by Simon Conway
‘Yes.’
‘I’m waiting for the right moment.’
The woman sighed. ‘Edward Malik was one of our best. Nobody was more cut up than I was when we had to let him go. He had such a bright future and then to have it all snatched away, it must have been a bitter pill.’
‘Spare me.’
‘Am I correct in saying that you’re going out to Pakistan to search for him?’
‘Why am I being held here?’
She took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. ‘I have a problem. There are eight Taliban moderates in prison in Rawalpindi. They’re not good men by any means, but they are realists. I believe that if they were released they could form the nucleus of a group prepared to negotiate with the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and all the other groups to secure a peaceful future for Afghanistan. So I’ve been doing all I can to get them released. If the Pakistani intelligence services found out what I’ve been up to it might cause difficulties.’
‘Why are you telling me this?
‘Because it’s the truth; because you think I’m a liar and I can’t thinking of any other way to prove I’m not. I care about the people that work for me, Leyla. I keep tabs on them. In Ed’s case, I made a mistake. I thought he was clean, that he could go over there without repercussions. But it turns out that he knows something valuable. It’s not connected with his time in the Service. It came after. He may not realise what he knows, but he knows it nonetheless. It’s unfortunate. It means I need to find out where he is. I need it as much as you need it. That makes us allies, of sorts.’
Leyla laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’m concerned that his captors might resort to unpleasant tactics to get the information out of him.’
33. The Toca
The gag reflex was almost but not quite immediate.
There were a few moments when he could still breathe in gulps of air. The water ran everywhere, in his mouth, his nose, and his eyes. He tried, by tightening his throat, to let in as little water as possible but he couldn’t hold on. It felt like he was drowning, his body contorting as it heaved against the rack, his hands and his feet shaking uncontrollably.
‘Enough,’ said a voice.
The water stopped and they pulled the rag out of his mouth. One of the sandbag men punched him in the stomach until he threw up any water that he’d swallowed. And Noman, who squatted beside him throughout, consulted his watch and pronounced how long he’d lasted.
Fifteen seconds…
#
There was a quality to what followed that was not unlike a dream, a melting together that made it difficult to keep track. It felt to Ed as if time had come unmoored and the order of things was no longer certain. They came into his cell for two reasons only: prayer or punishment. They dragged him down the corridor to the cellar and led him to either the improvised rack or the prayer mat. It was impossible to calculate how often they came. The order of the daily prayers was jumbled and nonsensical, al-Fajr followed al-‘Asr, al-‘Isha preceded al-Maghrib, and the prayer mat pointed in a different direction every time. If he refused to pray he was beaten with a bamboo switch.
On the rack, they water-boarded him. They strapped him to the V with his legs apart and raised above his head, and his arms bound at his sides. A rag was stuffed in his mouth and the water poured on his face from an old tin watering can. Later they told him that the longest he’d lasted was seventeen seconds, though he had no way of telling if that was correct.
They wore the sandbags over their heads throughout, even the ones he recognised – the giant Mahfouz and Noman, who was as wide as he was tall. There seemed to be no purpose to it, any more than there was to the questions they asked. They looped and meandered and fixated on unexpected details, as if the questions themselves were deliberately intended to add to his disorientation. He remembered describing the problems they had in both Iraq and Afghanistan with suspect’s names. They didn’t even have a common way of writing Mohammed so at times it felt like they had no idea who they were up against or who they had in prison. They seemed particularly interested in his mother and her lover’s suicide pact – why they had chosen death over any other alternative? They seized on anger and shame, on anything that animated or needled him.
But there was really only one question that mattered, he understood that much. Noman whispered it softly his ear, often just before they tipped the watering can…Can I trust you?
Back in the cell they flicked the lights on and off at random, switching from total darkness to searing fluorescence, and one of the guards banged on the door at random intervals with a length of pipe.
