The Agent Runner (2 page)

The ISI treated Afghanistan, and in particular its Pashto speaking lands, as its own personal fiefdom and if you wanted insight into the current insurgency you needed an asset inside the ISI.

#

It had been almost impossible to establish a decent network of reliable informants in Afghanistan. Just as in Iraq there were too many local agencies, most of them penetrated by the enemy, too few sources and not enough secure locations to meet.

When the break came it was a result of unforeseen events that required a swift response, and not in Afghanistan. It was March 2006 and Ed got a call on the secure phone at the Kabul Embassy telling him to get on the next available flight home. He rode back in the cargo hold of an RAF Boeing C-17 alongside coffins carrying the bodies of two infantrymen killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand. At Brize Norton he side-stepped the cortege and strode across the tarmac to a waiting police car. He was driven north on the motorway, hurtling up the fast lane with lights and siren.

Ed spent the journey studying the contents of the MI5 file he’d been handed. A surveillance operation initiated by one of their people in an Oldham mosque had uncovered the existence of a small cell of ISI officers, who were up to the same things as MI5, monitoring the activities of Jihadi talent scouts in Oldham and Manchester who were recruiting local kids for specialised training in madrassas in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The ISI cell had been under surveillance for several months now. The file included detailed biographies of the cell members as well as a summary of their activities. It was the first time he saw a picture of
Nightingale
: a grainy black and white photocopy of the passport photo on his visa application. But you could tell he was good-looking, with a square jaw and chiselled cheeks, and a curved bow of a mouth. You’re a spoiled young man,
was Ed’s first thought. There were other photos of course, of clandestine meetings, of pick-ups and casual encounters, with
Nightingale
at the centre of attention and everybody around him smiling as if they felt some kind of gravitational pull. They must have fallen over themselves to confide in him. What a carefree life it must be this spying lark, Ed thought, followed by a sharp retort. Now it’s all going to be very different.

At the back of the file was the transcript of a phone intercept. A panicked call made by
Nightingale
from an address in Oldham to a number in Islamabad just over fifteen hours ago. According to GCHQ, the calm and unhurried voice on the end of the line in Islamabad belonged to the
“
Hidden Hand
”
– Pakistan’s legendary spy of spies – Major-General Javid Aslam Khan.

#

The lights and siren were switched off as they approached Oldham.

Ed was dropped off on the Lees Road, half a mile short of his destination, and walked in. He was the right skin tone for the neighbourhood. He turned into Gibraltar Street. The carcass of a Victorian mill dominated the skyline.

The single storey redbrick bungalow was at the end of a shabby cul-de-sac. Frosty blades of grass were pushing up through the cracked tarmac of the carport and the curtains were drawn. He knocked on the door.

A white woman opened it. She was not tall, about five-four he estimated, late twenties with auburn hair cut in a sensible bob and a determined look on her face. She was wearing practical clothes: black jeans, canvas trainers and a fleece.

‘Come in.’

He stepped inside. It was chilly. She handed him a pair of latex gloves, which he snapped on. ‘How is he?’

‘Like a sulky child,’ she replied. He registered her Yorkshire accent. ‘What do you want to do first?’

‘Show me the body.’

He followed her down the hall to the bedroom.

The body on the bed was cold and rigid. His back and buttocks had the blue-cheese-mould patina of stagnant blood,
liver mortis
. Ed realised why it was so cold. They must have turned off the heating in an attempt to preserve the body for as long as possible.

‘Cause of death?’

‘By the looks of it he choked on his own vomit. They were smoking heroin.’ There was a fold of discoloured aluminium foil beside the bed and a lighter. ‘I’m told it’s almost impossible to kill yourself smoking heroin.’

‘Bad luck then. A nasty surprise.’

She nodded. ‘He says he woke up alongside him.’

‘That’s when he made the call?’

‘That’s right. He woke, found the body and called Islamabad. He was told to sit tight until midnight tonight when a clean-up crew would arrive and he would be given a fresh set of instructions.’

Ed looked at his watch. They had three hours.

