The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  What of Mehsud and his advisers? Surely they knew of the whereabouts of this difficult-to-pin-down group – all summer thousands of Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships swept the Taliban strongholds, picking off forts and hideouts one by one, searching for clues. The number of American drones increased to such an extent that there was a constant buzzing in the air, like mosquitoes that could never be swatted away. Then on August 5th, Mehsud was killed in a drone attack on the small town of Zahara, a few miles to the east of the Taliban stronghold of Makeen.

  With his death all talk of itami devices ended. Not a whisper. It was as though the threat evaporated into the air. In Washington and Islamabad they let out a collective sigh of relief. They told themselves that the House of War was a tall tale, an absurd boast by a gang of ill-equipped mountain fighters. But Noman wasn’t so sure. In his book absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence. Just because people had stopped talking about them didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

  ‘I’m thinking of going to look for them,’ Noman said.

  ‘If you go up there you’re signing your own death warrant,’ Khan told him. ‘You know what happened to Colonel Imam.’

  Noman laughed bitterly.

  ‘You think it’s funny ha-ha?’ Khan snapped. ‘Do you know how you look? You’re sweating alcohol. I can see your eyes. Do you think people in this business don’t know what’s going on with you?’

  ‘I’ll cease drinking tomorrow.’

  ‘Ceasing tomorrow!’ Khan shook his head in exasperation. ‘Always there is tomorrow. That’s funny, Noman. You do that.’ He put down his teacup. ‘Come home. Mumayyaz is waiting for you. She loves you very much. Stick with your current responsibilities.’

  ‘I need a mission. Work is medicine for me.’

  Khan leaned across the table and said, ‘You’re protecting the most wanted man in the world. What more do you want?’

  ‘Oh please,’ Noman hissed, pushing back his chair. ‘Bin Laden’s a toothless tiger. We both know that. He’s a bugbear to frighten the Americans with and to keep the lunch moolah rolling in. He hasn’t left the house in five years. You don’t need me to keep an eye on him and you don’t want me going up there anyway. Anyone could do it. I need real work.’

  Khan stared hard at him. ‘Relax. Sober up. Call me in a day or two and we’ll discuss what you should do.’ He called for the bill. ‘Don’t go anywhere until you’re sober.’

  They went out to the car park. Khan gripped Noman’s sleeve.

  ‘People are watching you,’ he said. ‘Evil people who wish you ill are watching you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Noman demanded.

  ‘You’re not amongst friends. You should trust no one except me.’

  6. The one-legged mullah

  Khan spent that evening in Peshawar having dinner with a village mullah at one of the rattletrap gypsy shacks between the Grand Trunk Road and the Kabul River. The mullah was of the Kakar tribe of Uruzgan in Southern Afghanistan. He had joined the Taliban at its inception and served under the warlord Dadullah Akhund, who had a reputation for beheading his enemies. It was said that the mullah had been involved in the massacre of thousands of ethnic Hazara in Bamiyan province and that he had also had a hand in dynamiting the Giant Buddha statues.

  These days the mullah scratched a living in the tribal areas. In return for food he performed circumcision rites, officiated at weddings and funerals, and conducted the occasional exorcism. In the recent past he and Khan had collaborated several times in matters relating to the presence of foreign fighters there. Like most Pashtuns, the mullah was convinced that all good things came from Pashtuns and whatever was bad came from aliens (Americans, Russians, Tajiks, Punjabis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, etc – take your pick), and like all Pashtuns he’d been taught since the cradle that to resist foreign domination was what it was to be a Pashtun.

  He was a large intolerant man of few words. With his weathered, outsize features and veins of scar tissue, and his clothes marbled with grease and grime, he looked like he’d been hewn out of the local onyx marble, which only served to make his ill-fitting, pink plastic leg all the more incongruous. He’d lost the original to a Russian anti-personnel mine back in the eighties.

