The Agent Runner (17 page)

Ed nodded. ‘I remember the plan.’

‘So what is this? What the hell is going on?’

‘I need you to take this girl into care.’

Jonah. ‘Who is she?’

‘Her name is Amal. She’s Somali. I rescued her from a brothel in Newham.’

‘You did what?’

‘You heard me. Get her adopted.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Pull some fucking strings.’

Jonah shook his head. ‘You’re out of control.’

‘Yes I am. And that’s what you wanted. Parade your impulsive side were your exact words.’

‘What kind of mess have you left behind in Newham?’

‘A fractured skull, a concussion and maybe a broken bone or two. Nothing that hasn’t already been done in the name of this operation.’

‘You’re a piece of work,’ Jonah said.

‘That’s what people say about you. If you want me to do this thing for you you’d better get this girl taken care of, you can tell Queen Bee that’s my condition.’

‘You’re pushing your luck.’

‘There’s something else,’ Ed told him. ‘If you don’t want a war with me at the centre of it, you better explain to the brothel keeper the futility of any kind of response. Her name is Nadifa. I’d make it very clear to her if I was you.’

25. Rolling with the punches

Leyla didn’t show up for work the next day. She came at night though, this time without her laptop. She was wearing track pants and trainers, and a white V necked T-shirt under her coat.

‘I want you teach me how to punch someone.’ The expression on her face left him in no doubt she was serious.

‘Sure.’ He hung up her coat and asked her to sit at the kitchen table. ‘Show me your hands.’ He turned them over, hesitant when he touched her, because he didn’t want it to seem like a caress.

‘I got a call from my contact in the Met,’ she said, her tone of voice giving nothing away. ‘Apparently someone went in and broke up the brothel in the early hours of this morning. The bouncer is in hospital with a fractured skull and Nadifa has disappeared. An eleven-year-old girl has been taken into care.’

‘I’ll wrap your hands,’ he told her, not sure if she was looking at him or not because he was staring into the corner of the room.

He got up and went to the counter. He took a rolled-up hand-wrap from a drawer and returned to kneel in front of her, head down, concentrating on her hands, trying not to look at the slice of exposed cinnamon-coloured skin between her track-pants and her T-shirt. He slipped a loop over her thumb, and wrapped her left hand, covering her knuckles and binding her fingers together before tying off the ends. Next he did the right hand. Then he reached for his gloves and put them on her.

‘Stand up.’

He folded away the table and hung his old heavy bag on a hook attached to one of the roof beams.

‘I’ve worked out what you are,’ she said.

He turned around. He kept his voice as level as hers. ‘Spread your legs slightly and bend your knees.’

‘I’ve been investigating you.’

‘Get up on the balls of your feet,’ he told her. She glared at him but complied. ‘That’s right. Now raise your hands higher.’ She squared her shoulders and raised the gloves. He tapped her left glove. ‘That’s your lead hand.’ He tapped her right glove. ‘That’s your rear hand. You’re going to use your lead hand to punch the bag and your rear hand to guard your jaw. You swivel and punch, bringing your fist into the horizontal.’

She stepped up to the bag. She hit it hard.

‘That’s good.’

She hit it again.

‘Next you’re going to hit with your rear hand. You roll your hips and throw it from your chin in a straight line.’

She hit the bag like she wanted to punch right through it. As well as the jab and the cross, he showed her the hook and the upper cut. She was a quick learner. Her movements were deft and assured. She focussed on him when he was explaining and her body when she was punching. She settled into a measured pace, twisting her body to throw her shoulder into the punches. Soon the bag was swinging. She looked fierce as an Amazon, like she really meant it, and his surprise at her strength gave way to admiration for her endurance.

Eventually she stopped, shut her eyes, and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. She turned and stood with her back to the bag. She was watching him, breathing steadily, her face and chest shiny with perspiration, her nipples sharp points.

‘You’re a lie, Edward Malik.’

He was half-expecting it, but when the blow came it knocked him back a step. He raised his hand to his nose and when it came away there was a smear of blood on it.

‘I have a blogger friend in Kabul. I faxed him your photo and he showed it to his cousin who works in the Human Resource Directorate at the Ministry of Finance. Nobody there remembers you.’

