The Walking Dead

by The Walking Dead (epub)

  'I do. I have been told it by the imam at our mosque in Jizan.'

  'Because you have been chosen from many, you are privileged. Ibrahim, you walk at the front of our struggle, God's struggle. The British are a people of corrupt unbelievers and you will teach them a lesson that will be long spoken of among the faithful followers of God. For what you will do, you will be taken to the table of God. Already there are the men who were your brothers on earth, with whom you were before I chose you. They are at the table, they keep a place for you and their welcome awaits you. You will have their respect for what you will have done and where you will have been. And I believe that young women of great beauty, in the gardens of Paradise, also await your coming. There you will be honoured–and you will be honoured on earth, wherever the Faith exists. Your name will be sung, your photograph will be shown, and your name and your photograph will fortify the courage of so many…Ibrahim, to sit at God's table and to lie in the gardens of Paradise is only for the strongest. Are you among them?'

  'I hope to be.' Emotion, sincerity, played on the boy's face.

  The agenda of revenge of Muhammad Ajaq had little to do with a table set with fruits and a fable of women who fucked endlessly behind shrubs in gardens. Because of the blood in his veins, and the lightness of his skin's texture, he had answered the call and had journeyed to the heartland of an enemy. He was the product of the seed of his father, that blood and that skin pallor. His father–he knew it now but had not known it for the many years of his childhood–was William Jennings, from Yorkshire in northern England, an engineer who had worked on the building of modern sewage plants in Jordan thirty years before. His father, the bastard Jennings, had seduced his mother, who was a secretary at the ministry in Amman that oversaw the modernization of Jordan's infrastructure. His father, Jennings, had been repatriated before his mother could no longer hide her pregnancy. She had gone back to her home–in the north of Jordan, near to the town of Irbid–with her disgrace and her shame, had borne the boy-child and suckled him, had left him in her room and gone. On a winter's morning, his mother had walked out into the desert sands, had stripped off her clothes and lain down naked so that hypothermia would claim her life quickly. She had died there and her skeleton–stripped of flesh by scavenging foxes–had not been found until the spring came. He had been brought up through childhood by his grandparents, his mother's family. On his nineteenth birthday, in the hour before he left home in Irbid by bus for the paratroops' training depot in the south, he had been told of his father's flight and his mother's death…and at that moment his character had been fashioned. Hatred ruled him, not God and not Faith.

  'You have to stay strong, Ibrahim, to justify the trust placed in you., 'I will.'

  He believed him. He did not think it would be necessary to use the hoax, with honeyed words, of a 'delayed time switch'. Some of the volunteers, so others told him, would buckle as they approached the day when they would walk or drive to their target. Those who showed weakness were given the he by the Engineer that they should reach the target, then dump a bag or park a car, and press the switch: they had a minute, or five minutes, to run before the explosion. There was, of course, no 'delayed time switch', and it was an unsatisfactory procedure. He believed the boy sought martyrdom and, without deception, would achieve it.

  He ran his fingers through the boy's hair, left him and returned quietly to his room.

  Left alone, Ibrahim listened to the stirring sounds of the building beyond the door, the street beyond the window and the yard's walls. He still sat on the floor.

  A harsh noise, new, filled his ears and eddied in the darkness around him.

  Ibrahim fought the noise, tried to rid himself of it. He held the palms of his hands over his ears. He thought of the table and his brothers, of the empty chair and the place set for him, but he could not lose the noise.

  It disgusted him.

  It was above him.

  Bedsprings squealed with growing intensity and a faster beat. What he knew about sex, about the physical matter of copulation, had been learned from textbooks in the library of the School of Medicine. He had never talked of it with his father, or–of course not–with his sisters: his parents' bedroom, when his mother was alive, had been at the far end of the villa from his own room and solid walls would have blocked out the sounds of lovemaking. Above him, over the now swaying lightshade, there was a thin layer of plasterboard, then planking, a similarly worn carpet, a bed with springs that sank and rose and howled. He had the image, and it had been hard in his mind since the imam had talked of it, of the young women who waited for a martyr in the gardens of Paradise, and their nakedness, but–in his mind–when he advanced on them and bent to touch them, there was always a distraction that snatched them away. He had never touched a woman. Boys who had been with him at the university, or at school in Jizan, had talked endlessly of women, even told stories of prostitutes they had paid in the cities, but Ibrahim had thought they lied.

