The Walking Dead

by The Walking Dead (epub)

  'Ibrahim, do you have military training?'

  'None. My brothers did. My eldest brother was martyred fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The other was martyred in the war against the American invaders of Afghanistan. I seek to match their dedication, to be worthy…'

  They all mouthed this shit. All the boys recruited by the gatekeepers in the mosques–of Riyadh and Jeddah, Damascus and Aleppo, Sana'a and Aden, Hamburg and Paris–spoke of the roots of their commitment. He was not a martyr, had no wish for suicide, and thought those who did were fools and deluded…But he needed them. They were the lifeblood of the war he fought. They took his opportunities of attack into defined areas of exactness that were otherwise unreachable. No shell, rocket or bullet fired from whatever distance had the same accuracy as a martyr bomb, or created matching devastation and fear. So he lived with the shit. He massaged the boy's shoulder and talked softly–as if the boy was his equal.

  'What you need to know, we will teach you.'

  'So that I may achieve success for my mission. Thank you.'

  'Have you been prepared in the matter of resistance to interrogation?'

  He felt the boy flinch. 'No.'

  Of course, the gate-keeper would not have talked of capture, of torture, of the failure of battery-powered circuits. The possibility of failure would have weakened the boy's commitment. Sometimes a back-up electrical circuit was built into the car bomb, or the bomb in the belt, so that it could be remotely detonated from a distance if dedication died or a device would not ignite. Sometimes a sniper with a long-barrelled Makharov watched the advance of a bomber through a telescopic sight and would shoot to kill if will or circuit failed. A boy, this one or any of those now riding in the pickups towards the cities of Iraq, would know too much of recruitment and transport routes, safe-houses and the personnel who commanded their mission–he would talk if he was captured alive and tortured to make rivers of pain. But Ibrahim Hussein could not be followed with a telescopic sight when he travelled to his target.

  He said, 'We put great trust in you,, and you should trust us for our skills. Everything that can be prepared has been–but disaster can come from a sunlit morning, from a clear sky, without warning. There are successes, there are setbacks. I will not hide anything from you, Ibrahim.'

  The lights, far away, became clear and the engines' sounds swelled as they approached. It was his tactic that the mention of failure, disaster, should be aired only at the end before they parted.

  'Huge courage is asked of you. We believe of you that the courage will be found. They will use electrodes on your genitals, they will inject drugs into you, they will beat you with clubs and iron bars. You will be denied sleep. Shrieking noise will be played in your ears, and they will question you…and at the end you will face execution if you are still in this region or a lifetime of imprisonment if you are far from here. We will all be praying for your resolve, your bravery. Our ability to continue the struggle will depend on the courage we believe you have. God will be watching over you. Take a place with your eye on a crack in the ceiling, on a join of plaster between tiles on a floor, on a bar in the window, on what has been scratched on the floor and stay silent. Stay silent for a week. Give us time to dismantle and move. A week–do you promise me?'

  He heard the small, stuttered answer: 'I will, a week, I swear it.'

  'Whatever the pain?'

  'Because I will be thinking of God.'

  He cuffed the boy. He made that speech to all the boys sent across the frontier to him by gate-keepers, and they all swore to stay silent for a week…A day would be enough. He eased his hand off the boy's shoulder.

  Two vehicles came close and braked, scuffing up sand. He told the boy, Ibrahim, that he must listen to what was ordered of him, do what he was told to do, give trust and not falter in his Faith. Through the mouth gap of his mask he kissed the boy's forehead. Then he led him to a Chevrolet truck. In the flash of the interior light, he saw the boy's face momentarily, the struggle with fear, then he slammed the door and the truck drove away.

