How to Betray Your Country Page 3

  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 was a man profoundly accustomed to being in control.

  “You did not follow my instructions,” said the man. His voice was louder, as though he had taken a step forward.

  “What?”

  “Clean-shaven, I said. Shave your beard on the day you travel. What you did, shaving several days ago, it tells everyone you are going somewhere.”

  “I told people I was getting hassled by the police. Listen, akhi —”

  “Have you forgotten this also? No Islamic language. Not with me, not with anyone. You are an ordinary tourist.”

  “Okay, yeah. Look, I’ll shave first chance I get.”

  “Who shaves on the first day of their holiday? You must learn to think about these things. And your clothes. Dress like a tourist, this is what I said. Put a camera around your neck, carry a guidebook in your hand. If the sun is shining, wear shorts. Why do you have a Turkish newspaper with you? Do you speak Turkish?”

  “I found it on the metro.”

  “This is not a game. If I give you an order, you must obey it without question. I have been doing this for a long time. The only reason I am still alive is because I do not make mistakes. You checked into the hotel?”

  “It didn’t feel right,” he said. “The receptionist was asking lots of questions.” A silence. “She wanted to take a copy of my passport,” he added.

  “This is normal. So where are you staying?”

  “I haven’t found anywhere yet.”

  “And your bag?”

  “I left it somewhere.”

  “You left it somewhere? You are being very vague. Where?”

  If this had been a training exercise, thought August, right now would have been the moment to put his hand up and admit that he had learned a valuable lesson about preparation.

  “Well?”

  He had to break the pattern of question and answer. He made a series of fast assumptions: that 34c was an IS recruit, that IS recruits came from difficult backgrounds, that people from difficult backgrounds were sometimes unpredictable. They had tempers, they said the wrong things. For the most part, before leaving for Syria, they had struggled to make a success of life. They hadn’t progressed through a series of issues like footholds on a rock face – anti-colonialism, the problem of Palestine, the limits of peaceful demonstration, American atrocities in Iraq – to emerge clear-eyed at the logical summit of extremism. Driving vehicles into crowds and throwing gay people from buildings didn’t emerge at the end of an argument that began with the desire for justice. It emerged at the end of an argument that began with an argument – about how everything was shit, about how life was unfair.

  “Well what?” August said, raising his voice. “Why all these questions? What’s my bag got to do with anything? I’m here just like you said, I’ve taken big risks travelling, I haven’t slept for three days and I want to know what’s happening next. What’s it matter where my bag is?”

  By the time he heard a noise – gravel, a twig, the sound of breathing – the man must have covered half the distance between them. August started to move. A dark shape appeared in the corner of his eye, closer than he would have thought possible, and from nowhere a hand took hold of his neck and forced his head back towards the gravestone. His fingers splayed in the dirt. He felt around for a stone, for a stick, for anything. The man’s hand was cold and enormously strong. The only thing August could hear was the wind, searching the trees for something it had lost. He didn’t care what happened. This wouldn’t be the worst place to die. There had been moments over the past few months when the idea had seemed almost desirable. Here there were trees, there was grass. At dawn there would be birdsong. No doubt there would be those who found it ironic that a traitor should come all this way only to end up in a corner of a foreign field where the dead were laid out according to nationality, as though a sign reading “England” or “Denmark” or “France” meant anything to the people lying all around him. He wondered what her grave was like. He’d never even been to see it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get it over with.”

  It was a long time before the man spoke.

  “I have money and a phone for you,” he said. He took his hand from August’s neck. “Check the phone at least two times a day, morning and evening. Not from your hotel, go somewhere busy. You will not use it for anything else. Is that clear?”