  It fascinated him.

  Before he went to the gardens, where virgins waited for him, he would never know the feeling of a woman's body. His hands' palms were tighter against his ears. He summoned the image of his father, whom he loved, and called to him shrilly in the night. From a great distance, his father seemed to smile on him. He heard his father speak of pride in his youngest, the same pride he had spoken of when the eldest and the middle sons had been reported dead in the jihad against the infidels of Russia and America. He saw his father sitting in the deep-cushioned chair in front of the wide-screen television with the cinema-standard speakers, and thought- his father blessed him for his courage.

  There was a cry overhead, a groan and silence, and the swing of the lightshade slackened. He let his hands fall from his ears and rejoiced: he had his father's pride.

  'It is what his father told us today.'

  'Why'd he call your people?' Hegner asked softly.

  'Because of love and because of fear.'

  'Wouldn't he have felt proud of his boy's actions?'

  'Pride perhaps in former times, at the loss of two sons, but not in the loss of a third, all that remains to him…and fear now at the consequences of silence.'

  Of all the Americans, of the Bureau and the Agency, working from the Riyadh embassy, only Joe Hegner would have had that late-evening call from the head of counterintelligence in the Kingdom. Only Hegner had the status, the reputation and the friendship to have been invited to come in the darkness to the Mabatha interrogation centre, south of the capital city Only this dogged zealot from the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have had a limousine chauffeur drive him behind privacy windows out of Riyadh, past the Ministry of Interior complex and through the high gates of what staffers at his embassy called the 'Confession Factory'. He sat now in a comfortable chair beside the senior man in that section of the mabaheth, with a cocktail of fruit juices at his elbow.

  'I am exceptionally grateful for this information you offer me.'

  'It is natural, Joe, that it should be given you.'

  'And already I have a scent on this.'

  'The nose, Joe–and I say it with respect–is the best.'

  He had access where for others of the Bureau and the Agency none existed. He had never concerned himself with the reasons that it was given him, because that would have been time wasted, and he thought time too precious. The trust had existed before he had gone on permanent posting to Baghdad and the insurgent war in Iraq, but had been cemented when it became known–after his injuries–that at the end of his immediate convalescence he had demanded to be posted back to the Kingdom. The trust had borne fruit. On his last visit from Washington, the director of the Bureau had spent forty-eight hours inside the embassy compound, kicking his heels, then been fobbed off with junior functionaries. A month before that, the director of the Agency–in spite of hourly telephone demands from subordinates–had not been granted an audience for three days. The door opened for Joe Hegner, and the carpet rolled out.

  'I t
hought, Joe, you would wish to know of this matter.'. 'I do, sir, and I appreciate it.'

  A. wish and an appreciation–of course. The speciality of Joe Hegner was in the collection of information on the strategies of recruitment, and the tactics employed for them, of suicide-bombers. He learned and in return he gave back a conduit route by which sensitive information from the mabaheth was funnelled back to the Bureau analysts at the Edgar Hoover Building. So different from the days before Nine-Eleven, but the muscle on those aircraft had been from the Kingdom: men from the Kingdom had carried the box-cutter knives that had terrorized cabin staff and flight-deck crews. The funnel was important to the counterintelligence officers and reduced the suffocating pressure of criticism flowing from DC. He had been told, but it mattered little to Joe Hegner, that his reports were in the Oval Office within forty-eight hours of being filed. He had small regard for praise, and only the barest interest in the stature he had achieved. His hand rested loosely on the handle of the stick that lay against his thigh.