  From the second vehicle, a Dodge, he took a holdall that had been lying on the wide back seat, where he had known it would be. He stood in the sand between the Dodge and the truck with the machine-guns that had brought him, laid down his assault rifle, peeled off the webbing that held the magazines, dragged up his mask, unlaced his boots and kicked them off. He dropped his combat trousers to his ankles, stepped out of them, and stripped off the tunic. He lifted the laundered white robe from the holdall, passed his arms through the sleeves and wriggled into it. Within a minute he had passed from being a soldier at war, a commander in conflict, to a businessman of stature. The uniform, the boots, the webbing harness and the assault rifle went to the driver who had escorted him from the battlefields of Iraq. Within another minute, that driver was on his way back over the sand hump that covered the single strand of wire. Within a third minute he was driving away in the Dodge. He remained a soldier, but had exchanged one battlefield for another.

  In two hours, the Scorpion would be at a remote desert airstrip, used by contractors who drilled in search of mineral deposits, where a twin-engined Cessna aircraft would be waiting for him. He did not doubt that all arrangements would be delivered as promised. His belief was total in the organizational skills of the Base now controlling him, and in the Cessna he would find the documentation for the new identity to be used in his onward travel.

  Yet he felt, so rare for him–even in the worst moments of combat–a little tremor of nerves. He had no Faith to comfort him, as the boy had. The nerves in his gut were because he journeyed to a foreign battlefield, on to ground he had not fought over before, and he had no knowledge of the quality of those who would fight beside him.

  She knew the name of the driver, and more of him than she should have.

  At Faria's direction they had twice circled the village after leaving the cottage. The driver, Khalid, had taken her back up the track from the cottage she had rented from the farmer's wife. On the far side of the village there was a sprawling, recently built housing estate, a bolt-hole escape for the middle classes who had abandoned the town that was her home; small detached brick houses were set behind pocket-sized front gardens. Faria understood the reason for their exodus from the streets where she and her community lived. The school in the town she had left six years earlier had then had 84 per cent Asian pupils; now she had read in the local paper that the figure had crept to 91 per cent. The new residents of the village distrusted the influx of migrants from the sub-continent, and had run from them. They would have whispered among their own, those who had fled from Luton, of the ghettos in their old town, of an alien state within a state and Muslim dominance as justification for uprooting their families.

  She knew that the driver, Khalid, was twenty-three and came from Hounslow, in west London. She had told him to circle the village so that she might see where there was a shop selling fruit and vegetables, where there was a doctor's surgery, in case she needed it, and a dentist. She knew that Khalid had been a worshipper at a mosque near to his home, where he lived with his parents, and that he had been recruited a year and a half before, after meetings in the evenings at an upper room in the mosque. She knew that he had been ordered to leave the mosque, not to associate again with friends there, and to await a call. She knew that his father worked as a security guard in a bonded warehouse complex at Heathrow, and that his mother cleaned the offices of the Qantas airline…They had sat in the car, a Honda Accord bought for cash at auction, in front of a pub and had watched the traffic flow through the village, and they had sat in a lay-by up the lane from which the cottage's track ran and seen the farmer's wife leave by Land Rover. After less than two hours in his company, she now knew that Khalid worked as a mini-cab driver in Hounslow, for a company owned by his uncle, and that his parents believed he had taken two weeks' leave for a holiday with cousins from Manchester. She knew all the lies of his life, and was horrified at the babble beating in her ears–and she k
new that the cause of it was fear.

  Of herself, she had told him nothing.

  The driver's eyes were on the road, flickering between the windscreen and his mirrors, but he talked as a tap dripped. 'Did they ask you? You know what I mean.'

  'It is not important what they asked me. You should not talk of it.'

  'If men come from abroad, important men, an attack is planned–yes?'

  'I don't know what is planned.'

  'What I believe, if an attack is planned and important men are coming it will be a martyr attack–so did they ask you?'

  'What I was told, what I was not told, should not be talked of.'

  At the time of her own recruitment the need for total secrecy had been emphasized, with nothing shared even in the privacy of her family. She did not know how to silence his torrent.