At some point he began to hallucinate. He couldn’t tell if it was a natural product of his condition or if he had been drugged. It couldn’t have been something he ate because they hadn’t given him anything to eat. He was starving. Maybe the water was spiked.
In the darkness it seemed that the cell filled with people.
He could hear them breathing and imagine their expressions: Tariq standing at the foot of the cot with a reproachful look on his face; Samantha Burns with her shallow smile; Jonah grimly blocking the door. There was Sameenah in a shell-suit dancing from foot to foot, resentful Nasir, supercilious Totty with his red socks and, somewhere in the darkness behind him, in all her defiance, Leyla. All the people who had brought him here, even if they didn’t know it. They were watching to see how he would acquit himself.
Just tell the truth. That’s the beauty of it, Jonah had told him, if you want to destroy Khan, you only have to tell the truth.
It felt like he might die before he got the chance.
34. Cui Bono
The bolt was drawn back and the door opened.
They lifted him up off the mattress and dragged him past the cellar door and up the steps to a room on the ground floor. Heavy black-out curtains covered the window and the only light was from a bulb overhead. In the centre of the white-tiled floor two wooden chairs faced each other across a wooden table with a meal of curry and naan bread laid out on it. The smell of the food was almost overpowering.
Noman was standing beside a sideboard with a bottle of Black Label on it. He had removed the sandbag and it lay beside him on the floor.
‘Sit down,’ he said, casually. ‘Eat.’
Ed needed no further encouragement. He shook off his captors and staggered over to the table. He tore off a piece of naan, and jabbed it in the curry before stuffing it in his mouth. He barely finished one mouthful before cramming his mouth again. He dropped into the seat and continued eating, shovelling the food into his mouth, pausing only to drink water from a metal cup.
Noman crossed over to him with a glass and the bottle of whisky. They sat across from each other. Noman poured himself a measure and sipped it.
‘When you recruited him, how did you know that Tariq was due to return to Islamabad and join the Afghan Bureau?’ he asked, eventually.
Ed paused between mouthfuls. So now it had begun. He felt genuinely grateful to be able to answer Noman’s questions. ‘Because that’s what Burns told me when she called me at the embassy in Kabul.’
He remembered that they had woken him in the middle of the night and escorted him to the embassy, put him in the secure room with the secure phone. He tried to recall her exact words.
‘She said that an ISI agent had got himself in a fix on UK soil and the situation was ripe for exploitation. She said that the agent was about to be called back to work for the ISI’s Afghan Bureau. She said, “I don’t need to tell you how important it is that we have an asset inside the Afghan Bureau if we’re going to get it right in Helmand. We need to get a handle on what the ISI are up to there and we need to do it quickly”’.
‘How did Burns know that Tariq was due to be recalled?’
Ed shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I guess it came from a wiretap. GCHQ were all across Tariq’s communications.’
‘You saw a transcript in the file?’
‘No. There was
nothing about him going back to the Afghan Bureau. But it wasn’t the full file. It was something they pulled together just for me.’
‘You didn’t think that was strange? They give you an agent to run but you don’t get to see the entire file. A key piece of information was given to you and you accepted it without seeing any evidence.’
‘It was short notice. The circumstances were unusual.’
‘Did you ever get to see the full file?’
‘No.’ He was conscious that it was a feeble response and there was what sounded to his ears like a pleading quality in his voice. ‘Burns played her cards close to her chest. That’s her way.’
‘And then you returned to Afghanistan?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And that’s where you next met with Tariq?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Describe the meeting.’
Ed closed his eyes and the memories gathered around him like old acquaintances.
#
He wound black turban cloth around his head and under his chin, drawing it up over his nose to mask his face. The sun was low in the sky and the wind had got up, orange-tinted dust billowed over the Hesco rampart of the Forward Operating Base and in front of him the sheet-metal door rattled in its frame.
‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ he shouted in the ear of the gate sentry, hoping it was true.
