The Walking Dead

  The wail of seagulls was in his ear, the rumble of the sea and the wind's whine.

  He returned the telephone to its cradle.

  Probably in response to a message on her screen, Mary stood, then used her handbag mirror to check her hair or her lipstick, and was gone.

  The photograph of the young man, the son of an electrical-goods salesman, stared smilingly back at him. He had fastened it, with Sellotape, to the glass panelling at the side of his office door. The smile seemed to mock him because it had the power to corrupt. He was a defender of the realm, and the proof of it was on the head of every sheet of notepaper he used, with its Latin words. As a defender he was able, if he twisted morality to a degree that Mary Reakes would not, to justify corruption. The Service, to an old-school warrior with a week's work ahead of him–then forgotten oblivion

  was above morality and legal processes…and he had orders. It's a different war and we may have to dirty our hands. A man such as Dickie Naylor needed an order and required leadership, was always happy when given a little nudge forward. I'm sure you know what's necessary. He was a functionary. Men such as Naylor–in uniform and in civilian dress, in democracies and in dictatorships–had always sat behind desks and received orders, had believed that the threat to the state outweighed moral and legal niceties. He was not a Gestapo man, God, no. And not an NKVD official…He heard tapping. It had a regular rhythm and was far down the corridor and came closer…Perhaps he was a man who could justify to himself the bending of due processes.

  He had not lost sleep over it in the Aden Protectorate, or in the holding cells of Castlereagh or the barracks at Portadown. Men screamed, blood dripped, bruises coloured–and the likes of Mary Reakes would have wet their knickers–but information had been gained. Information saved the lives of innocents. He did not need a tumbler of whisky or a pill to help him sleep. So he had telephoned a distant island and put two men from his past, proven as reliable, on stand-by to come south…The tapping intruded into his thoughts, was loud, the beat of a stick on the corridor's walls.

  Mary Reakes came into the outer office.

  A man used one hand to hold her arm, and in the other was a white-painted stick He used Mary and the stick as his guides, and swung the stick forcefully in front of his legs and hers. It rapped the door jambs, desk legs, the backs of chairs. The man was weathered from sunshine, stooped, and had thinning grey hair; he wore tinted glasses.

  At Naylor's door, Mary said, 'I've brought up Mr Hegner. I told you he was coming. Mr Josiah Hegner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, their Riyadh station.'

  'I'm Joe,' the voice growled. 'How d'you do?'

  Naylor was on his feet. He saw the creases in the clothes, and thought the agent must have come straight from the airport, not cared to take the time to change from what he'd slept in. He was starting forward to move a chair to a more accessible place, but backed off in the face of the swinging stick. A chair leg was whacked. The hand that had been on Mary's arm was loosed and found the chair's back, and the man dropped down into its seat. This was the expert, and he was blind.

  'Thank you, Miss Reakes–that's kind of you.'

  'Again, I'm going to apologize about the front entrance.'

  'Water under the bridge, Miss Reakes, and no offence taken.'

  'I was totally ashamed,' she babbled to Naylor. 'They wouldn't let Mr Hegner inside the security barrier until he'd gone through the metal-detector arch. Had his coins from his pocket, his glasses and his watch, his stick because it has a metal tip, and still wouldn't pass him through. It was a disgrace.'

  Below the spectacles a grin of mischief formed. 'I still got an ounce, that's an estimate, of a bomber's shrapnel in me. So I said, "You want to see the scars?" He didn't answer so I dropped my pants and lifted my shirt. That seemed to satisfy him. I don't take it badly when a man's got to do his job, but I doubt I look like a goddamn wannabe Islamic martyr.'

  'It was quite uncalled-for,' she said. 'I'll make some coffee, proper stuff.'

  They were alone.

  Naylor stumbled, 'I thought you'd have done the embassy and a hotel first, had a bit of sleep after a night flight.'

  'Nice thought, but I reckon there ain't enough time for luxuries. Mr Naylor, you're in the eye of the storm.'

  'I'm Dickie, please.'

