The Agent Runner by Simon Conway

seemed just as likely that she knew it from looking at him. She had dark powers, Noman was convinced of it. She was psychic and she had the power to lay a curse. Once after a fight with her he had been shot at three times in twenty-four hours: once by a Tajik assassin sent from Kabul; once by a vengeful husband whose wife he’d given a bad case of crabs; and once by a nervous gate sentry who had taken him for a suicide bomber. It had been a warning from Mumayyaz, he was certain of that. He imagined her alone in bed, taking a break from pleasuring herself, waving her glistening fingers to spark the bullets in their chambers and send them spinning towards him.
    ‘I saw bin Laden,’ he said.
    ‘How is he?’
    Noman shrugged. ‘Fine.’
    ‘He’s a very attractive man. Don’t you think so?’ she said, partly to annoy him, but she believed it too. She was a sucker for any kind of celebrity. ‘Dignified and so accomplished. History is not going to forget him, is it? Did it make you jealous?’
    ‘Why should it?’
    ‘Come on, darling, I know you better than that. You’re in a sulk. It must be bad otherwise you wouldn’t be here snivelling at my feet. You’d be off tupping one of your little girls.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Or is it a little boy this time?’ She knew all about his wayward behaviour. There was nothing she liked better than to taunt him with his failings: the unruly temper so easily sparked to violence; the shameful upbringing that wrought the colossal chip on his shoulder; the bouts of mania and depression; the urgent promiscuity; the desperate need for power and recognition. She seemed to regard each weakness revealed with Machiavellian indulgence, as if they were tools to be used in the years ahead. And as for his taste for buggery, his near-philosophical obsession with mining the depths, it provoked near-gleeful torrents of abuse: ‘The cunt is too wide a berth and too deep a port for my anatomically challenged husband. Only the smallest and tightest of holes will fit his eager little soldier.’
    ‘No, you must be really in a funk to have shown up here,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame you weren’t here earlier. You could have seen Rifaz before she went to theairport.’ Rifaz was Mumayyaz’s daughter, Noman’s stepdaughter. Mumayyaz’s first husband had been a Punjabi politician once tipped for high office. He’d died in a mysterious explosion after two years of marriage. Rifaz had been the product of that marriage. She was a clever, rebellious girl with a grievance against the world. She’d flown back to an English all-girls boarding school that afternoon. ‘You know what the last thing she said to me was?’
    ‘No?’
    ‘That I should stop pretending to love you.’
    ‘Maybe she was right.’
    ‘Please. Spare me your self-pity.’
    ‘I’ve had a hard day.’
    ‘Don’t whine. I can’t bear it. You’re such a pathetic whiner. Sometimes I lie marooned here and wonder how you ever became a hero.’
    ‘You’re not marooned,’ he told her, ‘you’re just too lazy to move.’
    She ignored that. ‘I suppose the Indians must have been even more scared than you, shivering and shuddering in the snow, you crying out for your mummy and them crying out for their mummies, and all of you wetting yourselves, and you firing your little gun at them. It’s really nothing to brag about.’
    ‘I don’t brag about it.’
    ‘Except for when you’re too drugged up to remember, of course. Then you shout about it from the rooftops.’
    ‘I didn’t have a gun.’
    ‘Pardon me, I forgot. You did it with a tradesman’s tool. You know you really do look terrible, I mean you look like some unwashed holy man from a shrine.’
    ‘I’m descended from holy men.‘
    ‘You don’t have to remind me,’ she said, ‘those terrible smelly fraudsters. No wonder you’re such an accomplished liar.’
    ‘Watch your tongue,’ he snapped.
    She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying: ‘You know