Affairs from his bag, peeled off the plastic and raced through the pages in a matter of minutes, astonished by all those words. Drinking was alchemy and magic was all around him. How else could you explain the fact that he was floating at 35,000 feet?

  “Erdogan, now he’s your traditional strongman.” He lowered his voice and leaned towards August. “Locks up journalists, protestors, politicians, even schoolteachers. Make no mistake, he’s turning the clock back.”

  August closed his eyes and imagined the scene: 34c waiting until his mum was watching TV downstairs – a comedy, that way he could hear her laughing, if it was EastEnders or Emmerdale he wouldn’t have a clue until she appeared on the landing. Clothes laid out on the bed, duvet ready to pull down like a shutter if the floorboard creaked. His suit still smelled of vomit from those three months working on nightclub doors but everyone knew the only kind of suit that got stopped at airports was a tracksuit. He’d bought it one size too big, had a whole programme of protein shakes and dawn workouts planned, but the job spat him out ten pounds lighter, what with all the fights, the banter about white boy jihadis, the jokes girls make. He’d use his mum’s razor at first light, take the beard off, apply some wax to his new haircut. It’d be a while before it stopped feeling weird putting his hand up and finding nothing there. Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and a second-hand Fodor’s from 2007 he bought from a market stall for 50p. Look, what’s your problem, the books said, I’m just a tourist. If he’d had the money he would have bought ten, put the matter beyond doubt. I’ve always wanted to visit the Bosphorus, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the thingy Sophia. Built in AD 537, it was originally a Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica. Beautiful.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t drink, buddy, Istanbul’s a party town. I’m just saying you need to be aware of the local customs. I once heard of a fella got chased by a mob for having a couple of Friday beers on the wrong street corner.”

  August picked up his book and read:

  Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them – not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

  “Live and let live, that’s my motto. But they’ve got a rule for everything, that’s the problem, and I mean everything: alcohol, pork, women, cartoons – you name it. Who would have thought anyone needed a rule about cartoons, for Christ’s sake? And heaven help any of us if we cross the line, even if we’re not Muslims, even if we didn’t know there was a line there in the first place.”

  A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched – whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie.

  That was it, that was another thing. Deploy in a secret capacity for the first time and you will feel that everyone is watching you. You will see surveillance everywhere; the most innocent of encounters will be freighted with suspicious intent. And if you think everyone is watching you, August thought, you will want to look your best, especially if you are a young man engaged in something you believe to be heroic, and so without knowing it, while those around you are taking advantage of the gloom to loosen their belts and pick their noses, you will adopt the expression you use when wanting to look your best, for Facebook or Tinder – in this case: jaw clenched, brow furrowed, shoulders raised and pushed forward to broaden the trapezius, deltoids and latissimus dorsi. If 34c had been wearing a necktie he’d have been making sure every few minutes that it was just so.

  August was fortunate not to have the same problem himself. The impulse to be a hero had stopped on the day of his wife’s death, four months earlier, like a frequency jammed by an enemy he didn’t know he had but who was suddenly everywhere, armed to the teeth with weapons that made him ache in ways he had never dreamed possible. He refilled his plastic cup. The alcohol might have done its job – he could close the file on 34c, it was no longer his responsibility to worry about such things – but still more transformation was required. That was the problem with alcohol: it didn’t know when to stop. In his case it had a long to-do list, filled with items such as grief, regret and anger. It had to turn a tall, bony, broad-shouldered, darkly dishevelled and comprehensively disgraced spy with a slight stoop and hands like shovels into someone prepared to submit calmly to the humiliations of international travel. It had to stop him crying in public.

  His neighbour was still talking.

  “Don’t get me started on Saudi. Men buried up to their waists, women up to their shoulders. Stones gotta be small enough that a couple of them alone won’t do the job. Dig yourself out in time, you go free, like the Hunger Games. Those are the rules.”

  “I can imagine how that’d feel.”

  “What’s that, buddy?”

  Other transformations were less desirable: sour breath, loss of appetite, rudeness.

