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

under the door of the minister’s hotel room, loudspeakers concealed in the embassy gardens that interrupt a reception to broadcast the names of imprisoned journalists, an impassioned speech delivered from a neighbouring table in his favourite Mayfair restaurant. She has dozens more ideas. Her favourite involves someone – she suggests with a giggle that I should do this, that the costume will allow me to remain incognito – dressed as a clown who appears mysteriously wherever the minister goes. She’s even bought a wig for me to try on. There is a real possibility, she says, that the media spotlight will compel the regime to release one or two of their more high-profile prisoners. And all that’s needed is an advance copy of his itinerary. But before she has even finished speaking I am shaking my head. There’s simply no way I can help. The Egyptians will complain, and her involvement will mean that the leak is traced back to me immediately. The only resistance she offers is to suggest in a quiet voice that this might be a suitable parting gesture to a job I’ve come to hate, but I interrupt to explain why this isn’t the right time, and she leans forward and kisses me and says that she understands.

Then I find myself sitting in the back row of the coroner’s inquest watching CCTV footage of a woman on a bicycle stopping at a traffic light alongside a black Mercedes with a diplomatic number plate. She reaches into the basket in front of her for an A4-sized piece of paper and carefully places it on the rear of the car. The driver and his passengers aren’t expecting this; she is able to place a second, third and fourth piece of paper onto the car by the time someone gets out and approaches her to see what is happening. He reaches for a piece of paper but discovers it is stuck on, and by this time the lights have changed and the cars around them are beginning to sound their horns, so he makes a half-hearted attempt to wave her away before getting back in and driving away quickly as the lights turn red.

But rush hour is against them, and minutes later she comes into view again, on a different camera, this time scattering a crowd of pedestrians on the pavement as she races towards the car. She has a piece of paper ready in her hand, but the driver sees her coming and begins to nose forward, so she has to weave between the traffic and lean forward with one arm outstretched to get close enough to slap a piece of paper onto the rear left window in the seconds before they pull away.

It takes her another ten minutes to find them, or to catch up. By now the passenger has opened his window and is trying to remove the piece of paper stuck there, but when he sees her coming and tries to close the window the paper jams the mechanism and keeps the window open. The woman leans down and speaks to him. She appears animated. His hand comes out and grabs her hair and pulls her roughly towards the car so that her head slams into the door, but she takes hold of his wrist with both hands and gives it a sharp twist in a move I remember teaching her, and the man quickly lets go.

There is a sixth piece of paper and a seventh piece of paper. By now the back of the car is beginning to look more white than black. She is clearly tiring. By the time they approach King’s Cross she is weaving recklessly through the traffic and shaking her fist and shouting at the car when it gets away from her. A stream of obscenities filthy enough to turn the air blue, claims one eyewitness, but a second says it was simply a list of Arabic names. One thing they agree on is that there was no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of the minister’s driver. The car is at least five metres clear when she is pulled underneath the lorry. And the remaining papers in the basket fall out onto the street, and for a while pictures of imprisoned and murdered journalists swirl around in the breeze before attaching themselves to the surface of the road, to a lamp post, to a puddle of blood, even to the blanket covering a homeless man asleep in a nearby doorway.

Lawrence has gone. The only noise I can hear is the steady ticking of a cane on the stairs outside.

And the last coherent thought that occurs to me before I fall asleep, and the first coherent thought I’ve had in three days, is that it seems odd they would give a blind man a room on the third floor.

DAY 4

It’s dark outside by the time I wake up, a full thirty-seven hours later. I feel calm, clear-headed, hollow with hunger. The only thing I take with me is a rucksack. In the hotel lobby the young man half-asleep on the sofa tosses aside his newspaper and scrambles to his feet but then doesn’t know what to do with himself when I stop at the front desk to tell them I’ll be leaving in the morning. The checklist of questions would do credit to a five-star hotel: what time will I be checking out, will I have any bags, where will I be going, do I have a flight booked, have I fully recovered from my illness, can they expect to see me again?

The night is cold and cloudless and the narrow cobbled street is quiet. My first objective is to let the team fall into a routine and get used to me as a surveillance target – to my height, build, clothing, silhouette and gait. After three long days sitting around with very little to do, it’s essential they quickly feel they have the situation under control. The last thing