The Walking Dead

  Not to Naylor, Hegner said, 'I want his bag and his documents, and I want him weighted.'

  It was done. Boniface searched pockets, produced a ticket, a passport and a slim wallet, then threw the bag at Naylor's feet. Clydesdale did not loose the hair, but kicked hard and backwards with heavy boots and broke the side of the shrub bed to loosen the bricks.

  To Naylor, Hegner said, 'Don't you countermand what I ask of them.'

  Naylor said, vomit in his mouth, 'I'll not describe it, damn well won't.'

  To Boniface and Clydesdale, Hegner said, 'Weight him well and put him over, where it's deep.'

  He saw whole bricks and broken bricks shoved into pockets and down the trouser waist, knew they would be held in place by the ankle pinions. He wondered whether the man would cry out, beg, plead, at the last. He gazed into the face of an enemy, at the features over which Hegner's fingers had moved. Saw contempt and defiance. It struck him then, worse than any kick or knee blow or punch, the power of that enemy. Could it ever be bloody beaten? They had him up. One on each arm, in a shuffling run, they dragged him on to the pier. Naylor turned away.

  He watched the approach of the young women. He held a handkerchief over his face and hoped to hide the split lips, the blood and the bruising. They never looked at him, did not break step, or their conversation. He heard the babble of their talk as they passed him. Was it done in their name, to keep them safe, and the babies they pushed? He listened for a splash but heard only the waves, above deep, dark water, pounding the pillars.

  Naylor said, 'Joe, if it is for vengeance, then that is a shaming motive. It does no credit…'

  Hegner said, 'Put him in the legal chain and he has a lawyer, and he doesn't speak during human-rights-controlled interrogation, and he becomes an icon of resistance, and kids all over speak his name. My way, he disappears. He's gone from view, from sight–where to? Confusion is created. Men move, men make calls, men hit the email. They have to know where he is. And if they don't? Then it's disruption and chaos. It hurts them, hurts them so bad, because they don't know. I live off mistakes made. Do they change codes, change safe-houses, change the membership of cells? They're in ignorance and they flounder…Think about it. Now, can we go find some coffee, Dickie?'

  He saw Boniface and Clydesdale walk back from the pier, short lengths of the plastic ties in their hands. They would have cut them at the moment they stunned him with a blow, then pitched him over…Could be a week, or two weeks, longer, before the nameless body was found, and he thought of the scientists and engineers–the new soldiers of the front line in the new war–scouring air waves for messages sent by an enemy who was confused and disrupted…and thought also of a boy in a white T-shirt with an angry bloody swan on it.

  'You forgot that damned Saudi kid.'

  'Didn't forget him, but I prioritized. Please, I'd like to go back and look for my glasses, what's left of them, then I want some coffee. Dickie, you let the kid take his chance and you don't know, and I don't, what might happen. All I'm saying is, the glass is half full–believe in the bright side.'

  Lee Donkin's targets were those who hoarded a bus fare in their purses, didn't have a car available to them and would walk all the way down the main road into the town and would not fritter what money they had collected for the sale in the shopping centre.

  The sun was on his pale face.

  His hood was up and, drawstring tied, none of his hair and little of his features, vindictive and cold, were visible. His gloves were on, and those of his right hand were in his pocket and on the handle of the short, double-edged knife. Because it was too many days since he had last injected himself, it was difficult for him to walk and more difficult for him to concentrate on a target. Once, he went forward, increased his speed sharply and came near to a woman with a buggy, but she must have heard the hiss of his breath: she turned abruptly and confronted him. She had an umbrella, folded and concertinaed, in her fist as a weapon, and he backed off.

  The aches in his chest and stomach were not from hunger or thirst, but from the craving.

  He saw another woman, ahead and on the pavement, and again stretched his stride, but he saw a police car crawling in traffic towards him, and the chance was lost.

