The Walking Dead

  He was not aroused by the touch of her against his fingers: what he did was a tactic of war. He made little sensual movements and could hear the growing pant of her breath. The experience of his mother, and, the scars left in him by the learning of it, had left deeper wounds on him than the pitted line across the forehead and cheek' of the girl. He had no trust in emotion, believed it weakness. To have had sex with her would have disgusted him perhaps frightened him. He heard the rustle and knew that her legs opened 'for him, but his fingers, nails, stayed on her stomach. Above the scent of the straw he smelt her wetness. He teased her, but it was only as a tactic of manipulation to achieve what he thought was necessary.

  She was a virgin. If she had not been she would have pulled down his hand, buried it in her hair, and she had not.

  He heard the breathing of the boy, steady but heavy with catarrh, beyond the wall of bales. It asked so much of him, the simpleton who was in love with God, that he must endure the delay, and he had thought hard as to how he could hold the resolve of the boy for more hours, more days.

  The nail of his forefinger penetrated her navel cavity, and he heard the small gasps. He moved his hand away, rolled on to his side with his back to her, left her.

  There was silence, long, and her breathing slackened.

  He had angered her, knew it and intended it.

  She was the pick of the cell, the only one among them that he valued.

  Her anger burst. She spat out her whispered anger: 'Is it arrogance that drives you, or cowardice that rules you? Which? Are you, in your mind, too important to die, or too frightened? Which? It is never the leaders who make the sacrifice. The leaders choose targets, they make the vests, they recruit, and they tell young men of the rewards of Heaven and of the praise that will be heaped on them when they have gone to Paradise, but at the last they stand aside. Are you too valuable? Is the fear too great? Everything you have done since you came is to ensure your own safety and ability to run, to be clear. I have not seen, ever, from you one moment of compassion for him, nothing. And I have read that in Palestine it is not the young boys of the leaders who wear the vests, because they are sent away–abroad–for education and it would never be. permitted for them to wear one. I tell you, I think that he is the one with true courage, but you treat him, as if he were a package, disposable, to be thrown away. I despise you.'

  The anger stilled. She would not have known it, in the darkness and with his back to her, but he smiled and was well satisfied.

  Chapter14

  Thursday, Day 15

  The ceiling light had been on, dull behind its mesh, since they had brought him back from the last session of questioning, but it was the cell door opening that woke Ramzi.

  He jolted up on the mattress. For moments he did not know where he was, then the clarity came. A uniformed man stood in the doorway, eyed him with withering distaste, then tossed a bundle of clothing and a pair of trainers on to the end of the bed. He blinked, wiped his eyes. He realized his home had been raided, searched, and the clothing had been brought from there. For a few seconds he thought of his mother and sisters, of the violation of their home by men with cameras and plastic bags, and their sifting through his family's territory. Confusion wafted in him…Why? Why had he been brought clothing and shoes from home? He- looked for an answer from the man, but there was none, only a grim, sour face staring back at him. He pushed up off the mattress and felt the stiffness in his muscles.

  Under the man's eye, Ramzi peeled the paper suit off his shoulders. Slowly, he dressed in the new gear given him, and he did not understand. When he was dressed, the man's finger beckoned for him to follow. He was led out of the cell, and the paper suit was left behind.

  He did not know of the bitter row in the small hours, between a superintendent of the Anti-Terrorist Unit and an assistant director of the Security Service, that had raged in a corridor of New Scotland Yard's tower building. He did not know that an assistant director had won the hour. Or how.

