The Walking Dead

  Not ever. She'd strode away. He'd called after her: 'You want to go somewhere else and get another quote, well, Miss, that's your privilege.'

  She would get it fixed 'somewhere else' in Luton, but not that week. Hadn't the money until the end of the month. Would have to ask round the A and E staff for a recommendation. It had done a double backfire at the lights at the bottom end of the Dunstable road. So damned unfair, and it had kept her awake, irritated and frustrated, but until the money was in the bank she must cut her cloth and live with it.

  The window slammed, and Khalid woke. He heard the water that dripped from the sill. The wind whistled through the gap and the curtain flapped.

  Which fool had left the window open? Not himself. Not Syed and not Jamal, because they had both been asleep before him. Ramzi? Ramzi had been reading from the Book, with a side-light when Khalid had faced the wall, sought sleep and found it, dreamless…No, the window had been shut, fastened, when they had gone to the room, undressed, climbed on to their mattresses.

  Again, the wind caught the window, seemed to seize it and pull it open, wider, and the curtain was lifted and the spatter of water was louder. Khalid did not understand how Syed, Jamal and Ramzi could sleep unaware of the open window. Could any of them have risen in the night and unlocked it because it was too warm in the room? Impossible, and the cold was against his skin. Syed and Jamal were nearest the door, but Ramzi's mattress was under the window; the noise was beside him and the water from the driving rain would be falling on him. He knew it was the day that the video would be made.

  Khalid crawled off his mattress. He hoped–had prayed for it–that after the recording of the video he would be permitted to return to his home and the mini-cab office. He had not been treated with respect. He had driven to Birmingham, had endured a night in a flea-ridden hostel, had driven back and not been thanked. Not a word of gratitude. Silence in the car. No leadership, no exhortation, no inspiration…as if he had no value. He wanted to be gone, to be at home…In the gloom of the room he stretched, and his knees cracked, but none of them woke.

  Syed was on his stomach, breathing noisily, and Khalid padded past him. He skirted the next mattress where Jamal lay, hugging his pillow, and he thought the kid pathetic. He was beside Ramzi's mattress, the one who was all talk and who had been tongue-lashed in front of them, and there was the dark shape of his body: the muscle man seemed to have buried his head under the blankets, to be sleeping and not moving; the covering over his head masked his breathing. The window swung again. He could make out, in the darkness of the room over which the shadows of the curtains bounced, the rainwater's brightness on those blankets. He reached forward, above the mattress and Ramzi, to catch the window.

  The curtain billowed into Khalid's face and covered his eyes, blinded him. The window cannoned into his fingers: Pain arced up from them. His feet snagged on the cable of the side-light, which went taut and toppled him. He fell on to the mattress and the sleeper. He expected a convulsion of movement and to be thrown off by thrashing arms and legs, but he sank down softly.

  Under the blankets, and lined up in the shape of a body, his hand–bleeding–found two pillows, a tight bundle of clothing and a closely rolled blanket.

  The curtain was pushed back by the wind, and the rain ran on his face and settled on his hair. He realized the enormity of what he had found.

  He pushed himself up and looked through the window. He did not feel the rain or the wind's force on his skin.

  Khalid shouted, a spirit that wailed at the approach of death. He screamed. Around him, they woke.

  The older men, in pants and T-shirts, were at the open door–and Faria in pyjamas. The ceiling light was snapped on.

  Khalid pointed first to the open window and the sodden curtain, then to the mattress, the pillows, the bundle and the rolled blanket. He tried to hide his shiver, but it was not from cold. Fear tugged at him.

  The voice snapped behind him: 'That fucking imbecile with the big mouth, how long since he was seen?'

  Who would answer? Who would dare to face the fury? Khalid steeled himself, hesitated, then looked down at his wrist-watch and stammered, 'Other than him, I was the last to go to sleep. He could have been gone for seven hours. What do we do?'