‘It’s a large ministry,’ he said, ‘and staff turnover is high.’

She punched him again, harder this time, driving him back against the counter. He made no attempt to resist.

‘My friend’s cousin has access to the personnel files for foreign consultants. Sure, there’s a file for you. There’s a whole stack of them for people no one’s ever seen. They call them ghosts. You’re a spook, Edward Malik.’

He looked away. ‘Stop it,’ he said.

‘I’m not the only one who thinks so. You’re out there on the web, Ed. And I’m not talking about stuff picked up by search engines. I’m talking about the deep web, the encrypted and the un-linked; Jihadis in chat rooms know your name. You need to have the right keywords in the right language but you’re not that difficult to find. You really burrowed your way into my family didn’t you?’

His voice softened. ‘What do you want me to tell you, Leyla?’

She narrowed her eyes, up on the balls of her feet, ready for the next punch. ‘The truth.’

‘I love you.’

He hadn’t meant to say it. Under the circumstances it was the most irresponsible thing to say. But it was the truth.

‘You bastard.’

She threw herself at him. He grabbed her by the wrists. She started to struggle and he held her close so that she couldn’t break free. His face next to hers, his mouth against the shell-like curve of her ear.

‘I’m sorry.’

She started to sob. He wrapped his arms around her. She reached up with her mouth and they were kissing, gently at first and then more urgently. She clung to him fiercely, pressing herself against him. His hands roved down her back, following the cord of her spine. She broke away and gasped. He pulled off the boxing gloves and flung them across the room. Then he was kissing her again, his hands on her shoulder blades, her wrapped hands cupping the back of his neck, her leg hooked around his calf.

They broke away again and he led her to the stairs. In his bedroom he unwrapped her hands. He lifted her T-shirt over her head and she kicked off her track pants. Next he removed his own clothing. Naked, they stood before each other. He was overwhelmed by the sight of her bare limbs, the dark aureoles of her nipples and her glossy black pubic hair.

She drew him to her again and down onto the narrow bed.

Making love to her, with her head on the pillow and his hands knuckling down into the mattress, he stared at her and she stared back, her mouth opened slightly, her eyes boring into him.

‘You,’ she said.

Afterwards she slept and he lay beside her while the moonlight falling through the open window dappled her skin with silver, and he listened to the rise and fall of her breath. He had never before felt this mixture of awe and promise, the expectation that life had something to offer, which few people knew anything about, the promise of happiness with another person who felt the same way.

At around eleven he went downstairs and made two cups of tea. When he returned he found her cross-legged on the bed with the List.

‘Isn’t it just another way of saying you’re a prick or a pathological narcissist? I mean, at least twice a week I get told some man or other is on the autism spectrum. It’s like bad shorthand.’

‘Sometimes people say things they don’t mean or that they later regret,’ he told her, gently. ‘The end of any relationship is messy.’

‘She called you a thief.’

‘She said I stole her heart.’

‘Is that what you do?’ She shuddered and drew the sheet around her. ‘I always knew there was something not right about you. You’ve torn something off. What did it say?’

‘Spy.’

‘You better tell me your story.’

Over the next hour he told her what had happened since his deployment to Afghanistan, how he had recruited and run Tariq as an agent in the ISI and how the information provided had saved the lives of soldiers and civilians alike. He explained that Tariq had revealed the location of Osama bin Laden and he described Tariq’s lonely death at the hands of Khan. He shared with her his sense of anger and betrayal. He described the assault on the CIA Head of Station that had led to his disgrace. And because she had seen him angry and violent she had no difficulty in believing any of it.

He did not tell her that after he came back to London from Kabul, when Burns had finished telling him his career was over in the basement under the old War Office, she had offered him another job, an off-the-books operation with the politicians kept out of the loop. She’d graced him with her sunniest smile and said, ‘I want you to help me destroy Khan.’

And because he hated Khan more than anything he had said yes.

26. Hugging a hoodie on Petticoat Lane

It was close to midnight. Ed was walking down Wentworth Street, past closed shops and the metal brackets that would be market stalls in the morning, when a large man in a hoodie fell into step alongside him.

‘You were supposed to make yourself invaluable, nobody said anything about you screwing her daughter.’

