The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

‘Then he’s not dead,’ she hissed.

  He licked his lips. He hadn’t come here with any kind of plan other than to vent his anger and break the place up but now that he was here a kind of improvisational faith had taken over. It was like going into battle. He was over the start line and it was time to wing it.

  ‘Khan killed him.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘Khan was our friend.’

  There was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. He saw that the cuffs of her shirt were shaking and he knew it was costing her to be this brave. No wonder. She was in a fix, and how could she be certain of anything any more. Suddenly he felt giddy with promise.

  ‘Khan was not your friend,’ he said, circling her. ‘This is what he said, word for word, on my honour: “Hunt down the traitor like a dog and leave his bloody corpse to fester by the roadside. Kill his parents, his wife and his servants. Demolish his family home.” It’s only because of me that you’re still alive and in this house. You wouldn’t even have a body to bury if it wasn’t for me. But, inshallah, he is in a better place now.’

  ‘He’s in Paradise, where you can’t touch him,’ she retorted.

  He grabbed her trembling arm and with his other hand pulled away the scarf so her hair tumbled free. It was thick as molasses. He leant in to whisper. ‘I loved him. He was beautiful. So beautiful. Such soft, smooth skin. Such a magnificent arse.' Her doe eyes widened. He saw fear but also recognition in them – she knew about her husband’s tastes. Tariq was not such a great deceiver after all. ‘But he was not as beautiful as you are. If he was alive I’d kill him again, here and now, for his betrayal of you, for his unfaithfulness and promiscuity, for his unnatural behaviour, but most of all to keep your beauty for myself.’

  ‘I’d throw acid in my face to stop you.’

  He snatched her hands. ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

  He pressed his lips to her fingertips. She flinched, appalled.

  She spoke softly, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘I’d kill you if I could.’

  ‘What is wrong with you? I am offering to protect you. Do you have any idea how vulnerable you are?

  ‘You killed my husband.’

  ‘I killed a traitor and besides I have helped you to find someone better.’

  ‘There is no one better.’

  ‘Oh yes there is! Me!’

  She spat in his face. He let go of her. Obviously he wasn’t going to marry her but it had occurred to him that he did need a new operational base if he was going to launch an investigation into how the British had managed to penetrate the ISI, if Tariq had acted alone and whether he had help from on high. Headquarters was impossible at the moment, with recriminations flying and the threat of a full-scale witch-hunt in the air. Hanging around there increased his chances of being scapegoated. And he wasn’t going back to the house he shared with Khan and Mumayyaz in Rawalpindi. He didn’t want Khan anywhere near his investigation. This seemed as good a place as any. The house was situated in an easily secured cul-de-sac at the heart of Gulberg. There were high walls protected with broken glass. With a bit of work it could be made readily defensible. There was the potential for a mutually beneficial relationship. He’d need a regular fuck if he stayed on, of course. He ran his hand across his cheek gathering her spittle and licked it off his fingers.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked, cultivating a wounded expression. He was really enjoying himself now.

  ‘I wish it was poison.’

  He seized her again and twisted her arms behind her back. She turned her head away from him. ‘I can’t bear it. Such scorn on lips that were made for kissing.’ Abruptly he let go of her. He reached into the back of his jeans and took out his Glock. ‘If you can’t forgive me then you must kill me, take this gun and shoot me right in the chest.’ He put the gun in her hands and ripped open his kurta. ‘I killed Tariq!’

  Her whole body was wracked with sobs. He felt exultant.

  ‘Kill me or have me,’ he yelled. ‘Go on! Do it!’

  He pressed the cold hard O-ring of the muzzle against his chest and then it dropped and her legs buckled and she slumped against him as if he was the only person preventing her from falling apart. He buried his face in her hair and breathed in her musky scent.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ she whispered.