  Khan had collected the mullah and his boy from outside a tiny concrete shack in the Tehkal quarter, the filthy flyblown area behind University Road. Khan had tried to persuade the mullah to leave the boy behind but the mullah was having none of it. ‘He is my oath,’ he’d insisted. So they had driven out here, near where the Kabul River met the mighty Indus. The food was good and it was relatively quiet this late in the season. If something went wrong there would be fewer casualties.

  The collection of shacks and the elderly ferris wheel alongside them had appeared on the pebble beach when the cold weather lifted, and would last until the river swelled with snow melt from the Hindu Kush and the gypsies moved again.

  The open-sided hut where they chose to eat was strung with fairy lights and had rope charpoys arranged around rickety wooden tables. The cook had an orange hennaed beard and grunted in approval when Khan chose the largest from amongst several Mahseer with glistening golden bodies and yellow-red fins that were stacked in a white plastic cool box.

  While he gutted and cleaned the fish, Khan and the mullah and Khan’s driver sat on the rope beds. The weary mullah removed his leg and rubbed his stump. The mullah’s boy squatted on the pebbles at the edge of the light in his ragged black overcoat with the bulky vest beneath it. This was what it must have been like for Dr Frankenstein, Khan reflected. You start out full of optimism, with a belief in progress, you do your best, but it turns out that all you can do is make monsters. It becomes an issue of damage limitation. You hope you can keep them in the fold so they are useful. But you can't control everything you create.

  The cook’s teenage son brought them a tray with mismatched cups and saucers and a metal teapot. The mullah watched the teenager pouring the tea as if he aroused some dreadful appetite, and Khan felt a shiver of distaste followed by a sudden surge of alarm, which he struggled not to show. What if the mullah’s boy was jealous? Was this how it would end, in a fit of murderous petulance? He glanced at the boy. No visible expression. If the boy harboured murderous rage he was keeping it well hidden. The cook’s son finished and went back inside the shack.

  I’m too old for this, Khan told himself.

  He remembered the first time that the mullah had shown him what was hidden underneath the boy’s black coat – a fabric vest packed with a mixture of potassium chlorate and ammonium nitrate and covered in a coating of ball bearings sunk in epoxy resin – he’d felt a profound sense of disappointment. He’d set out to defend Pakistan from those that threatened its borders. Was this where it got you, sharing dinner with a teenage suicide bomber?

  There was a lot of talk of helping bring the Pashtuns into the twenty-first century but Khan regarded this as nonsense. His belief was that a more modest goal was advisable. Dragging them out of the Stone Age would make a start.

  The reason the mullah was down in Peshawar was to report to the feudal landowner or malik, who provided him with housing and whose tenants the mullah served. The landowner was no longer able to travel up to his land holdings. His reputation had suffered a terrible blow after an assassination attempt against him, which killed one of his guards. He had left town immediately after the attempt and failed to attend the guard’s funeral. He had been too scared go to, which was viewed as the worst crime amongst Pashtuns who valued physical courage above all else. You could not show fear in the tribal areas and remain a malik in anything but name.

  The mullah poured his tea from the cup into his saucer and drank from that, slurping noisily.

  ‘There is a situation developing,’ Khan said.

  The mullah squinted at him over the saucer. ‘What kind of situation?’

  ‘Someone is showing an interest in the House of War.’

  ‘As I said they would,’ the mul
lah told him.

  With Pashtuns, Khan reminded himself, and with tribal people generally, it was a commanding voice and an assured presence that counted. ‘You know your part in this,’ he said, sternly.

  The mullah shrugged.

  ‘If this individual comes looking for the House of War,’ Khan continued, ‘it is possible that he will find his way to you.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Noman Butt. He is a bold, ruthless and ambitious man. He is not to be underestimated. If he finds you, I want you to make sure he doesn’t learn something that might be open to misinterpretation.’

  ‘Misinterpretation?’

  ‘We both know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘You should have had me silenced when you had the chance,’ the mullah said.