  'I am saying it will be a martyr's attack–have you been asked if you would do that?'

  'You should drive, not talk.'

  'You know what happens to a martyr? 'I saw it on a website. If he has a vest or a belt, his head comes off. The head is taken off. It is how they knew which were the martyrs on the trains in London. They had no heads. In Tel Aviv, they found the head fifteen feet from his body, on a table, and he was still smiling. It was on the website.'

  'Do you want me to tell you to stop? Shall I get out and walk?'

  'It is not for me. I will help, I will drive and–'

  'And you will talk–and by talking you will put all of us at risk,' Faria snarled.

  'Do you think they would force one of us to do it, make it impossible to refuse? Could they do that? I support the struggle but–'

  'Stop.'

  The traffic flowed round them. If he had slowed, cars, vans and lorries would have swerved to overtake on the inside. He could not stop and she knew it.

  'It is not just me they might ask, but you…Would you?'

  'What I will tell you is this. Tell you once. The important people, when they arrive, I will tell them to dismiss you.'

  'You have to think of what you would do if you were asked. There were videos from the struggle in Palestine. Women were used. In Palestine the word for them is shahida. Arafat called them his "army of roses". Women were martyrs who carried the bombs. Arafat said to them, "You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks." Have you not thought of what might be asked of you?'

  Her ears were closed to him. Faria could not answer; neither could she threaten again to denounce him for cowardice, for lack of faith, for talking and putting them all into a marksman's sights or a prison cell. She stared from the window and the car brought her towards the town's centre. She had thought that as a stranger to the town he might find it difficult to locate the street that was her home when he came to pick her up, so she had told him, when he had called the mobile, to meet her at the extremity of the station car park. That mobile now lay embedded in the silt of the river Lea that divided the town. Faria had thought, before he had talked through the history of his life, that he could drop her close to home…The looseness of his talk frightened her. At the next set of lights, she swung open the door and was gone. She never looked back at him.

  Have you not thought what might be asked of you? Faria had. In her room, at night, she had wrestled with that thought, sweated and been unable to sleep. She had read that in Palestine the funeral of the small pieces of a woman martyr was a 'wedding with eternity'. She could picture in her mind the photograph of the calm face of the shahida Darine Abu Aisha, who had gone to the bus station at Netanya, killed three and injured sixty. A friend had said of her, 'She knew that her destiny was to become the bride of Allah in Paradise.'

  She did not know what she would say if it were asked of her.

  'A police officer, in sworn testimony, described you, Mr Curtis, as a "main man", and meant by that, Mr Curtis, that you were a major criminal. Was he right or wrong?'

  The defence barrister, in court eighteen, used a low lectern in the front row of the lawyers' territory between the judge's bench and the dock, now occupied only by Ollie Curtis and the minders.

  'I can say quite honestly, sir, that the description of me is wrong. It is a lie, a fabrication.'

  It was possible for Tools Wright to watch the barrister but not to permit his eyes to waver to the left, into a field of vision that included Ozzie Curtis in the witness box.

  'I want to be quite sure of this. You are telling m'lord and the members of the jury that you are not a big player in the criminal underworld?'

  'What I am saying, sir, is utterly truthful. I am not a big player, not a major criminal, not a main man.'

  Jools watched the barrister ask the questions and listened to the answers. He thought that Ozzie bloody Curtis wriggled like a maggot on a hook.

  'You are in fact, Mr Curtis, a businessman and a legitimate trader?'

  'That's right, sir, dead right.'

  'I'm asking this because I think the jury will expect to hear your answer to the allegations made by the police, in evidence, that you–associate with criminals, are in fact at the heart of a web of thieving and violence.'

  'Maybe I meet criminals, but not intentionally. In business, buying and selling, I meet many people. Honestly and truthfully, though, I don't go round asking guys whether they've done bird. They sell to me and I sell to them. That's about it.'

