A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “So it’s my kind of place.”

  “It is,” Monteith replied, without smiling. “I suggest that you get yourself there straight away. Find Nor and finish the job once and for all. I mean kill him.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I can’t afford for you to get cold feet again.”

  “I’ll do the job,” Jonah told him.

  “Good.”

  “But I’m not going to be able to take a step without the ISI knowing about it.”

  “Of course.”

  Jonah realized with a sinking feeling that he had no means of secure communication with Miranda. No means of telling her that he would not be coming straight back. A second betrayal.

  “Let me explain something to you, Jonah.” Monteith was staring fixedly into the distance with his fists clenched on his knees. “After the ambush and the death of Kiernan, I came under considerable pressure to take action against you. Fisher-King accused you of being in league with Nor. It didn’t help that your personal life was a mess. The collapse of your marriage was judged to be a destabilizing influence. I had to fight to keep you. At the same time, I had to fight to maintain my own standing. The Department was threatened. Certain compromises had to be made. I did not approve the kidnapping of your wife’s lover six years ago. I did not initiate it. In fact, I argued against it. But my arguments did not prevail. I regret now that I did not fight harder for you. You have never given me any reason to doubt your loyalty.”

  In all the years that he’d known him, Jonah had never heard Monteith admit a mistake, let alone make an apology. He came from a generation of soldiers who viewed any admission of failure as a weakness. It was unnerving. “I need to leave for the airport,” Jonah told him.

  Monteith studied him for a while. “Very well.” He opened his canvas bag again and delved about in it, retrieving a passport. He handed it to Jonah.

  “They’ve put a stop on your personal passport. This one should still be good. I pocketed it before I left.”

  The passport was Belgian. Jonah flicked through the well-worn pages, noting the mishmash of immigration stamps. He stopped at the photo page. “Is that the best photo of me you could find?”

  Monteith grimaced. “You look almost human.”

  “My name is Ishmael?”

  “Ishmael was Abraham’s oldest son, born by his wife’s servant Hagar. He was the world’s first bastard.” He cleared his throat. “He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. Genesis sixteen; verse eleven. Rather apt, I thought.”

  Next Monteith passed him an envelope packed with cash.

  “There’s ten thousand dollars in there. In addition, I have a line of credit with Yakoob Beg that you can utilize. I warn you, Jonah, they’re preparing to make a scapegoat of you. You’re not safe and nobody around you is either. I shredded everything I could before I left but it won’t make any difference. They’ll build a conspiracy out of your schooldays with Nor. They’ll use the kidnapping as evidence of sociopathy. With her history, they’ll have a field day with Miranda. She’ll be cast as an accomplice. They’ll plant evidence tying you to the plot. And it’s certain they’ll use it as the pretext to bring down your mother and end the reforms to the intelligence community that she has championed. The only chance you have to prevent all that is to find Nor and put a stop to him before he gets anywhere near this country.”

  THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER

  August 2005

  In Peshawar, there was a layer of brown smog that trapped the acrid smoke from the refuse fires of Afghan refugees. Each morning Jonah sat in the courtyard at Green’s Hotel and listened to the songbirds in cages on the roof. For four days, he had been waiting on permission to travel up into the tribal areas in the mountainous border regions where Afghanistan blurred into Pakistan.

  It was a week since he had travelled as Ishmael to Lahore via Dubai. In Lahore, he stayed in a cheap hotel above a row of gold shops and ate curried chicken and dhal on Annarkali Street. The following morning, he flew to Peshawar, the bustling city at the foot of the Khyber Pass that was the gateway to Afghanistan.

  It was more than six years since he had last stayed at Green’s Hotel. That was in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of the CIA agent Kiernan, in the final days before Monteith, who was terrified of discovery, dispersed the Afghan Guides to the four winds. Jonah was sent to the Kosovo/Albanian border and a few weeks later his wife ended their marriage. Six years in which the landscape had irrevocably changed: Iraq and Afghanistan were under occupation and there was a blockade of fuel and food supplies to the tribal areas, where thousands of Pakistani troops backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery were rolling northwards into the Pashtun villages, searching for jihadis.