  ‘Your husband was a traitor,’ he whispered softly in her ear. ‘He betrayed you in the bedroom. And he betrayed his country for money. Killing me would kill the one person who can protect you. I can keep you safe. Do you hear me? Safe. You could go on living in this house.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You have to trust me,’ he said. He kissed the soft flesh of her neck. He lifted her chin and brushed her hair away from her face. He lifted the tears from under her eyes with his thumbs. ‘It’s going to be alright.’

  He kissed her on the lips and after a few moments she surrendered. A fresh thought occurred to him. Why was Khan so keen for him not to go looking for the House of War? And fresh on its heels another thought. If he discredited Khan and took his place he would become one of the most powerful men in Pakistan.

  14. No motto please, we’re British

  From the window of the plane, Ed watched the meandering Thames beneath him, the U-bend of the Isle of Dogs and the red flashing pin-light on One Canada Square, the brash “loads-a-money” landmarks on the river’s crowded banks – the tent-pole Dome, the unfinished Shard, the big-dick Gherkin, the fairground Eye…

  He was a failure, grand and total.

  British by birth, Asian and Muslim by descent and agnostic by conviction, Edward Henry Malik found it difficult to explain why he felt such a strong allegiance to Britain, perhaps because he found it difficult to define what it meant to be British. Not just what it meant to him but what it meant to anybody born in this beautiful, damp, varied country that was thankfully free of poisonous spiders. The British rarely seemed to have spent any time defining themselves. It was a mark of self-confidence, he believed – Britain was a trading nation whose instinct was to absorb influences and peoples (Jews, Poles, Afro-Caribbeans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Russians) rather than peevishly trumpet its superiority. He liked to belong to a country that was suspicious of cheerleading claptrap, where the goosestep had never caught on and satire refused to hold its tongue for long.

  He loved the countryside with an unsentimental passion. His earliest memories were of school trips there, particularly a visit to Winston Churchill’s family home at Chartwell. It was said of its views across the Weald of Kent that, in the dark days of May 1940, it inspired Churchill to promise nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat because it was better to die fighting than live with the shame of slavery. Like Churchill, Ed would suffer bouts of both belligerence and black dog depression. But unlike Winston, who never saw the value of silence, Ed often disguised his true feelings behind bloody-minded indifference. And in that he was more like that other Winston, the reluctant hero of George Orwell’s nightmare parable of the future 1984. Like Winston Smith he yearned, without much hope, for the ordinary pleasures of humanity – a walk in the countryside or the act of lovemaking.

  He remembered the kindness and fairness of his teachers in Tower Hamlets, their colour-blind humanity. He remembered his mother helping him with his homework and afterwards reading to him from Dickens’ Great Expectations and Kipling’s Kim. Looking back further, he remembered building a snowman in Weaver’s Fields and being taken to meet Santa Claus every year. He ate Marmite on toast and Wotsits. He hid behind the sofa during Doctor Who.

  Ed’s father was born in British India and his mother in Birmingham. His father was an emigrant from one country and a newcomer in two. He moved against his will from India to Pakistan and from there by choice to England. He was a former Merchant Navy officer who arrived in England in 1963 and set himself up as restaurateur on Brick Lane. He was a stern man of flinty and adamant Tory views who gave his sons the names of Plantagenet kings. Father and son were never close,
nor were Edward and his younger brother Geoffrey. The first love of Edward’s life was his mother and she was fiercely ambitious for him. She was a shopkeeper’s daughter with aspirations. She was the one who demanded he apply to Oxford because ‘if there are going to be Muslims in the upper class, then Edward is going to be one of them‘. She didn’t like her firstborn to be called Ed ‘as if he was a taxi-driver or a road sweeper’. She was a bookkeeper by training and she worked with his father at the restaurant.

  The focus of Ed’s early life was home and junior school. His days were filled with reading, writing practise, drawing, mathematics and physical exercise. Family life was close-knit. His parents were not particularly wealthy but neither were they poor. They lived in a narrow Georgian terrace in Whitechapel and avidly listened to Radio 4. They took care to ensure that Ed did not fall in with the Brick Lane mafia or the Cannon Street Posse.

