The Agent Runner (21 page)

Noman lit another cigarette. ‘How did that go?’

‘How do you think? I tried to stick it out at the bank but I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I’d been doing. I fell out with my line manager. Then out of the blue I got a letter from MI6, would I like to join?’

‘So you joined MI6?’

‘Yes. First I had to take the Civil Service Selection Board. Then I was sent to Fort Monckton in Hampshire for operational training.’

‘But you’d already been in the field for several years,’ Noman observed.

‘Sure. I knew as much as the instructors did. But I bit my lip and got on with it. The end of my training coincided with the 7/7 attacks and because I had experience of running agents I was temporarily attached to MI5, who were scrambling to set up a network of informants in Muslim communities in England to prevent anything like that happening again. After a few months of lurking around mosques I returned to MI6 and a desk at Vauxhall Cross in the Af-Pak Controllerate. In February 2006 I was sent to Afghanistan.’

‘Why?’

‘I was supposed to be processing intelligence reports, making assessments of the capacity of insurgent networks, tracing individual commanders and their
modus operandi
. Because of the proposed deployment to Helmand it was now a priority. But then Tariq came along and everything changed.’

‘When was Tariq turned?’

‘A month after I arrived. March 2006. Because of his importance I was instructed to drop everything and run him myself.’

‘Now he’s dead.’

‘Yes. Khan killed him. He should never have taken the assignment in Abbottabad. I warned him not to.’

‘We’ll return to Tariq in due course. After he died and you made yourself
persona non grata
in Kabul, you flew back to London?’

‘Yes that’s right.’

‘And you were dismissed from MI6?’

‘That’s right. I was initially suspended and then after a few weeks I was dismissed at a board of inquiry. Burns threw me to the wolves.’

‘And that was it for your association with MI6?’

‘Yes, officially that is. I did a one-off courier job after I left, mostly because I didn’t now what else to do. Then I got the job at J&K.’

‘What courier job?’

‘I delivered a suitcase full of cash to a woman in a hotel room in Dubai.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘That will do for now,’ Noman said. He held up his hand and the guards approached. ‘Take him down to his room.’

32. Schedule 7 detention

Leyla was in the departures lounge, with her MacBook open on her knees. A large black man with a mournful expression on his face sat down beside her and said something,

She removed her ear-buds and said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look over there,’ he said. There were two armed police officers pointing their sub-machine-guns at the floor in front of Hugo Boss. ‘And over there.’ She looked in the opposite direction. Two more armed officers hovering by Sunglasses Hut, also intent on the floor. ‘They’re going to throw you on the ground and shout at you if you don’t do as I say.’

‘What do you want?’

‘See the door over there.’ He tipped his head in the direction of a nondescript grey door between Costa and Travelex.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Mr Ben time.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Don’t worry. You’re too young. Just go through the door.’

She did.

#

‘I’m not signing these,’ she told the woman, pushing the forms back across the Formica table. ‘Do you seriously think I’m going to waive my rights?’

‘Why are you going to Pakistan?’ the woman asked her. She was black, in a navy blue uniform with
Border Agency
epaulettes. There was another standing blocking the door, a Bengali by the look of her.

‘What horrible irony means that the border agency is the most ethnically diverse arm of government?’ Leyla wondered aloud.

‘Just answer the question.’

‘My mother wants me to marry a nice boy from Lahore.’ She turned to Jonah. ‘What is this?’

There were four of them in the interview room: Leyla, the border agency women, and Jonah, but there was a mirrored glass wall that suggested others were watching.

Jonah grimaced. ‘We’d like to understand
why
you have decided to travel to Pakistan?’

‘I don’t believe this. Under what authority am I being held here?’

‘Under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000.’

‘You think I’m a terrorist?’

He shrugged. ‘Are you?’

‘Fuck you,’ she said. She stretched out in her chair with her arms crossed. ‘You have nine hours.’

Jonah sighed. He glanced at the Border Agency officers. ‘That’s all, thanks.’ He waited until they had left before producing a cigarette packet from his pocket. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘I mind that you won’t let me see a lawyer.’

