by Simon Conway
The other MI5 officer was standing with his back to the sink. He was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing Lycra cycling shorts and a waterproof jacket. There was a cycle helmet on the sideboard beside the kettle.
He nodded to Ed. ‘Now say hello to the mystery man who’s come all the way from Kabul to have a chat.’
Nightingale grunted and continued to stare into his cup of tea.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ Ed told him. He waited while the two MI5 officers went through into the living room and then sat at the table. Ed placed his hands down with his fingers splayed, a pianist centring himself before a recital. He resisted the urge to rub his face. He remembered his training: on first meeting an agent, appear calm and carry yourself with authority. Be Gnomic. Be Desi Yoda. Sweat prickled the back of his neck. He wished he’d had an opportunity to shave.
‘I have to make a decision,’ he told Nightingale in a conversational tone. ‘I have to decide whether to call in the police or do nothing and let your people clear it up.’
That brought his head up: wide-eyed, eager as a puppy. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might walk away from this. Later Ed would pinpoint that as the moment when he first decided that Nightingale was a lousy spy, his face so expressive you could watch each and every thought unfold. Later still he would revise his opinion: Nightingale’s thoughts were so random and grandiose and scattergun, that they served to disguise his true feelings. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad spy after all.
‘If I bring in the police, you’ll be arrested and you’ll probably go to prison, your cover will be blown and your relatives will no longer be welcome here. The Prevention of Terrorism Act already gives us wide powers but we won’t be in any way constrained by it.’ Keep your voice as flat as an oil spill, Ed told himself. ‘Let me spell that out for you. Your cousin will be kicked off his chemical engineering course and deported. Your aunt will almost certainly lose her job at the solicitors firm. There will be no more summertime visas for the family. And the money they have been squirreling away for the day when Pakistan becomes uninhabitable will be seized and made forfeit. That’s just the start. We’ll think up whole new ways to inconvenience you while you’re waiting on remand. I can guarantee you won’t like your cell mate and he won’t like you.’
Nightingale’s face was ashen and his lower lip wobbled, the tears welling up in his eyes. He rubbed them with the backs of his hands.
‘It’s a bummer isn’t it?’
‘What do you want?’ Nightingale said.
‘I understand you are about to be recalled? I understand you have been offered a new position with the ISI’s Afghan Bureau.’
‘How do you know that?’
Never answer a direct question.
‘I think at this point you have to assume that we know everything about you,’ Ed told him. ‘In fact we know you better than you know yourself.’
‘What is it you want from me?’
‘It’s simple really. We want you to go back to Pakistan as planned. We want you to take up your new job in the Afghan Bureau. We want you to go on working for Khan but we want you to work for us too. In return for a regular flow of information we’ll guarantee your cousin finishes his course and there won’t be any problems for your family. We’ll even add to the pot of money your parents have stashed away and we’ll offer you and your whole family British citizenship and police protection for life.’
‘You want me to spy on Khan?’
‘Exactly. We want to know what he’s up to in Afghanistan. We want the whole picture, warts and all.’
‘I don’t have any choice do I?’
Then he smiled, his tears forgotten. That was Nightingale for you, he was too devil-may-care to be blackmailed and although his family struggled to maintain their lifestyle it wasn’t about the money either. For him it was about the excitement. If being a secret agent was a thrill, how much more thrilling to be a double agent?
#
Four years of clandestine meetings followed, in ditches and graveyards scattered across Afghanistan, anywhere sufficiently distant from prying eyes, and often only for a few minutes. Nightingale provided Ed with information that allowed coalition forces to successfully disrupt attacks, smash insurgent networks and counter the flow of weapons and bomb-making materials over the border. And if at times it had seemed as though the information provided by Nightingale was partial (the smashed networks were invariably those considered the most independent of the ISI and the disruption of bomb-making materials didn’t result in a significant reduction in the number of explosions) and that Nightingale might in fact be a triple agent (an ISI plant receiving guidance from Islamabad), Ed could put his hand on his heart and say he had expressed his suspicions to London and had been told, in no uncertain terms, to keep his opinions to himself. For four years Nightingale had been referred to by London as “the gift that kept on giving”.
