The Agent Runner (6 page)

He had stolen their water and one day they would make him pay the price.

#

It was after midnight when Khan’s Chief of Staff, Tufail Hamid, found him. He was in a brandy shop squeezed between a boss-eyed whore and a
musth malang
, a filthy, stoned beggar from one of the local shrines who controlled a clutch of giggling, half-naked boys who were gathered at their feet. The
malang
was wearing a dress, with a headdress made from animal skins and feathers like a pagan shaman.

‘Tufail!’ Noman roared, waving his fists. ‘
Salem Aleikum!
I want to talk to you!’ He batted away the whore’s roving hands and shoved her along the bench to make a space. He slapped the wood. ‘Come here! Come here!’

Reluctantly, without bothering to disguise his distaste, Tufail stepped between the boys on the floor and sat alongside him.

‘I waited for over an hour at the Cave,’ he said.

Noman scrunched up his face. ‘What?’

‘You stood me up.’

He nodded slowly. ‘You’re here now.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Tufail demanded. ‘What do you want to talk to me about? Does Mumayyaz know you’re here?’

‘Don’t be such a killjoy.’ Noman hooked him around the neck and dragged him under his arm in a headlock. He patted the crown of Tufail’s head. ‘Faithful Tufail.’ He leant close, his mouth next to Tufail’s ear. ‘Evil people are watching me.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tufail gasped. ‘Let go of me!’

‘Something’s not right here. No. No. No. Your boss Khan is up to something.’

Abruptly he let go of Tufail, who shook himself and rubbed his neck.

‘You bastard.’

But Noman wasn’t listening. He’d been working himself into a fury over what Khan had told him outside the restaurant. What did the old man mean? Who were these unnamed enemies supposedly ranged against him?

He staggered to his feet, scattering boys in every direction.

‘
Mere Saath Aaiye
,’ he said, Come on!

#

Twenty minutes later they were sitting on plastic chairs outside a hole-in-the-wall
chai
shop. Noman was alternating sips of sweet, milky tea and puffs on a cigarette.

‘I’m sure you’re just being paranoid,’ Tufail told him once he’d explained.

‘He said it!’ Noman protested, louder than he’d intended. He looked around suspiciously. There was no change in the tempo of snoring emerging from the nearby line of rickshaws. Satisfied they were not being overheard, he leant forward and repeated the warning, ‘Evil people who wish you ill are watching you. That’s what he said. He doesn’t say things without cause.’

Tufail gave him a sympathetic look. ‘Are you a hundred percent positive that’s what he said?’

Noman gritted his teeth. ‘Of course I’m bloody positive.’

‘It’s just that you’re not yourself at the moment. You’ve been filling yourself up with drink and God knows what else.’

‘You think I imagined it?’

Tufail rocked his head from side-to-side. ‘You have a high-pressure job. Maybe the most difficult job in Pakistan.’

‘I’m not crazy!’

‘Calm down!’ Tufail reached out with one white-gloved hand and placed it on top of Noman’s. ‘I’m not calling you crazy. I just think you need rest and recuperation.’ He glanced around. ‘Leave bin Laden to Khan. It was stupid of you to go up there. You have other fish to fry. What about
Lashkar-e-Taiba
or the
Tehrik-i-Taliban
?’

Noman shrugged. ‘I feel like a naysayer. That’s all I do, say no. No you can’t kill this so-and-so or no you can’t blow up that dam. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t done anything since Mumbai.’

He had always considered the four-day rampage through the city in 2008 as one of the highpoints of his career. Whispering down the voice-over-internet into the ear of the gunman Mohammed Ajmal Kasab as he strode through the train station and fired into the crowd at the Metro Cinema had been one of the most voyeuristically exciting experiences of his life.

‘Your chance will come again,’ Tufail told him. ‘And when it does you’ll be transformed. I know you. When you get the bit between your teeth you’re
unstoppable. In the meantime you need to take it easy.’ He sighed. ‘I think you should go home. It will make Khan happy and Mumayyaz too.’

‘Yes,’ Noman agreed in a resigned tone.

And so finally he went home.