‘The usual rules don’t apply.‘ He shook out a cigarette. ‘Do you think you’re going to find him?’

‘Find who?’

‘Ed.’

‘Why do you care?’

‘We’d like to find him too.’

‘I bet you would.’

He lit the cigarette, inhaled and exhaled. ‘What do you think happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened to him? Was he abducted or did he decide to disappear?’

‘Why would he decide to disappear?’

Jonah shook his head. ‘Perhaps he’s gone over to the other side.’

‘Why would he do that?’ she sneered. ‘After all, you’ve treated him so well.’

#

Leyla’s next visitor was a woman wearing a dark red Jaeger jacket and matching pencil skirt. She entered carrying a coffee in a cardboard cup and perched on the edge of the seat beside Jonah.

‘I’ve become a fan of your blog,’ she said, without introducing herself. ‘You’re beginning to cause quite a stir.’

‘Ed was abducted in broad daylight. Of course I’m going to write about it.’

The name Tracy was written on the woman’s cup. Leyla didn’t suppose it was the woman’s real name, a random slightly manic thought struck her: maybe a spook computer spat out a list of names every week for use with over-eager
baristas
. And then another even more random thought, maybe the woman’s father was a fan of
High Society
.

‘Are you planning to post anything further on the matter?’ the woman asked.

‘Like the fact that he used to be an MI6 officer involved in spying on Pakistan?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m waiting for the right moment.’

The woman sighed. ‘Edward Malik was one of our best. Nobody was more cut up than I was when we had to let him go. He had such a bright future and then to have it all snatched away, it must have been a bitter pill.’

‘Spare me.’

‘Am I correct in saying that you’re going out to Pakistan to search for him?’

‘Why am I being held here?’

She took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. ‘I have a problem. There are eight Taliban moderates in prison in Rawalpindi. They’re not good men by any means, but they are realists. I believe that if they were released they could form the nucleus of a group prepared to negotiate with the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and all the other groups to secure a peaceful future for Afghanistan. So I’ve been doing all I can to get them released. If the Pakistani intelligence services found out what I’ve been up to it might cause difficulties.’

‘Why are you telling me this?

‘Because it’s the truth; because you think I’m a liar and I can’t thinking of any other way to prove I’m not. I care about the people that work for me, Leyla. I keep tabs on them. In Ed’s case, I made a mistake. I thought he was clean, that he
could go over there without repercussions. But it turns out that he knows something valuable. It’s not connected with his time in the Service. It came after. He may not realise what he knows, but he knows it nonetheless. It’s unfortunate. It means I need to find out where he is. I need it as much as you need it. That makes us allies, of sorts.’

Leyla laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m concerned that his captors might resort to unpleasant tactics to get the information out of him.’

33. The Toca

The gag reflex was almost but not quite immediate.

There were a few moments when he could still breathe in gulps of air. The water ran everywhere, in his mouth, his nose, and his eyes. He tried, by tightening his throat, to let in as little water as possible but he couldn’t hold on. It felt like he was drowning, his body contorting as it heaved against the rack, his hands and his feet shaking uncontrollably.

‘Enough,’ said a voice.

The water stopped and they pulled the rag out of his mouth. One of the sandbag men punched him in the stomach until he threw up any water that he’d swallowed. And Noman, who squatted beside him throughout, consulted his watch and pronounced how long he’d lasted.

Fifteen seconds…

#

There was a quality to what followed that was not unlike a dream, a melting together that made it difficult to keep track. It felt to Ed as if time had come unmoored and the order of things was no longer certain. They came into his cell for two reasons only: prayer or punishment. They dragged him down the corridor to the cellar and led him to either the improvised rack or the prayer mat. It was impossible to calculate how often they came. The order of the daily prayers was jumbled and nonsensical,
al-Fajr
followed
al-‘Asr
,
al-‘Isha
preceded
al-Maghrib
, and the prayer mat pointed in a different direction every time. If he refused to pray he was beaten with a bamboo switch.

