The Agent Runner (11 page)

In the Navy Ed learned something of the arts of navigation and seamanship during a couple of months on a minesweeper in the Irish Sea. But the British state had other plans for him. After completing the officer’s training course at the Royal Naval College, he was immediately selected for the Joint Services Intelligence Organisation in Chicksands. He spent no time on ships after that, working entirely with land forces on campaigns far from the sea. After his initial training at Ashford, which included learning Pashto, he worked briefly on ”special duties” in Afghanistan. Then in 2003 he was plucked out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. He spent the next few months alongside MI6 officers on a fruitless and frustrating hunt for weapons of mass destruction, followed by many more months of hunting down former Baathists, while around him Iraq descended into chaos.

He gave up for a while and went back to banking but it wasn’t long before he bowed to the inevitable. In early 2005 he joined “The Firm” (MI6) and, once he’d completed his training, became a fully-fledged spy. He was assigned to the AF-PAK Controllerate and tasked with developing relationships with potential informants within the ISI. MI6 wanted an asset inside the ISI for the simple reason that the ISI had so many assets spread across the range of terrorist networks that operated under the “umbrella” of the Taliban, and the requirement to know what was going on in the mind of the enemy had been
given extra importance because of the 7/7 bombings and the upcoming deployment of British armed forces to Helmand.

A month after his arrival in Afghanistan, a covert MI5 operation uncovered a Pakistani intelligence cell operating out of Manchester University, a young student in Oldham died of an asthma attack brought on by smoking heroin, and in Islamabad Javid Aslam Khan answered the phone to a panicked cell member on his first overseas assignment, a young Punjabi named Tariq Mahoon who was ripe for turning.

Once turned, Ed was made his handler – a twenty-four hour assignment with all other activities on hold. For the next five years, Tariq Mahoon had been Six’s eyes and ears inside the ISI, passing information on the links between Pakistani intelligence and insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan and the adjacent tribal areas, and the comings and goings of British-born Asians to the terrorist training camps there.

But now Tariq was dead, shot by Khan, and Ed was unsure what that meant for him.

15. Going underground

Where feasible Ed preferred to travel above ground, so he took a bus from Paddington, travelling south down Park Lane past the Animals In War memorial and, at the edge of Green Park, the half-built Bomber Command memorial. Sometimes it felt like the whole city was a mausoleum, its open spaces punctuated by monuments to public sacrifice. The bus went around the back of Buckingham Palace and down Vauxhall Bridge Road towards Vauxhall Cross, the Inca-pyramid-on-the-Thames that was home to MI6.

He was allowed through the first airlock but stopped at reception and informed his pass had been revoked. He was given a piece of card with a handwritten Whitehall address on it and told to report there immediately. Slinging his rucksack over his shoulder he set off east along Albert Embankment and crossed the river again at Westminster Bridge.

Craig’s Court was at the north end of Whitehall situated an equal distance between the horseback statue of Charles II and the Banqueting House, the site of Charles I’s execution. It was a cul-de-sac so unremarkable that Ed had never noticed its existence before. He stood at attention before a set of wooden double doors in a stone portico with Telephone Exchange written on them and smiled up at a camera. The doors clicked open.

Roland Totty from Human Resources was waiting for him inside.

‘Bloody bad news about Tariq,’ Totty told him, leading him down an unremarkable corridor with tiled walls, ‘Queen Bee is furious.’

‘With me?’

‘Best if I leave it to her to deliver the news.’

Ed didn’t like Totty. He was a Home Counties boy who wore red socks and imagined it made him interesting. He lived in Putney or Chiswick, somewhere like that on the District line, and he struggled to pay school fees. Ed thought him a buffoon.

‘Where are we going?’ Ed asked.

‘We’re going underground,’ Totty replied, light-heartedly, ‘like the song.’

Ed could imagine what Paul Weller would make of that. He remembered what Weller had said when the Prime Minister, a former Eton pupil and member of the cadet corps, had described Eton Rifles as his favourite song: ‘It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song.’

