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

I do?” He shrugs and smiles. “In a way I regretted that it was coming to an end. I warned him that I was a proud Iraqi and that as a people we have a reputation for being hostile towards outsiders who try to control us. Do you know what he did then? I remember it like yesterday. He leaned across the bar and tapped my empty glass of beer and said, let me top this up. It can be another one of our secrets, he said, that you enjoy the occasional drink. Something else we keep from your masters.

“I am not sure what happened after that. In those days I had a real temper. But whatever it was, it caused me lots of problems. To evade the police and get out of the country I had to use an escape route built for our most important agent. In Baghdad they were angry with me. I knew they would not understand the truth, so I didn’t tell them that the man was an intelligence officer trying to recruit me. Instead I said that he was a drunk who had tried to attack me and that I had been forced to defend myself. But the truth was that I felt a sense of outrage that he could possibly believe this was power, that he could tell my corrupt boss who slept with prostitutes and beat his wife that I drank a glass of beer on Sunday nights, and that this gave him power over me. I could not believe it. I still cannot believe it. The night before that, I had followed a man into an abandoned railway tunnel and pressed my fingers around his throat until his neck snapped like a piece of dead wood, and here was this elegant man in his brown suit and his cufflinks and his silk handkerchief demonstrating what he thought was power. And in that moment I simply thought, no: let me show you what the world is really like.”

Before he’s finished speaking he takes a step forward and lifts his left arm out to the side. He’s still too far away to do any harm. But as he begins to swing the metal spike through the air towards me I can see that momentum is sliding it down from his sleeve between his fingers, and it’s much longer than I realized, looped at the end with a piece of rope. I am still turning away when it hits the back of my head and tears open a long hot cut under my hair.

“Where is the money?” he says.

He puts his hand through the loop to secure it. My one advantage was height and reach but he’s neutralized that with the spike. When it hangs from his hand the point is long enough to draw a line in the earth. He takes hold of the end and steps forward and jabs it like a spear at the top half of my left leg. It misses but he pulls it back and moves forward for another attempt. I circle away from him. He’s not trying to kill me, not yet. He’s just trying to stop me getting away.

This time it rips open my trouser leg, but the wound is superficial.

“Where is the money?” he says.

I swing at him with the knife and try to back away but the length of the metal spike allows him to keep a safe distance. He jabs it again and again at my legs, trying to bring me down. This can’t continue. Each time, the rope tugs at his wrist like a dog at the end of its chain. That’s his mistake, if he’s made one. That it’s tied to his wrist. If anything happens to that arm it’ll be useless as a weapon. He rushes forward again. And this time I don’t back away but instead step forward and switch the knife to my other hand, hoping that the spike doesn’t hit an artery in my leg, as I slash downwards across his outstretched forearm as hard as I can.

I know the vizier is close because I can hear him. Even above the wind he struggles to move quietly. His breathing is laboured and his blood gleams like metal on leaves, on the bark of a tree, marking the route he has taken. I cut a strap free from the rucksack and tie it around my leg to slow the bleeding. Everything else can wait – the flesh wound down my back, the bite mark in my ear, two broken hands. “You always surprise me,” I call out. “I never know what to expect. I didn’t think it would be this difficult.” Something moves to my left. I rush towards the noise, stabbing at the undergrowth with the metal spike. He scrambles away noisily into the darkness. “It doesn’t matter now, so I can tell you what I really thought.” I stop to let the pounding of blood in my ears settle. I feel dangerously light-headed. “Here’s a man who’s already betrayed his country by joining Daesh,” I call out, “and now he’s betrayed them as well. There’s nothing harder than recruiting someone who actually believes in their country. But Daesh have broken him in like a horse and from now on he’ll accept anyone’s saddle. They’ve cured him of any nationalistic bullshit. I thought the last thing I’d hear from you is talk of loyalty or pride. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone more suited to what I was going to propose.” There’s a scuffling noise, followed by silence. “You’re the embodiment of self-interest. You’re the perfect traitor – the perfect agent.” A shadow moves between the gravestones, less than three metres away. I hold out the knife and rush in his direction and a rock comes hurtling through the darkness. It barely misses my head. “I never even got the chance to list the advantages of changing sides: that you’d be allowed to live, that people