‘You’re a crazy man!’ The sentry was a wide-eyed and buck-toothed boy from Tennessee who’d never seen someone walk out of the FOB alone and unarmed before. It was against every rule in the book. Beside the sentry, Dai gave him a nod that Ed had learnt meant both good luck and see you later for whatever passes for beer in this place. Not that there was any beer in the FOB. There was plenty of Dimethylamine but no alcohol. They would have to go over to the Afghan Police post for that. If he made it back…
He slipped into the anonymity of the dust storm. Twenty minutes later he was just one of the crowd hurrying to cross the border before it closed. The friendship gate was an unwieldy double-arched desert confection, which looked as if George Lucas had assembled it from the salvaged parts of a second-hand space station, while the hooded and cowled figures struggling beneath it resembled Jawas and Tusken Raiders.
The gate was too precarious to admit traffic, and the long lines of waiting trucks were funnelled off the highway into a detour, a one-lane dirt road that snaked through a treacherous scree-covered ravine. By day up to a hundred trucks carrying fuel and supplies for ISAF passed this way. But by night – when the crossing was officially closed – smugglers and their corrupt allies in the Afghan Border Police controlled it.
Ed set off on foot down the ravine, passing alongside the stationary trucks. Without warning, a man stepped out from behind a truck up ahead. It was Tariq, wearing the uniform of the Pakistan Frontier Police. He indicated for Ed to follow and ducked back into the shadows.
The tailgate was down on one of the trucks and ragged tarpaulin pulled aside. Ed climbed up and into the back where Tariq was waiting, sitting astride a pallet of 50-kilogram sacks.
‘This is the kind of shit you’re looking for, right?’
Ed switched on his torch and inspected the cargo. No effort had been made to disguise their provenance: white sacks with the familiar palm tree logo and PalmTree Fertilizer Limited stencilled on them in black lettering and, below that, Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN). The PalmTree factory was a sprawling forty-year-old complex of belching chimneys, rattling pipes and rusting tanks surrounded by thousands of acres of mango orchards and cotton fields on the outskirts of Multan, in Punjab’s agricultural heartland. Powerful and well protected landowners bought the three types of fertiliser produced by the factory, used the two safer varieties domestically, then trucked the ammonium nitrate across the border to Afghanistan. It was easy to turn CAN into a bomb. Insurgents boiled the small, off-white granules to separate the calcium from the nitrate, mixed it with fuel oil and packed the slurry into a jug or box and rigged it for detonation. Each sack could make up to four bombs.
‘Four truck loads,’ Tariq told him. ‘That’s a lot of dead unbelievers, right?’
‘Where are they going?’
‘Helmand. This is all they need for the spring offensive, right here. I’ve done well, right?’
Ed grunted. In his experience all agents were insecure and out for approval. Tariq was no different to anyone else he’d run. The key was giving it to him in the right dose. Too much and he might get complacent and start taking risks, too little and he might run back to the ISI and confess his sins.
Tariq gave him a bewildered look, and said. ’You’re not tawhid are you?’
Ed frowned. ‘No.’
‘I hoped you were some kind of believer.’
He sounded depressed. Ed was surprised. Was that the impression that he’d given in the Oldham flat – that he was motivated by purity of belief and action? Was Tariq hoping that there was some kind of redemption in betrayal?
He reached out and grabbed him by the lapels.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a mullah, or a guru, or a fucking Sufi saint. I don’t care whether God is a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew. I’m as fucked up as the next person, as fucked up as you. Yes, you’ll save lives. British lives and Afghan lives. Well done. One day we’ll give you a medal. Meantime, tell me who this shit is going to?’
Two days later, a US Special Forces team backed up by a British Quick Reaction Force from 2 Para, intercepted the trucks on the highway as they were being unloaded near Lashkar Gah. Four insurgents were killed and a local businessman, with connections to the Provincial Governor, was arrested and airlifted to Bagram Prison for interrogation. Subsequent operations in Sangin and Musa Qala resulted in the arrest of several alleged Taliban sympathisers.