  And two men in a beat-up Toyota Hilux followed him every time he stepped out of the hotel.

  Ms. Nasir of the Narcotics Section of the Home Department of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas had all the trappings of a Pakistani bureaucrat—a dingy private office, a locked filing cabinet, a huge red telephone and a stapler, a desk fan for when the electricity worked and a view out of the window of a jumble of bricks. Her purpose was to stamp and initial permits for the tribal areas. It was a job that gave her absolute bureaucratic power and she knew it. On his first visit Jonah filled in the forms and told her that he was looking for his brother; on the second he brought her a packet of duty-free dates from Dubai; and on this third visit a bottle of perfume.

  “The tribal areas contain a very sensitive frontier,” she told him. “We must protect our borders.”

  “I’m very worried about my brother,” Jonah explained. He was squeezed into a chair that was far too small for him, leaning forward and trying to appear eager without toppling forward on to the desk.

  “Does your brother also have a Belgian passport?”

  “No. He has a Jordanian passport.”

  Miss Nasir eyed him skeptically. “Excuse me, but what is he doing in the tribal areas?”

  There was a sticker on the desk that read SAUDI RELIEF COMMITTEE FOR AFGHANISTAN. “He’s working for an Islamic relief organization helping refugees,” Jonah explained.

  Miss Nasir pursed her lips in a disapproving manner. “We have a lot of problems with foreigners in the tribal areas.”

  “I want to bring him home,” Jonah said. “His father is sick. It is possible that he may not survive much longer.”

  A smartly dressed man in a white shirt and black tie knocked, entered and whispered in Ms. Nasir’s ear. She listened intently. The man finished and left. Ms. Nasir contemplated Jonah with renewed skepticism.

  “Come back at four p.m. tomorrow.”

  The corridor outside Ms. Nasir’s office was no longer empty.

  Someone had produced a light bulb and a white plastic chair.

  Sitting in the chair, in a pair of pressed slacks and a tweed sports coat, with a bamboo cane across his crossed knees and a group of well-dressed, eager young men around him, was the man whose dog-eared likeness was stapled at the center of the Afghan collage, the man who more than any other was responsible for the rise of the Taliban, Monteith’s arch-nemesis, “The Hidden Hand,” Brigadier Javid Aslam Khan, retired former head of the Afghan Bureau of the Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence, the ISI.

  “You are looking for Mr. Nor ed-Din, I believe?” the Brigadier said.

  “I am,” Jonah told him.

  “You know, you do not look much like Nor’s brother. You are much darker. Not so slight. I think maybe you had different mothers. Is that right?”

  “Something like that,” Jonah agreed.

  “But there’s no mistaking the father. I can see it in your face. The Scotsman Monteith fathered you both. He sent you here to bedevil me. Do you know who I am?”

  There wasn’t any point denying it. “I do, Brigadier.”

  “Am I still on his wall?”

  Jonah nodded. “You are.”

  “Am I still
at the center?”

  “You are.”

  The brigadier laughed. The well-dressed young men laughed alongside him. “I do not deserve it, but I count it a great honor to be so revered. Come on, young man. I know these tribal people. I understand how their minds work. I’m going to help you find your brother.”

  They ate freshly caught fish in a makeshift hut on the banks of the Kabul river. The brigadier peered over the top of his bifocals into a plastic cold box and used the tip of his bamboo cane to indicate his choice of fish. The cook, a Pashtun with a hennaed beard, weighed and gutted the fish, then rolled it in seasoned flour and chili flakes and slid it gently into mustard seed oil. While it cooked, they walked across a stone causeway and past a fairground, the darkened shapes of carousels looming out of the wood smoke around them. The brigadier’s assistants followed, maintaining a discreet distance.

