The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  ‘Yes,’ Noman agreed in a resigned tone.

  And so finally he went home.

  8. Good vibrations

  Noman drove the blacked-out streets of Rawalpindi’s old town, along narrow alleyways of shops with their shutters down, eventually turning into a high walled cul-de-sac at the end of which was an archway with a set of wooden doors on hanging stiles with iron straps and white-painted jambs. This was the entry point to the Khan mansion, a large sprawling affair of many floors and wings and sagging roofs and painted shutters, that was spread out over several blocks and seemed to insinuate itself in the spaces between adjacent buildings like water between rocks in a stream.

  He beeped the horn and the elderly chowkidar dragged the doors open and threw up an enthusiastic salute as Noman drove into the small courtyard beyond. It didn’t matter what time of night or day he pitched up at the gate, the old chap was always there, grinning like an idiot and stamping his heels together and saluting. The chowkidar was a Christian convert from a much-persecuted Hindu village close to the Indian border and he seemed to imagine that his lowly status gave him some affinity to Noman. In return Noman despised the old fool and would have happily got rid of him by now, but the hiring and firing of domestic staff lay in his wife’s gift and she enjoyed the spectacle of her husband’s discomfort too much to sack the man. He made a mental note to get the local street youths to beat him up at the first opportunity. In the Swat Valley, when the Taliban were in charge, they’d made Hindus wear red turbans and Noman regarded that as a good thing. Make ‘em stand out so you can easily herd them together, he thought.

  There were two other cars in the courtyard: Khan’s silver Mercedes and beside it his wife’s white Pajero, which she hardly ever used. Noman parked between them and went inside without a backward glance.

  He strode down cluttered passageways, brim-full with hat racks, stags’ heads and stuffed fishes in glass cases, the legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive Khans, and up and down stairs, and along further corridors to the dark-panelled study that was lined with hardback books.

  It was in this room that he had first realised his father-in-law’s air of learning was a sham. The books all bore the ex libris stamp of a certain Colonel Arthur Neville of the 44th Regiment of Foot, and many of the pages were uncut. It was a gentleman’s library, looted intact from the site of the massacre of Lord Elphinstone’s ill-fated expeditionary army in the Tazeen Pass at the ignominious end of the First Afghan War in 1842, and its only real use was to provide kindling for the fire in the mild, wet winter months.

  By means of a secret lever concealed in the fireplace, he opened a door disguised as a bookcase and entered his wife’s apartments. Her bedroom was at the end of a narrow dimly lit corridor. It was a large and mysterious space, rendered exotic by candles, the centre dominated by a teak four-poster-bed with lustful serpents coiled around the columns, and a tapestry scene from Paradise of eager virgins on the canopy.

  As he had expected to, Noman found his wife Mumayyaz, en dishabille, reclining on the bed, surrounded by a litter of unwashed plates and cups, rifled magazines and torn up newspaper. She was wearing a white diaphanous nightgown that hardly concealed the folds and furls of her mountainous flesh. She was a big woman. Junoesque. With heels on she stood a couple of inches taller than Noman. She could bring a room to a halt by walking into it but as a rule she preferred to remain in bed. She had a huge mass of black hair, a large nose and a wide mouth that could take on many shapes and fit many things. Her complexion was her claim to beauty, for like that other fearsome Punjabi Benazir Bhutto, her skin was almost cream-white, and such wanton skin, pillows of it, soft and pliant as dough.

  She was awake of course. Like the wretched chowkidar at the gate, he had never managed to surprise her. She was smoking and the curls of drifting smoke were as yellow as the nicotine-stained canopy of the bed. She felt him examining her from the doorway and raised her eyes to glare at him, the magazine in her lap sliding off the covers and onto the floor, a glimpse of a buff male torso on glossy paper. There was something about her fierce stare and the way she held the cigarette in her mouth that had always aroused him.

  ‘You look awful,’ she said. Her voice was a master-class in contempt. ‘You really are a loathsome little Hindu.’

