A Loyal Spy Read Free Page B

than anything. The Taliban could play a central role in restoring centralised government in Afghanistan. The Americans agree. They are going to run a thousand miles of pipeline straight through the middle of it and pump a million barrels of oil a day. The oil companies are opening offices in Kandahar.’
    ‘And the missing Stingers …?’ Jonah asked. ‘Shouldn’t we be trying to get them back?’
    The CIA had given away more than two thousand of the easy-to-use, shoulder-fired missiles during the war against the Soviets. The Stinger automated heat-seeking guidance system was uncannily accurate, and they had brought down scores of helicopters and transport aircraft, sowing fear among Soviet pilots and troops alike. Jonah had seen recent intelligence that suggested that six hundred Stingers were still at large.
    Fisher-King dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. ‘The Americans are even as we speak negotiating with Mullah Omar to buy them back. They’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for each one. There’s nothing we can bring to that particular table. We don’t have the resources. You’ll tell Nor, won’t you? It’s best coming from you. He’s your joe …’
    ‘Tell him what exactly?’
    ‘What I’ve just told you: job well done. Thanks very much.’
    ‘And what do you expect him to do?’
    ‘Same as he does now.’ Fisher-King smiled winningly and sprang to his feet. ‘I’m sure the Pakistanis will keep him busy.’ He removed his double-breasted suit jacket from a rack and put it on, sweeping together the silk-lined flaps and buttoning it up. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Top Floor is waiting. You know your way out.’
    Jonah found Monteith sitting on a plastic chair in front of the Afghan ops board in one of the largest of his basement rooms. As was his daily custom, he was wearing a hand-stitched tweed suit and polished brogues. It was difficult to tell whether the suit was forty years old or simply looked it.
    ‘They want me to pack it up in boxes and stick it in an archive,’ Monteith muttered angrily, staring intently at the board. ‘Fisher-King says it should be in a museum. I was thinking of donating it to my old school.’
    Monteith’s Afghan ops board was a legend across the intelligence services. It was known as the Khyber Collage. It was a mishmash of satellite photos, mugshots, maps, waybills, freight certificates, Post-it notes, bills of lading, company accounts and bank records, transcripts of phone intercepts, letters and newspaper cuttings. Things were crossed out and new bits superimposed and glued on. It was maddeningly complex, like an alchemistic experiment. When Jonah had joined the Department it covered a single wall, now it was two. Only Monteith professed to see all the links. Only Monteith could claim to have been following 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, when the Americans and the Saudis, without any thought for the consequences, funnelled money to a diverse range of Afghan fighters. Funds that went to tens of thousands of people, some operating as individuals, others as mujahedin groups – groups that had over time dissolved or gruesomely mutated.
    At the centre of the board, there was a photograph cut from a newspaper of a donnish-looking man with a high forehead and bifocals perched on his nose. It was Monteith’s arch-nemesis, Brigadier Javid Aslam Khan, known to the Department as ‘The Hidden Hand’. Khan was head of the Afghan Bureau of the ISI, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s shadowy and all-powerful intelligence agency. Monteith maintained that it was Khan who was responsible for channelling Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the mujahedin during the Soviet occupation. It was Khan who was directly responsible for the brutal civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal when