The Agent Runner Read Online Free PDF

bi-focal glasses.
    ‘How are you, Noman? How is Mumayyaz?’
    ‘She wants a divorce.’
    Khan looked at him without expression. ‘That’s not funny, Noman.’
    They both knew that Mumayyaz would never leave him. The only reason Khan was asking was because Noman hadn’t been home for several weeks. He’d been on a binge, criss-crossing the country, visiting regional outposts and surveillance operations from Free Kashmir to Balochistan, a tour that had ended close to home, in bin Laden’s neighbour’s house.
    The waiter brought tea. Khan waited until he had left before speaking again. ‘Tell me about Abbottabad?’
    Noman thought that Khan almost certainly knew about what happened last night with the boy. In all likelihood either Tariq or Omar had called Khan the moment he left the house. They were Khan’s boys. There was almost nothing that Khan didn’t know. It occurred to him that part of the reason he had fucked the boy was as a gesture of defiance. How juvenile and ridiculous that seemed now.
    ‘No change,’ he told Khan, grudgingly. ‘Our guest remains confined. A courier comes and goes. They burn their rubbish.’
    Khan sipped at his tea and looked around the restaurant. Nothing seemed to disturb his air of having his mind on something more important than his surroundings. He carried with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which Noman’s sarcasm often seemed childish.
    ‘I went up there to make sure the operation was being run properly,’ Noman told him, peevishly. ‘It is my responsibility as a serving officer.’
    ‘You did what you had to,’ Khan told him.
    #
    There were times, watching Noman in action, that Khan felt a tearing inside at the prospect of the torch passing to such a new and unfathomable bearer. He regarded his son-in-law as a man of lavish and prodigal talent, in many ways an admirable fellow. It was his untamed libido and his loud-mouthed swagger that Khan struggled to understand. It was as if, like Napoleon, Noman’s character had been fixed for the lack of a couple of inches, which in conjunction with a shameful past, a brutal upbringing in an orphanage and a murderous army career, had produced a creature more akin to an
Afreet
, a demon, than a regular intelligence officer.
    Khan was still trying to understand why he had gone to Abbottabad. He didn’t give much credit to Noman’s claim that it was his professional responsibility, and it was surely more complex than simple boredom or deliberately going against Khan’s wishes. It was as if he had gone there to tip hishat, to pay homage to a hero. The last thing Khan wanted was for bin Laden’s house to turn into some kind of shrine.
    The decision to hide Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad had been taken by a small secretive group of “retired” former ISI officers, Khan foremost amongst them, who had taken on responsibility for bin Laden’s welfare after he crossed the border into Pakistan in early 2002. A group chosen because if it ever came out that they had been hiding him, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be able to semi-plausibly deny any knowledge of it.
    The obvious choice for hiding bin Laden, the tribal areas, was deemed too risky, too volatile. And so it had proved. There were the American drone attacks to worry about, but more than that too many fighters holed up there had turned against their former masters in the ISI. There was a time when an ISI officer could count on easy access to any Jihadi training camp or madrassa on the border but that was true no longer. It was only three months since the Pakistani Taliban had executed Sultan Amir Tarar, best known as Colonel Imam.
    Grey-bearded Imam, who was a guerrilla-warfare specialist and hero of the Jihad against the Soviets, regarded the tribal areas as his spiritual home and the motley gangs hiding there as his children. He was always offering them advice on how to tackle the enemy. It didn’t stop them turning against him. They filmed the execution. After a