The Agent Runner (32 page)

Then he heard a machine-gun firing, close by. He crawled to the edge of the boulder and risked a glimpse. The dust was beginning to clear. He saw movement on the trail and fired. He slumped back into cover. The injured villager had stopped moving. Ed didn’t have the strength to get himself back into the village. This was it, he realised, the ground where he would make his stand.

He smiled.
The Weald of Kent
.

June 1940. Churchill’s last stand:
We will never surrender
.

He dried his trigger finger against his shirt and slipped it back into the guard. He was ready.

The machine-gun opened up again, first near Ed, pummelling the rocks and shredding the dirt in a maelstrom of sparks and rock chips, and then, drifting towards the rising sun, it found the advancing Taliban – in an instant their bodies whipped like tattered flags in a high wind. Within a few seconds the assault was broken, the surviving fighters retreating down the trail.

Ed let his rifle drop to his side. A large black man in combat fatigues emerged out of the smoke. He was wearing a helmet and carrying a rifle.

Ed didn’t recognise him at first.

‘Jonah?’

Jonah knelt beside him. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Just fucking dandy,’ he managed.

Jonah reached across him and felt for a pulse at the neck of the villager beside him. He shook his head and closed the man’s eyes.

‘Is she ok?’ Ed demanded. ‘Leyla, I mean, is she ok?’

‘She’s fine.’

He felt a wave of relief.

‘Medic!’ shouted Jonah. ‘You’re the one that needs attention.’

‘How did you know how to find us?’ Ed asked.

‘We were listening in on the Taliban. We knew you were out here somewhere. When they announced they were going to attack the village we knew it must be you.’

‘I thought you wanted me dead.’

Jonah laughed.

‘It would have been tidier,’ he conceded, ‘but who wants tidy?’

54. The finger of God

‘They make a desert, and call it peace.’

Tacitus,
Agricola

Khan paid no attention to him at first, a boy pulling at his sleeve. The market was full of beggars. He was choosing mangoes for Mumayyaz.

‘Sir?

Irritated, Khan turned on him, raising his cane to strike him. But something made him pause. The boy was small, dirty and barrel-chested with a narrow, pinched face and a glob of snot on the end of his nose. He was wearing a filthy black coat that was far too large for him. There was something strangely familiar about him. Khan had seen him somewhere before. An odd thought struck him: this was what Noman must have looked like, before the army fashioned him into a man.

‘Do I know you?’ Khan demanded.

‘Yes indeed sir,’ said the boy, politely.

‘How?’

The boy opened his coat, revealing row upon row of shiny steel ball bearings like chain mail. Khan remembered him from dinner with the one-legged mullah on the banks of the Kabul River on the night before bin Laden was killed. The boy had sat just out of reach and watched them eat.

‘What do you want?’ Khan said, softly.

‘It is time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Time for the death of Pharaoh.’

Pharaoh? Was that how they saw him?

‘Now?’ Khan asked.

The boy nodded, solemnly. His right index finger curled around the trigger switch. He began to recite from the Koran: ‘
And the guilty behold the fire and know that they are about to fall therein, and they find no way of escape…’

Khan realised that the boy was right. There was no point running, no point sounding the alarm. It would only start a stampede.
Really, there was nothing to be done
. Khan looked around him at the bustling market and the sights and smells assailed him, the crowded stalls with their chaotic ever-changing vibrancy and the warren of alleyways slipping away in all directions, the sacks of spices – saffron, turmeric, cumin and halved burls of nutmeg – the bolts of brightly-coloured cloth, the mottled stacks of fruit, the aroma of dust on the warm breeze and beneath it all the sly whiff of rotting fish. And everywhere people. He loved this place. This verdant valley. This teeming city. He imagined it moments from now as a slaughterhouse of legs and arms and torsos with glistening loops of entrails and a torrent of blood. It was depressing, really. He found that he had nothing to say. He knew he should be making peace with God but the truth was he did not believe in God. There was just this world and nothing beyond it.

He would not wake up in Paradise.

He looked down at the boy and saw that his face had become a mask. The boy’s eyes were shocking. They looked through him and beyond him to some
place of pain and torture, to some inward hell that Khan would never experience and could not even imagine.

‘Go on,’ Khan said, closing his eyes. He realised that he’d wasted his final moments watching a child re-live his life when really he should have been reliving his own.

The boy squeezed the trigger.

Acknowledgements

In the Acknowledgements to
The Tailor of Panama
, his 1996 homage to Graham Greene, Le Carré wrote: “After Greene’s our
Man in Havana
, the notion of an intelligence fabricator would not leave me alone.”

The Agent Runner
would not have been written without John Le Carré. In Kabul, during a snowstorm, I re-read
The Spy who came in from the Cold
, and the notion came to me (and would not leave me alone) of classic espionage tropes knocked about and re-worked in a contemporary setting - Moscow Rules in the Hindu Kush - with the Durand line as arbitrary a division as the Berlin Wall, and Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency as duplicitous a foe as the KGB.

There was a fad around the time the Soviet Union collapsed to assert that the spy novel was similarly over. The enemy that emerged from the cauldron of Afghanistan over the next decade was too alien and asymmetric, and its adherents too unlike us, for it to be portrayed as a game of chess between equals. But a look behind them to who is working the levers reveals a much more familiar adversary. The ISI is an organisation born of the break up of Empire, run by a three-star general in a uniform that would not look out of place in our own Ministry of Defence.

After more than a decade of questionable conflicts in the name of democracy modern scepticism of intervention by democratic powers is stronger than ever. We no longer accept the bold claims of governments and we have come to realise that dirty tactics often underlines the noble goals of democracy. There is a moral vacancy on both sides. In such circumstances, there is plenty of room for the morally compromised world of spy fiction.

For the details of the Abbottabad raid I drew on Nicholas Schmidle’s article Getting Bin Laden in the
New Yorker
and for the valley at the edge of the world Sebastian Junger’s
War
. For some of the details of Ed Malik’s early life and upbringing I raided Ed Hussein’s
The Islamist
and
Only Half of Me
by Rageh Omar.

For insight into what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan I can recommend:
The Triple Agent
by Joby Warrick,
The Operators
by Michael Hastings,
Task Force Black
by Mark Urban and
Losing Small Wars
by Frank Ledwidge. For their assistance on my various trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan I am very grateful to Dr Farid Homayoun and Raza Shah Khan as well as to Tim Porter, Chris Alexander and Hedvig Boserup.

In seeking to understand how Pakistan works I was helped enormously by Anatol Lieven’s excellent
Pakistan: A Hard Country
.

I must also acknowledge the influence of Mohsin Hamid’s novel
Moth Smoke
, which I read in Lahore in 2005 before I travelled to Peshawar and the tribal areas. Thanks for inspiring Nadifa’s story and the boxing lesson. Huge thanks also to the rapper Adil Omar for granting his permission to reproduce lyrics from
Paki Rambo
. He’s a brave young satirist in a country where violence is commonplace and comedy is dangerous.

For the whiff of brimstone about Noman Butt I am indebted to Mailer, Roth and Stone and for the widow’s seduction Shakespeare’s
Richard III
.

Thank you to my wife Sarah, my first and most diligent reader. I cannot thank you enough for your unwavering support and incisive advice. Also to Nick
Sayers, Jane Rogerson and Phil Robertson for reading and commenting on early drafts. My gratitude to Mark Stanton who offered wise counsel at a time when it seemed like the book might never see the light of day and David Smith who stuck by me.

Edinburgh, 2014