‘Fuck off,’ Ed growled.

Jonah gave him a sideways glance. ‘You really like her don’t you?’

Ed stopped and turned on him. They stood facing each other for a few moments, weighing each other up with their hands loose but ready, each one waiting for the other to make the first move. Jonah was bigger, his fists like axeheads, but Ed was younger by ten years and fast on his feet.

‘I went to see the Somali girl,’ Jonah told him, his face impassive. ‘She’s now with a foster family down in Brighton.’

The fight went out of Ed. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine. She’s got good people looking after her. They’re confident she can be placed with an adoptive family soon.’

‘Thank you,’ Ed told him.

‘You ruffled a lot of feathers with that particular stunt,’ Jonah told him. ‘Now come on, Queen Bee wants to talk you.’

They hurried down rain-slicked back streets. Jonah led him through a unmarked door beside a commercial waste bin and up a narrow set of carpeted stairs past signs for an actuary’s office on the first landing and an immigration lawyer on the second. The flat was on the top floor behind a scuffed white door. Jonah produced a set of keys.

Inside the flat smelled of curry, empty beer bottles and stale cigarette smoke. There was a dimly lit corridor with a threadbare carpet and at the end of it a kitchen with two large windows that were big for the room and looked out on Whitechapel High Street. Burns was sitting there, in a linen suit and leopard-print heels, with a skinny Cappuccino on the table in front of her and an open briefcase at her feet.

‘Sit down.’

Ed sat and Jonah pulled up a chair alongside him. From the briefcase beside her Burns took out a sealed envelope and placed it on the table.

‘You’ve always suspected that there was someone behind Tariq, that someone else was writing his script. Isn’t that right?’

‘That’s right,’ Ed conceded, staring at the envelope.

‘We think its time the Pakistanis thought the same thing.’ She glanced at Jonah. ‘Open it.’

Jonah tore the envelope open and shook out the photos inside. He spread them out like a dealer at a table. Three mug shots: two men and a woman. Ed recognised Javid Aslam Khan but not the other two.

‘That is Noman Butt,’ Jonah said, pointing. In the photo, the man resembled a boxer at a photo-call. He radiated brute hunger. He looked as if he was about to bite. ‘He is head of the ISI’s SS Directorate, which monitors terrorist groups that operate in Pakistan and is responsible for covert political action and paramilitary special operations. We believe that he had operational control of the surveillance operation that was overseeing bin Laden’s confinement in
Abbottabad. We know that you know the name. Tariq mentioned him in his last face-to-face meeting with you.’

‘Give us the known-knowns, Jonah,’ Burns said. ‘Tell us about the humble beginnings and the rise to power, the Janissary zeal. Give us a feel for the man.’

‘This is what we have learned,’ Jonah replied. ‘Noman Butt was born in a village of low-caste Hindus in central Sindh. The village has since been destroyed.’

‘You wouldn’t want to be a Hindu in Pakistan,’ Burns said. ‘They fall into the category of Graham Greene’s “torturable class”.’

‘Hindus in Pakistan are outside the system altogether,’ Jonah continued. ‘They have no access to protection, patronage or charity. Add to that both his parents died while he was still a baby. He was taken into an orphanage and we assume that it was there that he converted to Islam. We have no idea whether he was coerced or chose to convert voluntarily. As soon as he was old enough he joined the army. It can’t have been easy. Twenty years ago a Sindhi officer in the infantry would have seemed as likely as a girl flying a fighter jet. But now they have three girls flying fighter jets and more and more Sindhis are joining the officer class. Noman was one of the first. The army is the only Pakistani institution that works as it is meant to and in the Pakistani military nothing is impossible, even for one such as Noman. He was an exceptional soldier and recognised for it. He graduated from the Kakul Academy as one of the top students. He served with the elite Baloch regiment and the Special Services Group before joining the ISI. It was there that he came to the attention of Javid Aslam Khan who was then head of the ISI’s Afghan Bureau and chief architect of the rise of the Taliban. Noman became Khan’s factotum and enforcer, a man he could turn to if secrets needed burying or fingernails needed pulling. And to bind him close and to ensure that Noman would stick by him whatever happened, Khan married him to his daughter and brought him to live in the family home.’