Free The Agent Runner by Simon Conway Page A

him?’
    ‘I can see him,’ Ed confirmed.
    Come on!
Tariq was at the border. He was almost through it. He had nearly made it.
    At that moment the figure stopped and crouched down.
    Then Ed heard it, a helicopter approaching.
    The helicopter’s searchlight flicked on, a bright white spear in the darkness.
    ‘Open fire!’ Ed roared. ‘The chopper’s crossed over to our side. Open fire!’
    Then the figure was running. There came the sound of a voice shouting through a loudspeaker, the searchlight sweeping across the rocks.
    ‘Open fire,’ Ed pleaded. ‘Please.’
    The soldiers stared through their night-sights and did not fire. The helicopter banked suddenly, turning away from them, heading back into Pakistan. Tariq was still coming.
    ‘Let him through,’ Ed shouted. ‘Let the guy through.’
    The man ran out into open ground and scrambled up the steep sides of the hilltop. He was barefoot, his legs covered in scratches and bruises. He scaled the sandbag walls and dropped like a sack into the centre of the outpost.
    Ed was the first to reach him. It was Hakimullah, Tariq’s elderly Hazara manservant. He was crouching in the dirt wrapped in the remnants of his blanket. He looked like a beaten dog.
    ‘Where’s Tariq?’ Ed demanded in Pashto, shaking him.
    ‘It’s not safe for him to cross,’ Hakimullah replied. ‘They are searching everywhere for him.’
    ‘Where did he go?’
    ‘The safe house in Peshawar.’
    Winslow was standing at Ed’s side. The two guards were hanging back, pointing their rifles at Hakimullah.
    ‘This is the guy?’ Winslow demanded. ‘This is your agent?’
    ‘No,’ Ed replied. ‘This isn’t him.’
    ‘Jesus Christ!’ Winslow swore. ‘Are you crazy?’
    ‘Fuck you,’ Ed snapped.
    ‘I’ll go,’ Hakimullah said. He reached into a pocket and retrieved a scrap of paper that he pressed into Ed’s hand. ‘This is Tariq’s number. You can call him.’
    ‘Where will you go?’ Ed asked, after a pause.
    ‘Back over. My granddaughter is there.’
    ‘They’ll hunt you down.’
    Hakimullah shrugged. He climbed wearily to his feet, re-arranged the blanket around his shoulders and without a backward glace climbed back over the sandbag walls, slid down the hillside and disappeared amongst the rocks and bushes.
    Ed groaned in frustration. He wanted to punch a wall. After a few carefully controlled breaths he regained his composure. Winslow was watching him.
    ‘I have to make a call.’
    He squatted down in the shelter of a sandbag wall and punched the numbers written on the piece of paper into his sat-phone.

11. A knock on the door
    For the third time that minute, Tariq glanced down at the phone in his hand and willed it to ring.
    Please Ed, bloody well call me!
Meri madat karo!
Help me!
    He was standing in darkness at the window’s edge, shielded by the weathered carcass of a wooden shutter, shivering despite the heat. From his vantage point he could see the shadowy entrance to the courtyard several floors below. He had never felt more alone and afraid. It was only a matter of time before he was discovered. He listened to the hiss and drip of elderly air conditioning units lashed to boards on the surrounding walls and tried not to imagine that the rooftops and passageways sheltered men with guns. He had been standing here for hours, tracking the movement of the sun as it crossed the sky and sank beneath the jumble of roofs in the Khyber Bazaar. In the morning he had watched as the pot-seller moved stacks of cooking pots from his shop out on the street to the storage unit on the ground floor and, in the far corner of the courtyard, the tailor at his sewing machine, running up American flags in preparation for a flag burning protest planned that afternoon.
    The safe house was close to the Street of Storytellers and he had listened to the chanting of the crowd and watched as several times groups of protestors had spilled into the courtyard for respite from the late afternoon