  He looked ahead and behind and could not see a lone prey, without people close. He swore…He reached a favoured place. Had struck there three times in the last two months, and there were boarded-up toilets beside the pavement that were surrounded by an overgrown evergreen hedge, then a school's playing-fields. He leaned against a lamp-post.

  Must wait–and desperation swam in him.

  What did he need food for? He did not need food, and she had none to give him.

  She had heard his stomach growl as he had prayed.

  He had knelt and faced a wall barely visible in the dull, dark room. She did not know what his mind saw but there was content on his face when he had finished. Her own lips moved, spoke the rehearsed speech, but in silence. She weighed it, the decision as to when she would make the speech, and whether it was necessary…There was no need for him to eat, and Faria knew the time had come.

  She took the bucket to him, and the damp, sodden T-shirt she had used the night before. She washed him again. In his armpits and round the neck where sweat had gathered in the night and his arms, legs and face. She squirted the scent on him. He looked down at her as she crouched on her haunches in front of him, but she could not read him.

  He lifted his feet and allowed her to manoeuvre the pants and trousers over them, and she pushed them up and pulled the zipper high, then buckled his belt. She put on his socks and trainers, tightened the laces and knotted them, and her hands fumbled it. He was impassive; she did not know whether he felt fear, whether the strength she had tried to give sustained him. She stood, then bent to lift the T-shirt from the careful pile she had made. He held out his arms and she threaded it over them. Faria saw the swan, and its open beak, its wide, outstretched wings: did the bird, in its anger, curse her? She gazed into his face, then sucked breath into her lungs.

  She took the waistcoat from the plastic sack, felt its weight. She swatted at the flies crawling over the bags of shit tied to it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Nothing at home, nursing her sick, demented mother, nothing in keeping house for her father and brothers before they left for the religious schools of Pakistan, nothing at school, where she had passed with distinction all the examinations she had sat, nothing in the room above the house that had become a cultural centre, where she had watched the videos of smiling women making declarations of Faith and then had seen buses, military convoys and street markets erupt in fire, where she had been recruited…nothing in the long months as a sleeper, and the call nothing in the cottage.

  Its weight sagged in her fingers. He held out his arms, and she slipped one through the space, then went behind him and guided the second through. She saw the pressure from the waistcoat settle evenly on his shoulders, and almost drag him down–but he straightened his back, took the weight. He had the button switch–which she had bought in the hardware shop and might have been used on the light beside her bed at home–in the palm of his hand, pulled the guard cover off it, and she saw the routing of the wires to the detonators, the taping that fastened them to the sticks in the waistcoat's pouches.

  The hand that held the button switch was inserted into the sleeve of the leather jacket, then emerged and disappeared again into the side pocket. When his hand was there, inside the pocket, the wire was hidden.

  She wanted to be gone. She hurried. Stepped back from him. Left him standing statue still. Threw the jilbab over her head, wriggled and let it fall, wrapped the dupatta round her neck, over her hair and across her face. Needed to be gone from the stink of the place, its darkness, the sweet sickly stench of the perfume.

  She .went to the door, crouched at it. He was by the bucket. She had seen his nakedness, but now he was turned away from her. She heard the tinkle against its side before he drew up the zip. He would not ki
ss her, as he had done in the night–lips on lips, tongues into mouths, teeth gentle on the hardness of her nipples–he had turned away from her so that she would not see it, and his dignity would not be lost…It was over. She had done what she had been told to, had made him strong.

  Faria said brusquely, without love, 'Time to go. Come on.'

  She moved the plank, went first into the gap. He followed, eased himself through and was careful not to jar the waistcoat under the heavy jacket, blinked in the bright sunlight. She led him up the side of the house. At the end of the wall, Faria looked right, then left, was satisfied and walked quickly to the pavement.

  They were a young man and a young woman, unexceptional, unremarkable, on an empty road, heading for its end. At the top of a hill they turned right and began the walk towards the town centre.

  The crowds had filled the steps to the doors. Ragged queues stretched across the square, and were already level with the library entrance.