  'Behave, if you are capable of it, like soldiers–not brats still crying for their mother's breasts.'

  The door slammed. All of them–Khalid, Syed and Jamal–trembled as they dressed in silence, and none went near the open window. Would it be aborted? Would they be sent home? By association, were they disgraced? The questions seared the mind of Khalid, but he dared not ask them.

  Chapter12

  Wednesday, Day 14

  As he lay on his bed, the tumult beat round Ibrahim. He could hear but not see. His door stayed closed. Whatever crisis raged in the cottage, he was not part of it. No one came to his room. Breakfast had not been brought to him, nor had he been called to the kitchen. Before retreating to his bed, after the shouting and door slamming had started, he had faced the wall, knelt and prayed with intensity. Then he had lain on the nicked-up sheets. What he could hear told him little.

  He remembered moments of confidence, some extreme, but they were now behind him. They played in his mind: walking from the mosque where the imam had spelled out the rewards available to the virtuous, the brave, the dedicated; cleaning his room personally, not leaving it to the servant, tidying his affairs secretively, and polishing the glass in the frames holding the photographs of his brothers, the martyrs; telling the untruths to his father and sisters, and justifying them because of the pride and glory his family would know when his name and face were on the television screen; being called forward by the Leader, the man of war, chosen above the other eleven, walking for him and being praised. Then confidence had surged in him, and it had been with him when he had stepped towards the departure gates at Riyadh's King Khalid airport–the calling of his name had not deflected it–and as he had walked past the checks and the armed police at the train terminus, his leather jacket thrown open to show the swan, and as he had arrived in the car at the cottage, knowing he would be carrying the bomb when he left it…But now the confidence was gone, had ebbed with each hour of the days and nights that he had been left in the room.

  Should he have thrown open the door, stalked out and demanded to be told what was the cause of the crisis?

  He wished the girl would come…Alone among them, she was the one he wished had come to his room.

  It was because she was flawed, her face crossed with the scar, that he valued her.

  Until now, beyond his door there had been a babble of shouting. He was forgotten. The voices had been indistinct. He recognized then that Jamal and the girl were in the corridor outside his room. Did they realize that he was on his bed, abandoned but straining to hear?

  Jamal said, a hoarse whisper, 'I don't think we can go on now.'

  She said, softer, 'Then the work of so many is wasted, was for nothing.'

  'I am intelligent, yes? I have a place at the university in London, yes? I am not a fool, yes? I see it, do you not? We are all in danger now.'

  'I had thought it would be easier…'

  'A big man was sent, a commander and a fighter, but he does not lead us. He has brought down chaos on us. We did not need him…and we did not need the Saudi kid,' Jamal murmured, but the boy heard him. 'I would have done it, if I had been asked.'

  'You boast as Ramzi boasted. You do not give him what he is owed –respect.'

  Savagely hissed by Jamal: 'The respect I have, now, this moment, is for the scale of the catastrophe falling on us. Do you not understand? You do not need education from a university to comprehend what we face–imprisonment all our lives'

  'What does he face? He faces two situations. He may be sent home, back where he came from, his martyrdom attempt a failure, and that failure with him for the rest of his life because he will never be chosen again. Or he faces a worthless martyrdom–not at the place and time of maximum advantage
, rushed to a street where the casualties are scaled down, where his death is wasted. Not only, Jamal, do you boast but you display a selfishness that disgraces you. You do not think of him, only yourself.'

  The boy heard a bitter, whinnying laugh. 'He might be free, and-'

  The boy heard the hiss of her response: 'Or kneeling in a square at home while an executioner raises a sword and prepares to behead him.'

  '- and might be walking forward, thinking of virgins awaiting him, and not caring whether he kills ten or one, wounds ten or one. He has virgins in his mind.'

  'You are obsessed. You disgust me. His Faith is to be admired, not sniggered at.'