He could remember the jubilant reaction from London: Britain’s security operatives, for too long starved of actionable intelligence, now had something to sink their teeth into. And the Americans could be invited to the feast. Signals intelligence from GCHQ and the American NSA was routinely shared under a bilateral agreement, but human intelligence was often subject to more of a barter process. By passing on intelligence from Tariq, the British were ensuring that they would be included if the Americans uncovered their own similar sources.
#
Noman poured cold water on it.
‘Was there a decrease in the number of roadside bombs in Helmand as a result of the tip-off provided by Tariq?’
‘Not as such,’ Ed conceded. ‘But there wasn’t an increase either. If we hadn’t intercepted those convoys a lot more soldiers would have died. ‘
‘How many shipments of ammonium nitrate did you seize?’
‘Between 2006 and 2010, seven shipments as a result of information from Tariq.’
‘All from the same source?’
‘Yes from the PalmTree factory.’
‘But still fertiliser found it’s way to Helmand?’
‘Sure. Tariq could only give us what he knew.’
‘Or what he was told to give you.’
Ed looked at him. ‘You think that the information from Tariq was coming from a higher source?’
‘Don’t be cute with me,’ Noman snapped. ‘I’ll send you right back down to the cellar. Tariq was a conduit, we both know that.’
‘It’s what I always suspected,’ Ed conceded. ‘But I didn’t have any proof. I didn’t know the identity of the higher source.’
‘It’s not difficult,’ Noman said. ‘Cui bono: who benefits. There are two factories in Pakistan that produce Calcium Ammonium Nitrate,’ Noman told him. ‘PalmTree Fertilizers was initially established as a joint venture by the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation and the Gulf Council Oil Company, it was privatised in 2005 and acquired by a consortium of the Noor Group and the Sharif Group. The other firm that produces CAN is Punjab Fertilizer Ltd, an enterprise privately owned by the Chuppa Group. You stopped the flow of CAN from PalmTree but not from Punjab Fertilize
r. You closed down one and opened a market for the other.’
‘You’re suggesting that we got caught up in some kind of turf war between competing companies over the supply of nitrate to the Taliban?’
‘Wake up and smell the coffee. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. And get this: the majority shareholding in the Chuppa Group is held by the Khan family, originally of Lahore. Javid Aslam Khan owns a six percent stake in the company.’
‘You think Khan was the higher source?’
‘Don’t you?’
There was a knock on the door and a beautiful barefoot young woman with tiny silver bells on her ankles came in with a steel tray. She set the tray down on the table and loaded it with the empty bowls. Her movements were slow and deliberate as if she had been drugged and Noman watched her with a kind of lazy but predatory interest.
Ed realised that she must be Tariq’s widow. He wanted to say something to her, but there was no consolation that he could offer. She picked up the tray and glided out of the room.
‘Tell me about the next meeting?’
35. The sociopath’s address book and other disappointments
They were in Kandahar, in the cemetery behind the Chowk Madad. Tariq came hurrying between the jumbled stone cairns and the ragged green martyr’s flags with a turban disguising his face.
‘What have you got for me this time?’ Ed demanded, once he’d established they only had a few minutes.
‘The nasty file.’ Tariq pressed a memory stick into his hand. ‘The sociopath’s address book.’
He left as swiftly as he arrived.
Bit by bit, Ed recounted the extent of the information in the Afghan Bureau files that were passed to him by Tariq. The name and location and ISI point of contact for the leadership of some of the nastiest splinter groups in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda affiliates, offshoots and copycats including the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Zarqawis and the White Taliban. In addition to the contact details there was a breakdown of their sources of funding including, at the local level, extortion, kidnapping and smuggling operations and, internationally, via wealthy donors in the Persian Gulf. Ed’s memory was good. He could remember the names of each and every ISI informant.
