How to Betray Your Country James Wolff (fun to read txt) 📖

Three minutes.

Wait. I can’t … can you bring the food closer?

A piece of stale bread hits the floor next to him.

What’s this about? he says. What do you want with me?

He eats the bread.

He thinks about survival. He has to stay alive.

Can I have some water? he says.

He wonders if this is the first time he has seen the vizier as himself, as he really is, without a disguise. The metallic grey hair lies flat and lifeless against a curiously small, round skull, shaped at the back like a question mark. His cheeks are covered with a day’s worth of white stubble. The shirt he wears is pale blue and loose-fitting, but when he turns and crosses the room to fill a cup of water it is plain to see the power rolling across his shoulders.

Two minutes.

His eyes are the colour of rain.

A small black rucksack sits in the hallway at the top of the stairs. He understands that it is wrong to think of the vizier as himself, that everything the vizier does will be calibrated towards a certain purpose, that even the vizier has just been a role temporarily inhabited by a man on the run, for this is what he has decided he is looking at. A man on the run who is being forced to stand still. Which makes him even more dangerous.

He drinks from the water being offered to him. It tastes dirty.

Which is why the five-minute limit is important, because he is staying elsewhere and only coming to the house to check on August. He decides —

One minute.

— that the vizier must have lured 34c here under the black flag of IS but the truth is that he’s cut loose from them somehow. IS is part of what is happening. He just doesn’t know what part.

You know you’re going to kill me if this goes on much longer.

August feels terror at the thought of another hour in the fridge. He groans and rolls over to hide a movement towards his pocket.

I’ve got a fever. I need a doctor.

He thinks: how can I change what is happening here? Shall I tell him I’m not 34c, shall I tell him what I did, shall I tell him that Lawrence is on his way with the police? Anything that might force a change of direction.

The vizier opens the fridge door and turns around.

Wait, don’t do this, I need to tell you something. Something about —

He lifts August in his arms in one smooth and effortless movement. The only sign of physical exertion is the appearance of a vein in his neck. August grips the tiny blade between his fingers and lunges but the abrupt movement forces his muscles into a cramp and he stiffens and cries out in pain. The vizier waits patiently for it to pass and then places August in the fridge. All he has to do, when August resists, is raise a single finger as though about to press on a doorbell.

August tries to prepare himself for what is coming next: a beating, a dousing with water, the gag that slips down his throat. He knows something is coming.

But when he sees what it is, he thinks: that’s genius. Forget about everything else. That’s the last thing I need.

The vizier reaches into the fridge, places a bottle of spirits in his hands and closes the door.

• • • •

August understands this is just another way of controlling him, that the vizier knows a sick and drunk prisoner will struggle to think clearly, let alone try to escape. For this reason he waits ten minutes before taking his first warming sip, fifteen before his second, seventeen before… After all, he doesn’t want to make it too easy. But with nothing in his stomach other than a piece of stale bread and a few mouthfuls of water, he is well on his way to being drunk within the hour.

In this state of inebriation and extreme fatigue, not to mention terror and tedium, or the discomfort caused by any number of cuts, bruises and broken bones, his mind – a skittish and fragile thing – alights once again on the theory that Martha was a foreign agent. The idea that she is alive is so powerful as to have an almost analgesic effect. Little wonder, then, that he indulges in it so comprehensively, that he dismisses out of hand all rational objections that the idea is clearly nonsense. Let’s hear the evidence, he says, gripping the bottle like a gavel. And so he finds himself preparing to entertain the case for the prosecution in the courtroom of his battered and bleeding head.

The alcohol has the rough sweet taste of cheap raki.

He takes another sip from the bottle and sees her sitting in the dock, her pea-green coat buttoned up to the neck, her eyes downcast. He looks at her. He looks at her again. But she won’t look at him. Not yet.

He hears the vizier walking around.

Is he supposed to say something to start the proceedings? Something about the importance of due process or the rule of law? Is that what judges say?

The sea makes a noise like murmurings from a restless public gallery.

The Russians, Your Honour.

The bottle almost slips through his fingers.

Lawrence steps out of the gloom. August wasn’t expecting to see him, but it makes sense now that he thinks about it. Lawrence is wearing his best grey wool suit and twirling a pair of expensive spectacles.

There can be no doubt they were behind this. Her Majesty’s experts are agreed that this whole thing smells of Russia: painstaking and patient, mischievous, unspeakably cruel.

He doesn’t sound like Lawrence, this lawyer. He looks like Lawrence, but he sounds … he sounds as though he has been drinking.

Let us pin the tail where it belongs, Your Honour, squarely on the hindquarters of the Russian donkey. In fact, let us go further and take a moment to close our eyes and imagine the defendant’s handlers sitting