How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (spicy books to read .TXT) 📕

say locker number 36 in the train station, waiting for someone to come along and help themselves to it? Or do you think it might be somewhere completely inaccessible?”

“Shall we find out?”

“I’ve got this, just to complicate things.” I lift a kitchen knife from the rucksack at my feet.

“This is not the complication you think it is.”

“You might be right.”

“I know what British spies are like. I have met plenty of them over the years. You are gentlemen. You like talking, you like a glass of whisky by the fireside, you like creating and solving puzzles, like everything is a crossword in a newspaper. You never had to fight to survive. But to grow up in a poor family in Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Every day you have to fight. Every day until I was eighteen either someone beat me or I beat them. It is like breathing. My father put out his cigarettes on me if I disobeyed him. In school the teachers hit me with their belts to make me behave, in the military they beat me with sticks to make me disciplined, in prison they tortured me because they were bored. None of this is unusual. It is the same with everyone I know. I was fifteen when I killed a man for the first time. You think you have put me in a difficult situation. But this man had a knife, just like you. He was trying to steal bread from my father’s bakery. So you must understand that I have been in a position worse than this a hundred times.”

“You’ve misunderstood. You’re not in a bad position.”

“Where is the money?”

“You’re in the best possible position given your circumstances.”

“And you are in the worst possible position. It is unthinkable for a sane person to have chosen this. But here we are. I will ask you one more time.”

“Haven’t you worked it out yet? What this is about?”

“I can see only one possibility. But it does not make sense. You said you no longer worked for them.”

“I don’t. I’m … freelancing.”

“It makes no difference. I am giving you an opportunity to realize that this is a mistake, and to understand that you can still give me what I want and walk away. So let me tell you something that you need to know. The last time an Englishman asked me to work for him I stabbed him in the eye with a beer bottle.”

“Well, times change.”

He throws back his head and laughs soundlessly.

For a while he doesn’t move. Then he looks around. He is working something out.

“The first time I saw him he wanted to talk about football,” he says, taking half a step to one side. “Then it was horses, then it was cricket, then it was politics. What was the name of the pub? The Duke of York, something like this. St Ann’s Terrace, not far from Regent’s Park. It was a long time ago, perhaps the autumn of 1994. We were both young men. His name was Charles. It did not matter that I wouldn’t talk to him. Every Sunday evening he was there, trying to buy me a drink. He always wore the same elegant brown suit. Sometimes he would unfold his newspaper on the bar and talk about which horse was going to come second at Cheltenham or the massacre in Rwanda or arguments between the Iraqi government and the UN. And at some point in the evening, after I had finished my drink, I would leave the pub and walk home – even if he was still in the middle of a sentence. Of course, I knew who he was. I had been told that this would happen at some point, as it happened to everyone, and the important thing was to be polite, listen to him, deny any knowledge of secret matters and refuse to cooperate. The most I should do, if he was extremely persistent, was threaten to lodge a formal complaint with the Foreign Office. But I was not about to complain – there is something enjoyable about meeting your adversary, hearing him talk. And Charles was good at talking. He had been on holiday to Jordan with his wife the year before and spoke a few words of Arabic. I remember he was reading a book by T. E. Lawrence. Until then my experience of British intelligence had been limited to trying to identify their surveillance teams, who were very skilful, far better than anything we had in Iraq.”

He takes a step forward. Red tape has been lovingly wrapped around one end of the metal spike to fashion a handle, while the other end taps against his knee.

“Then one evening he said that he had a question about my superior, a fat, venal man from Mosul who had only been posted to London because his brother-in-law was senior in the ministry. I expect that he knew I hated him and thought the betrayal would be easier as a result. All he wanted to know was where this man was planning to go on holiday that Christmas – something unimportant, something that he could have found out a hundred different ways. He pushed his newspaper across the bar towards me and said with a smile that there was an article I would enjoy on page eight. I could see a bulge in the paper, like an envelope was hidden there. It was the Racing Post, I think. He was proud of this detail. He said, if you ever get asked, if they ever squeeze you, tell them the money is your winnings. Tell them you have developed an interest in the horses. He said that he would be waiting for me the following Sunday at eight o’clock, and that from now onwards he would buy the drinks.”

By now he is five paces away. At no point do his eyes leave me. His skin is pale in the moonlight and rainwater from the trees speckles his black shirt.

“What could