The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  Noman interrupted. ‘Stop,’ he said. He was wearing the same stony I’m-about-to-explode frown as when Ed described the provenance of the intercepted cargo of fertiliser. ‘That’s all he gave you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A rag-tag bunch of splinter groups that nobody would miss. That was your great coup?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘It’s what he gave us.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask for more?’

  ‘Of course we did. He said he didn’t have access to better information. He didn’t have the clearance.’

  Noman was incredulous. ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to believe.’

  ‘Tariq was Khan’s message-boy. He carried messages to everybody, from Mullah Omar to the Haqqanis, father and son. He knew everybody! He could have given you everything!’

  Anger had been replaced by confusion on Noman’s face.

  #

  The next memory stick was pressed into Ed’s hand in a roadside culvert outside Jalalabad. They squatted amongst tangles of mottled bark sheddings that had been washed down from a eucalyptus plantation on the slope above them.

  ‘They’re going to wet themselves for this in London,’ Tariq told him with a sparkle in his eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The enemy within,’ he said. ‘The alumni list.’

  The files on the stick identified the location of a dozen madrassars across the tribal areas providing weapons and explosives handing training to eager young Jihadis from English and other European inner cities, and with it a list of the names and passport numbers of those who had graduated over a four-year period. British, Dutch and German passport holders who might one day form the nucleus of a home grown insurrection.

  ‘And did they wet themselves?’ Noman asked.

  ‘Sure. Since the 7/7 attacks, preventing any further attacks on the homeland had become the highest priority.

  ‘But?’

  Ed sighed. ‘We couldn’t find any of the individuals on the list. Don’t get me wrong. They were real people. We could identify their families. Some of their friends and associates were placed under surveillance. A couple of arrests followed. Two of them turned up dead in Afghanistan and another in Somalia. But there was no record of any of them re-entering the UK. It was the same with the Dutch and the Germans. At Vauxhall Cross it became known as the missing persons list.’

  ‘And the madrassars?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘All the indicators suggested that the sites had been used as training camps but by the time we got drones in the airspace over them they had all been abandoned. Some just a couple of weeks before we received the intelligence.’

  And the confusion written on Noman’s face had been replaced with dismay.

  #

  After that it was an irrigation ditch in the Green Zone, the lush strip of dense vegetation that ran alongside the Helmand River. Ed went out of the medieval mud-walled fort that was FOB Inkerman with a platoon patrol from 2 Para. They dropped him off at a pre-arranged spot and agreed to collect him on the way back in. He slid down a reed bank into green scum-filled water. Tariq was already there waiting.

  ‘What did he have this time?’ Noman demanded.

  ‘He told me a story,’ Ed explained. ‘He said it concerned a Jihadi group in the tribal areas and its efforts to build a dirty bomb out of a cache of radioactive medical waste. When I asked where he had got the information, he refused to answer. He said he wanted to talk to Samantha Burns.’

  ‘He used her name?’

  ‘Yes. I was surprised. Shocked even.’

  Noman swore softly under his breath. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I called Burns.’ He’d waded along the ditch far enough to be out of earshot and called her on the sat-phone.

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘She was unruffled. She told me to hand over the phone to him. I argued against it, caving into Tariq like that would only encourage more petulance. But I was overruled.’

  ‘So you gave him the phone?’

  ‘Yes. She was my boss. It was an order.’

  It was Tariq’s turn to wade along the ditch.

  ‘Did you hear what was said?’ Noman asked.

  Ed shook his head.

  ‘How long did they talk for?’

  ‘Forty minutes.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I waited in the ditch.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Tariq handed me back the phone and took off into the foliage. Burns was still on the phone and so I asked her what had been said. She told me not to worry about it. And she’d let me know what was going on in due course.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘About two weeks later she called me in Kabul. She sounded relieved. She said it was a great coup, proof that our agent could deliver genuine major-league intelligence. She told me that the Americans had become involved and a drone strike had been authorised. That was the last I heard on the subject, officially at least.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  ‘I know the strike went ahead. A rumour went around afterwards that the Americans weren’t happy that the intelligence was from a singe source. They were demanding evidence that there had really been a dirty bomb factory and that they hadn’t been drawn into some private vendetta between clans.’