  In the corridor outside his cell's door, a clutch of men formed up round him, and none had a word for him. The echo of metal-tipped toecaps and heels played in his ears, but his arms were not held as they had been on each of the times he had been taken from his cell to the interviews…He had said nothing. He had followed every instruction given him when he had been recruited those many months before. He felt pride in that silence. Truth was, if lost hours could have been regained, if actions could have been undone, he would never have left the cottage–would have stayed in his bed and not disguised it. But Ramzi could not retrace those steps and all he could offer to the family–Syed, Khalid, Jamal and Faria, the Leader and the bomb-maker–was his silence, was the places at which he had focused on the floor, walls and ceiling. He had a small stirring, but growing, pride in his silence. And he walked, in the corridor, then through barred gates and up the steps, the better for his pride. Another door, steel-sheeted, was opened when numbers were punched by the head of his escort into a sunken panel. He was led left, and there was more uncertain chaos in his mind…They had used two interview rooms to question him–and to listen to his silence–but they were off, through a set of swing doors, to his right. He was brought to a counter on which were laid two plastic bags, and he hesitated.

  He did not know that the two teams of detectives who had posed those questions were now stood down, asleep in their beds. He did not know that the assistant director had produced a single sheet of paper, headed with the printed address of a Home Office-sponsored forensics laboratory. He did not know that the superintendent had sworn out loud as he had read, 'I confirm that an initial examination of the swabs taken from the hands of the suspect RI 01 I 18.04.07 was flawed. Further and more detailed tests have shown conclusively that no, repeat no, traces of banned explosive materials were present on the samples given to us. No indications exist that the suspect handled or was in direct proximity to such materials. My department apologizes for the earlier false analysis provided to you, and trusts you have not suffered inconvenience. Faithfully…' There had been a scribbled set of initials over the typed name of a professor of Forensic Studies. He did not know anything.

  Around him he felt a wall of hostility. Nothing was said, but it radiated. The plastic packets were pushed towards him and he reclaimed his watch from one, his wallet from the other. He stood to his full height, heaved back his shoulders and believed he had destroyed their best efforts–and the disgust and shame that had swamped his mind when on the bench bed were gone. A form was handed to him–which listed his watch and his wallet–with a biro, and he made an unrecognizable scrawl to acknowledge receipt.

  He did not know that a whole chain of uniformed policemen, those close to him in the prisoner-reception area and those who wore suits to question him and were in their beds, had been kept in absolute ignorance of what was planned for him.

  The pride veered towards conceit. His silence had beaten them. He said, 'It is always the same. You persecute us. To be Asian, a Muslim, is sufficient for us to be persecuted. Innocent people, as I am, are abused, imprisoned without cause…I am free now?'

  He had thought he faced fifteen years or longer. There was so much that Ramzi did not understand. In a moment of idiocy he had handled the sticks that were in the waistcoat pouches, and the dog had found the traces that the rain had not washed off. Then he blanched, and his shoulders fell. Why was he released, freed?

  But a voice, behind him, wiped the confusion. Quietly snarled, 'That's right, chummy, free to piss off out of here.'

  He spun, did not know which of them had said it.

  He looked down at his watch. 'What am I supposed to do at this time in the morning, five o'clock?'

  Another voice, again behind him: 'Don't bloody complain, you don't have to walk. There's a car waiting for you–will take you where you want to go. Goodbye, friend, and goodnight.'

  He smelt the staleness of their breath, and the whiff of whatever fast-food they had swallowed in the night hours. They made a little
aisle for him, and he walked through it to the door gaping ahead. He did not look back.

  When the cold was on his face and the rain cascaded in front of him, a hand snaked past his body and pointed down the street to his left. He saw the rear lights of a car parked against the pavement.

  He imagined the faces beading at his back.

  He went fast down the steps, past a drenched policeman who stood guard with a weapon slung against his chest, hit the pavement at speed. He ducked his head to keep the rain from his eyes, the car's tail-lights ahead. He ran, did not slow to see the car's make or its registration. As he charged towards it, the rear door on the pavement side was opened–but the rain sluiced on the rear window and he could not see inside it. He fell into the car, sagged down on to The back seat, and an arm came across him and pulled the door shut. At the same moment the driver raced the engine and they screamed out into the empty, glistening road. He wiped the water from his face and heaved a sigh of relief, and the sigh hung on his lips…Pain flooded him, then darkness.