  “What about the thing I’m here for?” August said. At the bottom of one rabbit hole and he started looking for another. “Don’t make me sit around waiting for —”

  “It will be a few days, no more than that,” the man said softly. It sounded as though he was smiling. “Until then, remember what you are: a British tourist in Istanbul. You have no religious affiliation, you are not political, you do not possess any strong opinions. Explore new places, learn new things. Take a ferry ride on the Bosphorus. Have you heard of Atatürk, of Mimar Sinan, of Suleiman the Magnificent? There is a place in the Grand Bazaar where they make excellent coffee, where you can sit in peace and listen to workmen tapping at brass ornaments two streets away. See if you can find it. Discover the best borek and tell me where it is made. Remember to
check the phone. You will hear from us when we are ready.”

  A few steps, first on gravel and then on soft earth. When August turned around he saw that a mobile phone and five hundred lire had been placed on the other side of the path.

  4

  file excerpt from investigation into august DRUMMOND

  INKWELL/001

  top secret

  foia exempt

  subject: Operation INKWELL

  date: 1 October 2012

  1. The purpose of this Note For File is to record the opening of Operation INKWELL. The operation will be run by the Gatekeeping team, and its objective will be to identify the member of staff responsible for the leak described below.

  2. On 30 September 2012 a Sunday newspaper published an article under the headline “Terror Sheikh in Prostitute Love Triangle” that claimed Islamist cleric Abu YAHYA Al Biritani @ Nigel WILLIAMS (METAL CUSHION of Operation FOSSILDOM) was a regular client of two Walthamstow-based prostitutes. The article included quotations from “a top-secret phone call” between the cleric and one of the prostitutes that had allegedly been handed to the paper by “a government insider”.

  3. The newspaper’s website contains a link to a 22-second excerpt of the phone call. We have confirmed it is genuine. The excerpt contains a brief negotiation over the price of a particular sex act and general discussion about the scheduling of the appointment. As the total call duration was 7 minutes and 16 seconds, much of which was taken up with conversation of a sexually explicit nature, we assess that the “government insider” is likely to have only given the newspaper the 22-second excerpt, as we can see no reason why the editor would have refrained from using some of the more colourful passages.

  4. METAL CUSHION has been a priority SOI for investigators for the past three years, and remains a highly effective radicalizer of young and vulnerable men in the south-east.

  5. We can assume that knowledge of the recording was widespread within the intelligence agencies and counter-terrorism police because of its sensational nature. In recent years, high-profile investigations such as ELVEDEN have highlighted the unofficial relationships that exist between some police officers and journalists – relationships that, while dwindling in number, remain a cause of serious concern to this team. However, preliminary enquiries indicate that although a written transcript of the call may have been shared widely with police partners, only those within this building have access to the recording itself. For this reason, we are treating it as an internal breach and will investigate accordingly under the name Operation INKWELL.

  6. We are focusing our early efforts on creating a list of those staff members with the technical access required to obtain a recording of the call. We have also begun to review vetting files for any mention of this subject, such as an expression of frustration at the way that METAL CUSHION has been able to get away with his radicalizing activities for years, or for any instance of an officer reporting a colleague making unauthorized contact with a journalist. Warrantry to allow further investigation of the journalist in question is currently with the Home Secretary.

  7. One final note on motivation. There are aspects of this leak that raise questions. Why did the “government insider” choose to provide a recording rather than a written transcript, given that this has put them at greater risk of being identified? If they provided this material for financial gain, why did they only hand over a partial excerpt of the call? Why did they not include the most sensational segments? We remain open-minded about these questions. We also remain open-minded about the possibility that this is a leak of a non-traditional nature, and that the motivation of the officer in question was a desire to harm the reputation of METAL CUSHION and degrade his ability to radicalize impressionable young men rather than a straightforward wish to make money.

  5

  August couldn’t remember much about his new employer. He couldn’t even remember what the company was called, other than that it was something to do with chess. Castle Communications? Knight Strategies? Bishop was too obviously Christian, king and queen a little old-fashioned, pawn out of the question for a number of reasons. When he finally turned up at the address he’d been given, one day after arriving in Istanbul, there wasn’t a sign outside the building as he’d hoped, just a walk up three flights of what appeared to be a run-down residential block to a reinforced door opened by buzzer after a wait of several minutes, and inside a four-bedroom apartment, the furniture pushed into corners and covered with plastic sheeting. Nobody was waiting for him. In one room three Syrian men were talking loudly about a video they were watching on a laptop, and in another a man was shouting in Turkish into a mobile phone. Wires hung from the ceilings and a puddle of grey water sat in the middle of the floor.