  Cheerful–eating chocolate, smoking, gossiping–anticipation grew, and the sun had climbed above the town-hall clock tower and warmed them.

  'It's Mary, isn't it? There's tea or coffee, whichever you prefer. And as of this morning you have taken over stewardship of a section particularly important to us, am I correct? Do help yourself to biscuits or a croissant. I'm told you have grave personal concerns as to the legality and morality of Service actions in this current time of crisis. Those are the fundamentals? Please, take a seat. You asked specifically to see me this morning when, sadly, the dictate of events gives me little time to lay at your disposal, but you should know–and I emphasize it–I take most seriously any such anxieties from the brightest and best of our staff. You know that? Mary, you have my full attention.'

  Light poured into the room, pierced the bombproof glass of the windows…and she knew already she was wasting her time. On the upper floor, in the director general's sanctum where she had never been before one on one, he had waved her to a chair that faced the window. While she had nervously, cluttered herself with a cup of tea and a saucer, he had taken a position where he leaned easily against the window-sill. To look at him, to hold his eye, she must peer into the full force of the sun. She was disadvantaged, and understood that nothing was by chance.

  She said that a prisoner with proven explosives traces had been wrongly freed from Paddington Green's cells.

  'I followed the matter, personally, very closely. I was told subsequent forensics disproved earlier conclusions…but please continue.'

  She said it was her belief that the prisoner had been freed, then abducted by her superior–who acted in concert with an American, a liaison agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation…and she remembered the hands on her and the way they had explored not only her body but her face, and she stumbled on what she said–for the purpose of illegal torture and abuse.

  'That is a most desperately serious allegation, Mary, but–in your own words–a belief, not substantiated with evidence. For all that, I assure yo I will follow this trail with the utmost rigour. What else, Mary do you have for me?'

  She was about to speak when his red telephone, in a bank of three, rang. He grimaced, as if to tell her that he was obliged to answer, a tacit apology for the interruption. He showed no elation or satisfaction that she could see. He repeated the short bullet phrases he heard: 'a facilitator' and 'resisting arrest and broke free' and 'lost in the sea' and 'presumed drowned' and 'a treasure trove of documentation recovered' and 'nothing on the bomber'. He listened closely for a few more moments, then replaced the receiver.

  'Where were we, Mary?'

  She had no more heart for it. She said that she had told him what she knew.

  'May I freshen your cup, no? Another biscuit, no? I think, forgive me, it was that you believed you knew, but could not swear to…but don't doubt that I will follow this through as soon as our present difficult time is played out…May I remind you, Mary, that Dickie Naylor has been a most loyal and devoted servant of our organization for thirty-nine years, a stickler for rectitude, and I find it hard to imagine he would have entered the realms of illegality. The presence of the American is something we welcome, a man of great experience in his field, but I would remind you of last year's speech by his government's secretary of state when she championed the rule of law in dealing with prisoners and most categorically denied they were subject to maltreatment. I quote, "use every lawful weapon to defeat these terrorists"…Even if well-intentioned, Mary, innuendo cannot be permitted to blacken the names of good men.'

  She stood up, put down her empty cup, thought herself a chastised schoolgirl.

  He said, 'You will, of course, be pleased to hear that early this morning the facilitator, a senior organizer in that murderous gang of zealots, was intercepted as he tried to flee the United Kingdom, broke free but went into the sea and is presumed drowned–good riddance–but he left his travel papers behind him. That information, Mary, is UK Eyes Only and it would do extreme damage to the war against terror should his people learn of his loss and what we have recovered…But, Mary it goes without saying that you have my complete trust.'

  Her head was down. She thanked him for his time. She was at the door.

  'Oh, a final thought, Mary. The vernacular for such a person is "whistleblower". It is not, in my opinion, a wise route for anyone to follow. It leads inevitably to resignation, the end of a bright, prospering career, and to denigration from previously valued colleagues. New friends might appear to lionize the blower, but it's short-termism in the extreme. Their usefulness past, the blower is discarded,'left lonely and unemployable. I hope you have found our talk helpful.'

