The Agent Runner Read Free

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