  Did she know about him drilling the boy’s arse? Khan might have told her, but it seemed just as likely that she knew it from looking at him. She had dark powers, Noman was convinced of it. She was psychic and she had the power to lay a curse. Once after a fight with her he had been shot at three times in twenty-four hours: once by a Tajik assassin sent from Kabul; once by a vengeful husband whose wife he’d given a bad case of crabs; and once by a nervous gate sentry who had taken him for a suicide bomber. It had been a warning from Mumayyaz, he was certain of that. He imagined her alone in bed, taking a break from pleasuring herself, waving her glistening fingers to spark the bullets in their chambers and send them spinning towards him.

  ‘I saw bin Laden,’ he said.

  ‘How is he?’

  Noman shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  ‘He’s a very attractive man. Don’t you think so?’ she said, partly to annoy him, but she believed it too. She was a sucker for any kind of celebrity. ‘Dignified and so accomplished. History is not going to forget him, is it? Did it make you jealous?’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘Come on, darling, I know you better than that. You’re in a sulk. It must be bad otherwise you wouldn’t be here snivelling at my feet. You’d be off tupping one of your little girls.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Or is it a little boy this time?’ She knew all about his wayward behaviour. There was nothing she liked better than to taunt him with his failings: the unruly temper so easily sparked to violence; the shameful upbringing that wrought the colossal chip on his shoulder; the bouts of mania and depression; the urgent promiscuity; the desperate need for power and recognition. She seemed to regard each weakness revealed with Machiavellian indulgence, as if they were tools to be used in the years ahead. And as for his taste for buggery, his near-philosophical obsession with mining the depths, it provoked near-gleeful torrents of abuse: ‘The cunt is too wide a berth and too deep a port for my anatomically challenged husband. Only the smallest and tightest of holes will fit his eager little soldier.’

  ‘No, you must be really in a funk to have shown up here,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame you weren’t here earlier. You could have seen Rifaz before she went to the airport.’ Rifaz was Mumayyaz’s daughter, Noman’s stepdaughter. Mumayyaz’s first husband had been a Punjabi politician once tipped for high office. He’d died in a mysterious explosion after two years of marriage. Rifaz had been the product of that marriage. She was a clever, rebellious girl with a grievance against the world. She’d flown back to an English all-girls boarding school that afternoon. ‘You know what the last thing she said to me was?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘That I should stop pretending to love you.’

  ‘Maybe she was right.’

  ‘Please. Spare me your self-pity.’

  ‘I’ve had a hard day.’

  ‘Don’t whine. I can’t bear it. You’re such a pathetic whiner. Sometimes I lie marooned here and wonder how you ever became a hero.’

  ‘You’re not marooned,’ he told her, ‘you’re just too lazy to move.’

  She ignored that. ‘I suppose the Indians must have been even more scared than you, shivering and shuddering in the snow, you crying out for your mummy and them crying out for their mummies, and all of you wetting yourselves, and you firing your little gun at them. It’s really nothing to brag about.’

  ‘I don’t brag about it.’

  ‘Except for when you’re too drugged up to remember, of course. Then you shout about it from the rooftops.’

  ‘I didn’t have a gun.’

  ‘Pardon me, I forgot. You did it with a tradesman’s tool. You know you really do look terrible, I mean you look like some unwashed holy man from a shrine.’
/>
  ‘I’m descended from holy men.‘

  ‘You don’t have to remind me,’ she said, ‘those terrible smelly fraudsters. No wonder you’re such an accomplished liar.’

  ‘Watch your tongue,’ he snapped.

  She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying: ‘You know what I’ve been reading? I’ve been reading about psychopaths.’

  ‘In She magazine? Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘I thought you were one. In fact I was convinced of it. But it says they dream in black and white.’

  Noman did not care to dwell on his turbulent childhood and its after-effects. He did not like to speak of it. Not for the first time he regretted telling her about his dreams. Looking at her he felt murderous anger. He’d have happily strangled her without feeling an inch of remorse.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, suddenly playful. Nothing turned her on so much as making him angry. She shifted on the bed and her nightgown gaped, offering him a view of her massive breasts and their maroon nipples. ‘Your secret is safe with me.’

  Who would she tell? The only time she left the house was on her monthly shopping spree to Dubai.

  ‘Come here and kiss me.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘You’re fragile tonight, aren’t you?’ She looked sideways at him, her face almost gentle for a moment, before resuming its customary shrewdness. ‘Is it bin Laden? Or is it Papa? Papa says you’re going looking for the House of War. You’re only going up there because he doesn’t want you to. You can be so childish sometimes.’

  ‘That was a private conversation.’

  ‘Silly.’ She nudged him with a painted toe, setting off a shiver of the bells on her ankle, the nightgown sliding back to reveal her thighs. ‘You know that Papa tells me everything.’

  Her toes described slow spirals around his groin. He felt himself stirring, despite himself. She knew exactly how to play him. She could coax an erection out of him in even the most trying circumstances.

  ‘And do you tell him everything?’ Noman managed.

  ‘Everything, darling.’

  She hooked a heel behind his thigh and pulled him towards her, rising from the bed so that she was level with his groin, her busy henna-stained fingers unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his jeans. She could move fast when the fancy took her.

  ‘I tell him that you are a man of vast appetite and uncommon desires,’ she said, scooping out his cock and balls. ‘I tell him you are a lion who must have red meat. I tell him that you will let nothing stand in the way of getting what you want. You’re not a psychopath, my love. You’re so much more than that. You’re an afreet. A demon!’

  She tossed her head to throw her hair back and made her mouth into a humid jungle cave and he went barrelling in. He groaned and extended his hands under her nightgown and down her broad pale back. She was a magnificent woman. If he was a lion then she was easily a lioness. As she went up and down, she never lost eye contact; her flashing eyes a beacon of promise.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, urging her on, ‘Yes! Fuckin yes!’

  Then he was gripping her hair, knotting the curls, while escalating spasms racked his pelvis and the backs of his legs, and his arse began to throb.

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

  She didn’t let him come though. With a popping noise, like a vacuum seal broken, she abruptly released him. He staggered backwards, wild-eyed and stiff as a tightly drawn bow, his arse vibrating and his face flushed with blood.

  ‘What the fuck?’ He yelled.

  Mumayyaz smacked her lips and wiped them with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Your phone’s ringing,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She shook her hair out.

  ‘It’s in your back pocket.’

  He grabbed the phone and held it to his ear.

  ‘What?’

  It was the duty officer in the watch room at ISI headquarters. He sounded terrified. He told Noman that the Americans had crossed the border in helicopters and killed bin Laden.

  ‘When?’ Noman demanded.

  ‘At least an hour ago.’

  ‘An hour! What the fuck? Why so long?’ He should have been informed within minutes of any assault on the Abbottabad house. ‘What about the bloody surveillance team?’

  Silence.

  ‘Dammit man, tell me!’

  9. The Abbottabad raid

  They began amongst the debris in the animal pen where the Black Hawk had come down. The Americans had destroyed it with thermite grenades before leaving, and the heat of the fire had warped the helicopter’s rotors so that it resembled the charred husk of a mutilated spider.

  ‘We have spoken to Haqqani’s people who have watchers in Jalalabad,’ Noman explained in a steely monotone. ‘They say that just after eleven o’clock last night two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from the airfield there. Shortly afterwards they crossed into our airspace undetected.’

  ‘Why undetected?’ Khan demanded.

  ‘Because our principal air defences are pointing east at India,’ Noman told him, ‘and the Americans have radar-dampening and noise-reduction technology. We were wide open. We always have been.’

  Noman had never seen Khan look so unsettled. The old man was standing with his mouth hanging slightly open and his shirt miss-buttoned, looking all of his seventy years. He’d rushed up here as soon as he’d heard the news, arriving not long after Noman. It was clear that whatever outcome Khan had expected from bin Laden’s long confinement, it had not been this – an American raid.