  “Can I help you?”

  A young man wearing a cream-coloured linen suit and a pair of dirty white running shoes stood in a doorway off to one side.

  “I’m August. It’s my first day.”

  “William.” He offered a delicate hand. He was in his early thirties, with thinning shoulder-length hair so blonde it was almost white. “Beatrice is on a call with London. Wasn’t she expecting you … earlier?”

  “Really?” said August. Three hours earlier, to be exact, but he had either slept through his alarm or forgotten to set it. After he had woken up and realized how late it was, it had still taken him over an hour to get out of bed, and even then the only real reason for moving was to get away from room 18 in the Hotel Turkish Delight. At one point between three and four in the morning he had sat upright in bed and considered going down to the reception desk to complain about the cockroaches or the rattling window or the thin mattress and demand to be moved. Not that any of those things bothered him in the slightest. He just didn’t think they would take him seriously if he complained about a ghost. He couldn’t blame them. And it wasn’t as though he had seen anything, or heard any inexplicable noises. It was just that everywhere he went she was both there and not there, a presence and an absence, and he didn’t know any other way to describe that.

  “Beatrice is more than a little annoyed, I won’t lie,” William was saying. “Brace yourself for a telling-off. She said the mobile number you gave her wasn’t working. She even had me call your hotel to see if you’d checked in.” Which explained the loud knocking at his door that morning, not that August had paid it much attention. “I don’t know if there’s anything for you to do until she’s free. Beatrice likes to be the one to set the scene – you know, manage people’s first impressions. She’ll want to make sure you understand that all of this” – he held up his hands to take in the unpainted walls, the wires and the puddle – “is evidence of a company moving fast and breaking things. A PR woman to the ends of her fingers and toes. Do you know what you’re going to be doing?”

  I don’t even know what the company’s called, August almost said, stopped only by the mention of PR. He had to start thinking about such things – he had applied for the job, after all, and there would be little sense in getting fired on day one.

  “Not a clue,” August said. “Beatrice is the boss then, is that right? My phone interview must have been with her.”

  Three o’clock in the afternoon, four weeks earlier, an autumn London downpour outside. August had been sitting in his dressing gown and thinking about a drink when the phone rang. He had forgotten about the interview, arranged during a brief period of engagement with the outside world that had also seen him speak to his parents, do his laundry, take out the rubbish and discover that he was days away from having his electricity cut off. He thought about letting it ring. Once he heard who it was he thought about telling Beatrice that he didn’t know anything about distribution channel evaluation, or that he was emotionally incapable of holding down a job, or that he’d made up so many aspects of his application that it was basically worthless. None of those things would have made any difference, he suspected. “A job like this will look great on your CV,” she had said almost immediately, her desperation audible down the line. “Managing budgets, significant stakeholder interaction, the opportunity to really make your mark. And if you want to return to government at a later stage, well, the embassy here is our principal customer, involved on a weekly basis and keen as mustard on the work we’re doing. You could easily go back in but at a significantly higher level.” I very much doubt that, thought August. He wondered how much trouble the company was in to be this short of staff. “The private sector would bite your arm off too,” Beatrice added quickly, in case she’d misjudged her pitch. “Not many people in strategic comms have such a unique opportunity to experience the digital front line. I like to describe our little frontier outfit as a sort of press office for the moderate opposition in Syria, that’s my shorthand for it – promoting their leaders, highlighting their military successes, showing them to be a force for good. It’s all completely above board, funded by the British government’s conflict and stability fund. In practice that means videos, military reports, radio broadcasts, news and magazine articles and social media content, all pushed out into the regional and global marketplace. What do you think?” It might have been the only question she’d asked.