  Noman was shaking his head.

  #

  Ed described his final meeting with Tariq in the cemetery in Kandahar in which he’d revealed the existence of an off-the-books surveillance operation watching a house in Abbottabad.

  ‘I’m getting close to something,’ Tariq had told him, excitedly. ‘There’s something hidden away up there, right under the generals’ noses.’

  ‘I told him to steer well clear,’ Ed explained. ‘I told him his focus was Afghanistan but he wasn’t listening. The rest you know. As soon as he informed us that it was bin Laden who was being sheltered in the house, we passed the information to the CIA at Langley. But the Americans had beaten us to it. They were already watching the compound and had been for several months, and they were now absolutely furious at us for “meddling”. The message from Langley was unequivocal: stay out of it. The Americans killed bin Laden and Tariq made a break for it. He got as far as Peshawar. Khan shot him in one of our safe houses.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘But why do that if Tariq was his agent?’

  ‘You know the answer to that.’ Noman replied. ‘Tariq’s cover was blown after the Abbottabad raid. He was on the run. If we had caught him he would have revealed under questioning that he was the conduit for Khan treachery. The only way Khan could ensure his own security was to have Tariq eliminated and so he shot him.’

  #

  Ed felt wrung out. But beneath the dejected façade there was a sense of grim satisfaction. He had almost fulfilled his mission. He’d done everything he could. Noman’s insistence that Tariq must have had a high level collaborator and that all the evidence pointed to Khan was exactly what they had planned and hoped for. It was at the heart of the scheme. But, at the same time, there was something unsettling about Noman’s conviction. As he unpicked each meeting, detail by detail, going back and forth, Ed had found himself equally convinced. Khan was the higher source. But if Khan really was a British spy, then why was Burns betraying him?

  Because London had got tired of him and his self-serving behaviour; because the intelligence provided hadn’t matched the promise; because spying was a profession of cold betrayal.

  But if that was true and London was prepared to deliberately sacrifice one of their own, then what did it mean for Ed, who was alone behind enemy lines?

  36. Under the Bo tree

  Noman burst out of the narrow stairwell onto the roof. The sky was a sulphurous yellow and a dusty smell hung in the still air. He could feel the air pressure building, a prickly uncomfortable feeling in the hair of his forearms and along the back of his neck.

  A storm was coming, in the next day or
two, the first of the monsoon. Soon purple-and-black thunderheads would pile up on the horizon. He was reminded of the storms of his childhood, when the orphans had danced in the streets as the rain soaked them and washed away the heat. He’d travelled a winding road since then: one beset with choices, difficult choices, and now he’d reached its most dangerous fork. What happened next would result in either his downfall or that of Khan. Nothing he had been told in the last few hours had made the outcome any more certain.

  Khan had been passing information to the British – Noman was convinced of that. But did it make him a traitor?

  He stepped between cement columns sprouting rebar-fingers and ducked under a line of drying bed sheets. There were two bearded fighters of the House of War sitting in rotting armchairs with Kalashnikovs resting on their thighs. As soon as he came into view, they rose from their chairs, lean as wolves, and bowed to him in exaggerated deference.

  With a curt nod he strode past them to the parapet, a three-foot high brick railing running along the edge of the roof. With both hands planted on the top of the railing, he swung his legs up onto it like vaulting a horse. From there he sprang upright and for a moment he swayed out over the drop, gripped by sudden plunging fear, before mastering himself.

  He straightened up and began to walk along the parapet, surveying his defences. As well as the two guards on the gate and the two here on the roof whose field of fire included the entrance to the cul-de-sac, there was a guard posted at the front door to the house and one in the kitchen by the rear entrance. Two more guards patrolled the grounds and loops of razor wire had been added to the tops of the boundary wall. All outside windows and doors were barred and internal steel doors had been added to the house. He had a room stacked to the ceiling with ammunition.

