The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  ‘I am Raja Mahfouz.’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ Ed told him. ‘Whatever this is, I’m sure you’ve made a mistake.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Raja Mahfouz.

  He flicked a switch that lit up the dashboard with a flashing red and blue light. They eased out into the traffic.

  ‘They’re going to take you somewhere private where they can question you,’ Jonah had said. ‘They may threaten you, but we don’t think they’re going to hurt you. After all, you have no reason not to co-operate with them.’

  Ed knew Lahore reasonably well and, despite being folded over, he soon had a sense of where they were going. They entered a quieter district of large high-walled compounds and mature banyan trees set back from the road. Gulberg. Eventually the car turned off the asphalt road onto a sandy track, hemmed in by high walls topped with broken glass that formed a cul-de-sac. At the end of the track the car pulled up in front of a twelve-foot steel gate and the driver beeped his horn.

  Two bearded men with Kalashnikovs and Salafists’ short trousers opened the gate and one of them checked underneath the car with a mirror on a pole while the other watched the road behind. They were in the same appalling physical condition as his kidnappers. Satisfied, the man with the pole waved them in before retreating behind a sandbagged emplacement.

  The car pulled up in front of a large three-storey flat-roofed concrete house that looked like it had been built in the fifties or sixties. It stood in the midst of a waste of parched brown lawn bordered by dead shrubs. They pulled Ed out. He stared up at the house. Its darkened windows were secured by bar grilles with scorch marks on the surrounding walls that suggested they had been hurriedly put in place, and he could see two more guards silhouetted on the roof.

  An old wild-eyed woman rushed forward and hissed at him.

  ‘Foul shame on you,’ she said.

  Raja Mahfouz shooed her away.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  As Ed climbed the steps towards the front of the house, a man pushed through the steel-bar gate that covered the doorway. He was a bull of a man, with a fighter’s stance and fathomless blue eyes that gave nothing away.

  ‘I am Noman.’

  31. Janissaries

  Ed followed Noman through the ransacked house, past smashed-up furniture and graffitied walls. This close Ed realised how short the ISI man was. Only his musculature made him seem tall.

  ‘I thought you might like to see your room.’ He was led down a narrow stairwell to the basement and along a corridor with mould-stained walls to a bolted metal door. ‘It’s Spartan but functional. Guests rest here between innings.’ He drew the bolts and gave the door a nudge. It opened on an impenetrable black rectangle. ‘The light is controlled from outside.’ He flicked the trip-switch on the corridor wall and the underground cell was flooded with light. It was just large enough for a mattress and beside it a cheap plastic bucket without a handle. There was an orange overall neatly folded on the mattress. Noman grinned, all teeth and gums. ‘We’ve provided you with a change of clothes, gitmo stylee.’ He closed the door and bolted it again. He turned off the light. ‘Now let me show you where we’ll do our work.’ Midway up the corridor, Noman opened another door and stepped into a larger windowless space, a cellar with a concrete floor. ‘I’ve made do with the equipment available.’ At some stage it had been used as a gym and various antiquated pieces of equipment, including leather medicine balls and a suede-topped vaulting horse, were scattered about the place. At the centre of the room there was an improvised rack. Two inclined wooden benches had been arranged in a V shape with the open ends of the V raised on a third perpendicular bench, and the apex above a drain in the floor.

  ‘I prefer to raise the feet when waterboarding,’ Noman explained, cheerily. ‘And I find it to be more efficient and less wasteful of water to follow the Spanish method and force the cloth into the recipient’s mouth rather than cover the whole face, though if you prefer a different method I’m open to suggestion.’

  ‘Look, I’m not in a position to tell you anything that you don’t already know,’ Ed replied. ‘We both know how this works. I spent five years deliberately cut off from my colleagues, running a single high-profile agent inside your organisation. He’s now dead and any information that he provided has outlived its usefulness.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide.’

  ‘You think that my former employers would have let me leave the country if they thought I knew anything valuable?’

  Noman shrugged. ‘Then there’s no reason not to tell me everything you know. Come on. Let’s go for a walk. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to see daylight again.’

  Ed followed him back up the stairs and through the house to the front door.

  #

  They were walking on dead grass, alongside the perimeter wall, with two of the guards following. A coat of red dust covered everything.

  Noman stopped beside a bench beneath a bower of Bougainvillea that had shed all its leaves. Behind them the guards also stopped.

  ‘Sit.’

  They sat beside each other. Noman offered him a cigarette.

  ‘No thanks.’

  Noman shrugged and lit one. ‘I wish it would rain.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a digital voice recorder. ‘Tell me about when you went to work for the British State. First state your name.’ He leant back with his legs outstretched and the air of someone expecting to be entertained, ‘Give me the whole nine yards, don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘Edward Henry Malik.’ Jonah had told him to tell the unalloyed truth and he saw no reason not to. He didn’t want to find himself back in the basement. ‘In October 2001 I returned to the UK from Saudi Arabia and joined the Royal Naval Reserve.’