8. Good vibrations

Noman drove the blacked-out streets of Rawalpindi’s old town, along narrow alleyways of shops with their shutters down, eventually turning into a high walled cul-de-sac at the end of which was an archway with a set of wooden doors on hanging stiles with iron straps and white-painted jambs. This was the entry point to the Khan mansion, a large sprawling affair of many floors and wings and sagging roofs and painted shutters, that was spread out over several blocks and seemed to insinuate itself in the spaces between adjacent buildings like water between rocks in a stream.

He beeped the horn and the elderly
chowkidar
dragged the doors open and threw up an enthusiastic salute as Noman drove into the small courtyard beyond. It didn’t matter what time of night or day he pitched up at the gate, the old chap was always there, grinning like an idiot and stamping his heels together and saluting. The
chowkidar
was a Christian convert from a much-persecuted Hindu village close to the Indian border and he seemed to imagine that his lowly status gave him some affinity to Noman. In return Noman despised the old fool and would have happily got rid of him by now, but the hiring and firing of domestic staff lay in his wife’s gift and she enjoyed the spectacle of her husband’s discomfort too much to sack the man. He made a mental note to get the local street youths to beat him up at the first opportunity. In the Swat Valley, when the Taliban were in charge, they’d made Hindus wear red turbans and Noman regarded that as a good thing. Make ‘em stand out so you can easily herd them together, he thought.

There were two other cars in the courtyard: Khan’s silver Mercedes and beside it his wife’s white Pajero, which she hardly ever used. Noman parked between them and went inside without a backward glance.

He strode down cluttered passageways, brim-full with hat racks, stags’ heads and stuffed fishes in glass cases, the legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive Khans, and up and down stairs, and along further corridors to the dark-panelled study that was lined with hardback books.

It was in this room that he had first realised his father-in-law’s air of learning was a sham. The books all bore the
ex libris
stamp of a certain Colonel Arthur Neville of the 44
^th
Regiment of Foot, and many of the pages were uncut. It was a gentleman’s library, looted intact from the site of the massacre of Lord Elphinstone’s ill-fated expeditionary army in the Tazeen Pass at the ignominious end of the First Afghan War in 1842, and its only real use was to provide kindling for the fire in the mild, wet winter months.

By means of a secret lever concealed in the fireplace, he opened a door disguised as a bookcase and entered his wife’s apartments. Her bedroom was at the end of a narrow dimly lit corridor. It was a large and mysterious space, rendered exotic by candles, the centre dominated by a teak four-poster-bed with lustful serpents coiled around the columns, and a tapestry scene from Paradise of eager virgins on the canopy.

As he had expected to, Noman found his wife Mumayyaz,
en dishabille
, reclining on the bed, surrounded by a litter of unwashed plates and cups, rifled magazines and torn up newspaper. She was wearing a white diaphanous nightgown that hardly concealed the folds and furls of her mountainous flesh. She was a big woman. Junoesque. With heels on she stood a couple of inches
taller than Noman. She could bring a room to a halt by walking into it but as a rule she preferred to remain in bed. She had a huge mass of black hair, a large nose and a wide mouth that could take on many shapes and fit many things. Her complexion was her claim to beauty, for like that other fearsome Punjabi Benazir Bhutto, her skin was almost cream-white, and such wanton skin, pillows of it, soft and pliant as dough.

She was awake of course. Like the wretched
chowkidar
at the gate, he had never managed to surprise her. She was smoking and the curls of drifting smoke were as yellow as the nicotine-stained canopy of the bed. She felt him examining her from the doorway and raised her eyes to glare at him, the magazine in her lap sliding off the covers and onto the floor, a glimpse of a buff male torso on glossy paper. There was something about her fierce stare and the way she held the cigarette in her mouth that had always aroused him.

‘You look awful,’ she said. Her voice was a master-class in contempt. ‘You really are a loathsome little Hindu.’

Did she know about him drilling the boy’s arse? Khan might have told her, but it seemed just as likely that she knew it from looking at him. She had dark powers, Noman was convinced of it. She was psychic and she had the power to lay a curse. Once after a fight with her he had been shot at three times in twenty-four hours: once by a Tajik assassin sent from Kabul; once by a vengeful husband whose wife he’d given a bad case of crabs; and once by a nervous gate sentry who had taken him for a suicide bomber. It had been a warning from Mumayyaz, he was certain of that. He imagined her alone in bed, taking a break from pleasuring herself, waving her glistening fingers to spark the bullets in their chambers and send them spinning towards him.