  ‘Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks, four Chinooks took off from the same airfield in Jalalabad,’ Noman told him. ‘We’re not sure but we believe that at least two of them crossed the border into Pakistan.’

  ‘We think the Chinooks put down in the tribal areas,’ Raja Mahfouz added, ‘we’re talking to some of our sources in the villages and trying to identify the exact location. We think the Chinooks were kept in reserve with their engines running as back-up in case of complications.’

  Major Raja Mohammed Mahfouz, Chief of Staff of SS Directorate and Noman’s deputy, was a shaven-headed giant with a thick ridge of bone running across his brow and a black bushy beard that covered his chest. He was a gruff, melancholy Pashtun from the North-West Frontier who had commanded one of Noman’s companies in Seventh Commando Battalion and Noman had brought him with him to the ISI. Like Noman, he had been up all night.

  ‘Meanwhile, the Black Hawks circled the city to the north following the ridgeline there and came in from the east,’ Noman said, pointing at the Sarban Hills. He was standing beside a detached helicopter wheel, ‘As you see one of them crashed here.’

  ‘Why?’ Khan demanded.

  ‘We don’t know yet. I’ve requested an air-crash investigation team from Mushaf Air Force base. They’re on their way. We don’t think that any of the Americans were injured in the crash and the setback doesn’t appear to have slowed them down. They used explosives to blow open the gate there.’

  He led them through the metal gates that were hanging off their hinges and into the alley that ran alongside the main building. A second locked gate had also been blown open. They entered the small courtyard where the courier lived with his wife and four children. There were crimson bloodstains in the dirt and flies feasting on them.

  ‘The courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was shot dead here and his wife beside him. The discarded shell casings are NATO standard 5.56 mm.’

  ‘What about the neighbours?’ Khan asked.

  ‘They undoubtedly heard the noise,’ Noman replied.

  ‘One of the locals posted on Twitter,’ Raja Mahfouz added, squinting at the Blackberry that was tiny in his hands, ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 AM…then in brackets…is a rare event.’

  ‘Did no one investigate?’

  ‘Anyone curious enough to come outside was told by a Pashto speaker that a security operation was underway and that they should go back inside their houses and turn
their lights off,’ Noman said. ‘It was dark. There was no moonlight. The Pashto speaker was dressed in a shalwar kameez and flak jacket and could easily have been mistaken for a plainclothes policeman.’

  ‘And our surveillance team?’ Khan asked.

  ‘Your surveillance team,’ Noman said, grimly.

  Khan blinked myopically. ‘My team?’

  ‘We’ll come to that.’ Noman led them to the paved patio at the front entrance to the house, where the courier’s brother Abrar and his wife had been shot, and together they went inside. There was a large unfurnished room with un-rendered walls and a crumpled gate that had once blocked the base of the staircase leading to the second floor. Near the top of the staircase there were more bloodstains and bullet holes in the concrete, marking the spot where Khalid, the Sheikh’s twenty-three-year-old son, had been shot several times and died.

  ‘They jumped over Khalid’s body,’ Noman explained. ‘Blew open the cage leading to the third floor and advanced to the landing.’ He climbed to the next level, swivelled at the top of the stairs and pointed to the nearest bedroom. ‘The Sheikh was in there with two of his wives.’

  He pushed open the door. More bloodstains.

  ‘The women resisted arrest,’ Raja Mahfouz said. ‘They attempted to shield him. The Americans shot one of them in the leg.’

  ‘Which one?’ Khan asked.

  ‘The Yemeni.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the military hospital,’ Raja Mahfouz told him.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The women were pushed aside. The Americans shot the Sheikh in the chest and in the head. He died there on the floor.’

  In silence they contemplated the ransacked room. Nine years and seven months after the Sheikh’s emissaries had brought down the Twin Towers and enraged a nation, the Americans had finally got their man. It wasn’t much of a place for the founder of Al Qaeda to die – a bare room with cheap nylon curtains and threadbare mattresses in a half-finished, shoddily constructed house.