But now, in a surprise move, Nightingale had returned to Pakistan and been given a new posting, an off-the-books surveillance operation in the ever-so-quiet garrison town of Abbottabad. Ed recalled the last time they’d met: a month ago in Kandahar in the cemetery behind the chaotic bazaar known as the Chowk Madad.
‘I’m getting close to something that will interest London,’ Nightingale had told him in his familiar high-handed way. Over the years it had become his favourite way of baiting Ed. Acting as if there was someone important in London who was his real handler and Ed was little more than a conveyor of messages, the opposite of Ed’s suspicion that Nightingale was little more than a conveyor of messages himself. After four years of secret meetings they behaved towards each other with the sly hostility of a long-married couple.
‘Khan’s got something hidden away up in Abbottabad, right under the noses of the Joint Chiefs. Something mega-secret. There is a house under permanent surveillance. I think I can wangle my way up there.’
‘You need to be careful,’ Ed cautioned him, not for the first time.
‘I met someone. They call him Noman. I don’t know whether it’s a name or a joke. He’s something big in SS Directorate so he’s got a finger in every pie. The thing is, Ed, he’s got the hots for me, big time. He’s a beast. You should see the way he looks at me. He can’t wait to get his hands on me. He can hardly control himself.’
‘And you’re going to let him?’
Nightingale was defiant. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I forbid it,’ Ed told him. ‘Your focus is on Afghanistan and imminent threats to UK security. Whatever the ISI is up to on home soil is outside our remit.’
Nightingale pouted. ‘Alright, alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay well away.’
You encourage them to cheat and lie, Ed thought, and they do it to you as well.
It was two weeks later that Nightingale got back in touch, via a dead drop run by the Intelligence cell at the embassy in Islamabad.
I was right! It’s the big Kahuna!
3. The surveillance operation
Waking, Noman thought he could smell sulphur. When he raised his head the poison struck: thirst, nausea and a barbed pain behind the eyes.
Tumultuous dreams.
For as long as Noman could remember he had been dreaming about the annihilation of the world. As a child it was often an earthquake, abysses yawned and mountains rose and fell. As a teenager it was more often than not a flood or a zombie apocalypse. Then in 1998 in operations Chagai-1 and Chagai-2, Pakistan detonated six nuclear devices in Balochistan and another dream was folded into the mental gravy: an atomic explosion over a desert city; first a shockwave that demolished houses and factories, after that a fireball rolling outwards to the horizon, melting car tyres and searing human shadows into the asphalt. And last of all the mushroom cloud, rising and spreading and hanging silently over the desert.
Ka-fucking-boom
His eyes were smarting and his vision was watery. There was a thin layer of acrid black smoke hovering just below the ceiling. It took him a few moments to realise that the neigh
bours were burning their rubbish again.
When he turned he felt the warm body beside him, naked and face down. He reached out and ran his fingers down the young man’s spine and over his smooth, round buttocks. When he first woke he had not been able to remember who it was. The touch of his skin brought recollection. Tariq.
He slipped out of the bed and padded across the tiles towards the chair where he had discarded his clothes. He did not want to wake the boy. Tariq’s amused and knowing smile, his peppy moves and jaunty over-confident quips, all of which seemed so attractive the night before, might provoke violence in him now in the slough of the morning.
Noman had always been ruled by extremes: shamelessness and shame were the roots of his emotions.
Reaching the chair, he realised that his clothes were not where he had expected to find them. He squinted at the floor with his eyes still smarting, but they were nowhere to be seen. He must have left them in the next room. Naked, he went out through the bedroom door into the unfinished space beyond.
