The Agent Runner (3 page)

He slipped out of the bed and padded across the tiles towards the chair where he had discarded his clothes. He did not want to wake the boy. Tariq’s amused and knowing smile, his peppy moves and jaunty over-confident quips, all of which seemed so attractive the night before, might provoke violence in him now in the slough of the morning.

Noman had always been ruled by extremes: shamelessness and shame were the roots of his emotions.

Reaching the chair, he realised that his clothes were not where he had expected to find them. He squinted at the floor with his eyes still smarting, but they were nowhere to be seen. He must have left them in the next room. Naked, he went out through the bedroom door into the unfinished space beyond.

The house belonged to a Major who taught on the Technical Graduate Course at the nearby Kakul Military Academy. Similar in function to Sandhurst or WestPoint, the Academy provided training to officers for the Pakistan Army. The Major had been “encouraged” to find temporary accommodation elsewhere. The house was a new-build located in the Bilal Town suburb of Abbottabad: an ugly flat-roofed three-storey structure constructed of un-rendered cinderblocks that had been put up to replace a house destroyed in the 2005 earthquake.

At the centre of the cement floor there was a tap stand and a bucket. He knelt down, wet his hands at the tap and rinsed his eyes. His head was splitting. When he looked up he felt three pairs of curious eyes watching him across the room, then a shudder of indiscriminate rage.

The first set of eyes belonged to a Bandar monkey on a chain. The red-faced monkey had been there last night. It had spun on its chain and shrieked while he bent the boy over a chair. Now it bared its fangs.

The second set of eyes belonged to an elderly bearded manservant who was squatting beside the camp chair where the deed took place. He was a classic Hazara, flat-nosed and Chinese-looking, with characteristic features inherited from thirteenth century Mogul invaders. The evidence of last night’s seduction, the bottle of scotch and the traces of white powder, had been cleared away and the trembling old man was holding up Noman’s pressed and folded shirt, jeans and underpants like an offering at a shrine. Balanced on top of them, like a crown on its cushion, was his gun, a Glock 17.

The third set of eyes belonged to a professional watcher, a young intelligence officer with floppy hair and skinny jeans. His name was Omar and he was perched on a stool beneath a hide of camouflage netting with a 25-125 times magnification spotting scope on a tripod in front of him. By rights he should have been watching the neighbours and logging their movements in the army-issue ledger in meticulous longhand, but instead he was transfixed, startled by the sight of the legendary spy-catcher, ruthless interrogator, decorated hero of the Siachen glacier, and all-round very fucking scary piece of work Noman Butt kneeling buck-naked at the tap stand.

Like the sleeping boy Tariq, Omar was a Close Observer. There should have been a surveillance team of at least six watchers in the house but the nature of the job, the absolute need for secrecy and the requirement to circumvent normal procedures meant there were only these two trendy
Banghra
boys from a privileged suburb of Lahore, who looked like they’d stepped out of a nightclub – Tariq and Omar – their ancient manservant and a bad-tempered monkey.

Beyond the hide was a large window with a view, just visible through the diffuse and smoky air, of the crumpled ochre slopes of the Sarban Hills and the burning disk of the sun. It was a bright day throbbing with malevolent promise.

Noman closed his eyes, gripping the bucket. Murderous fantasies assailed him of destroying them all, of stamping on the monkey and strangling the old man and of kicking the two boys until their organs burst, turning their supple youth to offal.

Instead he should be praying, pressing his forehead to the rough cement in abasement, earning him the
zabiba
, the permanent thumb-shaped bruise of the truly devout, but it was a long time since he had prayed with conviction. He was ready to sacrifice for Islam, anything short of throwing himself into a cauldron of molten metal, but he struggled to live by it. He felt like death.

‘Shit, yaar,’ he muttered. He was still half-drunk.

He took a deep breath, swallowed and held himself erect. First, a shower. He let go of the bucket, snatched his clothes and gun from the old man and went down the stairway to the room where he’d left his briefcase. He opened it and rummaged around until he found his phone. Five missed calls, all from his fleshy, imperious wife. He threw the phone back in the briefcase, went to the bathroom and locked himself in.