  Noman seemed surprised. ‘You’re a boating man?’

  ‘I didn’t spend much time at sea. Because of my background and my skill with languages I was selected for the Joint Services Intelligence Organisation. I received training at the Defence and Intelligence Security Centre in Chicksands. I studied several HUMINT modules. I learned Pashto in the language-training wing and I completed a resistance to interrogation course.’

  ‘What did they do to you there?’

  ‘The usual pride-and-ego-down stuff.’

  Noman whistled. ‘I can see we’re going to have to throw the manual out when dealing with you, bypass the early stages and go straight to the sexy stuff.’

  Ed paused. ‘You want me to go on?’

  ‘I would if I was you.’ Noman looked in the direction of the two guards. ‘You don’t want to give them any reason to think you’re withholding information. They’ll go to work on you.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Ed asked. ‘They aren’t exactly regular troops are they? They look like you scraped them out of a hole. Does Khan know I’m here?’

  Noman flicked the stub of his cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath his heel.

  ‘I’m the one that asks the questions.’

  ‘If I’m involved in some kind of off-the-books operation because you can’t trust your own people I think I deserve to know.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to make demands.’ Even sitting, there was something explosive about Noman that seemed barely contained, as if he might burn a hole in the ground. ‘Tell me your story. Make me believe in you.’

  ‘Once I’d completed my training, I was sent to Afghanistan. For three months I served in the ISAF Security Mission Headquarters in Kabul.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘I was part of an American-funded intelligence cell tasked with buying back surface-to-air missiles.’

  Let out all that anger and bitterness at the mess we made, Jonah had told him. Remember you were dismissed. You don’t owe us any loyalty.

  ‘We were negotiating with former Northern Alliance Commanders to buy back the missiles we’d given them during the fight against the Soviets. These were warlords, most of them now in government and
nominally on our side. They weren’t going to just hand the stuff back, though. They wanted money for their toys and we gave it to them by the pallet-load. They then spent the money on kick-starting opium production, which had pretty much dried up under the Taliban.’

  ‘Who was running the operation?’

  ‘Bob Hagedorn from Langley, it was a CIA operation. That was the first time I met him. I came across him again later in Iraq and then again when he was made Head of Station in Kabul. We didn’t get on.’

  ‘You head-butted him in Kabul.’

  ‘I’m not proud of what I did.’

  ‘We’ll come back to him.’

  ‘I didn’t stay that long in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I had Arabic they wanted me in Iraq.’

  ‘So you went to Iraq?’

  ‘I flew into Baghdad Airport in April 2003 with a mixed party of soldiers and civilians led by Director UK Special Forces. US armour had just reached the airport but it wasn’t secured yet. Baghdad was a mess. Disbanded Republican Guards, Fedayeen irregulars and criminals let out of the jails were tearing the city apart.’

  ‘What task were you given?’

  ‘Our first job was to make contact with agents that had supplied information prior to the fall of Saddam. The Prime Minister had put so much emphasis on weapons of mass destruction that the pressure was on us to find some.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Noman said.

  ‘No. Not a goddamn thing. We were deep in the shit.’

  ‘But you stayed on?’

  ‘Yes. I was attached to a British intelligence unit tasked with identifying the location of High-Value Targets – HVTs – elements of the old Baathist regime, on the American’s deck of cards. We were to stick close to the Americans and help them in any way we could. Several HVTs were taken down as a result of intelligence we supplied, but it soon became clear to those of us on the ground that the real threat was not from former-regime elements but from the Jihadists who had put out a call across the Middle East for Mujahideen to come and fight in Iraq. Iraqi society was collapsing and we were doing the Jihadists a favour, removing local leadership and creating a vacuum they could step into. Things got better when McChrystal took over Joint Special Operations Command. He went after the Jihadists. But we still had problems.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘The Jihadists were much tougher customers than the Baathists. Being locked up and interrogated was an unpleasant experience for the Iraqi elite who’d enjoyed an easy life under Saddam, but many of the religious extremists already had experience of torture at the hands of secret police across the Arab world, they weren’t intimidated by us. We also had problems back in the UK where the MOD understood why British forces were in Basra but they couldn’t see why we had to be in Baghdad. They started interfering. We lost operational independence. The Americans accused us of being semi-detached. At the same time everything the Americans were doing was going wrong. The body bags were building up. The Provisional Authority was wasting billions. Iraq wasn’t going to be some kind of model for democracy in the Middle East. It was a fucking disaster. I got fed up with it and resigned from the Navy. In late 2004 I returned to the UK and went back to work for the bank.’

  Noman lit another cigarette. ‘How did that go?’

  ‘How do you think? I tried to stick it out at the bank but I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I’d been doing. I fell out with my line manager. Then out of the blue I got a letter from MI6, would I like to join?’

  ‘So you joined MI6?’

  ‘Yes. First I had to take the Civil Service Selection Board. Then I was sent to Fort Monckton in Hampshire for operational training.’