  A teacher organised boxing lessons three nights a week and thanks to his father’s steely insistence Ed learned the mechanics of jump rope, speed bag and heavy bag. He went from junior school to secondary school and did well. He grew in confidence and was quick to put his hand up in class.

  His confidence was short-lived. At school the other boys soon tired of his eagerness to please. They shouted ‘big head‘ at him and drew stick pictures of him with a bloated head. In response he became withdrawn and introverted. He talked quietly to himself. The ringleader of those tormenting him was a new arrival from Bangladesh who lived in a council flat in Stepney Green. One winter afternoon Ed followed his tormentor home and cornered him in a dark alley, where he proceeded to use his fists to pummel him into submission. They left him alone after that but the damage was done. He became wary and suspicious. He had trouble making friends.

  Nevertheless, he continued to do well at school and in accordance with his mother’s wishes he applied – and was accepted – to read History and English at Balliol College, Oxford. At Balliol, he led a curiously dualistic life. By day, “Ed” marched in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of Bosnia and Palestine and addressed fellow students with a bullhorn from an upturned milk crate. And by night “Edward” wore a dinner jacket to dine with the warden of the college. He wrote his dissertation on Modernism and Post Colonial Enchantment. He continued to box and continued to win in the ring. He told a friend. ‘The rich don’t know how to fight.’ It was at Balliol that he was approached in the usual way and offered a career in the Intelligence Services. He refused. If anything it caused him to pay greater attention to his Muslim heritage.

  On coming down from Oxford and securing a job at HSBC bank in the City of London, he registered for part-time Saturday morning classes in Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies so he could read the Koran in its original language. He joined the Islamic Society of Britain. The ISB was a home for middle-class Muslims who aligned themselves to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Hamas and wanted to make Britain more of an Islamic country.

  His flirtation with Islam was short-lived, however. Two experiences turned him away from it. They occurred during a placement with a bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was there that he observed African women in black abayas scavenging amongst the rubbish bins outside wealthy Saudi residences, and in the slum known as Karatina, a perversion of “quarantine”, that he first saw naked poverty: thousands of fellow Muslims who had been living in Saudi Arabia for decades but were deemed illegal and abandoned to cardboard shanties under a flyover. It was then that it dawned on him that Britain, his home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan. He had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They had their own mosques and were given council housing. Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia.

  The second event was the cataclysm of September 11th 2001. It was late afternoon on a Tuesday in Riyadh and the bank was due to close. Ed got a call from a friend who worked at the military hospital who told him that one of the twin towers had been hit by a plane. He rushed into the manager’s office and switched on CNN. Soon the small office was filled with Saudis, some in western business suits but most in long white thobes and red-checked headscarves. On the screen there was a vast dark cloud rising from lower Manhattan and all around him his colleagues were wide-eyed and silent. Awe-struck. Then the second plane struck and one of the men said, ‘Wow! Hit it!’

  Then they were all smiling.

  Ed walked out of the bank and did not go back. Later that night he would watch a member of the Saudi royal family describe the attacks as a Jewish-American conspiracy. The prince said that not a single Jew had been killed in the attacks because they had been warned to stay away. As for the American assertion that seventeen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, he dismissed it as ridiculous and said they were regular passengers, tourists and students.

  What Ed did next he would always find difficult to explain, as if his actions were questions instead of answers. He caught a flight back to the UK and walked into a Royal Navy Recruitment Centre. Anger and restlessness both played a part, along with a sense that he had to do something in response to the attacks. Also his father had been a seaman. All reasons but none of them sufficient to explain his actions – maybe sometimes, he told himself, we do a thing in order to find out the real reason for it.

