The Agent Runner (22 page)

‘How did Burns know that Tariq was due to be recalled?’

Ed shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I guess it came from a wiretap. GCHQ were all across Tariq’s communications.’

‘You saw a transcript in the file?’

‘No. There was nothing about him going back to the Afghan Bureau. But it wasn’t the full file. It was something they pulled together just for me.’

‘You didn’t think that was strange? They give you an agent to run but you don’t get to see the entire file. A key piece of information was given to you and you accepted it without seeing any evidence.’

‘It was short notice. The circumstances were unusual.’

‘Did you ever get to see the full file?’

‘No.’ He was conscious that it was a feeble response and there was what sounded to his ears like a pleading quality in his voice. ‘Burns played her cards close to her chest. That’s her way.’

‘And then you returned to Afghanistan?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that’s where you next met with Tariq?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Describe the meeting.’

Ed closed his eyes and the memories gathered around him like old acquaintances.

#

He wound black turban cloth around his head and under his chin, drawing it up over his nose to mask his face. The sun was low in the sky and the wind had got up, orange-tinted dust billowed over the Hesco rampart of the Forward Operating Base and in front of him the sheet-metal door rattled in its frame.

‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ he shouted in the ear of the gate sentry, hoping it was true.

‘You’re a crazy man!’ The sentry was a wide-eyed and buck-toothed boy from Tennessee who’d never seen someone walk out of the FOB alone and unarmed before. It was against every rule in the book. Beside the sentry, Dai gave him a nod that Ed had learnt meant both
good luck
and
see you later for whatever passes for beer in this place
. Not that there was any beer in the FOB. There was plenty of
Dimethylamine
but no alcohol. They would have to go over to the Afghan Police post for that. If he made it back…

He slipped into the anonymity of the dust storm. Twenty minutes later he was just one of the crowd hurrying to cross the border before it closed. The friendship gate was an unwieldy double-arched desert confection, which looked as if George Lucas had assembled it from the salvaged parts of a second-hand space station, while the hooded and cowled figures struggling beneath it resembled Jawas and Tusken Raiders.

The gate was too precarious to admit traffic, and the long lines of waiting trucks were funnelled off the highway into a detour, a one-lane dirt road that snaked through a treacherous scree-covered ravine. By day up to a hundred trucks carrying fuel and supplies for ISAF passed this way. But by night – when the crossing was officially closed – smugglers and their corrupt allies in the Afghan Border Police controlled it.

Ed set off on foot down the ravine, passing alongside the stationary trucks. Without warning, a man stepped out from behind a truck up ahead. It was Tariq, wearing the uniform of the Pakistan Frontier Police. He indicated for Ed to follow and ducked back into the shadows.

The tailgate was down on one of the trucks and ragged tarpaulin pulled aside. Ed climbed up and into the back where Tariq was waiting, sitting astride a pallet of 50-kilogram sacks.

‘This is the kind of shit you’re looking for, right?’

Ed switched on his torch and inspected the cargo. No effort had been made to disguise their provenance: white sacks with the familiar palm tree logo and PalmTree Fertilizer Limited stencilled on them in black lettering and, below that, Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN). The PalmTree factory was a sprawling forty-year-old complex of belching chimneys, rattling pipes and rusting tanks surrounded by thousands of acres of mango orchards and cotton fields on the outskirts of Multan, in Punjab’s agricultural heartland. Powerful and well protected landowners bought the three types of fertiliser produced by the
factory, used the two safer varieties domestically, then trucked the ammonium nitrate across the border to Afghanistan. It was easy to turn CAN into a bomb. Insurgents boiled the small, off-white granules to separate the calcium from the nitrate, mixed it with fuel oil and packed the slurry into a jug or box and rigged it for detonation. Each sack could make up to four bombs.

‘Four truck loads,’ Tariq told him. ‘That’s a lot of dead unbelievers, right?’

‘Where are they going?’

‘Helmand. This is all they need for the spring offensive, right here. I’ve done well, right?’

Ed grunted. In his experience all agents were insecure and out for approval. Tariq was no different to anyone else he’d run. The key was giving it to him in the right dose. Too much and he might get complacent and start taking risks, too little and he might run back to the ISI and confess his sins.