  'What obsesses me–with Ramzi gone–is the thought of a prison cell with the key thrown away.' The shouted answer. 'And it should obsess you, too, and–'

  There was a yell from deep in the cottage, as if they were called, and the boy heard their feet patter away. He gripped his -raised knees. He had learned the cause of the crisis.. the, reason for the catastrophe, and what was thought of him. To all of them but her, he was as worthless as an animal sent for slaughter. To her he had importance…but she had not come to his room.

  More voices. He came off the bed.

  Voices beyond the window. He edged back the curtain but kept his body hidden.

  The older men searched the garden. 'He has the whole night's start on us.' They started at a bare dug bed under the window along the outer wall from his. 'I should have cut his fucking throat when I could have.' They crouched there and made a close examination of the ground. 'Will he go to the police and talk with them? Will he have gone home to his fucking family? I don't know…If he has gone home, then is arrested, will he be able to endure interrogation?' They stood and gazed across the grass, and the rain fell on them. Neither had a coat or seemed to notice it. 'At least here, in a democracy,' the boy heard rough, braying laughter, 'it will not be as severe interrogation as in Abu Ghraib. It will be decent and polite–but would he break?' Then they tracked away over the grass, like hounds scenting a quarry, and came to the break in the hedge beyond which was the expanse of the ploughed field…and Ibrahim no longer heard them. What he did hear, faintly, was the sound of a vehicle approaching, an engine's grind.

  Ajaq listened.

  The Engineer, close to the hedge, said, 'My decision is made. My work is finished. I will not stay another hour.'

  Ajaq thought his friend had been too long and too often near to the source of explosions that the damage to his hearing was irreparable. The noise of the vehicle was growing, and he imagined it heaving between the rutted lines in the track and the potholes. 'You, my dear one, should be with me. Tell me you will be.'

  He heard the voice of his friend, urgent, and he thought of the men in mountain caves, or in the compound of a tribal chief in the foothills, who had sent him and who now listened to their radios to learn that the faith placed in him was justified. He heard the engine of the vehicle, racing in low gear, and he thought of the myriad skeins of the web that had been put together. He heard a shrill call for him to come back to the cottage, and he thought of how many had risked so much to place him where he now stood and how they would crumple if the mission failed or was ineffective.

  'You cannot delay. You cannot remain here. You were given rubbish to work with. You would not be fairly blamed if you quit. At home, where you belong, where you are a leader of fighting men, you would have finished with this, moved on and found another target.'

  He heard the howl of the vehicle's engine. He looked over the neat chopped top of the hedge, across the ploughed field, beyond the wood of dense tree-trunks, and into the distance where a cloud bank settled on a shortened horizon. He saw the wheel of the birds' flight and sensed the innocence of the place. There would have been the same innocence to be seen if he had gazed out from a derelict hut, once used to shelter livestock, at groves of trees that bore dates, or irrigated fields of maize. Innocence reigned in the moments before the Apache gunships materialized above a horizon of gently swaying branches. On his fighting ground in Iraq, if a new cell member had fled in the night, he would have abandoned the place he slept and his current plan, would have started again from point zero on the laborious preparation for a new attack site. Too many now depended on him, and he knew that he would ignore the entreaties of his friend.

  'If it is ready, you should go,' Ajaq said.

  He walked away from his friend, across the wet grass. Inside the Triangle, on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, innocence was unknown to him. Once, he had been captured. Once, the army of the enemy had had him defenceless and within their power, his freedom gone. Once, for an hour less than half a day, he had sat hunched down in the blister of the sun, with his arms held in the small of his back by plastic restrainers, his eyes taped over. But his papers had held up to examination, and the interrogation in the field had been rough–a few kicks, some belts with a rifle's butt–yet bored and cursory. He had been freed. With the wide, staring eyes of an idiot and the limp of a man disabled by polio -. as listed on his documentation–he had shambled away from the Americans. And that night Muhammad Ajaq, who was the Scorpion, had started an inquest inquiry as to whether he had been betrayed or merely fallen into the enemy's arms by misfortune, but men had died because he might have been betrayed. There, innocence did not exist. Here, his ability to recognize a mistake wavered.

