The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  Totty stopped in front of a scuffed steel door.

  ‘Far as I go old chap,’ he said. ‘She’s in there waiting for you.’

  *

  It was said of Samantha Burns (Queen Bee to her underlings) that she was not even a household name in her own household and the only time her name appeared in newsprint was when she shimmied over to the palace to upgrade her gong. She was a woman of secrets who had come up via Hutcheson’s Grammar School, Glasgow University, Treasury, Six and then the call to attend the newly formed National Security Council in the Cabinet Office. The remarkable thing about Burns was that she was so lively and twinkly-eyed, and always ready to kick off her heels and bustle about in stockinged feet. It was as if her anonymity was not a product of the usual institutional greyness but rather of an essential slipperiness, an ability to bend light around her and thereby render herself invisible. She delivered bad news with an emollient smile and expressed friendly concern when people had done wrong. Crisis never disturbed her bonhomie.

  She was sitting on a plastic chair in one of the basement rooms with a tall skinny cappuccino in one hand. The object of her attention was plastered across several walls: a mishmash of satellite photos, mug shots, maps, receipts, waybills, freight certificates, Post-it notes, bills of lading, company accounts, bank records, transcripts of phone intercepts, letters and newspaper cuttings. Things were crossed out and new bits superimposed and glued on. Strings of red thread made connections as complex as any spider’s web.

  ‘It’s known as the Khyber Collage,’ Burns explained.

  Ed had heard of the Khyber Collage. He’d even seen it mentioned in footnotes in classified reports in Kabul. It was said to chart the growth of the broad and diverse movement that was radical Islamic militancy, going back decades to its roots in the Jihad against the Soviets and progressing to the current day. Depending on who you believed it was either a testament to diligent decades-long research or a metaphor for rampant paranoia. Ed struggled to remember what he’d heard of those responsible for its creation, not much more than gossip really, some kind of black ops outfit born of military intelligence known only as The Department. It had evolved from an even older outfit, the Afghan Guides, which had set up shop in Peshawar in the eighties and provided military assistance to the collection of Mujahideen groups known as the Peshawar Seven that were based there. The Department had limped on through the nineties when no one gave much of a shit about Afghanistan before enjoying a renaissance post 9/11. It was shut down after a controversy in 2005. Bodies had turned up in unexpected places: a bomb factory in Glasgow, a park bench in St James Park, a seaside town on the Kent coast.

  At the centre of the board where the red string met there was a photograph cut from a newspaper clipping of a slim, donnish looking man with a high forehead and bi-focals perched on his nose. It was Major-General Javid Aslam Khan, colloquially known as “The Hidden Hand”. Khan was the former head of the ISI, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, and generally regarded as one of the key members of Pakistan’s Invisible Government, a cabal of “retired” military officers that formed a much more powerful counterpart to Pakistan’s democratically elected one.

  If you believed the collage it was Khan who was responsible for channelling Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. It was Khan that was directly responsible for the brutal civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan when the Mujahideen groups turned on each other and fought over the rubble. It was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban as a bulwark against foreign intervention. And when that spectacularly failed it was Khan who fed and watered the terrorist networks, many of them former Mujahideen, like Hekmatyar and Haqqani, who were even now killing British and American servicemen. Ed realised that somebody had been keeping the collage up-to-date. There were links from Khan to recently formed groups including the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, whose specialty was assassinating Shi'a; the Zarqawis, a bloodthirsty band of Pakistanis who operated in Kandahar; and the White Taliban, a motley collection of Europeans and Uzbeks who operated in Zabul province.

  ‘Quite something isn’t it?’ Burns rolled her eyes in the direction of the back of the room and, with a start, Ed realised they were not alone. There was a large brooding presence in the shadows, a black man straddling a plastic chair.

  ‘This is Jonah,’ Burns explained, ‘official custodian of the collage. I won’t bother with his surname. He used to run the only other significant asset we had inside the ISI and he’s the only serving officer we have who’s actually met Khan. Got on like a house on fire, isn’t that right? What did you make of him, Jonah?’

  ‘He’s an unscrupulous bastard,’ Jonah replied. His verging-on-posh accent, with its gliding vowel, was at odds with his appearance, much more so than Ed’s. ‘He’s always happy to play both ends against the middle.’

  Burns looked pointedly at Ed.

  ‘You’re tired aren’t you? I expect you’re angry as well.’

  ‘My agent was killed.’

  ‘There’s no point getting all riled up because the Americans didn’t give us fair warning. We all knew it would be that way.’

  ‘With respect, ma’am, nobody told me that it would be that way.’

  ‘It’s Khan you should be angry at. Khan killed Tariq.’

  ‘I listened to it happen,’ Ed replied.

  ‘Of course you did. And now you want revenge. Isn’t that right?’

  Ed opened his mouth and abruptly closed it again. Revenge wasn’t supposed to be a motivation for action, not out loud at least. But Queen Bee was right. He’d lost an agent and he wanted someone to pay.

  ‘If it’s feasible,’ he said, ‘yes, of course.’