  He judged that things were as ready as they could be under the circumstances and given the constraints against him. It had been a calculated risk, running the operation without the knowledge of his colleagues in the ISI and instead using Abu Dukhan’s fighters as foot soldiers. He had been forced to balance the danger of Khan learning what he was up to against his reliance on the unknown quantity that was the House of War. He didn’t trust them. He didn’t trust anybody for that matter, but for now the interests of the House of War coincided with his. They were united by their hatred of Khan. And he had no doubt that they would fight to the death if pressed, not least because their leader was lying in one of the guest bedrooms. But defending themselves against attack was one thing, bringing down Khan was another. He needed more than he had learned so far to move from defensive to offensive operations.

  Closing down the flow of PalmTree Fertilizer to open up the market for Khan’s own product was no more venal than the activities of any number of past and former Joint Chiefs of Staff. Facilitating the destruction of a few splinter groups that had refused to tow the ISI line was, by any reckoning, a practical move. The alumni list was patently worthless. He’d be surprised if any of the named individuals were still alive. As for calling in an American drone strike to take out the bomb-making capabilities of the House of War, there were powerful voices within the Joint Chiefs that would argue that, no matter the means used, it was the only available course of action in the face of a threat to the integrity of the nation.

  Nothing that Ed had told him was sufficiently incriminating. If Khan was to be court-martialled as a traitor then Noman required more. Without it his plan was dead in the water. He would most likely die here, defending this house.

  It felt like he was about to detonate.

  He had reached the point where the parapet made a right-angle turn to the right and ran parallel to College Road. There was no sign of any watchers. No indication that their location had been compromised. The only person who knew they were here was the bootlegger who made weekly deliveries, and he could be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

  Noman continued along the parapet to the next right angle. Here the boundary wall backed up against the playing fields of a technical academy. There was a pipal tree against the wall, what the Buddhists called a Bo tree and where they believed the Buddha achieved enlightenment. It was old, much older than the house and too close to the perimeter wall. He regarded it as a weakness in the defences and had wanted to have it cut down, but since then it had taken on a new inhabitant. Sheltering between two of the ancient buttress roots in the shade of its dusty cordate leaves was a dark shape. Not Buddha. Bomb-boy.

  Noman jumped down off the parapet and crossed the roof to the exit, passing Tariq’s mother who was pulling down sheets from the line. She shrank away from him and hissed like a cat.

  #

  Noman went out through the kitchens to the servant’s quarters, pausing to pick up a bowl of meat in curry sauce and nodding to the guard at the back door as he passed. He walked between the raised beds of the abandoned cottage garden and across the dead lawn to the solitary pipal tree. He squatted down beside the boy and offered him the bowl.

  While the boy shovelled the curry into his mouth with his right hand, Noman recounted the day’s events. He shared with him his frustration and his fears, his sense that nothing was going according to plan.

  The boy listened sympathetically.

  Noman could have had the boy shot at any time in the last few weeks, a simple order and a sniper’s bullet could have ended the threat long before the boy had any chance to press his trigger switch. The question was why hadn’t he? There was the matter of the bamiyat, the oath. But the truth was he had come to enjoy these sessions. The boy was a ready listener and in talking to him Noman did not feel bound by the usual constraints. He felt able to say what he was really thinking. This was what it must be like for Catholics in their confessional boxes, he thought.

  And why shouldn’t he tell him whatever he liked? The boy was doomed, a self-shredding device. It didn’t matter what was said. There was no security risk. It would disappear into the air.