Tariq gave him a bewildered look, and said. ’You’re not
tawhid
are you?’

Ed frowned. ‘No.’

‘I hoped you were some kind of believer.’

He sounded depressed. Ed was surprised. Was that the impression that he’d given in the Oldham flat – that he was motivated by purity of belief and action? Was Tariq hoping that there was some kind of redemption in betrayal?

He reached out and grabbed him by the lapels.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a mullah, or a guru, or a fucking Sufi saint. I don’t care whether God is a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew. I’m as fucked up as the next person, as fucked up as you. Yes, you’ll save lives. British lives and Afghan lives. Well done. One day we’ll give you a medal. Meantime, tell me who this shit is going to?’

Two days later, a US Special Forces team backed up by a British Quick Reaction Force from 2 Para, intercepted the trucks on the highway as they were being unloaded near Lashkar Gah. Four insurgents were killed and a local businessman, with connections to the Provincial Governor, was arrested and airlifted to Bagram Prison for interrogation. Subsequent operations in Sangin and Musa Qala resulted in the arrest of several alleged Taliban sympathisers.

He could remember the jubilant reaction from London: Britain’s security operatives, for too long starved of actionable intelligence, now had something to sink their teeth into. And the Americans could be invited to the feast. Signals intelligence from GCHQ and the American NSA was routinely shared under a bilateral agreement, but human intelligence was often subject to more of a barter process. By passing on intelligence from Tariq, the British were ensuring that they would be included if the Americans uncovered their own similar sources.

#

Noman poured cold water on it.

‘Was there a decrease in the number of roadside bombs in Helmand as a result of the tip-off provided by Tariq?’

‘Not as such,’ Ed conceded. ‘But there wasn’t an increase either. If we hadn’t intercepted those convoys a lot more soldiers would have died. ‘

‘How many shipments of ammonium nitrate did you seize?’

‘Between 2006 and 2010, seven shipments as a result of information from Tariq.’

‘All from the same source?’

‘Yes from the PalmTree factory.’

‘But still fertiliser found it’s way to Helmand?’

‘Sure. Tariq could only give us what he knew.’

‘Or what he was told to give you.’

Ed looked at him. ‘You think that the information from Tariq was coming from a higher source?’

‘Don’t be cute with me,’ Noman snapped. ‘I’ll send you right back down to the cellar. Tariq was a conduit, we both know that.’

‘It’s what I always suspected,’ Ed conceded. ‘But I didn’t have any proof. I didn’t know the identity of the higher source.’

‘It’s not difficult,’ Noman said. ‘
Cui bono
: who benefits. There are two factories in Pakistan that produce Calcium Ammonium Nitrate,’ Noman told him. ‘PalmTree Fertilizers was initially established as a joint venture by the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation and the Gulf Council Oil Company, it was privatised in 2005 and acquired by a consortium of the Noor Group and the Sharif Group. The other firm that produces CAN is Punjab Fertilizer Ltd, an enterprise privately owned by the Chuppa Group. You stopped the flow of CAN from PalmTree but not from Punjab Fertilizer. You closed down one and opened a market for the other.’

‘You’re suggesting that we got caught up in some kind of turf war between competing companies over the supply of nitrate to the Taliban?’

‘Wake up and smell the coffee. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. And get this: the majority shareholding in the Chuppa Group is held by the Khan family, originally of Lahore. Javid Aslam Khan owns a six percent stake in the company.’

‘You think Khan was the higher source?’

‘Don’t you?’

There was a knock on the door and a beautiful barefoot young woman with tiny silver bells on her ankles came in with a steel tray. She set the tray down on the table and loaded it with the empty bowls. Her movements were slow and deliberate as if she had been drugged and Noman watched her with a kind of lazy but predatory interest.

Ed realised that she must be Tariq’s widow. He wanted to say something to her, but there was no consolation that he could offer. She picked up the tray and glided out of the room.

‘Tell me about the next meeting?’

35. The sociopath’s address book and other disappointments

They were in Kandahar, in the cemetery behind the Chowk Madad. Tariq came hurrying between the jumbled stone cairns and the ragged green martyr’s flags with a turban disguising his face.

