The Agent Runner by Simon Conway Read Free Book Online

sparingly. He found the prospect of sudden death robbed him of his appetite. The boy in the suicide vest did not eat at all. When they were done, the mullah stretched out on a
charpoy
and Khan’s driver passed around a snuffbox.
    The mullah was right, Khan thought. It would have been sensible to have killed him when he had the chance. Even though he was paying him, Khan had little confidence that the mullah would do as instructed. His best remaining hope was that Noman gave up on this foolish idea of searching for the House of War.
    They dropped the mullah and his boy back in Tehkal and drove back to Rawalpindi. At Hasan Abdal they left the Karokoram and joined the Grand Trunk Road that stretches for sixteen hundred miles from Kabul all the way to Chittagong in India.
    Khan went to bed at midnight, without touching the glass of milk that his daughter Mumayyaz left on his bedside table, as she had done every day since his wife died. There were times when he felt weighed down by mourning – for his beloved wife, for the nobility of the struggle to secure Pakistan and for the man-child that he never had.

7. Fear and loathing in the brandy shop
    His mother was the village whore and he had no idea who his father was. Now he over-revved a state-of–the art, turbo-fucking-charged Range Rover, jerked off to
fisting nuns
on a ruggedised Toughbook and hosed miscreants with a Generation 4 Glock pistol, thank you very much. He scared the living shit out of anyone he pleased to.
    Noman Butt was born in a one-room hut in a village of low-caste
Saraiki
-speaking Hindus on the banks of the mighty River Indus. The village sat astride the smuggling route that runs through Sindh from Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, and was just a few miles from the shrine to an ancient Sufi mystic, where drumbeats filled the night air, and uncovered women in red spun like dervishes. The soft aroma of hashish and cooked bread wafted through the tiny alleyways and old men with watery eyes sucked on clay pipes.
    In the summer the heat hit you like a five-knuckle wallop. It was on such a day when the temperature reached forty-eight degrees that his mother died. She fell across the door to their hut and trapped him alone inside. He was four years old. It was two days before one of her more impatient and impassioned clients broke down the door. Noman had survived by drinking water from a brass bowl, an offering to a Hindu deity.
    He didn’t know which one.
    From the village he was taken to an orphanage in Karachi and raised as a true believer, though he was never allowed to forget that he came from Hindu stock. It didn’t seem to matter that the village had disappeared without trace after corrupt local officials diverted floodwaters to protect a prominent landowner’s fields. It wasn’t the kind of past you could so easily erase. There were times when it felt like he carried a mass of Hindu gods on his shoulders, swarming like flies above their sacrifices.
    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