  He had even teased the boy’s life story out of him. He was, as Noman suspected, an orphan. He’d grown up in a small village in Afghanistan and his parents had died in an air strike. At fourteen he was sent by his uncles to the local madrassa, where he was told that Pharaoh had come to destroy Islam and it was his obligation to sacrifice himself in defence of it. After six months he was sent for formal training as a suicide bomber in a desert city. It seemed likely to Noman that the city was Quetta in Pakistan. From there the boy travelled back across the mountains to fulfil his obligation. It was as he approached an enemy base that the car he was travelling in was stopped at a checkpoint. He was pulled out of the car and his suicide vest removed. He was sent to prison. The boy had described his shame at failing to complete his holy work. His uncles had disowned him and the adult inmates had repeatedly abused him. He had escaped during a mass break-out organised by the Taliban. One of his abusers had dragged him out through a hole blown in the prison wall. He would not describe the time between the escape and joining Abu Dukhan’s band of men, but the manner of his silence suggested some even deeper shame.

  It was Abu Dukhan who had promised the boy a path back to redemption. He had offered him a blanket and a bed of straw in a hollow in a mulberry tree, which was as much kindness as anyone had ever offered him. Above all, he had offered the boy the opportunity, if he was patient, to put on a suicide vest again. While he waited, he had watched the men of the House of War building the bomb as day after day they shovelled radioactive shit into the smelter. He had watched them physically deteriorate. He had been there, watching the wedding feast from his tree, when the drone strike had happened.

  In the aftermath of the attack, it was Abu Dukhan who had given him the suicide vest and told him that it was his destiny, as man-child, in accordance with the ancient prophesy, to destroy Pharaoh.

  The boy believed that the index finger of his right hand was the Shahadat, the finger of Allah, and that he must use this finger on the trigger switch to be assured of a place in Paradise.

  ‘You will have your vengeance,’
Noman promised him. ‘The traitor will be exposed and discredited and then you can do your work. I’ll do whatever it takes.’

  While he was talking Raja Mahfouz approached. He stopped at a respectful distance.

  ‘What is it?’ Noman called out.

  ‘We’ve found the girl.’

  37. With the Lahore party crowd

  It was like being at the centre of a kaleidoscope, the spinning lights from the dance floor reflecting off the walls and the marble floors, the heat radiating out of her body. The music was a thumping remixed Desi collage recently arrived, like Leyla, from London. All around her the Who’s Who of the Lahore party crowd were grinding against each other with long, lean bodies and huge grins on their faces. There must be some good ecstasy in circulation – proof, if any were needed, of the local aphorism that you could get hold of anything if you knew the right, i.e. “wrong”, people. The best you could say about it was that it was a Taliban nightmare come true.

  It felt like she was the only one not in on the joke. She had no job to speak of, no money and no wish to bag herself a prince from amongst their preening ranks. All she had was her determination to find Ed.

  They’d let her go at Heathrow eventually and she’d made it onto the flight as last call was announced.

  She pushed out through French windows onto the back lawn. There was a pool with a few of the most wasted revellers splashing around in it and on the far side several people were chatting on their mobile phones. One of them nodded in recognition as she passed.

  There were sprinklers at work across the vast lawn and it sparkled by moonlight like thousands of tiny mirrors. And there were fireflies, sudden traceries in the darkness, blinking at her, inviting her towards them.

  She removed her Converse and luxuriated in the feel of the wet grass between her toes. There was no point even thinking about how much water was being squandered. It was the kind of calculation that made you want to scream. The father of the guy who was hosting the party was the Director of Export for Pakistan Ordnance Factories, and responsible for a joint venture with the South Koreans to sell cluster munitions to tin-pot dictators. All the ingredients were present for a fin-de-siècle blog about the country going-to-hell-in-a-handcart. But that wasn’t why she was here. She was looking for a bootlegger named Salman who ran a network of motorcycle couriers and bolans, second-hand min-vans, delivering high-end foreign alcohol to the city’s elite. All her other lines of enquiry had failed. The city police, who could normally be relied upon to cough up information in exchange for a generous khancha (bribe) had no idea of the whereabouts of Edward Henry Malik, recently arrived from London. They knew nothing about any Red Notice. A call for help on the Internet had yielded nothing but far-fetched speculation.