  ‘And there’s the nub. Did Totty tell you the facts of life? The PM wants us out of Afghanistan double quick, all shoulders to the wheel to ensure a smooth exit. Did he tell you that the PM is proposing to hold a joint Anglo-Pakistan peace initiative for Afghanistan?’

  ‘No he didn’t tell me that.’

  Where was she going with this? Everybody knew that the last thing the Pakistanis wanted was peace in Afghanistan. They preferred the place in turmoil.

  ‘The status quo cannot hold,’ Burns explained. ‘We need new choice architecture.’

  ‘Choice architecture?’

  ’The PM’s calling for a nudge.’

  ‘A nudge?’

  ‘We’ve got to get out with a modicum of dignity intact. This isn’t going to be another Basra.’

  ’I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with me?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s my point.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  She smiled her meaningless smile. ‘This gives me no pleasure but you’ve left me no choice. Your agent’s dead and the Americans have made it plain you’re not welcome back in Kabul, or anywhere else for that matter. We need a new approach to intelligence and, I’m sorry to say, you’ve ruled yourself out of it.’

  ‘You brought me here to tell me that?’

  ‘No, I brought you here to tell you that you’re suspended pending a disciplinary inquiry.’

  16. The List

  Lurking had become almost second nature to him. Ed stood in the shadow of a doorway with his hands in his pockets and a bag at his feet. London was blurred by autumn condensation, softened somehow. Maybe it was him. Was he becoming sentimental? He wasn’t meeting an agent this time. There was nothing covert or clandestine here.

  The object of his attention was a small Brick Lane curry house on the corner of Heneage Street. It was well after midnight and the restaurant was closed for the night but there was still movement inside. People were clearing up, stacking chairs on tables and sweeping the floor. Eventually the front door opened again and the staff emerged. The last one out pulled down the bottom of the metal shutter from the shop awning and padlocked it. Terse goodbyes were said.

  A stooped elderly man in the white shirt and black trousers of
a waiter zipped up his windbreaker, walked a few feet and then paused on the pavement to light a cigarette, the flame of the lighter briefly illuminating his face before he set off again. Ed followed. He fell into step alongside him as he approached the southern end of Brick Lane.

  The man gave him a sidelong glance.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  There had been a period in his twenties when Ed had been angry with his father, but as he approached his middle years he had achieved a kind of accommodation.

  The old man looked at the black bag in his hand. ‘You need somewhere to stay?’

  ‘Just for a few weeks.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  They crossed behind the East London mosque on Fieldgate Street and turned down one of the narrow one-way streets. People had put their pink recycling bags out and they spilled across the pavement so it resembled an obstacle course.

  They stopped in front of a green door with three different locks.

  Inside the hallway was narrow and smelled damp. There were chauffeur cards and pizza flyers spread across the floor.

  ‘You know how to find your room.’

  #

  He lay on his bed and stared upwards at the triangular prism on the ceiling, bending light’s path: The Dark Side of the Moon. A poster for an album released four years before he was born, an album about things that make people mad.

  It was like travelling back in time. Nothing had changed. A bed as narrow as a coffin and posters on the ceiling because the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases arranged with a librarian’s care. His father called it the submariner’s cabin. The last time he lay here was in the immediate aftermath of the break-up of a relationship. Then as now his life had seemed in ruins.

  He rolled over and looked under the bed. His 2000 AD collection remained there in cardboard boxes, each individual comic stored in a clear plastic sleeve. Once upon a time he had imagined himself as Johnny Alpha, the mutant bounty hunter who tracked down his own kind across an apocalyptic landscape. It was funny really, when you thought about it. He rolled back. Above him there was a ledge and wedged between Milan Kundera and Hanif Kureishi a bundle of letters, communications from his mother during his first year at Oxford.

  And the list: the archaeology of a failed romance.

  As he was leaving, after she’d told him their relationship was over, his GP fiancée had handed him a piece of paper. He remembered going out to the car and sitting and reading the contents. It was a list of who he was. It was more than just a parting shot; she’d clearly been working on it for weeks if not months. It was a compilation of difficult truths in ink, pencil and fluorescent marker. As badly written as her prescriptions. It had been folded and unfolded. It had clearly been scrunched up and then flattened out at some stage. There was a translucent smudge of olive oil and several burgundy wine-rings.

  It said:

  Who are YOU?

  Alien

  mask-wearing/stealth-loving

  Angry idealist

  good in bed

  Autistic spectrum

  Mama’s boy

  warmonger

  JANISSARY

  thief

  SPY

  His first act had been to neatly fold back the bottom line before tearing it off, carefully removing the word SPY. Never advertise the fact of what you are. Always clear up after yourself. He imagined how much that would have annoyed her. He hadn’t been angry with her. The list was difficult to argue with. He took it as a measure of her frustration and despair. It was a variant of a question that she had asked him throughout their short engagement. Who are you? What are you? Why do you do what you do?