  In the Navy Ed learned something of the arts of navigation and seamanship during a couple of months on a minesweeper in the Irish Sea. But the British state had other plans for him. After completing the officer’s training course at the Royal Naval College, he was immediately selected for the Joint Services Intelligence Organisation in Chicksands. He spent no time on ships after that, working entirely with land forces on campaigns far from the sea. After his initial training at Ashford, which included learning Pashto, he worked briefly on ”special duties” in Afghanistan. Then in 2003 he was plucked out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. He spent the next few months alongside MI6 officers on a fruitless and frustrating hunt for weapons of mass destruction, followed by many more months of hunting down former Baathists, while around him Iraq descended into chaos.

  He gave up for a while and went back to banking but it wasn’t long before he bowed to the inevitable. In early 2005 he joined “The Firm” (MI6) and, once he’d completed his training, became a fully-fledged spy. He was assigned to the AF-PAK Controllerate and tasked with developing relationships with potential informants within the ISI. MI6 wanted an asset inside the ISI for the simple reason that the ISI had so many assets spread across the range of terrorist networks that operated under the “umbrella” of the Taliban, and the requirement to know what was going on in the mind of the enemy had been given extra importance because of the 7/7 bombings and the upcoming deployment of British armed forces to Helmand.

  A month after his arrival in Afghanistan, a covert MI5 operation uncovered a Pakistani intelligence cell operating out of Manchester University, a young student in Oldham died of an asthma attack brought on by smoking heroin, and in Islamabad Javid Aslam Khan answered the phone to a panicked cell member on his first overseas assignment, a young Punjabi named Tariq Mahoon who was ripe for turning.

  Once turned, Ed was made his handler – a twenty-four hour assignment with all other activities on hold. For the next five years, Tariq Mahoon had been Six’s eyes and ears inside the ISI, passing information on the links between Pakistani intelligence and insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan and the adjacent tribal areas, and the comings and goings of British-born Asians to the terrorist training camps there.

  But now Tariq was dead, shot by Khan, and Ed was unsure what that meant for him.

  15. Going underground

  Where feasible Ed preferred to travel above ground, so he took a bus from Paddington, travelling south down Park Lane past the Animals In War memorial and, at the edge of Green Park, the half-built Bomber Command memorial. Sometimes it felt like the whole city was a mausoleum, its open spaces punctuated by monuments to public sacrifi
ce. The bus went around the back of Buckingham Palace and down Vauxhall Bridge Road towards Vauxhall Cross, the Inca-pyramid-on-the-Thames that was home to MI6.

  He was allowed through the first airlock but stopped at reception and informed his pass had been revoked. He was given a piece of card with a handwritten Whitehall address on it and told to report there immediately. Slinging his rucksack over his shoulder he set off east along Albert Embankment and crossed the river again at Westminster Bridge.

  Craig’s Court was at the north end of Whitehall situated an equal distance between the horseback statue of Charles II and the Banqueting House, the site of Charles I’s execution. It was a cul-de-sac so unremarkable that Ed had never noticed its existence before. He stood at attention before a set of wooden double doors in a stone portico with Telephone Exchange written on them and smiled up at a camera. The doors clicked open.

  Roland Totty from Human Resources was waiting for him inside.

  ‘Bloody bad news about Tariq,’ Totty told him, leading him down an unremarkable corridor with tiled walls, ‘Queen Bee is furious.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘Best if I leave it to her to deliver the news.’

  Ed didn’t like Totty. He was a Home Counties boy who wore red socks and imagined it made him interesting. He lived in Putney or Chiswick, somewhere like that on the District line, and he struggled to pay school fees. Ed thought him a buffoon.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ed asked.

  ‘We’re going underground,’ Totty replied, light-heartedly, ‘like the song.’

  Ed could imagine what Paul Weller would make of that. He remembered what Weller had said when the Prime Minister, a former Eton pupil and member of the cadet corps, had described Eton Rifles as his favourite song: ‘It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song.’

  They went through a fire door, down a spiral staircase and the length of an underground corridor, opening a series of internal doors with mesh-lined windows, and down a further set of concrete steps to an older, mustier tunnel that opened out into a suite of mothballed basement offices.