  'You're in the eye of the storm because I think you got the Twentyman here, and–'

  'I don't understand–who or what is the Twentyman?'

  'An Iraq-based insurgent commander. Uses suicide-bombers to effect. Has many names but that's mine for him. His attacks never fail to kill at least twenty, usually many more but that's a minimum. I'm here because I think the Twentyman is too and, if I'm right, that makes a real bad picture for you.'

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday, Day 13

  'Ah, up with the lark, I see…' Dickie Naylor shrugged out of his coat. It was not yet eight o'clock, but his visitor was already in place, sitting comfortably in the easy chair, cradling a steaming coffee mug in his hands. '…and no problems, I trust, at the front entrance?'

  'No problems. That feisty Miss Reakes smoothed the way. I didn't have to strip down this time. So as we don't lose time on minimalities, I'll cut to the chase. I want to share my knowledge with you, Dickie.'

  'I'm going to have a rather busy day. I don't know how much time I'll have for–'

  The American's voice had a lacerating whip in it. 'Now, I think you're going to have to fit me in, Dickie, where your "busy day" permits. Make phone calls and I'll stop, but play with your computer and I'll talk–you ought to get used to the idea that I'm with you and am staying…What I heard, when you guys were hit the first time, you concentrated investigations on the bombers and their identities, but you failed to get at the kernel of it.'

  'We think we did tolerably well, and "fail" is not a word we care to bandy about.' He did not care if his irritation showed. Mary bloody Reakes had not brought him coffee. An interloper had intruded into his workspace. He felt himself, already, treated as an imbecile. 'And I have a meeting in ten minutes.'

  He might as well have kept silent: he was not heard.

  The voice drawled and rasped at him. 'I'm going to say it. There was, Dickie, a failure in that you have circulated no information on the facilitator, or on the bomb-maker. Your efforts were aimed at the foot-soldiers. You boys should get it into your heads that foot-soldiers are in plentiful supply. Facilitators and bomb-makers are where you hit pay-dirt. Cut down the foot-soldiers and another crop will seed and spring up. Locate and eliminate the facilitator and the bomb-maker and you hit the Organization where it hurts most. The facilitator is known to me as the Scorpion, but the Twentyman is my pet name, and I know the bomb-maker by the title of the Engineer. In the unlikely event that you could walk more than a couple of hundred yards outside the fence wire and the blast walls of any military encampment in Iraq, that's the Sunni part, or beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad, and not have your throat cut, then settle down in a coffee-shop, interrupt the guys reading their newspapers or watching Al Jazeera on the screen and ask a question, it would be "Who is most successfully carrying the war to the Coalition?" The answer you will get–assuming you don't have a company of marines round you, which you'd need if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders–is that the Scorpion is the top guy, and alongside him is the Engineer. Kill them and you got yourself a real victory. Those men don't grow on trees. Look, Dickie, in Afghanistan and Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia, there has always been one son-of-a-bitch who gives himself the Scorpion moniker. It ain't me, it's them. A wriggling, burrowing little shit with a sting. He has made a mistake, and that mistake may well prove to be of dramatic proportions. He has come off familiar ground, he is no longer if I am correct–in the heartland of Ar Ramadi or al-Fallujah or Baquba or any of those murderous little enclaves of the Triangle. Whether from vanity, obedience or his understanding of duty, he has come on to your soil. I believe that making the journey was his mistake Now the son-of-a-bitch is v
ulnerable.'

  Naylor looked down at his watch. 'Sorry, but I've to go to that meeting.'

  'No problem; I ain't going anywhere. I'll be here when you get back, and we'll talk some more.'

  'Has he returned yet?'

  It was the third time that morning that Ibrahim had left the loneliness of his room, come into the living area and asked the question. He interrupted the first snarls of the argument, watched from a low chair by Ramzi. The heap of dirty clothing was in the centre of the carpet.

  Syed said, waspish, 'If he was back you would see him. If you cannot see him he is not back.'

  Faria said, 'You will hear him when he comes. I told you yesterday and I told you today, he has gone to Birmingham. When he has finished, he will return.'