  It was done so expertly and so fast. The pain was when his arms were wrenched behind his back, then pinioned. The darkness was from the hood, with the smell of cold sacking, that covered his head. He lashed out with his feet but caught only the back of the front passenger seat, and there was more pain from a blow across his face, and more darkness as he screwed his eyes shut in response. Then tears came through his closed eyes, and the fight fled him. He subsided.

  From the front, a voice asked calmly, 'Everything all right back there, Donald?'

  From beside him, a voice replied softly, 'Everything's fine here, Xavier, and I'm confident the gentleman's going to be sensible.'

  Then, quite gently, as the car sped into the night, he felt a force he could not struggle against, pushing him down on to the floor, wedging him between the seats; boots lay across his spine and the back of his head.

  'Does it ever stop raining in this country? Describe this place to me, Dickie. I feel the emptiness, but paint me a picture.'

  They stood under the umbrella that Naylor held. He favoured Hegner with it but could not protect the American's legs. Unnecessary, really, to have left the car hidden in the only one of the wide Nissen huts that had survived. They were on old Tarmacadam, beside a single-storey building's open doorway; its iron window-frames had long lost every pane of glass. In the dawn light, a red flag flew limp on its pole. The approach road, a taxiing run for the aircraft, had become obsolete sixty years back.

  Naylor said, 'There's one runway left, the others were dug up by the landowner for urban hardcore. One Nissen remains, probably would have been a workshop for damaged aircraft, and the rest were dismantled after the war and sold off. About all that's left is the Tarmacadam, the Nissen, and a single building that was once the station's armoury, too solidly built for easy demolition. This part of England was thick with bomber stations, and most are in this condition–desolate and forgotten. As far as the horizon there are flat, ploughed fields and it looks to me as though the crop will be peas, for the supermarkets, and there's a red flag flying. It's used a couple of times a year for live firing by the local police, and the flag's hoisted so that the locals know to stay clear…So, I had it run up last night. They're very good, the locals, not at all inquisitive. We use it every two or three months for A Branch, open country, surveillance exercises–and it is, I promise you, damn difficult to get a mile from here and not be seen. So peaceful now. Sixty years ago it would have been a base for a heavy-bomber squadron, twenty-two Lancasters if they were at full strength, some limping home with flak holes, and others belly-flopping down with their casualties. So quiet now…I'd say it's a place of ghosts.'

  'I have that picture. You chose well, Dickie,' Hegner said, and Naylor saw a slow, sardonic grin cross the.American's lips and he thought the man had not the slightest sprinkle of charity in his soul. 'It seems to be a real good place for a new ghost–know what I mean?'

  Naylor did. At Riverside Villas there were enough, mostly from the recent intakes and young, who derided the Agency's tactic of shipping detainees, known as ghosts, off to the remote military bases of the willing Polish, Romanian or Albanian allies, or to Uzbekistan and North Africa. No information was given on them. They disappeared without a trail of paper. They were exposed to brutality, to the extremities of agony, and an American from the Agency would sit in an outer room and wait to be passed tapes of the interrogations. Naylor felt the damp that had gone into his shoes. He, too, dealt in ghosts and had done so since service in Aden, during time in Northern Ireland and in the worst days of the bloody Balkans affair. Naylor valued them, and had less than two working days to exploit the latest ghost to cross his path…But it was war, wasn't it? It was as much a time of war as when the heavy-laden bombers had trundled on the triangle of runways and lifted off, had flown to targets where civilians cowered in shelters, where firestorms had raged–wasn't It?

  'Dickie, you've gone quiet.'

  'Just thinking of ghosts.'

  'I reckon this ghost's on his way.'

  Naylor hadn't heard it. He peered into the mist and low cloud above the runway that had run west to north, saw nothing and heard nothing. A full minute after the American had alerted him, he caught a first glimpse of the grey shadow that was a car, and it was not for a half-minute more that he heard its engine.