‘What have you got for me this time?’ Ed demanded, once he’d established they only had a few minutes.

‘The nasty file.’ Tariq pressed a memory stick into his hand. ‘The sociopath’s address book.’

He left as swiftly as he arrived.

Bit by bit, Ed recounted the extent of the information in the Afghan Bureau files that were passed to him by Tariq. The name and location and ISI point of contact for the leadership of some of the nastiest splinter groups in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda affiliates, offshoots and copycats including the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Zarqawis and the White Taliban. In addition to the contact details there was a breakdown of their sources of funding including, at the local level, extortion, kidnapping and smuggling operations and, internationally, via wealthy donors in the Persian Gulf. Ed’s memory was good. He could remember the names of each and every ISI informant.

Noman interrupted. ‘Stop,’ he said. He was wearing the same stony I’m-about-to-explode frown as when Ed described the provenance of the intercepted cargo of fertiliser. ‘That’s all he gave you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A rag-tag bunch of splinter groups that nobody would miss. That was your great coup?’

Ed shrugged. ‘It’s what he gave us.’

‘Didn’t you ask for more?’

‘Of course we did. He said he didn’t have access to better information. He didn’t have the clearance.’

Noman was incredulous. ‘Did you believe him?’

‘I didn’t know what to believe.’

‘Tariq was Khan’s message-boy. He carried messages to everybody, from Mullah Omar to the Haqqanis, father and son. He knew everybody! He could have given you everything!’

Anger had been replaced by confusion on Noman’s face.

#

The next memory stick was pressed into Ed’s hand in a roadside culvert outside Jalalabad. They squatted amongst tangles of mottled bark sheddings that had been washed down from a eucalyptus plantation on the slope above them.

‘They’re going to wet themselves for this in London,’ Tariq told him with a sparkle in his eyes.

‘What is it?’

‘The enemy within,’ he said. ‘The alumni list.’

The files on the stick identified the location of a dozen madrassars across the tribal areas providing weapons and explosives handing training to eager young Jihadis from English and other European inner cities, and with it a list of the names and passport numbers of those who had graduated over a four-year period. British, Dutch and German passport holders who might one day form the nucleus of a home grown insurrection.

‘And did they wet themselves?’ Noman asked.

‘Sure. Since the 7/7 attacks, preventing any further attacks on the homeland had become the highest priority.

‘But?’

Ed sighed. ‘We couldn’t find any of the individuals on the list. Don’t get me wrong. They were real people. We could identify their families. Some of their friends and associates were placed under surveillance. A couple of arrests followed. Two of them turned up dead in Afghanistan and another in Somalia. But there was no record of any of them re-entering the UK. It was the same with the Dutch and the Germans. At Vauxhall Cross it became known as the missing persons list.’

‘And the madrassars?’

Ed shrugged. ‘All the indicators suggested that the sites had been used as training camps but by the time we got drones in the airspace over them they had all been abandoned. Some just a couple of weeks before we received the intelligence.’

And the confusion written on Noman’s face had been replaced with dismay.

#

After that it was an irrigation ditch in the Green Zone, the lush strip of dense vegetation that ran alongside the Helmand River. Ed went out of the medieval mud-walled fort that was FOB Inkerman with a platoon patrol from 2 Para. They dropped him off at a pre-arranged spot and agreed to collect him on the way back in. He slid down a reed bank into green scum-filled water. Tariq was already there waiting.

‘What did he have this time?’ Noman demanded.

‘He told me a story,’ Ed explained. ‘He said it concerned a Jihadi group in the tribal areas and its efforts to build a dirty bomb out of a cache of radioactive medical waste. When I asked where he had got the information, he refused to answer. He said he wanted to talk to Samantha Burns.’

‘He used her name?’

‘Yes. I was surprised. Shocked even.’

Noman swore softly under his breath. ‘What did you do?’

‘I called Burns.’ He’d waded along the ditch far enough to be out of earshot and called her on the sat-phone.

‘How did she react?’

‘She was unruffled. She told me to hand over the phone to him. I argued against it, caving into Tariq like that would only encourage more petulance. But I was overruled.’