The Agent Runner Read Free Page A

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.
    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