  'I'm sorry to say, and I know you won't take me the wrong way, but you folks have failed to stop the flow of suicide-bombers recruited here, and failed to lock down your borders.'

  'We know it, Joe.'

  'You are the prime source of these kids.'

  'Joe, we know it.'

  'You've waited till the eleventh hour, but finally you're trying to arrest these boys.'

  'We are trying, Joe, and that is the truth.'

  'I've got to be honest with you, I'm not sure the "trying" is good enough.'

  For such a riposte, any other man from the Bureau or the Agency would have been shown the door, booted out of the gate with a kick four-square in the ass, and would have had to trek back across the desert towards Riyadh's distant lights and illuminated towers. Joe Hegner was not 'any other man'. Hegner lived off plain-talk, always had. Folks spoke plain and simple where he came from. A man kept his conversation plain and simple, or he walked alone, in the bit of Montana that was north of the intersection at Forsyth of Route 12 and Route 94 and close to Big Porcupine Creek. The nearest town was at Ingemar where his grandfather had been the community blacksmith, and his father had run a hardware store. Hegner had lost most of his plain-talk when he'd gone, first of his family to the university in Helena–and lost some more during a marriage now also gone, during induction and subsequent postings with the Bureau…but he'd regained it while lying in inked darkness after his injury. His Saudi contacts in the mabaheth were at professorial level with obliqueness, innuendo and subtlety of language, as obscure as mirrored walls, but they listened to him.

  'Your government, its policies, they are the recruiter.'

  'Well, that's one on the money and I'm not going to argue.'

  'A twenty-one-year-old medical student, Joe, has told his family he is visiting cousins in Sana'a, and in fact he is travelling to Europe, with a false passport and a false name on the airline's manifest…What am I telling you?'

  'You are telling me to listen for one heck of a bang–a big, big bang. We will hear the bang unless–where he's travelling to–they get their act together fast. More important they get real lucky, and fast. You got a different take on it?'

  'I am hearing you, Joe.'

  'They're gonna need a sack of luck large enough to keep a Bedu's camel happy for a month in the Rub' al Khali. I'm going to ship this on. Right?'

  'Disperse it where it should be thrown.'

  'Gotcha. Hope we have the time.' At the last, Joe Hegner was fulsome in courtesy. He said gruffly, sincerely, 'I thank you, sir, for your trust in me.'

  The head of counterintelligence of the mabaheth in the Kingdom kissed Hegner's cheek. His arm was taken and he was guided to the door with a sympathy that did not embarrass him. He paused there while those who would lead him back to his limousine came from an outer office.

  He asked, 'What do you make of the kid's father telling you what he knew? He a patriot or…?'

  'A frightened man, Joe, or a parent wanting his son to live. As yet, I do not know. We flew him here this afternoon to talk to him. To drain him, Joe. I have no interest in the father, except what he can tell me of his son. I am concerned only with his son, with Ibrahim Hussein.'

  'That's good. That's real good.'

  Heavily, on his stick, Joe Hegner went out into the night, and the inner walls of the Mabatha Interrogation Centre were behind him. From the darkness, the shadows in which he lived, he heard the limousine door opened. He had that bad feeling. It was the one the Shin Bet officers in Israel talked about when he visited Tel Aviv, and the tortured Americans in Baghdad. A bomber was on course for a target. A boy with a dream of Paradise stalked close to a place of martyrdom. Where'd he go? Where was the kid headed?

  He was sagging but the chain that held him did not permit him to fall to his knees.

  Two men, alternately, thrashed the back of Omar Hussein with an iron bar and a pliable rubber truncheon. The cell in which he was suspended had a floor space of less than three metres by less than two. He had now defecated and urinated in his underpants. He could not protect his back from the blows, and when he screamed the bar and the truncheon hit him with greater power. He could smell his own filth. He thought he had done right…He screamed at the pain, hoped only for unconsciousness, and cursed his son.

  The questions came…When had he first known? Who had recruited his son? What was the target of his son? Was not the whole of Asir Province a snake's nest of dissent, a foxes' den of violence against the Kingdom? Did he support his son's belief in murder? The answer was a single croak inside the hood over his old head: he knew nothing, nothing.