  'Now–and this is most important, Mr Curtis–a Crown witness has said, again on oath, that she can positively identify you as being in the allotment nurseries, and behind a lock-up shed, as you changed from a boiler-suit into more normal clothing, then dumped the boiler-suit, rubber gloves and a face mask in a brazier that was already lit. Was that witness correct in her identification or mistaken?'

  'Absolutely mistaken. She got it wrong. I wasn't anywhere there–and it's lies if people say I was.'

  'Possibly a lie, Mr Curtis, but more probably a genuine mistake.'

  'Whichever, I wasn't there.'

  Jools could remember that witness better than, any of the Crime Squad detectives who had given evidence and better than any of the forensics experts and the one who had said the men in boiler-suits and masks caught by CCTV inside the shop had identical physiques to the accused brothers. The witness had been small in build, plain-faced and with an ugly cold sore at her mouth, not more than twenty-two years old, probably younger–and she had been so certain. Jools had believed her. He would have staked his life on her.

  The defence barrister was a tall, bowed man, with a hawk nose and a casual stance–his weight was taken by the lectern on which his notes were laid out–and he was dressed in crumpled striped trousers and waistcoat, and a tatty old robe that might have been slept in. Not for a night but a month. Jools thought that the studied indifference was part of the barrister's well-practised art. Confronted by the eye-witness, he had started out with bogus sincerity in challenging her, but received no satisfaction. He'd gone through the quiet, sneering phase and still failed to shake her. Then he'd barked. Eyeball contact and courtesy slipped away, and flat statements demanding that she contradict what she had already stated. He'd not broken her. She was as strong after four hours of ruthless cross-examination as she had been when she'd started in the box. Jools had thought her so gutsy. Himself, he couldn't have turned in such a performance, and he'd gone home that evening, after she'd finished, and told Babs about the girl's courage in the face of her ordeal. All of them in the jury room had believed her.

  'And where were you, Mr Curtis, at the time the jewellery shop was robbed by armed men who threatened the lives of the staff and who wore boiler-suits, rubber gloves and face masks? Could you tell the jury where you were?'

  'Down at my mum's, sir. She's not well.'

  'She has, I believe, a medical history of diabetes mellitus, Mr Curtis.'

  'That's what they call it. I look after her, and Ollie does. I was with my mum and so was he.'

  He heard a little snigger from Corenza. Ettie murmured to Baz that Curtis must have been watching too many police soap
s on TV Peter grunted scornfully. Yes, it was a pretty old one–sick mum, loving and dutiful sons playing carers.

  'So, we can be very clear on this. At the time that this criminal enterprise was under way, you were more than twenty miles away with your mother…and a witness who says otherwise is mistaken?'

  'Right. Yes.'

  The judge intoned, 'I think this a good moment to adjourn.'

  After he was gone, and the Curtis brothers with their minders, Jools and the rest were led out by their bailiff. He wondered, going to the door sandwiched between Fanny and Dwayne, whether the accused men realized they were scuppered, knew they were on a conveyor-belt to a guilty verdict.

  'What do you reckon?'

  'You want it straight up, Ozzie?'

  'Straight up? Course I bloody do.'

  'Then I have to say that you're shafted–and I can see no different outcome for Ollie. Both of you, well and truly shafted.'

  As a hard-working solicitor who represented a superior strata of the criminal classes–if they had the resources to pay for his services, and pay substantial sums–Nathaniel Wilson had a potent reputation. A serious facet of it, alongside his willingness to beaver away all the hours of the day and week on behalf of his clients, was frankness.

  'You can't see any way out?' A cloud had settled over the elder Curtis brother's face. They were dinosaurs, from a world long extinct. Armed robbery, waving handguns in the faces of the staff at a jeweller's–it was the stuff of fossils.

  The solicitor shrugged. 'We'll try, your brief and I. If there was going to be a happy ending I'd be the first to tell you…and I'll be the first to tell you when you're going down.'