‘What about the other members of the cell?’

‘They’ve gone quiet. No calls, no web traffic and no movement.’

Nightingale
had made the call and, subsequently, word had gone out to the rest of the cell to stop whatever they were doing and wait. Khan was known for caution. He didn’t want to waste a clean-up crew on a trap.
Nightingale
hadn’t liked that of course, he’d objected in the strongest terms.
You can’t leave me here with a dead body
. But he’d been told to put a sock in it.
Sit tight and wait
.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in the kitchen. We’ve been moving him back and forth between the kitchen and the living room all day.’

Nightingale
was sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket around his shoulders and a cup of sweet tea in his hands. He’d had fifteen hours to work his way through the full gamut of emotions – despair, anger, outrage, bitterness and resignation.

The other MI5 officer was standing with his back to the sink. He was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing Lycra cycling shorts and a waterproof jacket. There was a cycle helmet on the sideboard beside the kettle.

He nodded to Ed. ‘Now say hello to the mystery man who’s come all the way from Kabul to have a chat.’

Nightingale
grunted and continued to stare into his cup of tea.

‘I’ll take it from here,’ Ed told him. He waited while the two MI5 officers went through into the living room and then sat at the table. Ed placed his hands down with his fingers splayed, a pianist centring himself before a recital. He resisted the urge to rub his face. He remembered his training: on first meeting an agent, appear calm and carry yourself with authority.
Be Gnomic. Be Desi Yoda
. Sweat prickled the back of his neck. He wished he’d had an opportunity to shave.

‘I have to make a decision,’ he told
Nightingale
in a conversational tone. ‘I have to decide whether to call in the police or do nothing and let your people clear it up.’

That brought his head up: wide-eyed, eager as a puppy. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might walk away from this. Later Ed would pinpoint that as the moment when he first decided that
Nightingale
was a lousy spy, his face so expressive you could watch each and every thought unfold. Later still he would revise his opinion:
Nightingale’s
thoughts were so random and grandiose and scattergun, that they served to disguise his true feelings. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad spy after all.

‘If I bring in the police, you’ll be arrested and you’ll probably go to prison, your cover will be blown and your relatives will no longer be welcome here. The Prevention of Terrorism Act already gives us wide powers but we won’t be in any way constrained by it.’ Keep your voice as flat as an oil spill, Ed told himself. ‘Let me spell that out for you. Your cousin will be kicked off his chemical engineering course and deported. Your aunt will almost certainly lose her job at the solicitors firm. There will be no more summertime visas for the family. And the money they have been squirreling away for the day when Pakistan becomes uninhabitable will be seized and made forfeit. That’s just the start. We’ll think up whole new ways to inconvenience you while you’re waiting on remand. I can guarantee you won’t like your cell mate and he won’t like you.’

Nightingale’s
face was ashen and his lower lip wobbled, the tears welling up in his eyes. He rubbed them with the backs of his hands.

‘It’s a bummer isn’t it?’

‘What do you want?’
Nightingale
said.

‘I understand you are about to be recalled? I understand you have been offered a new position with the ISI’s Afghan Bureau.’

‘How do you know that?’

Never answer a direct question
.

‘I think at this point you have to assume that we know everything about you,’ Ed told him. ‘In fact we know you better than you know yourself.’

‘What is it you want from me?’

‘It’s simple really. We want you to go back to Pakistan as planned. We want you to take up your new job in the Afghan Bureau. We want you to go on working for Khan but we want you to work for us too. In return for a regular flow of information we’ll guarantee your cousin finishes his course and there won’t be any problems for your family. We’ll even add to the pot of money your parents have stashed away and we’ll offer you and your whole family British citizenship and police protection for life.’

‘You want me to spy on Khan?’

‘Exactly. We want to know what he’s up to in Afghanistan. We want the whole picture, warts and all.’

‘I don’t have any choice do I?’

Then he smiled, his tears forgotten. That was
Nightingale
for you, he was too devil-may-care to be blackmailed and although his family struggled to maintain their lifestyle it wasn’t about the money either. For him it was about the excitement. If being a secret agent was a thrill, how much more thrilling to be a double agent?