The house belonged to a Major who taught on the Technical Graduate Course at the nearby Kakul Military Academy. Similar in function to Sandhurst or WestPoint, the Academy provided training to officers for the Pakistan Army. The Major had been “encouraged” to find temporary accommodation elsewhere. The house was a new-build located in the Bilal Town suburb of Abbottabad: an ugly flat-roofed three-storey structure constructed of un-rendered cinderblocks that had been put up to replace a house destroyed in the 2005 earthquake.
At the centre of the cement floor there was a tap stand and a bucket. He knelt down, wet his hands at the tap and rinsed his eyes. His head was splitting. When he looked up he felt three pairs of curious eyes watching him across the room, then a shudder of indiscriminate rage.
The first set of eyes belonged to a Bandar monkey on a chain. The red-faced monkey had been there last night. It had spun on its chain and shrieked while he bent the boy over a chair. Now it bared its fangs.
The second set of eyes belonged to an elderly bearded manservant who was squatting beside the camp chair where the deed took place. He was a classic Hazara, flat-nosed and Chinese-looking, with characteristic features inherited from thirteenth century Mogul invaders. The evidence of last night’s seduction, the bottle of scotch and the traces of white powder, had been cleared away and the trembling old man was holding up Noman’s pressed and folded shirt, jeans and underpants like an offering at a shrine. Balanced on top of them, like a crown on its cushion, was his gun, a Glock 17.
The third set of eyes belonged to a professional watcher, a young intelligence officer with floppy hair and skinny jeans. His name was Omar and he was perched on a stool beneath a hide of camouflage netting with a 25-125 times magnification spotting scope on a tripod in front of him. By rights he should have been watching the neighbours and logging their movements in the army-issue ledger in meticulous longhand, but instead he was transfixed, startled by the sight of the legendary spy-catcher, ruthless interrogator, decorated hero of the Siachen glacier, and all-round very fucking scary piece of work Noman Butt kneeling buck-naked at the tap stand.
Like the sleeping boy Tariq, Omar was a Close Observer. There should have been a surveillance team of at least six watchers in the house but the nature of the job, the absolute need for secrecy and the requirement to circumvent normal procedures meant there were only these two trendy Banghra boys from a privileged suburb of Lahore, who looked like they’d stepped out of a nightclub – Tariq and Omar – their ancient manservant and a bad-tempered monkey.
Beyond the hide was a large window with a view, just visible through the diffuse and smoky air, of the crumpled ochre slopes of the Sarban Hills and the burning disk of the sun. It was a bright day throbbing with malevolent promise.
Noman closed his eyes, gripping the bucket. Murderous fantasies assailed him of destroying them all, of stamping on the monkey and strangling the old man and of kicking the two boys until their organs burst, turning their supple youth to offal.
Instead he should be praying, pressing his forehead to the rough cement in abasement, earning him the zabiba, the permanent thumb-shaped bruise of the truly devout, but it was a long time since he had prayed with conviction. He was ready to sacrifice for Islam, anything short of throwing himself into a cauldron of molten metal, but he struggled to live by it. He felt like death.
‘Shit, yaar,’ he muttered. He was still half-drunk.
He took a deep breath, swallowed and held himself erect. First, a shower. He let go of the bucket, snatched his clothes and gun from the old man and went down the stairway to the room where he’d left his briefcase. He opened it and rummaged around until he found his phone. Five missed calls, all from his fleshy, imperious wife. He threw the phone back in the briefcase, went to the bathroom and locked himself in.
His hands trembled on the shower lever. Suddenly he was sick, vomiting into the shower-pan. Purged, he sat on the tiled floor with his head in his hands. He was poisoned. He had been poisoning himself for weeks.
He struggled to his feet again. As he stepped into the shower he caught sight of himself in a mirror on the medicine cabinet and was briefly paralysed by fear and self-loathing.
He closed his eyes and took slow, deliberative breaths. When he looked again the moment had passed and what he saw was a hard and compelling face with massive angular cheekbones and a stubborn jaw. But that wasn’t what terrified the unwary in basement cells. It was all in the eyes, he had mesmeric eyes of blue, scary bowel-voiding eyes, so perfectly blue they went all the way back to Alexander the Great’s foray across the Indus, and some said they tunnelled all the way back to Satan, to the very first evil eye.