  'Where is Birmingham? What is in Birmingham? Why has he gone to Birmingham?'

  Looking away, not meeting his eye, Syed muttered, 'You don't need to know.'

  Staring at the ceiling, Faria blustered, 'It is better you stay in your room. You should be in your room.'

  He retreated and shut his door on them. Nothing was as he had believed it would be. Again, and it was the same each day and each evening, they isolated him. From the moment he had been chosen in the desert and had sat close to the Leader, he had believed that he would be asked to express his desire as to the sort of target he would walk towards, and also asked what he wished to achieve by the sacrifice of his life…but he was shut away. His desires, wishes, were insignificant.

  He could hear the movements in the room next to his, where the waistcoat was prepared, and he remembered the feel of its weight on his shoulders. Then, beyond his door, the argument broke again.

  Syed's voice: 'I am telling you, do my washing.'

  Faria's voice: 'Do your own washing, I have the meal to make.'

  'You did his washing. You will do mine.'

  'I will not.'

  'My mother or my sister does my washing.'

  'Then take it back to them and they can slave for you.'

  'You take his washing, so why is mine different from his?'

  Faria's voice, rising: 'Because–because he is different. Are you an idiot? Can you not see that? Different–'

  Syed's voice, yelled anger: 'Women should do washing. You should do my–'

  A door opened. The shout of the man who had so calmly, like a tailor, checked the fall of the waistcoat over his chest and stomach: 'Can you not be quiet? Do I fucking care who washes, who does not? I do my own washing. I have work to do, intricate work, and you disturb me. Where I am, I wash my own clothes–maybe in the river, maybe at a well, maybe under a stand pipe, maybe in a ditch. I wash my own because my wife is dead, killed by my enemy, and where I fight I do not have a servant. Get that fucking washing off the floor. I tell you, where I have come from you would not, any of you, survive a single day as a fighter. Your only use to me would be with a belt round your waist, and then I would not care whether there was filth on your clothing, whether you smelt like a fox's arse. And a fucking minute after the explosion of the belt I would have forgotten your name, your face.'

  He heard the front door slam.

  A minute later, through the crack in his curtains, he saw the man who had made the waistcoat pace in fury on the grass.

  She had done his washing because he was different.

  Would he be forgotten? Would she forget him?

  He sank down on the bed and his head dropped into his hands.

  'You're back. Let me pick up where I left off. I was talking vulnerability.'

  Dickie Naylor grimaced. 'Sorry, et cetera. I've only a few minutes, Joe, then another meeting.'

  'So, the Saudi boy who lodged the shrapnel inside me was a student of economics, probably with an intelligence quotient higher than mine, and he killed twenty-two men. Some of them were queueing for lunch and some had just sat themselves down at a table. He wounded a whole lot more, and I was one of them. Embedded in his bomb were ball-bearings, two-inch nails and one-inch screws, and it was one of those that robbed me of my sight. That was at the Marez garrison camp in Mosul–it's the forward operating base at the airport. The boy is unimportant, might as well have been a parcel in the post. The man who brought him out of Saudi, who collected the intelligence required to get him into our mess hall, who oversaw the documentation he needed, and the transport and the safe-house for the night before, is a master of his trade. He is the Scorpion…

  'Of course you risk failure against a man like that. You, Dickie, you have the assistance of gadgets and staff alongside each step you take. You have computers, you have telephones with land-line connections and analogue and digital systems, you have assistants, you have a line manager who guides you, you have a building that is secure and protected. What does he have? He lives like a fugitive, sleeps rough, cannot use any form of telephone and is constantly aware, around him, of the sophistication of his enemy's arsenal. But he has the charisma of leadership, and will enforce it with ruthlessness.

  'He had a prisoner, an American boy from Utah and from the 1st Infantry Division. There was a charade of negotiation but the boy was doomed to have his throat sawn through. The boy, clever and brave, escaped his hell-hole–but was recaptured and murdered. The Scorpion would have thought one of the guards helped the boy to that short moment of freedom. His reaction: he personally killed fifteen, fifteen, of the men charged with the boy's imprisonment, which made certain he had the right one, the traitor…He is that ruthless. But, and I live in hope, by coming here he may have made a mistake. In his game, mistakes have fatal consequences. How are we doing?'