  “I’m just saying that I can imagine how it’d feel to be trapped at the waist somewhere I’d give anything to escape from, unable to stop an endless barrage of trivial but deadly —”

  “Hey. I don’t know what… Stewardess spotted you drinking from your duty-free, that’s all I’m trying to say. I’ve seen people taken to one side at the other end for not much more than that. A friendly warning. Sorry to trouble you.”

  And then the guilt. He hated other people because he hated himself, or so the grief counsellor had said. Was it as simple as that? Another thing to depress him, the idea that his feelings about the world were nothing more than his feelings about himself, written across the sky.

  “That came out wrong,” he said, offering his hand. “My name’s August. Truth is I can’t get by with the booze they give you on aeroplanes, I swear they water it down. Would you like some? Come on, I insist. You keep an eye out for the stewardess and I’ll… There we go. Sounds like we’ll both need something to fortify us, with all those barbarians crowding the gates of Constantinople.”

  “I’m not saying… Whoa, steady on there, buddy. Got anything to mix with this?”

  “It’s expensive stuff, you don’t need a mixer. Look here, it’s flavoured with liquorice, almonds, grains of —”

  “Uh, okay —”

  “Tell me,” said August, “it sounds like you know this part of the world pretty well.”

  “I should do, I spend enough time here. Austria to Azerbaijan and everything in between.”

  “Is there even a country between those two?”

  “Are you joking? Hungary, Romania, let’s see, Bulgaria —”

  “Oh, I thought you meant alphabetically.”

  “What? No, no, on a map.”

  “My money’s on ambassador, something like that.”

  “Agricultural equipment, regional sales manager for the second largest firm in the US. Yourself?”

  It was the first time he’d been asked that question since being fired just eight weeks earlier. Civil servant? That certainly didn’t apply any more. Between jobs, unemployed, on a career break? Former spy under investigation for breaches of the Official Secrets Act?

  He watched 34c stand up four rows ahead to check for the third time that his rucksack was still in the overhead locker.

  “Me?” he said. “Executive recruitment.”

  With that, having decided that 34c wasn’t his responsibility, August was suddenly working again, thinking about collection, about agents, about deniability, about risk. He was imagining the operation going wrong, as he’d been trained to do, and watching from 35,000 feet the subsequent investigation running its course like a river, and building a dam here and weakening the banks there so the water would run off into unimporta
nt fields. Espionage was a complete system, that was its chief advantage to someone in his position – someone looking for distraction. It required minimum input; he could do it without thinking. It was like one of those vacuum cleaners that works its own way discreetly around a room, taking its time and keeping things tidy, powered by the belief that this way is good and that way is bad, as universal a principle as one of those plugs that will fit any socket.

  And he had been good at it, too, before it all went wrong in such spectacular fashion: gifted with tenacity, imagination, natural authority and a gently eccentric manner that put people at their ease. If it is true that most people are defined by a number of “facts” that orbit them like vague moons, like space junk, the ones that circled August, truthfully or otherwise, were as follows: that he found it impossible to sit at his desk for any period of time without removing his shoes and socks; that the bump halfway down his long nose had been acquired during a short but reasonably successful amateur career in the boxing ring; that he had once been formally reprimanded for using what was described in the official record as “language unbecoming a representative of Her Majesty’s Government” towards a senior CIA agent; that he’d had a mysteriously aristocratic upbringing, as evidenced by a surprisingly shabby collection of Savile Row suits, the ability to speak Romansh and attendance at a long succession of boarding schools; and that you didn’t want to find yourself sharing a crowded lift with him, as he was oblivious to the idea that conversation in public spaces should be limited to the blandly impersonal. More than once a colleague had got out a floor early to avoid a looming question or confession.

  All that had changed on the day his wife died. Suddenly that was the only thing people knew about him – that and the fact he should be avoided where possible, because of behaviour described in a steadily increasing stream of emails to the personnel department as “taciturn, tearful and prickly”, “wilfully reckless to the point of seeking out risk” and “utterly fucking oblivious even to the idea of a management chain”.