His hands trembled on the shower lever. Suddenly he was sick, vomiting into the shower-pan. Purged, he sat on the tiled floor with his head in his hands. He was poisoned. He had been poisoning himself for weeks.

He struggled to his feet again. As he stepped into the shower he caught sight of himself in a mirror on the medicine cabinet and was briefly paralysed by fear and self-loathing.

He closed his eyes and took slow, deliberative breaths. When he looked again the moment had passed and what he saw was a hard and compelling face with massive angular cheekbones and a stubborn jaw. But that wasn’t what terrified the unwary in basement cells. It was all in the eyes, he had mesmeric eyes of blue, scary bowel-voiding eyes, so perfectly blue they went all the way back to Alexander the Great’s foray across the Indus, and some said they tunnelled all the way back to Satan, to the very first evil eye.

#

Pummelled by the cold spray, Noman began to feel like himself again.

He was a short man with close-cropped hair and a weightlifter’s physique. He was strong, the strength discernible in his legs and shoulders, in his broad neck and in his spade-like hands and stubby fingers.

Noman worked in intelligence, for the Inter
bloody
Services
bloody
Intelligence Agency, or ISI, having come into it from the army and before that an orphanage. As an officer cadet at the nearby Kakul Academy he had narrowly missed out on the Sword of Honour, the prestigious award for best cadet, after completing the Long Course in 1994 – not bad for an orphan convert from a low-caste Hindu village in Sindh. It was in the nature of things that the sword was won by the less capable but better-connected son of a Punjabi officer of the Leadership Caste. After the passing out parade the Commandant had grudgingly told him that he might even make General one day, provided that is, India and Pakistan didn’t immolate themselves with nuclear weapons before he got the necessary crowns and pips.

He had served with the Baloch Regiment in Free Kashmir and been awarded a Crescent of Courage Medal, a significant honour only one down from The Sign of the Lion Medal, which had replaced the British Victoria Cross at the time of Partition and had so far only been awarded to martyrs, which was too high a price for a piece of tin as far as Noman was concerned. He had received the medal for conspicuous gallantry in repelling an Indian attack on the Siachen Glacier.

The attack had been a total surprise, even to the Indians whose mountaintop artillery position was delivered by an avalanche into the midst of a Pakistani Forward Operating Base (FOB). In the sudden chaos that ensued, Noman had killed five Indian soldiers with an ice axe. He’d dug himself out of a hastily excavated snow hole and they were all over the place. Close to him, Indian gunners were climbing out of a tiny window from an almost fully submerged Portacabin bunkhouse that had been lifted out of its cradle of concrete blast walls and surfed the wave of snow down the mountain. They were popping out like champagne corks. He’d gone at it with the axe until he was the only one left standing, and then he’d hacked at the snow until he’d dug out enough to plug the window and prevent any more escaping.

After that he’d completed the punishing eight-month Special Service Group selection course and gone on to command Seventh Commando Battalion. From Special Forces he’d transferred to the ISI and served across several Directorates, including the Afghan Bureau. It was while at the Afghan Bureau that he had come to the attention of Javid Aslam Khan, the farsighted hero of the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the man credited with creating the Taliban and ending the Afghan civil war.

Khan, who was without a son, had taken a liking to Noman, spotting his unscrupulous intelligence and appetite for the work. He chose to nurture Noman’s ambition and steer him through the labyrinthine corridors of Pakistani intelligence. He offered him his daughter in marriage. As a result of his patronage, Noman Butt was now in command of the ISI’s SS Directorate that monitored the activities of “flagged” groups within Pakistan. That made him the in-house expert on every armed group and extremist faction in Pakistan, from the Tribal Areas to Free Kashmir, from Balochistan to the Punjab.

For five years now, in SS Directorate’s longest running surveillance operation, a succession of close observers had watched the house next door, logging the comings and goings of a white SUV whose spare-tyre cover was emblazoned with an image of a white rhino. It was an ugly three-storey house with high-walled balconies that made it look like a chest of drawers with the drawers part-pulled out. The driver of the SUV was an Arab named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, also known as Sheikh Abu Ahmed, also known as “the courier”.