  'I have to be gone,' Dickie said.

  It was the chance that Ramzi had waited for.

  In the kitchen, Syed–pathetic and unworthy of a place in the cell–was sourly studying the washing-machine manual. He had measured out the soap powder and spilled enough of it on the floor. Beside Syed, not acknowledging him, Faria–arrogant, full of herself, too ready to argue–was cutting vegetables on aboard. Jamal was up the drive and out in the trees…and the car had not come back…and he was in his room…and he could see the shape of the man's back1 hunched in anger, as he strode on the grass like the caged animals he had watched on school trips to zoos.

  He slipped from the chair. He did not think Syed or the girl had seen him move. He padded, tiptoe, across the carpet and into the corridor. He counted his way past the doors, then his fingers dropped to a handle. He turned it and the door, unlocked, opened. When the man had surged out of the room to demand an end to the dispute, he had come in explosive fury and Ramzi had not heard him turn the key…and that had created the chance.

  What was it like? His home was swamped by women, his mother and sisters, and they watched the satellite channels from the Middle East, and they cooed together in a sort of keening wail of excitement when the last video message of a martyr was played. What was the feel of it? His sisters idolized the young men whose faces flickered over the satellite, and each time the message of sacrifice to the Faith was complete they would look across the room at him. It was never said, but was implicit: he, too, could gain their especial love and esteem. What did it weigh? He. thought his sisters would have flushed with pride, not wept, if it had been their brother whose face was on the television and whose words were played on the speakers, but the opportunity had not been given him. What was the size of it? His elder sister had downloaded a document–The Virtues of Martyrdom–from the Internet, and his younger sister had read to him: 'There is no doubt that the sacrificing of one's soul for the sake of Allah in order to defeat His enemies and support Islam is the very highest level of sacrifice.'

  What was the shape of it?

  It lay on the table. It was inches from his hands.

  He skirted the table and the bed, went to the window and gently held back the curtain. He saw the man striding, relentless, as if he tried to lose devils that trailed him. The face was knotted with fear or anxiety–but the man had not lost them and would walk more.

  He was back at
the table. There was an envelope and on it were two tickets. On opening out their leaves, he saw the printout for ferry sailings, noted the port of departure, the dates and times different–and names he did not recognize. He closed the tickets because they did not seem of importance to him, and his eyes roved on across the table.

  It seemed so simple, so ordinary. Ramzi thought it something that children could have put together, like a school's project. He had read in the newspaper of a school in Palestine, in Gaza City, where teenage boys were taught the virtuous lessons of the bomb on their bodies, the journey to Paradise and the welcome of the virgins…a school for martyrs. The quiet clung round him. He reached out. He had the right to touch, to learn. He was treated with contempt. He did not particularly admire any of the others; but the same level of contempt was shown to them all. A bomber, a martyr, should be revered, not forgotten–it was what the maker of the waistcoat had said–after one minute. His sisters did not forget and could recite names from Grozny, Jenin and Baghdad. In secrecy, he would tell them of what he had seen, would whisper in their ears how it had felt, the weight, the size and the shape of it.

  He touched the material and the coarse stitching was against his fingertips. They ran on over the wires and the taping, and flies buzzed round him. He could see, inside the plastic bags, the clusters of nails and screws, the small ball-bearings. He touched the batteries, then moved to the switch. He lifted it and dared to allow a finger to brush, so softly, against the button. In Palestine there were posters in schools and on the walls of public buildings of the smiling young men who were martyrs. He eased a stick from its cloth socket. He was careful not to tighten the wire, to break the taped connection. He held the stick in his hand and it was smooth, moulded, with a tackiness on its surface. He let it lie in the palm of his hand. The weight of the stick rested there. He bent, put his nose close to it and tightened his grip on it, suddenly fearful that it might drop and wrench clear the web of wires, but it had no odour. He replaced the stick.