They went through a fire door, down a spiral staircase and the length of an underground corridor, opening a series of internal doors with mesh-lined windows, and down a further set of concrete steps to an older, mustier tunnel that opened out into a suite of mothballed basement offices.

Totty stopped in front of a scuffed steel door.

‘Far as I go old chap,’ he said. ‘She’s in there waiting for you.’

*

It was said of Samantha Burns (Queen Bee to her underlings) that she was not even a household name in her own household and the only time her name appeared in newsprint was when she shimmied over to the palace to upgrade her gong. She was a woman of secrets who had come up via Hutcheson’s Grammar School, Glasgow University, Treasury, Six and then the call to attend the newly formed National Security Council in the Cabinet Office. The remarkable thing about Burns was that she was so lively and twinkly-eyed, and
always ready to kick off her heels and bustle about in stockinged feet. It was as if her anonymity was not a product of the usual institutional greyness but rather of an essential slipperiness, an ability to bend light around her and thereby render herself invisible. She delivered bad news with an emollient smile and expressed friendly concern when people had done wrong. Crisis never disturbed her bonhomie.

She was sitting on a plastic chair in one of the basement rooms with a tall skinny cappuccino in one hand. The object of her attention was plastered across several walls: a mishmash of satellite photos, mug shots, maps, receipts, waybills, freight certificates, Post-it notes, bills of lading, company accounts, bank records, transcripts of phone intercepts, letters and newspaper cuttings. Things were crossed out and new bits superimposed and glued on. Strings of red thread made connections as complex as any spider’s web.

‘It’s known as the Khyber Collage,’ Burns explained.

Ed had heard of the Khyber Collage. He’d even seen it mentioned in footnotes in classified reports in Kabul. It was said to chart the growth of the broad and diverse movement that was radical Islamic militancy, going back decades to its roots in the Jihad against the Soviets and progressing to the current day. Depending on who you believed it was either a testament to diligent decades-long research or a metaphor for rampant paranoia. Ed struggled to remember what he’d heard of those responsible for its creation, not much more than gossip really, some kind of black ops outfit born of military intelligence known only as The Department. It had evolved from an even older outfit, the Afghan Guides, which had set up shop in Peshawar in the eighties and provided military assistance to the collection of Mujahideen groups known as the Peshawar Seven that were based there. The Department had limped on through the nineties when no one gave much of a shit about Afghanistan before enjoying a renaissance post 9/11. It was shut down after a controversy in 2005. Bodies had turned up in unexpected places: a bomb factory in Glasgow, a park bench in St James Park, a seaside town on the Kent coast.

At the centre of the board where the red string met there was a photograph cut from a newspaper clipping of a slim, donnish looking man with a high forehead and bi-focals perched on his nose. It was Major-General Javid Aslam Khan, colloquially known as “The Hidden Hand”. Khan was the former head of the ISI, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, and generally regarded as one of the key members of Pakistan’s
Invisible Government
, a cabal of “retired” military officers that formed a much more powerful counterpart to Pakistan’s democratically elected one.

If you believed the collage it was Khan who was responsible for channelling Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. It was Khan that was directly responsible for the brutal civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan when the Mujahideen groups turned on each other and fought over the rubble. It was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban as a bulwark against foreign intervention. And when that spectacularly failed it was Khan who fed and watered the terrorist networks, many of them former Mujahideen, like Hekmatyar and Haqqani, who were even now killing British and American servicemen. Ed realised that somebody had been keeping the collage up-to-date.
There were links from Khan to recently formed groups including the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
, whose specialty was assassinating Shi'a; the Zarqawis, a bloodthirsty band of Pakistanis who operated in Kandahar; and the White Taliban, a motley collection of Europeans and Uzbeks who operated in Zabul province.

‘Quite something isn’t it?’ Burns rolled her eyes in the direction of the back of the room and, with a start, Ed realised they were not alone. There was a large brooding presence in the shadows, a black man straddling a plastic chair.

‘This is Jonah,’ Burns explained, ‘official custodian of the collage. I won’t bother with his surname. He used to run the only other significant asset we had inside the ISI and he’s the only serving officer we have who’s actually met Khan. Got on like a house on fire, isn’t that right? What did you make of him, Jonah?’