  She said brightly, 'I have and I'm grateful. Thank you.'

  It had been helpful, she reflected, and disguised her rampant bitterness, because she was not a trade unionist, or a Communist, or a Jew.

  She closed the door after her.

  They were walking along the pavement towards him, towards the boarded-up toilets and the shadows thrown by the hedge where Lee Donkin waited.

  Tremors shook his arms and legs, and he bit down hard on his tongue, his lower lip.

  There was heavy traffic going both ways on the road, but still moving. Not another pedestrian within a hundred yards of them, behind them. He checked the sports field: kids booted a ball towards goal-posts that had no net but there were no adults with them. Lee Donkin thought his patience rewarded. His escape run was clear.

  The man wore a heavy leather jacket, his body bulging under it, and his hands were in the pockets. The expression on his face was vacant, as if he was distracted, but he had a slight smile on his face. The woman alongside him was dressed in the black robe–what Lee Donkin called 'binbag gear'–had a scarf across her face, and a bag hooked up on her shoulder. They were not talking. They didn't look right or left, just walked. He would have said, Lee Donkin would have, that they saw nothing…would not see him until he hit them. He readied himself, which made the shaking worse, tensed and flexed.

  They came level with the hedge.

  Lee Donkin was out fast from the shadow, was on them before he was seen. He hit the woman with his shoulder, heard her gasp, saw the shock. She reeled away, nearly fell into the road as a lorry went by. He had his hand on the strap of the bag and tried to drag it clear of her, but she clung on. A kick slashed at the muscle on the back of his shin. His hand went into his pocket, clasped the knife handle–should have had it out at the start. The man grappled him. The woman held on to her bag and used her free hand to pound him. He was vicious but not strong. Was bloody losing…Wouldn't have realized it, but the addiction had sapped him. He had a grip on the leather jacket and tried to pull it closer to him to make the stab thrust shorter. Tugged and ripped at the jacket and was poised to strike with the knife. Lee Donkin felt his arm twisted back–like it would break, and loosed the knife, lost it. Heard the knife fall…He broke free and fled.

  Lee Donkin ran, slipping, sliding, across the mud of the sports field. Past the kids and their
bloody ball. Didn't look back, didn't know what he had done. Ran until he dropped, couldn't breathe, then slumped.

  She bent, picked up the knife. Crouching, she dropped it into her bag–couldn't have said why.

  'You all right, Miss?'

  She looked up, saw the driver high in the lorry's cab. She nodded, and stood. Ibrahim was beside her, and seemed detached from it, far away, still smiling, one hand in a pocket.

  The lorry pulled away.

  They went on together, walking down the hill towards the town.

  It was a busy road, no different on a Saturday morning from any other day and it led to a chosen battlefield of the new war…There were no defiles and crag peaks, as in the mountains outside Jalalabad, no high-walled compounds that could be defended, as in the remote villages of Waziristan, no culvert drains into which improvised explosive devices were packed, as under the route from the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport.

  The new war had found a fresh fighting ground where people gathered in a square, and did not concern themselves that they paid the wages of soldiers and airmen, paid for the bullets, shells and bombs that were used in their name, did not think of the consequences, and considered themselves far removed. The news on the radio that morning, if anybody had listened, reported a new operation by American troops in difficult mountain country, a raid by Pakistani military against an Al Qaeda leadership target, a bomb in Baghdad that had killed three South African security guards but it was all a long, long way away.

  He heard the breakfast cooking, heard the whistled anthem through the bedroom door, waited to go with his Principal to buy a newspaper and a packet of cigarettes.

  David Banks opened the notebook, turned to the last page.

  2 August 1938

  To: Miss Enid Darke, Bermondsey, London

  From: Nurse Angelina Calvi, 38th Field Hospital, Ebro River Front