  He remembered one stolen afternoon together in the Print and Drawings Room of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and in response to an innocent question he’d explained to her that the Janissaries were Christian boys captured by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century, forcibly converted to Islam and trained to be soldiers in the Sultan’s army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were neither freemen nor ordinary slaves. They were supervised twenty-four hours a day, indoctrinated and subjected to severe discipline. They were prohibited from taking up any skill other than war. As a consequence they were ferocious and utterly loyal.

  ‘They had no choice about it,’ he told her. ‘They had fought to erase their own civilisation. They had nowhere else to turn to.’

  She had waited until that evening before ambushing him. ‘Is that how you see yourself, as a Janissary?’

  ‘I am what I am by choice,’ he’d replied.

  ‘You wish!’

  She hadn’t mentioned it again, though she’d clearly saved it up for the List.

  On the subject of the Iraq war she had always been forthright: ‘You’re an apologist for Blair.’

  He wasn’t that. After all, he’d been there – he’d flown into Baghdad in April 2003 expecting it to be an Aladdin’s cave of documents with evidence of WMDs and links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In the days following he’d sat in living rooms with agents who confessed they had no idea where the stuff was. These were the same sources that, before the war, had been telling anyone who cared to listen that WMD could be launched inside forty-five minutes. They’d have said anything to be rid of Saddam. He felt that endless to-and-fro over whether the public had been lied to about the threat in the build-up to the Iraq war served as a kind of smokescreen for a wider and more fundamental failing, the sheer incompetence of the endeavour.

  ‘I don’t mind that we did it,’ Ed had told her. ‘I mind that we did it so badly. Nobody gave a thought to how the country would stand up to invasion or what would come after. They didn’t understand Iraq’s tribal and social structures or its religious divide. I don’t think Blair even knew the difference between a Shi’ite and a Sunni when we went in. He was the guy that put the New into New Labour. It was all about the future. Nobody was interested in history or past mistakes. They didn’t read history books. They really thought that things could only get better. We charged into Basra with no thought for the consequences and to make our lives easy we handed control of the city over to a bunch of Iranian-backed death-squads who went to work on the populace with electric cable and power drills.’

  ‘So why didn’t you do something about it?’ she yelled.

  ‘What could I do?’

  She sneered. ‘You’re pathetic.’

  It would be the same in Helmand in 2006. Another failure. A too eager government and the usual gaggle of over-ambitious generals had convinced themselves that a British contingent could deploy down there in soft-skinned vehicles on a operation in which not a shot would be fired. No one gave any thought to the skill with which the Mujahideen had used roadside bombs to disrupt Soviet armoured convoys down there in the eighties. No one imagined a repeat of that. No one gave a thought to what happened the last time a British army went down there. A thousand British and Indian troops slaughtered at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. Nobody outside of a university in Britain remembered that. But they did in Helmand. They might not have the Internet or TV or much schooling but they did have oral history. Tales they told themselves. Mostly about how they beat the invaders or died trying. Resistance was in their psyche and their folklore. They even had their own Joan of Arc. At Maiwand a young woman named Malalai had ripped off her veil and used it as a standard to lead the Pashtuns to victory, shouting out: ‘If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God someone is saving you as a token of shame.’

  You couldn’t beat people who believed that kind of hokum.

  He remembered sitting in the car outside the house that he was no longer welcome in. He’d folded the List up and driven the car east, back to his roots in Whitechapel, the immigrant enclave that had first propelled him out into the world. He remembered thinking that he was ashamed of spying, of how little good it had done. It was a kind of drug, similar to heroin in its effects, a fetish that attracted violence and criminality.
The realisation had come to him suddenly, here on this bed, as if it had been waiting for the chance to find him alone. He’d suppressed it and got on with his job. But now there was nothing to hold it at bay.

  It wasn’t just that his life felt like a succession of lies, it was that he felt like he was lost in a maze, a hall of mirrors, and the faces that stared back at him were distorted beyond all recognition.

  17. On tenterhooks

  The Gulberg cellar reeked of blood with a sly background whiff of piss and shit. The hanging man’s veins were pumping out blood faster than a halal chicken, as if they were in a hurry to be rid of it.

  Noman took a long and unsatisfying drag on his cigarette and tried to remember the first time he realised that blood had a smell. There had been so much of it over the years, buckets full of it, bathtubs even. It was difficult to remember. He felt sure that it would have been in a space much like this one, either a cell or a basement, or in the “fingernail factory”, the ISI’s purpose-built interrogation facility in Islamabad. Khan would have been there of course, shepherding him through the first weeks of his induction in the methods of intelligence gathering. Khan had been so keen to show him the ropes. Somebody else would have been inflicting the damage of course. Khan didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Noman did remember Khan telling him to pay attention to the particulars of anatomy and painting: ‘You must find within yourself the knowledge, assurance and dexterity of a surgeon but also the boldness, imagination and daring of a baroque painter. ’ Eager to please, he had learned the names of muscles, organs, bones and veins. He had surfed the internet for paintings. He had learned to wield the blade and the baton with both care and abandon.

  Badchodiyaan! It was all bullshit. Torture wasn’t an art or a science. Just because there were swags of blood on the wall it didn’t make him Caravaggio. He was a mechanic salvaging scraps in a wrecker’s yard.