‘He’s an unscrupulous bastard,’ Jonah replied. His verging-on-posh accent, with its gliding vowel, was at odds with his appearance, much more so than Ed’s. ‘He’s always happy to play both ends against the middle.’

Burns looked pointedly at Ed.

‘You’re tired aren’t you? I expect you’re angry as well.’

‘My agent was killed.’

‘There’s no point getting all riled up because the Americans didn’t give us fair warning. We all knew it would be that way.’

‘With respect, ma’am, nobody told me that it would be that way.’

‘It’s Khan you should be angry at. Khan killed Tariq.’

‘I listened to it happen,’ Ed replied.

‘Of course you did. And now you want revenge. Isn’t that right?’

Ed opened his mouth and abruptly closed it again. Revenge wasn’t supposed to be a motivation for action, not out loud at least. But Queen Bee was right. He’d lost an agent and he wanted someone to pay.

‘If it’s feasible,’ he said, ‘yes, of course.’

‘And there’s the nub. Did Totty tell you the facts of life? The PM wants us out of Afghanistan double quick, all shoulders to the wheel to ensure a smooth exit. Did he tell you that the PM is proposing to hold a joint Anglo-Pakistan peace initiative for Afghanistan?’

‘No he didn’t tell me that.’

Where was she going with this? Everybody knew that the last thing the Pakistanis wanted was peace in Afghanistan. They preferred the place in turmoil.

‘The status quo cannot hold,’ Burns explained. ‘We need new choice architecture.’

‘Choice architecture?’

’The PM’s calling for a nudge.’

‘A nudge?’

‘We’ve got to get out with a modicum of dignity intact. This isn’t going to be another Basra.’

’I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with me?’

‘Nothing. That’s my point.’

‘I’m sorry?’

She smiled her meaningless smile. ‘This gives me no pleasure but you’ve left me no choice. Your agent’s dead and the Americans have made it plain you’re not welcome back in Kabul, or anywhere else for that matter. We need a new approach to intelligence and, I’m sorry to say, you’ve ruled yourself out of it.’

‘You brought me here to tell me that?’

‘No, I brought you here to tell you that you’re suspended pending a disciplinary inquiry.’

16. The List

Lurking had become almost second nature to him. Ed stood in the shadow of a doorway with his hands in his pockets and a bag at his feet. London was blurred by autumn condensation, softened somehow. Maybe it was him. Was he becoming sentimental? He wasn’t meeting an agent this time. There was nothing covert or clandestine here.

The object of his attention was a small Brick Lane curry house on the corner of Heneage Street. It was well after midnight and the restaurant was closed for the night but there was still movement inside. People were clearing up, stacking chairs on tables and sweeping the floor. Eventually the front door opened again and the staff emerged. The last one out pulled down the bottom of the metal shutter from the shop awning and padlocked it. Terse goodbyes were said.

A stooped elderly man in the white shirt and black trousers of a waiter zipped up his windbreaker, walked a few feet and then paused on the pavement to light a cigarette, the flame of the lighter briefly illuminating his face before he set off again. Ed followed. He fell into step alongside him as he approached the southern end of Brick Lane.

The man gave him a sidelong glance.

‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he said.

‘Hello, Dad.’

There had been a period in his twenties when Ed had been angry with his father, but as he approached his middle years he had achieved a kind of accommodation.

The old man looked at the black bag in his hand. ‘You need somewhere to stay?’

‘Just for a few weeks.’

‘Come on, then.’

They crossed behind the East London mosque on Fieldgate Street and turned down one of the narrow one-way streets. People had put their pink recycling bags out and they spilled across the pavement so it resembled an obstacle course.

They stopped in front of a green door with three different locks.

Inside the hallway was narrow and smelled damp. There were chauffeur cards and pizza flyers spread across the floor.

‘You know how to find your room.’

#

He lay on his bed and stared upwards at the triangular prism on the ceiling, bending light’s path:
The Dark Side of the Moon
. A poster for an album released four years before he was born, an album about things that make people mad.