The Agent Runner Read Online Free PDF Page B

short speech a masked man shot him five times, four more than looked strictly necessary.
    Khan had found himself feeling surprisingly sanguine about the murder.
    ‘These things happen,’ he remembered telling Noman at the time. ‘If you feed a crocodile you must be careful it doesn’t bite off your hand.’
    Truth be told, Khan was relieved to have Imam out the way. He had become something of a public embarrassment with his outspoken views on the American presence in Afghanistan. The Americans had loved him once though. George Bush Senior had given him a lump of the Berlin Wall in thanks for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. But then they had taken against him when they learned he’d been active in Afghanistan after the September 11 th attacks, facilitating the movement of Al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan.
    The Americans had a habit of taking things personally.
    #
    It amused Noman to think how angry the Americans would be if they ever learned that bin Laden was being hidden in plain sight. The Americans loved it when they were invited to send their generals up to the Kakul Academy to lecture the officer cadets. They jumped at the chance, and they showered money on the Pakistani military, thirteen billion dollars in the last decade. Little did they know that their greatest foe was living quietly just a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Academy.
    It wasn’t a sanctioned operation, of course. The politicians were not informed. It didn’t appear on any paperwork. It wasn’t discussed over tea and tiffin cake at the Punjab Club. That was why Khan didn’t like him going up there. He didn’t want to attract any attention. Stay away, he’d said. But Noman argued that since the budget for the surveillance team was buried in an SS Directorate slush fund under his control it was his duty to keep an eye on the operation.
    ‘Now that you’ve been are you satisfied?’ Khan inquired.
    ‘No,’ Noman muttered. ‘I don’t trust those kids you’ve got up there.’
    Khan stared evenly at him without comment. Noman could imagine what he was thinking,
if you don’t trust them why did you nail one of them on the job?
There were times when Noman felt a visceral hatred of his father-in-law. He looked away. ‘I need to do some proper work.’
    Khan raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Proper work?
    ‘I want a proper operation to run. Something more than going through the motions.’ That was what he wanted, something concrete to launch himself at. ‘I’ve been looking through open files. I’ve been thinking about the House of War.’
    ‘Forget about it,’ Khan replied. ‘It’s a tall tale. A story to frighten the Americans.’
    ‘I’m not so sure.’
    The first whisper of the existence of a cell known as
Dar al-Harb
, or “The House of War”, had coincided with the much derided declaration in May 2009, by the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, that Pakistan’s nuclear security was the strongest in the world. An American National Security Agency computer trolling phone lines in South Waziristan had picked up a conversation between two Taliban commanders in which one of them had used the Pashto term
itami
, meaning “nuclear” or “atomic”. The House of War had an
itami
device, he said.
    A few days later one of the agency’s trawlers intercepted a conversation between two advisers to Baitullah Mehsud, the short thuggish Pashtun who had assumed command of the Pakistani Taliban. The advisers were overheard discussing an ethical dilemma that had recently come to the fore. Was it permissible under the laws of Islam for the House of War to use its “device”?
    The Americans had gone ballistic. They had directed their entire intelligence infrastructure on South Waziristan – wire intercepts, drones and covert agents. The ISI, when they were eventually informed, had been more sceptical, scornful even. Baitullah Mehsud was a semi-literate gangster with a big mouth and those he surrounded