  ‘Who can say for sure what I should have done?’ Khan nodded to his driver, who went and fetched a briefcase from the car. Khan passed it to the mullah, who opened it and stared indignantly, as always, at the bundles of rupees inside. Khan knew that the mullah did not like to talk about money. He did not see himself as a venal man. He lived simply. He did not drink. He did not fornicate (except with the occasional boy, which did not count). He was a crook but a crook from tradition so as not to be thought a fool.

  ‘I will be deeply hurt if you do not accept this gift,’ Khan told him, in the usual manner.

  It had always been said of Pashtuns that they could not be bought only rented for a while.

  ‘What would you have me do with Noman Butt if he finds me?’ the mullah asked, eventually.

  ‘Put a halt to his investigation.’

  ‘How do you suggest that I do that?’

  ‘You’re not usually this slow.’

  The mullah eyed him speculatively. ‘You don’t like this Noman very much do you?’

  ‘My feelings on the matter are not important,’ Khan said. ‘My priority is the security of the state.’

  The mullah nodded solemnly, ‘The security of the state…’ He closed the briefcase and set it down by his side.

  The cook brought them their fish on a metal platter. It had been dredged in chickpea flour and spices and fried to a golden hue. They sunk their fingers in the succulent flesh and lifted morsels to their mouths. The mullah ate as noisily and messily as he drank, pausing between mouthfuls to wipe his fingers on a pile of freshly baked flatbread. Khan ate sparingly. He found the prospect of sudden death robbed him of his appetite. The boy in the suicide vest did not eat at all. When they were done, the mullah stretched out on a charpoy and Khan’s driver passed around a snuffbox.

  The mullah was right, Khan thought. It would have been sensible to have killed him when he had the chance. Even though he was paying him, Khan had little confidence that the mullah would do as instructed. His best remaining hope was that Noman gave up on this foolish idea of searching for the House of War.

  They dropped the mullah and his boy back in Tehkal and drove back to Rawalpindi. At Hasan Abdal they left the Karokoram and joined the Grand Trunk Road that stretches for sixteen hundred miles from Kabul all the way to Chittagong in India.

  Khan went to bed at midnight, without touching the glass of milk that his daughter Mumayyaz left on his bedside table, as she had done every day since his wife died. There were times when he felt weighed down by mourning – for his beloved wife, for the nobility of the struggle to secure Pakistan and for the man-child that he never had.

  7. Fear and loathing in the brandy shop

  His mother was the village whore and he had no idea who his father was. Now he over-revved a state-of–the art, turbo-fucking-charged Range Rover, jerked off to fisting nuns on a ruggedised Toughbook and hosed miscreants with a Generation 4 Glock pistol, thank you very much. He scared the living shit out of anyone he pleased to.

  Noman Butt was born in a one-room hut in a village of low-caste Saraiki-speaking Hindus on the banks of the mighty River Indus. The village sat astride the smuggling route that runs through Sindh from Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, and was just a few miles from the shrine to an ancient Sufi mystic, where drumbeats filled the night air, and uncovered women in red spun like dervishes. The soft aroma of hashish and cooked bread wafted through the tiny alleyways and old men with watery eyes sucked on clay pipes.

  In the summer the heat hit you like a five-knuckle wallop. It was on such a day when the temperature reached forty-eight degrees that his mother died. She fell across the door to their hut and trapped him alone inside. He was four years old. It was two days before one of her more impatient and impassioned clients broke down the door. Noman had survived by drinking water from a brass bowl, an offering to a Hindu deity.

  He didn’t know which one.

  From the village he was taken to an orphanage in Karachi and raised as a true believer, though he was never allowed to forget that he came from Hindu stock. It didn’t seem to matter that the village had disappeared without trace after corrupt local officials diverted floodwaters to protect a prominent landowner’s fields. It wasn’t the kind of past you could so easily erase. There were times when it felt like he carried a mass of Hindu gods on his shoulders, swarming like flies above their sacrifices.

