A Loyal Spy Read Online Free

the mujahedin groups turned on each other and fought over the rubble. And it was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban for a purpose that was yet to be fully revealed, but which kept Monteith awake at night.
    Khan was also Nor’s ISI handler. Nor was one of the roving sets of eyes and ears that Khan maintained in the shifting jihadi groups that he subsidised in Afghanistan. Nor fed information to Khan and Nor fed information to Monteith. He was the Department’s best Afghan source, and Jonah suspected that there was nothing that Monteith hated more than the sense that Khan had finally prevailed.
    ‘We stride boldly away from the twentieth century with too much confidence and too little reflection. We wrap ourselves in self-serving half-truths and comic-book tag-lines: the triumph of the West, the end of history.’ He snorted. ‘The unipolar American moment. It’s ridiculously naive.’
    ‘What do you want me to tell Nor?’ Jonah asked.
    Monteith glared at him. ‘Tell him that he can expect no further assistance from us, either financial or legal. Tell him that if he shows his face here we will deny that we ever had anything to do with him.’
    ‘How do you think he’s going to react to that?’
    ‘I don’t expect him to react well. What do you think?’
    ‘I think he’s going to throw a fit.’
    ‘Thank you for your insight. You’d better head off if you’re going to catch your plane.’
    On his way out, Jonah saw that some wag had written ‘only connect’ on the back of the door.
    A week later, in the final days of the
‘hundred-and-twenty-day wind’, when the Afghan plains were lashed with dust storms and the sky was the colour of a bruise, Jonah slipped silently into Kandahar.
    Tradecraft dictated that they meet in the privacy of the ­cemetery behind the Chawk Madad, among the tattered green martyrs’ flags and upright shards of stone. Nor strode back and forth, his thoughts and words running into each other, gesticulating with his hands as tears rolled down his cheeks. Nor had always been emotionally extravagant: he swerved from one extreme to the other, from unblinking stillness to this staccato jumble of speech.
    ‘You must be fucking joking,’ Nor said. ‘I’m not hearing this.’
    Jonah had just told Nor that he must learn to live without him.
    ‘They pulled the funding,’ Jonah explained.
    ‘So what am I supposed to do now?’ demanded Nor. ‘Stand by and watch while this country rolls back into the Dark Ages? Because that’s what’s going to happen, Jonah, they’re going to wind the clock all the way back to zero. They’re going to break the fucking springs.’
    ‘They’re delivering peace,’ Jonah said, lamely.
    Nor stopped and stared. His accusing silence, as always, was worse than his mania.
    ‘Afghanistan has a chance that it hasn’t had in a generation,’ Jonah told him. ‘The Americans are going to run a pipeline through it.’
    Nor sat down and buried his head in his hands.
    ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he said.
    And Jonah couldn’t believe that he was saying it.
    ‘What’s happened to you?’ asked Nor suddenly.
    Jonah wondered whether to tell him: I have bought a dilapidated farmhouse on an island on the west coast of Scotland, somewhere as far away from Afghanistan as it is possible to get, and I’m going to repair it and live in it; I am to become the father of a baby girl and I have a marriage that I want to make right again, and that is all I care about.
    ‘The Department is downsizing,’ Jonah told him instead. ‘The Afghan Guides have been consigned to history. I’m retiring.’
    ‘What the fuck are you talking about? How can you retire? You’re not even thirty years old.’
    ‘I’m done.’
    ‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’

The mullah wants to parley
    January 1999
    It was in early 1999, just over two years after he was deemed to be surplus to requirements in the new Taliban era, that Nor got back in touch with the