  'I think I'd like to sit in, Dickie.'

  'I'd expected that you'd want to,' Naylor said drily.

  'See that the right questions are asked.'

  'They know what's required of them. I won't be there.' He followed with what he hoped was irony. 'I wouldn't want to be in the way.'

  'My experience, Dickie, is that in these circumstances it's easier to give orders and not get dirty–easier on the conscience.'

  He thought a dart speared him. The car had stopped. He recognized the two of them. They reached inside a rear door and dragged out their ghost. Both were heavier in the body and thinner in the face than they had been when he had last seen them. The ghost tried to shamble between them, but then his feet were kicked out from under him and they dragged him as if that would augment the wretch's fear and humiliation, his helplessness. The taller one, his hair greyer than Naylor remembered from the Bosnia-Herzegovina assignment, had the rucksack hooked on one shoulder. The shorter one was balder, his head shinier than when a Serb warlord had been the ghost–and the answer required had been the location of a kidnapped aid-worker, being held by Arab fighters, whose life was in extreme jeopardy. He was seen; the shorter man–Clydesdale–tapped his chest, as if to indicate that the envelope delivered to RAP Northolt was secreted there. He was noticed; the taller man–Boniface–raised his spare fist and gave him a thumbs-up. They were as unconcerned as the pair of jobbing gardeners, father and son, who came to his home every month and always had pleasant small-talk for Anne.

  Holding the umbrella, he guided the American towards the door of the building. He reached the entrance, saw a torch beam roving and heard their surprised pleasure.

  'Oh, that's good, Donald, there's a new power point. Oh, gets better! There's a tap and all.'

  'Excellent, Xavier–water and electricity, couldn't be better.'

  The hooded figure cowered against a wall. For a moment Naylor was a voyeur and could not take his eyes from him. On an A Branch night exercise, a generator was run off the power point–the cable laid at the Service's expense–and the water supply had never been cut off after the war; then and now it was used for brewing tea.

  Naylor said brusquely, to assert his authority, 'Excellent to have you both on board. Time is of the essence, and we don't have much of it. My colleague will be with you, and he has my full confidence. Myself, I've calls to make.'

  He stumbled away, the lie ringing in his ears, back out into the rain. His age caught him, and shame, and he shook, could not control the trembling. He left them with the American and the ghost, and thought himself damned.

  She was alone. Groping her way through the house, Faria wa
s guided only by slivers of light that came through the boarded-up windows. Around her was the smell of old, dried filth, but it was old…The yobs who had wrecked the interior had not been inside for months, no vagrants had slept there for weeks. It would do for them.

  She checked the dismantled kitchen, the back room, the front room and the hallway, but not the stairs. She heard the scurry of the mice as they fled ahead of her and her face brushed against thick spiders'

  webs. She was alone but trusted. After their flight from the cottage and after being told the schedule they now worked to, she had said that she knew of a house out to the west of the town centre, behind Overstone Road, that was owned by the cousin of a friend of her father, that was derelict, that would not be put up for sale until there was improvement in the property market. Faria lived in the ghetto fashioned by the ethnic minority to which she belonged. Inside it, she was isolated. It shaped her. Within it, her feelings of revulsion for the society around her, beyond self-created fencing, spawned spores…Meandering through the grey darkness of the house's ground-floor, she could recall each insult that had been offered her. She believed she had the strength to earn the trust. His fingers had been on her stomach, in the crevice of her navel, and she would do what was required of her–that strength had been given her.

  She used her arms, extended, to warn herself of obstructions– the toppled, legless settee, broken chairs, torn-up carpeting–went back into the kitchen, and stepped over the fallen cooker. She went down on her knees and pushed back the bottom plank that had been nailed against the outside of the door and that she had prised away with a half-brick. She lay on her stomach, in the dried filth, wriggled through the gap and emerged into the light. She gasped down the cleanness of the air, then crouched in the rain and replaced the plank.