  He had stolen their water and one day they would make him pay the price.

  #

  It was after midnight when Khan’s Chief of Staff, Tufail Hamid, found him. He was in a brandy shop squeezed between a boss-eyed whore and a musth malang, a filthy, stoned beggar from one of the local shrines who controlled a clutch of giggling, half-naked boys who were gathered at their feet. The malang was wearing a dress, with a headdress made from animal skins and feathers like a pagan shaman.

  ‘Tufail!’ Noman roared, waving his fists. ‘Salem Aleikum! I want to talk to you!’ He batted away the whore’s roving hands and shoved her along the bench to make a space. He slapped the wood. ‘Come here! Come here!’

  Reluctantly, without bothering to disguise his distaste, Tufail stepped between the boys on the floor and sat alongside him.

  ‘I waited for over an hour at the Cave,’ he said.

  Noman scrunched up his face. ‘What?’

  ‘You stood me up.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘You’re here now.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Tufail demanded. ‘What do you want to talk to me about? Does Mumayyaz know you’re here?’

  ‘Don’t be such a killjoy.’ Noman hooked him around the neck and dragged him under his arm in a headlock. He patted the crown of Tufail’s head. ‘Faithful Tufail.’ He leant close, his mouth next to Tufail’s ear. ‘Evil people are watching me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Tufail gasped. ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘Something’s not right here. No. No. No. Your boss Khan is up to something.’

  Abruptly he let go of Tufail, who shook himself and rubbed his neck.

  ‘You bastard.’

  But Noman wasn’t listening. He’d been working himself into a fury over what Khan had told him outside the restaurant. What did the old man mean? Who were these unnamed enemies supposedly ranged against him?

  He staggered to his feet, scattering boys in every direction.

  ‘Mere Saath Aaiye,’ he said, Come on!

  #

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting on plastic chairs outside a hole-in-the-wall chai shop. Noman was alternating sips of sweet, milky tea and puffs on a cigarette.

  ‘I’m sure you’re just being paranoid,’ Tufail told him once he’d explained.

  ‘He said it!’ Noman protested, louder than he’d intended. He looked around suspiciously. There was no change in the tempo of snoring emerging from the nearby line of rickshaws. Satisfied they were not being overheard, he leant forward and repeated the warning, ‘Evil people who wish you ill are watching you. That’s what he said. He doesn’t say things without cause.’

  Tufail gave him a sympathetic look. ‘Are you a hundred percent positive that’s what he said?’

  Noman gritted his teeth. ‘Of course I’m
bloody positive.’

  ‘It’s just that you’re not yourself at the moment. You’ve been filling yourself up with drink and God knows what else.’

  ‘You think I imagined it?’

  Tufail rocked his head from side-to-side. ‘You have a high-pressure job. Maybe the most difficult job in Pakistan.’

  ‘I’m not crazy!’

  ‘Calm down!’ Tufail reached out with one white-gloved hand and placed it on top of Noman’s. ‘I’m not calling you crazy. I just think you need rest and recuperation.’ He glanced around. ‘Leave bin Laden to Khan. It was stupid of you to go up there. You have other fish to fry. What about Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Tehrik-i-Taliban?’

  Noman shrugged. ‘I feel like a naysayer. That’s all I do, say no. No you can’t kill this so-and-so or no you can’t blow up that dam. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t done anything since Mumbai.’

  He had always considered the four-day rampage through the city in 2008 as one of the highpoints of his career. Whispering down the voice-over-internet into the ear of the gunman Mohammed Ajmal Kasab as he strode through the train station and fired into the crowd at the Metro Cinema had been one of the most voyeuristically exciting experiences of his life.

  ‘Your chance will come again,’ Tufail told him. ‘And when it does you’ll be transformed. I know you. When you get the bit between your teeth you’re unstoppable. In the meantime you need to take it easy.’ He sighed. ‘I think you should go home. It will make Khan happy and Mumayyaz too.’