  ‘But you’d already been in the field for several years,’ Noman observed.

  ‘Sure. I knew as much as the instructors did. But I bit my lip and got on with it. The end of my training coincided with the 7/7 attacks and because I had experience of running agents I was temporarily attached to MI5, who were scrambling to set up a network of informants in Muslim communities in England to prevent anything like that happening again. After a few months of lurking around mosques I returned to MI6 and a desk at Vauxhall Cross in the Af-Pak Controllerate. In February 2006 I was sent to Afghanistan.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was supposed to be processing intelligence reports, making assessments of the capacity of insurgent networks, tracing individual commanders and their modus operandi. Because of the proposed deployment to Helmand it was now a priority. But then Tariq came along and everything changed.’

  ‘When was Tariq turned?’

  ‘A month after I arrived. March 2006. Because of his importance I was instructed to drop everything and run him myself.’

  ‘Now he’s dead.’

  ‘Yes. Khan killed him. He should never have taken the assignment in Abbottabad. I warned him not to.’

  ‘We’ll return to Tariq in due course. After he died and you made yourself persona non grata in Kabul, you flew back to London?’

  ‘Yes that’s right.’

  ‘And you were dismissed from MI6?’

  ‘That’s right. I was initially suspended and then after a few weeks I was dismissed at a board of inquiry. Burns threw me to the wolves.’

  ‘And that was it for your association with MI6?’

  ‘Yes, officially that is. I did a one-off courier job after I left, mostly because I didn’t now what else to do. Then I got the job at J&K.’

  ‘What courier job?’

  ‘I delivered a suitcase full of cash to a woman in a hotel room in Dubai.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That will do for now,’ Noman said. He held up his hand and the guards approached. ‘Take him down to his room.’

  32. Schedule 7 detention

  Leyla was in the departures lounge, with her MacBook open on her knees. A large black man with a mournful expression on his face sat down beside her and said something,

  She removed her ear-buds and said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look over there,’ he said. There were two armed police officers pointing their sub-machine-guns at the floor in front of Hugo Boss. ‘And over there.’ She looked in the opposite direction. Two more armed officers hovering by Sunglasses Hut, also intent on the floor. ‘They’re going to throw you on the ground and shout at you if you don’t do as I say.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘See the door over there.’ He tipped his head in the direction of a nondescript grey door between Costa and Travelex.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Mr Ben time.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’re too young. Just go through the door.’

  She did.

  #

  ‘I’m not signing these,’ she told the woman, pushing the forms back across the Formica table. ‘Do you seriously think I’m going to waive my rights?’

  ‘Why are you going to Pakistan?’ the woman asked her. She was black, in a navy blue uniform with Border Agency epaulettes. There was another standing blocking the door, a Bengali by the look of her.

  ‘What horrible irony means that the border agency is the most ethnically diverse arm of government?’ Leyla wondered aloud.

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘My mother wants me to marry a nice boy from Lahore.’ She turned to Jonah. ‘What is this?’

  There were four of them in the interview room: Leyla, the border agency women, and Jonah, but there was a mirrored glass wall that suggested others were watching.

  Jonah grimaced. ‘We’d like to understand why you have decided to travel to Pakistan?’

  ‘I don’t believe this. Under what authority am I being held here?’

  ‘Under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000.’

  ‘You think I’m a terror
ist?’

  He shrugged. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said. She stretched out in her chair with her arms crossed. ‘You have nine hours.’

  Jonah sighed. He glanced at the Border Agency officers. ‘That’s all, thanks.’ He waited until they had left before producing a cigarette packet from his pocket. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘I mind that you won’t let me see a lawyer.’

  ‘The usual rules don’t apply.‘ He shook out a cigarette. ‘Do you think you’re going to find him?’

  ‘Find who?’

  ‘Ed.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘We’d like to find him too.’

  ‘I bet you would.’

  He lit the cigarette, inhaled and exhaled. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What happened to him? Was he abducted or did he decide to disappear?’

  ‘Why would he decide to disappear?’

  Jonah shook his head. ‘Perhaps he’s gone over to the other side.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ she sneered. ‘After all, you’ve treated him so well.’

  #

  Leyla’s next visitor was a woman wearing a dark red Jaeger jacket and matching pencil skirt. She entered carrying a coffee in a cardboard cup and perched on the edge of the seat beside Jonah.

  ‘I’ve become a fan of your blog,’ she said, without introducing herself. ‘You’re beginning to cause quite a stir.’

  ‘Ed was abducted in broad daylight. Of course I’m going to write about it.’

  The name Tracy was written on the woman’s cup. Leyla didn’t suppose it was the woman’s real name, a random slightly manic thought struck her: maybe a spook computer spat out a list of names every week for use with over-eager baristas. And then another even more random thought, maybe the woman’s father was a fan of High Society.

  ‘Are you planning to post anything further on the matter?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Like the fact that he used to be an MI6 officer involved in spying on Pakistan?’