#
Pummelled by the cold spray, Noman began to feel like himself again.
He was a short man with close-cropped hair and a weightlifter’s physique. He was strong, the strength discernible in his legs and shoulders, in his broad neck and in his spade-like hands and stubby fingers.
Noman worked in intelligence, for the Inter bloody Services bloody Intelligence Agency, or ISI, having come into it from the army and before that an orphanage. As an officer cadet at the nearby Kakul Academy he had narrowly missed out on the Sword of Honour, the prestigious award for best cadet, after completing the Long Course in 1994 – not bad for an orphan convert from a low-caste Hindu village in Sindh. It was in the nature of things that the sword was won by the less capable but better-connected son of a Punjabi officer of the Leadership Caste. After the passing out parade the Commandant had grudgingly told him that he might even make General one day, provided that is, India and Pakistan didn’t immolate themselves with nuclear weapons before he got the necessary crowns and pips.
He had served with the Baloch Regiment in Free Kashmir and been awarded a Crescent of Courage Medal, a significant honour only one down from The Sign of the Lion Medal, which had replaced the British Victoria Cross at the time of Partition and had so far only been awarded to martyrs, which was too high a price for a piece of tin as far as Noman was concerned. He had received the medal for conspicuous gallantry in repelling an Indian attack on the Siachen Glacier.
The attack had been a total surprise, even to the Indians whose mountaintop artillery position was delivered by an avalanche into the midst of a Pakistani Forward Operating Base (FOB). In the sudden chaos that ensued, Noman had killed five Indian soldiers with an ice axe. He’d dug himself out of a hastily excavated snow hole and they were all over the place. Close to him, Indian gunners were climbing out of a tiny window from an almost fully submerged Portacabin bunkhouse that had been lifted out of its cradle of concrete blast walls and surfed the wave of snow down the mountain. They were popping out like champagne corks. He’d gone at it with the axe until he was the only one left standing, and then he’d hacked at the snow until he’d dug out enough to plug the window and prevent any more escaping.
After that he’d completed the punishing eight-month Special Service Group selection course and gone on to command Se
venth Commando Battalion. From Special Forces he’d transferred to the ISI and served across several Directorates, including the Afghan Bureau. It was while at the Afghan Bureau that he had come to the attention of Javid Aslam Khan, the farsighted hero of the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the man credited with creating the Taliban and ending the Afghan civil war.
Khan, who was without a son, had taken a liking to Noman, spotting his unscrupulous intelligence and appetite for the work. He chose to nurture Noman’s ambition and steer him through the labyrinthine corridors of Pakistani intelligence. He offered him his daughter in marriage. As a result of his patronage, Noman Butt was now in command of the ISI’s SS Directorate that monitored the activities of “flagged” groups within Pakistan. That made him the in-house expert on every armed group and extremist faction in Pakistan, from the Tribal Areas to Free Kashmir, from Balochistan to the Punjab.
For five years now, in SS Directorate’s longest running surveillance operation, a succession of close observers had watched the house next door, logging the comings and goings of a white SUV whose spare-tyre cover was emblazoned with an image of a white rhino. It was an ugly three-storey house with high-walled balconies that made it look like a chest of drawers with the drawers part-pulled out. The driver of the SUV was an Arab named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, also known as Sheikh Abu Ahmed, also known as “the courier”.
Showered, Noman stepped out of the stall and dried himself. Avoiding the mirror, he checked the medicine cabinet. Nothing. Then he remembered that he had some Valium in his briefcase.
He put on his underpants, jeans and shirt. He stuffed the Glock down the back of his trousers. He dry swallowed a Valium and went up the stairway again. The monkey had retreated to a corner of the room and the manservant had made himself scarce. Noman stood at the doorway to one of the bedrooms for a few moments contemplating Tariq’s sprawled and sleeping body. His anger had dissipated now. Tariq really was a beautiful boy.