‘I saw bin Laden,’ he said.

‘How is he?’

Noman shrugged. ‘Fine.’

‘He’s a very attractive man. Don’t you think so?’ she said, partly to annoy him, but she believed it too. She was a sucker for any kind of celebrity. ‘Dignified and so accomplished. History is not going to forget him, is it? Did it make you jealous?’

‘Why should it?’

‘Come on, darling, I know you better than that. You’re in a sulk. It must be bad otherwise you wouldn’t be here snivelling at my feet. You’d be off tupping one of your little girls.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Or is it a little boy this time?’ She knew all about his wayward behaviour. There was nothing she liked better than to taunt him with his failings: the unruly temper so easily sparked to violence; the shameful upbringing that wrought the colossal chip on his shoulder; the bouts of mania and depression; the urgent promiscuity; the desperate need for power and recognition. She seemed to regard each weakness revealed with Machiavellian indulgence, as if they were tools to be used in the years ahead. And as for his taste for buggery, his near-philosophical obsession with mining the depths, it provoked near-gleeful torrents of abuse: ‘The cunt is too wide a berth and too deep a port for my anatomically challenged husband. Only the smallest and tightest of holes will fit his eager little soldier.’

‘No, you must be really in a funk to have shown up here,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame you weren’t here earlier. You could have seen Rifaz before she went to the
airport.’ Rifaz was Mumayyaz’s daughter, Noman’s stepdaughter. Mumayyaz’s first husband had been a Punjabi politician once tipped for high office. He’d died in a mysterious explosion after two years of marriage. Rifaz had been the product of that marriage. She was a clever, rebellious girl with a grievance against the world. She’d flown back to an English all-girls boarding school that afternoon. ‘You know what the last thing she said to me was?’

‘No?’

‘That I should stop pretending to love you.’

‘Maybe she was right.’

‘Please. Spare me your self-pity.’

‘I’ve had a hard day.’

‘Don’t whine. I can’t bear it. You’re such a pathetic whiner. Sometimes I lie marooned here and wonder how you ever became a hero.’

‘You’re not marooned,’ he told her, ‘you’re just too lazy to move.’

She ignored that. ‘I suppose the Indians must have been even more scared than you, shivering and shuddering in the snow, you crying out for your mummy and them crying out for their mummies, and all of you wetting yourselves, and you firing your little gun at them. It’s really nothing to brag about.’

‘I don’t brag about it.’

‘Except for when you’re too drugged up to remember, of course. Then you shout about it from the rooftops.’

‘I didn’t have a gun.’

‘Pardon me, I forgot. You did it with a tradesman’s tool. You know you really do look terrible, I mean you look like some unwashed holy man from a shrine.’

‘I’m descended from holy men.‘

‘You don’t have to remind me,’ she said, ‘those terrible smelly fraudsters. No wonder you’re such an accomplished liar.’

‘Watch your tongue,’ he snapped.

She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying: ‘You know what I’ve been reading? I’ve been reading about psychopaths.’

‘In
She
magazine? Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘I thought you were one. In fact I was convinced of it. But it says they dream in black and white.’

Noman did not care to dwell on his turbulent childhood and its after-effects. He did not like to speak of it. Not for the first time he regretted telling her about his dreams. Looking at her he felt murderous anger. He’d have happily strangled her without feeling an inch of remorse.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, suddenly playful. Nothing turned her on so much as making him angry. She shifted on the bed and her nightgown gaped, offering him a view of her massive breasts and their maroon nipples. ‘Your secret is safe with me.’

Who would she tell? The only time she left the house was on her monthly shopping spree to Dubai.

‘Come here and kiss me.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘You’re fragile tonight, aren’t you?’ She looked sideways at him, her face almost gentle for a moment, before resuming its customary shrewdness. ‘Is it bin
Laden? Or is it Papa? Papa says you’re going looking for the House of War. You’re only going up there because he doesn’t want you to. You can be so childish sometimes.’

‘That was a private conversation.’

‘Silly.’ She nudged him with a painted toe, setting off a shiver of the bells on her ankle, the nightgown sliding back to reveal her thighs. ‘You know that Papa tells me everything.’