  “As the snow melts in Afghanistan the water level rises and these people are forced to leave,” said the brigadier, pointing to the collection of shanty-town restaurants with their chugging generators and vertical strip lights. “They’ve only got a few days left here …”

  He looked thoughtful. Khan had taken it upon himself to educate Jonah.

  “You know, it is not true that we created the Taliban. They were an indigenous movement. Of course, we started supporting them when they became powerful. Pakistan just wanted a stable and peaceful neighbor to the west. That’s all we have ever wanted. What you in the West fail to understand is that the Taliban bought stability to Afghanistan. Before that it was anarchy. Warlords and gangsters flourished in the vacuum left by the Soviets. Afghanistan is a tribal country where you need strong tribal leaders and strict tribal laws. The Taliban provided that.”

  “I’m sure that you had the best intentions, Brigadier.”

  The brigadier snorted. “You are in too much of a hurry. How much do you really know about the history of the Taliban? Not much, I can see by your expression.”

  “Brigadier, please. There’s no time.”

  “Nonsense,” the brigadier said. “I will tell you. The movement originated in a village madrasa near Kandahar. A band of students led by their teacher, Mohammed Omar, freed two women who had been raped by local commanders. They hanged the commanders from the barrel of a tank. A few months later, two commanders fought a battle on the streets of Kandahar over a boy that they both wished to rape. Omar arrived with his students, freed the boy and executed the commanders. This was exactly what the people needed.

  “Straightaway we saw an opportunity. Afghanistan is a perfect corridor for goods from Central Asia. These countries needed an outlet for their oil and gas. At the time the route to Central Asia through the north was blocked by the fighting in Kabul, so we decided to try the southern route. We put together an aid convoy, thirty trucks or so, that was to drive from Quetta and travel via Kandahar and Herat to Askhabad in Turkmenistan. The convoy was a sweetener, to encourage meaningful negotiations on energy supplies. The trucks left Quetta in October 1994 with several young military officers and a number of irregulars. Your colleague Nor was among them.” He glanced across at Jonah. “I remember him. He was a quiet and courteous young man.”

  And by that stage recruited into the ISI, Jonah thought. One of your prized assets, your eyes and ears inside the Taliban, though ours first. He sighed. “Go on, Brigadier.”

  “Near Kandahar some of the city’s militia leaders blocked the convoy’s route, demanding money, and Nor was among those who were taken hostage. For three days, we waited. After a suitable pause, we turned to the Taliban for help and Mullah Omar agreed to free the convoy by force. The students carried out an assault on the village where the convoy was parked and chased out the commanders and their men. They attacked Kandahar that evening and, after two days of fighting, captured it. It was the beginning of a campaign that brought Afghanistan under control in just two years. Early in 1995 they took Herat, and a year later they were in Kabul.”

  “You must have been pleased.”

  “Of course, we were pleased,” said the brigadier with a shrug of his shoulders, “and let me tell you we were not the only ones. The Americans were ecstatic. They had a new route for a pipeline. American oil companies opened offices in Kandahar. But, of course, it didn’t last. The Taliban became too ambitious. They weren’t content to bring peace. They wanted to create the purest Islamic society in the world. There were excesses. We did not approve of the restrictions that they placed on women, but they no longer consulted us. There was nothing to be done.”

  “And Nor?” Jonah prompted him, gently.

  “He went with them all the way to Kabul and that’s the last I heard of him. Obviously, he turned bad.”

  “Brigadier, please don’t treat me like an idiot.”

  “What do you mean? I’m trying to help you to understand.”

  “Brigadier. I’ve been here for almost a week now.”

  “I know what you are going to say,” the brigadier said loftily, peering at Jonah through the drifting smoke. “But you must understand that these things take time. It is a vast area. There are perhaps thirty or forty permanent training camps, and more than a hundred transient ones. Small groups and individuals are lodged with families. There are Arabs, Central Asians and South Asians, as well as Chechens, Bosnians and Uighurs from western China. We are looking for one man. One man! And even if we find him there is no guarantee that the tribal people will give him up. They do not give up guests easily. They have their own laws and their own customs. The rules of hospitality are inflexible. And the Taliban are resurgent. Frankly speaking, the army is struggling against them. There have been setbacks. Then there are the Americans, with their Predator drones and their Hellfire missiles. You must understand the difficulties that we face.”

