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

I want is to alarm them into calling in reinforcements – that is, until it’s too late. And I need it for myself, too, this chance to stretch my legs and swing my arms and fill my lungs with air and walk off any last trace of the drug in my bloodstream. It takes about half an hour to reach the restaurant, and before ordering food I take a seat near the window in order to be easily observed from any number of vantage points on the street.

By the time the meal arrives I am confident that in addition to the young man from the lobby there are at least four others: a dark, lean man in a tracksuit who follows me into the restaurant and takes a seat at the back beside the toilets; two men in their early forties, both running to fat, bored by the assignment and clearly of the opinion that it won’t require any particular expertise; and a fourth man on a moped who parks opposite the restaurant and begins to play a game on his phone. The decision to keep the young man out of my line of sight suggests that their intention is to be covert, rather than to intimidate me into staying in the hotel. This must be why Elif gave me seven days rather than ordering me to leave immediately – she must have concluded she’d been lied to in our meeting and hoped that surveillance would shed some light on what I’d really been doing. After forty minutes I signal my imminent departure with some elaborate waving for the bill and a long pause on the steps outside to take my bearings.

It takes another hour to confirm that there are two others: one behind the wheel of a black Toyota Corolla – a short taxi ride draws him into the open – and the other a man in his early fifties who appears to be coordinating the team and staying in contact with his superiors via a collection of mobile phones so large that when someone calls him he frequently reaches for the wrong pocket. This man interests me – at various points in the evening I am able to engineer sightings of him in the Toyota, on the back of the moped and on foot; he takes his turn behind me just like everyone else. He is often engaged in angry conversation. I don’t know how many officers Elif will have assigned to this task. Even if it’s just the seven I’ve identified this is going to be difficult. They know the ground intimately, and if they get the vaguest of hints that I’m going to do something unexpected they’ll draw the net around me so tightly that it’ll never work. I have one chance to get this right.

In my favour is the fact that this team is unusually consistent in its use of tradecraft. Over the course of the evening I lead them through all types of urban environment, from busy markets to the metro to quiet residential streets, and they stick rigidly to certain rules – about formation, about use of cover, about distance. Also in my favour is the fact that the team – like every other surveillance team – is a living thing with a character all its own. It might follow a set of rules, but within those rules it expresses its uniqueness in hundreds of small decisions about risk: how long to leave an officer in a static position, whether to send someone into an unknown premises behind a target, how often to alter physical appearance over the course of a shift. Two teams following the same SOPs can behave in markedly different ways, and the single biggest factor in determining this is the personality and judgement of the leader.

By midnight I have learned all sorts of things about this team, but only three of them are going to be of any use: that the officer behind me rotates every fifteen minutes precisely, regardless of what is happening at that moment; that when operating on foot in a quiet area they leave an air gap of between twelve and eighteen seconds between the first two officers; and that the team leader is a proud, officious and unpopular man.

They are also susceptible to incorrect assumptions. And so just before the open-air market closes I buy a box of baklava and an alarm clock in the shape of the Blue Mosque and begin to walk back in the direction of the hotel. The closer we get, the more convinced they will be that they know exactly where I am going and that soon afterwards their shift will come to a welcome end. The quickest route back would take less than twenty minutes, but I build in a diversion to ensure that the team leader is in pole position at the right moment.

The road ahead is quiet and wide and brightly lit, and there is an obvious right turn towards the hotel a hundred metres ahead. But I take an earlier turning into a narrow street lined with restaurants that even at this late hour are open and busy. As soon as I have turned out of sight I take several long steps – people would turn to look at someone running – into the open doorway of a building and press myself into the shadows. Exactly on time the team leader comes around the corner, his back and neck stretched upwards for a better view and his head lighthousing to re-establish my whereabouts. His pace quickens as he skirts small clusters of diners saying their goodbyes on the street. He is only ten metres past my position and still in clear sight when – counting down the seconds on my watch – I step out and walk across the street and into an alleyway. This is only the first part of my escape: as soon as they realize they’ve lost me I have to anticipate