On the rack, they water-boarded him. They strapped him to the V with his legs apart and raised above his head, and his arms bound at his sides. A rag was stuffed in his mouth and the water poured on his face from an old tin watering can. Later they told him that the longest he’d lasted was seventeen seconds, though he had no way of telling if that was correct.

They wore the sandbags over their heads throughout, even the ones he recognised – the giant Mahfouz and Noman, who was as wide as he was tall. There seemed to be no purpose to it, any more than there was to the questions they asked. They looped and meandered and fixated on unexpected details, as if the questions themselves were deliberately intended to add to his disorientation. He remembered describing the problems they had in both Iraq and Afghanistan with suspect’s names. They didn’t even have a common way of writing Mohammed so at times it felt like they had no idea who they were up against or who they had in prison. They seemed particularly interested in his mother and her lover’s suicide pact – why they had chosen death over any other alternative? They seized on anger and shame, on anything that animated or needled him.

But there was really only one question that mattered, he understood that much. Noman whispered it softly his ear, often just before they tipped the watering can…
Can I trust you?

Back in the cell they flicked the lights on and off at random, switching from total darkness to searing fluorescence, and one of the guards banged on the door at random intervals with a length of pipe.

At some point he began to hallucinate. He couldn’t tell if it was a natural product of his condition or if he had been drugged. It couldn’t have been
something he ate because they hadn’t given him anything to eat. He was starving. Maybe the water was spiked.

In the darkness it seemed that the cell filled with people.

He could hear them breathing and imagine their expressions: Tariq standing at the foot of the cot with a reproachful look on his face; Samantha Burns with her shallow smile; Jonah grimly blocking the door. There was Sameenah in a shell-suit dancing from foot to foot, resentful Nasir, supercilious Totty with his red socks and, somewhere in the darkness behind him, in all her defiance, Leyla. All the people who had brought him here, even if they didn’t know it. They were watching to see how he would acquit himself.

Just tell the truth. That’s the beauty of it
, Jonah had told him,
if you want to destroy Khan, you only have to tell the truth
.

It felt like he might die before he got the chance.

34. Cui Bono

The bolt was drawn back and the door opened.

They lifted him up off the mattress and dragged him past the cellar door and up the steps to a room on the ground floor. Heavy black-out curtains covered the window and the only light was from a bulb overhead. In the centre of the white-tiled floor two wooden chairs faced each other across a wooden table with a meal of curry and
naan
bread laid out on it. The smell of the food was almost overpowering.

Noman was standing beside a sideboard with a bottle of Black Label on it. He had removed the sandbag and it lay beside him on the floor.

‘Sit down,’ he said, casually. ‘Eat.’

Ed needed no further encouragement. He shook off his captors and staggered over to the table. He tore off a piece of
naan
, and jabbed it in the curry before stuffing it in his mouth. He barely finished one mouthful before cramming his mouth again. He dropped into the seat and continued eating, shovelling the food into his mouth, pausing only to drink water from a metal cup.

Noman crossed over to him with a glass and the bottle of whisky. They sat across from each other. Noman poured himself a measure and sipped it.

‘When you recruited him, how did you know that Tariq was due to return to Islamabad and join the Afghan Bureau?’ he asked, eventually.

Ed paused between mouthfuls. So now it had begun. He felt genuinely grateful to be able to answer Noman’s questions. ‘Because that’s what Burns told me when she called me at the embassy in Kabul.’

He remembered that they had woken him in the middle of the night and escorted him to the embassy, put him in the secure room with the secure phone. He tried to recall her exact words.

‘She said that an ISI agent had got himself in a fix on UK soil and the situation was ripe for exploitation. She said that the agent was about to be called back to work for the ISI’s Afghan Bureau. She said, “I don’t need to tell you how important it is that we have an asset inside the Afghan Bureau if we’re going to get it right in Helmand. We need to get a handle on what the ISI are up to there and we need to do it quickly”’.