#

Four years of clandestine meetings followed, in ditches and graveyards scattered across Afghanistan, anywhere sufficiently distant from prying eyes, and often only for a few minutes.
Nightingale
provided Ed with information that allowed coalition forces to successfully disrupt attacks, smash insurgent networks and counter the flow of weapons and bomb-making materials over the border. And if at times it had seemed as though the information provided by
Nightingale
was partial (the smashed networks were invariably those considered the most independent of the ISI and the disruption of bomb-making materials didn’t result in a significant reduction in the number of explosions) and that
Nightingale
might in fact be a triple agent (an ISI plant receiving guidance from Islamabad), Ed could put his hand on his heart and say he had expressed his suspicions to London and had been told, in no uncertain terms, to keep his opinions to himself. For four years
Nightingale
had been referred to by London as
“
the gift that kept on giving
”
.

But now, in a surprise move,
Nightingale
had returned to Pakistan and been given a new posting, an off-the-books surveillance operation in the ever-so-quiet garrison town of Abbottabad. Ed recalled the last time they’d met: a month ago in Kandahar in the cemetery behind the chaotic bazaar known as the Chowk Madad.

‘I’m getting close to something that will interest London,’
Nightingale
had told him in his familiar high-handed way. Over the years it had become his favourite way of baiting Ed. Acting as if there was someone
important
in London who was his
real
handler and Ed was little more than a conveyor of messages,
the opposite of Ed’s suspicion that
Nightingale
was little more than a conveyor of messages himself. After four years of secret meetings they behaved towards each other with the sly hostility of a long-married couple.

‘Khan’s got something hidden away up in Abbottabad, right under the noses of the Joint Chiefs. Something mega-secret. There is a house under permanent surveillance. I think I can wangle my way up there.’

‘You need to be careful,’ Ed cautioned him, not for the first time.

‘I met someone. They call him Noman. I don’t know whether it’s a name or a joke. He’s something big in SS Directorate so he’s got a finger in every pie. The thing is, Ed, he’s got the hots for me, big time. He’s a beast. You should see the way he looks at me. He can’t wait to get his hands on me. He can hardly control himself.’

‘And you’re going to let him?’

Nightingale
was defiant. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I forbid it,’ Ed told him. ‘Your focus is on Afghanistan and imminent threats to UK security. Whatever the ISI is up to on home soil is outside our remit.’

Nightingale
pouted. ‘Alright, alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay well away.’

You encourage them to cheat and lie, Ed thought, and they do it to you as well.

It was two weeks later that
Nightingale
got back in touch, via a dead drop run by the Intelligence cell at the embassy in Islamabad.

I was right! It’s the big Kahuna!

3. The surveillance operation

Waking, Noman thought he could smell sulphur. When he raised his head the poison struck: thirst, nausea and a barbed pain behind the eyes.

Tumultuous dreams.

For as long as Noman could remember he had been dreaming about the annihilation of the world. As a child it was often an earthquake, abysses yawned and mountains rose and fell. As a teenager it was more often than not a flood or a zombie apocalypse. Then in 1998 in operations
Chagai-1
and
Chagai-2
, Pakistan detonated six nuclear devices in Balochistan and another dream was folded into the mental gravy: an atomic explosion over a desert city; first a shockwave that demolished houses and factories, after that a fireball rolling outwards to the horizon, melting car tyres and searing human shadows into the asphalt. And last of all the mushroom cloud, rising and spreading and hanging silently over the desert.

Ka-fucking-boom

His eyes were smarting and his vision was watery. There was a thin layer of acrid black smoke hovering just below the ceiling. It took him a few moments to realise that the neighbours were burning their rubbish again.

When he turned he felt the warm body beside him, naked and face down. He reached out and ran his fingers down the young man’s spine and over his smooth, round buttocks. When he first woke he had not been able to remember who it was. The touch of his skin brought recollection. Tariq.