Showered, Noman stepped out of the stall and dried himself. Avoiding the mirror, he checked the medicine cabinet. Nothing. Then he remembered that he had some Valium in his briefcase.

He put on his underpants, jeans and shirt. He stuffed the Glock down the back of his trousers. He dry swallowed a Valium and went up the stairway again. The monkey had retreated to a corner of the room and the manservant had made himself scarce. Noman stood at the doorway to one of the bedrooms for a few moments contemplating Tariq’s sprawled and sleeping body. His anger had dissipated now. Tariq really was a beautiful boy.

‘The guest is out in the garden, sir,’ Omar said.

Excited suddenly, Noman went over to the hide and Omar slid off the stool to allow him to look through the scope. He pressed his eye to the viewfinder and the house opposite sprang into high relief, the electronically enhanced lenses bringing the figure of a man in the courtyard close enough to touch. A tall, frail, stooping man shuffling along under an umbrella, his beard shot through with two distinctive white streaks.

In the house next door, under the very nose of the military establishment, lived the leader of the most flagged group of all, the world’s most wanted man.

The Sheikh Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden.

For all that he regarded him as little more than a prisoner, and this half-arsed and poorly manned operation as a pointless drain on the Directorate’s resources, Noman couldn’t help but feel humbled and a little awe-struck in the presence of bin Laden. The scything airplanes and the plunging towers had often featured in his dreams.

He watched as bin Laden completed his slow circuit of the courtyard and went back into the house, careful to furl the umbrella before stepping inside. Looking up from the scope Noman realised that his eyes had filled with tears. Rather than have Omar see him like this, he pretended to study the ledger of observations open on the music stand beside the tripod.

‘I’m leaving,’ he announced after a minute or so.

‘Sure,’ Omar replied and then remembered who he was talking to, ‘I mean … yes, sir! Thank you for visiting.’

Noman put on his mirrored sunglasses, picked up his briefcase and went out into the morning.

4. Apache Commando

Bouncing down one of the narrow dirt streets in his glossy black Range Rover, Noman found his way blocked by a crowd of determined-looking women and howling brats. Beyond them, in a trash-strewn open space, he observed a white tent with a banner announcing a mother-and-child vaccination programme. After pumping the horn a few times he realised it was futile and reversed up the alley.

Soon he was speeding south on the Murree Road with the windows down and the supercharged V8 engine growling, his hands too busy for driving. Steering through the curves and bends of the national park with his knees, the pine forest rising above him on one side and the ravine falling away on the other, he loosened the tobacco in the barrel of a Gold Flake cigarette and squeezed it out onto his palm, crumbling hash into the tobacco, kneading and mixing before re-filling the Flake, twisting it shut, and lighting up. Deep drag.

Hakuna Matata
, as the Africans would say. No tension.

A welcome jolt to the brain.

He rooted around amongst the CDs on the passenger seat until he found what he was looking for, a bootleg of Adil Omar’s freshly cut track
Paki Rambo
. He cranked it up to full volume and the words rattled around in his head like an un-shooable fly:

I’m a junky on a binge and damn I’m so faded

Apache Commando

Put my foot in your asshole

He felt his spirits soar.

The P…The A…The K…The I

Paki Rambo!

#

Above all, Noman thought of himself as a survivor. Not the lickspittle, ass-kissing kind of survivor that made General these days. He was the opposite – the dogged, undeterred-by-anything, approach-every-task-with-utter-concentration-kind of survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. It was a quality that his superiors had recognised and valued in him – there was no job too difficult or too morally compromised for him to accept.

He was up for anything, he thought, anything that is except facing his wife this sunny morning. Irritated, the mood just as suddenly broken, he pulled over at a roadside café that overlooked the river. He sat in a plastic chair and they brought him
chai
that had been steeped long enough to acquire a rich dark colour and made creamy with full fat milk.

What I need is a plan, he told himself, something other than alcohol and drugs and arse to get by on. I’ll make a plan.