The Agent Runner by Simon Conway Read Free Book Online Page A

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’reunstoppable. 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