  Jonah repeated the question. “Brigadier, when did you last hear from Nor?”

  “A very long time ago. I would need to consult my records.”

  “Brigadier, we both know that Nor was your asset.”

  “He was never my asset,” the brigadier snapped, tapping his swagger stick against the tops of his boots in irritation. “That’s what I said to the FBI when they came to me. This Nor was a British asset, I said, nothing to do with us. They showed me the video of Nor’s confession. Go and speak to Monteith, I said. He’s the man who killed Kiernan.” He turned to Jonah and pointed the stick at him. “Have I surprised you? I can see by your expression I have. Did you really think that I would hold up my hand and confess that Nor was ours? Your agency deliberately planted a spy in the Taliban and now that he has gone rogue you want us to sort out the bloody mess for you. Forgive me if we are not overjoyed about it.” He turned around and strode back along the causeway towards the shacks. “Come on, the fish will be ready.”

  “I need to speak to Nor, Brigadier,” Jonah insisted, hurrying after him.

  The brigadier frowned, as if the idea was not agreeable. “In good time.”

  “Brigadier, Monteith is sitting on a filing cabinet full of evidence that links Nor to the ISI and in particular to you.”

  The brigadier had stopped and was staring at Jonah. “Are you blackmailing me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re an impudent pup.”

  “No, Brigadier, I’m a fully-grown dog.”

  The brigadier sucked on his mustache for a moment. “I can see you are.”

  “Monteith knew that as soon as I mentioned Nor ed-Din’s name in this town you would come looking for me. I’ve been ready and waiting. Now I need your help.”

  The brigadier nodded. “We’ll talk after the food.”

  He ducked under the awning of the nearest shack, and his assistants pulled up two string bedsteads.

  “Sit,” he said. Jonah sat.

  The cook delivered their fish on a large platter. They ate it with their fingers, lifting the flesh off the bone, and after the meal they tucked balls of snuff under their lips and passed around a flask of whisky.

  “Well?”
Jonah asked.

  “We believe that Nor is being given shelter in one of the villages in Bajaur Agency,” the brigadier told him. “Tomorrow we’ll get you a permit. Then we can go and find him.”

  THE SHADOW ARMY

  August 2005

  It was after three when Brigadier Khan strode into Green’s flanked by his assistants. Spotting Jonah, he crossed the courtyard towards him, weaving between the chairs and tables and acknowledging the greeting of several groups of businessmen with a smile and a wave of his cane. He came to an abrupt halt in front of Jonah and the smile vanished just as abruptly.

  “Good afternoon, Brigadier,” Jonah said, looking up from the postcards that he was struggling to write. The brigadier tossed a folded sheet of A4 on to the coffee table. Jonah unfolded it. It was a standard Red Notice issued by Interpol’s General Secretariat seeking the provisional arrest of a wanted person with a view to extradition based on an arrest warrant. There was a photo of Jonah and identity particulars (physical description, fingerprints, aliases, etc.) as well as details of the warrant.

  “Shall I continue to call you Ishmael?” the brigadier demanded. “Or would Jonah be more appropriate?”

  Jonah wasn’t surprised. Shortly after rising and showering that morning, he had walked a block to an Internet café, and sat at a terminal in a tiny curtained-off chipboard booth to check his emails. There had been two messages in his inbox. One from Monteith. One from Flora. He had opened the one from Monteith first:

  US Attorney’s office has issued warrant for your arrest.

  Then he had opened the one from Flora:

  I love you. There, I’ve said it. I wish it was not so. But I can’t help it. I refuse to live in a world of lies. I’ve told Beech. Everything is in ruins.

  “You can call me whatever you like, Brigadier,” Jonah replied.

  “Nor spoke of you. I remember it. You were at boarding school together.”