  And then his tormentors left him.

  Again, muffled by the hood, he screamed the curse against his son.

  He had been working late, was in no hurry to be home after the early spat with Anne and, for a break, he had slipped out of Riverside Villas and walked to the park at the back. He shared a bench with a pathetic creature, sodden with a bottle of full-strength cider and destitute, but Dickie Naylor was ignored, left alone with his thoughts and his lit pipe.

  When six more working days were done, Naylor would never again sit in the evening quiet of St John's Gardens. He had learned the value of coming to the park and sitting under the high plane trees when the world, his world, collapsed around him. And here he could smoke a pipe and be free of the tobacco police.

  It had been a burial ground. He fancied that he, and the vagrant, sat with phantoms long deceased. That did not bother him, was actually something of a comfort; he could cope with the past and inevitability. Three and a half centuries before that spring evening, and the ebb of his working life, the cemetery had been full and an extra yard deep of topsoil had been carted in so that new graves could be dug on top of the old. An enterprising solution to a capacity problem. He had sat here, with the same pipe stem clamped in his teeth, on the evening of Nine-Eleven.

  On that September day, some had rushed round the offices and corridors of Riverside Villas, acting the parts of whirling dervishes, or clutched paper sheets, or had mobiles pressed to their ears and called for meetings, or rifled for files from the archive. Dickie Naylor had watched the frenetic action, then walked to the solitude of St John's Gardens and smoked, using the quiet to ponder. He had returned and said, 'This day will turn out to be as significant as. that of the first of September sixty-two years ago when the battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shells at the Polish garrison of the Westerplatte at Danzig.' He did not flatter himself that any had listened. A month later the new section was formed to monitor for the arrival of suicide-bombers into the United Kingdom and he had been nominated as second in charge. After a year Freddie had gone, retired to golf or tomato-breeding, and Naylor had taken his place and occupied his cubicle. The tick of his own retirement clock had started.

  But the new topsoil dumped on the garden had created its own problems. Solutions always bred consequences, Naylor believed. The shallow graves, not excavated deeply enough for fear of dist
urbing the already interred, had provided scope for body-snatchers. 'Block one hole and another appears', he would have said, if the vagrant had asked him. By 1814, what was now St John's Gardens had been patrolled by armed guards, carrying not cudgels but primed pistols, and the hospitals were denied the cadavers they needed for dissection tutorials.

  He had come here, to the same bench, on the day that jargon now called Seven-Seven. That day, Riverside Villas had been stunned and quiet. 'God, it's bloody well reached us–us,' he'd heard an ashen-faced branch director murmur. The building's business was compartmentalized. An officer was supposed to know his own area of study, but not of investigations in hand adjacent to his desk. 'Need to bloody know' was the mantra of the Villas. By mid-morning on Seven-Seven that sacred rule was shredded. A verdict of failure had consumed the building. The guards on the big doors to the basement car park, the canteen cooks and the director general in a lofty suite of offices would have known it. There hadn't been a damn whisper of what was going to happen. Four guys, with clean skins, had walked through all the beavering efforts of detection with which the Service was charged. Naylor had come to the gardens that lunchtime, eaten a sandwich and thought that the illusion of all-seeing competence manufactured in the Villas was gone. He had come back in, swiped his card, taken the lift up, tramped down his corridor and an officer had asked him, 'What the hell should be our response, Dickie?'

  And Naylor had said what was obvious to him: 'We should all pedal a bit harder.'

  By order of Lord Palmerston, at some date in the 1850s, the burial ground had been closed, the gardens had been laid out, a fountain built in the centre and the plane trees planted. It was the best place Dickie Naylor knew…God's truth, he'd miss it.

  Charity did not come often to him, but on an impulse he took the half-emptied tobacco pouch from his pocket, laid it in the vagrant's lap and smiled. He wished him a good evening, and was on his way.