  He heard a vehicle's door slam at the front of the cottage.

  He left his friend, the Engineer, behind him. The curtain flicked at a window, the boy's room.

  He should have killed the bastard…but he had not.

  He came round the side of the cottage, where the climbing rose was thickest.

  He heard the woman's piping voice. 'I just wanted to see that you were all well, all enjoying your holiday together.'

  And heard the girl's stammered reply: 'Very well, very much enjoying being together.'

  At a front window, pressed close to each other and up against the glass panes, were the faces of the rest, staring like fools and frightened. With his hand by his thigh he snapped his fingers at them and saw their retreat. The girl, Faria, had come out through the front door and intercepted the intruder by the porch. The woman was middle-aged, jowled at her throat, and had crow's feet at her eyes; she wore an old waxed coat and a tweed skirt. He thought her strong. He thought she would fight, and saw the nails on her fingers and the heavy boots on her feet–would fight hard for her life. She stood square in front of a mud-spattered Land Rover, parked beside their own car.

  She had not yet seen him. 'It seemed only polite that I should call round–you know–to be satisfied that everything was working, that you had everything you needed.'

  Neither had the girl seen him. 'Everything's good, fine, no problems, wonderful.'

  If he needed to, he would kill her. The woman would condemn herself if she gained entry and meandered through the bedrooms, if she saw the boy, if she entered the room where the waistcoat was laid out, if her questions were persistent, prying.

  'There has been a problem with the shower unit–I forgot to tell you about it–and sometimes it needs a bit of a tweak. With so many of you here it might need that…I said to my husband that I really should call by and check the shower flow…' She was moving forward, about to skirt the girl.

  He saw the girl's hand reach out, as if in panic. 'There's nothing wrong with the shower.'

  'Best to be sure.'

  'There's a mess inside–I wouldn't want you to see–'

  'Too early, am I? Only take a moment–it's awful when a shower hasn't got the flow.'

  The woman was past the girl, on the step, and the door was wide open. The girl's hand snaked out, caught the arm of the waxed jacket, and the woman stared into her face, surprised by her grip. By his orders and planning, Ajaq had killed many, perhaps high hundreds. With his own hand, by shooting, with a knife or by strangulation, he had killed tens. Man or woman, he had never lost sleep for those he had killed. He saw the woman's thic
kened throat, below the jowl, and buried in it would be the windpipe, where the pressure of his thumbs would be if she entered the cottage. He did not believe there was malice in her, only curiosity but it would be sufficient to condemn her to death–by strangulation.

  He stepped forward briskly. 'Can I help you, madam?' He smiled at her.

  'Oh, didn't see you…I just popped over to see that all was well with you all. You understand?'

  'Madam, I think you embarrass my niece.'

  'So sorry; didn't mean to. I just thought…'

  He charmed. 'And will embarrass my nephews. Madam, we are late up this morning, and have not yet tidied the cottage. Some are still using the bathroom. Another time, another day would be more suitable. You know, madam, what young people are. Please, madam.'

  He took her arm and turned her gently. It was the courtesy that his grandfather would have shown, an old and near-forgotten skill. As a commander in war, he rarely used courtesy, charm, the richness of his smile and the soft persuasion of words, but now he scratched in his memory for them.

  'Are you sure–nothing I can do?'

  'Nothing, madam. Everything is perfect. And you have our gratitude for the use of a home, at this time that is so special to us, where the comfort and facilities you have provided will be long remembered. We thank you, madam.'

  Would she live or die? He could smell soft scent on her. She hesitated, as if she were not often balked, and he saw disappointment slide on to her face. But she turned and, in doing so, safeguarded her life.