'I tell you, Dickie, you don't know how lucky you are. It's going to get worse — couldn't be a better time to be getting out. Did you say a greenhouse?'
He heard them, took no note. What filled his mind was telling the Engineer — when he met him the next day — what he had learned and the sights he had seen.
They had confirmed his decision. Muhammad Ajaq started out on his lonely walk back to the hotel.
A table had been brought into the room and sheets of old newspaper were laid across it. On the newspaper he had placed what had been bought for him the previous evening from his list. Reaching him were the smells of cooking, not the scents of the Arab food with which he was familiar, but the odour of an Asian curry; he could eat it but would not enjoy it. That door was closed and the curtains of the room given him were pulled tight across.
In the centre of the table, across the middle of a fold in the newspaper, he had placed the artefact of his trade: the stack of explosive sticks that had been retrieved from the cupboard of a boat's kitchen. The slim, shiny detonators lay at the edge of the table. Between the sticks and the detonators and over the rest of the newspaper were what he would need for the construction of the device: a loose waistcoat of cotton fabric and straps cut from a towel, a packet of heavy needles and a reel of thick thread, big batteries for a flashlamp torch, coils of multicoloured wire, a soldering iron, a paper bag of two-inch nails, another of carpet tacks, a small plastic sack of screws, washers, bolts and ball-bearings, and a button switch from the flex of a table light. He could have fashioned the device with greater intellectual skill, but thought it unnecessary.
In his own country, far away and behind him, he built devices of ever-increasing sophistication. He could booby-trap a dead body and cause it to explode when the medical crews came from the Shia hospital. He could use mercury tilt switches that would detonate a device in a car parked close to a barracks, and the vehicle would explode as troops opened its doors. He could place culvert bombs under a road and have an infrared beam flare across the tarmac to catch a Humvee or armoured personnel carrier. He could spend many hours at his work, if his target was an enemy explosive and ordnance disposal officer…or he could spend a minimum of time and still create havoc, chaos and fear. But with every creation, clever or simple, he followed a basic rule of survival and used differing techniques of wiring, positioning of detonators and loading of a vehicle or waistcoat. He left no repetitious signature. All that was constant in his work was the devastation in the aftermath.
The name given him by his father was Tariq, but to all with whom he fought he was the Engineer. He doubted that a photograph of his head and shoulders existed in the headquarters of the intelligence buildings at the airport, but there a ghost's image of him would exist. He loathed his enemy, and where he could find them, he killed them, and that would have created, in their air-conditioned suites, respect.
He came from the Triangle town of Fallujah.
His wife, three children, and his mother had perished in the rubble of the assault on Fallujah, and he had never seen or prayed at the rough, quickly dug graves in which they were buried. His father — insane from the bombing, shelling, shooting and grief — now lived in a world of devastated silence at the home of his brother; he had never visited him. He carried no photographs of that family, only the memory of them and his hatred of those who had killed them and broken his father.
In Iraq, alongside the graves of his family, there were many hundreds more; he and his hatred were responsible for them.
The Scorpion had asked him to travel far from his home. 'For what reason? Am I not more valuable here?' The Scorpion had spoken of the 'underbelly' and its softness. 'I accept it. I will go with you. The underbelly attracts me.' Why did it attract him? 'The town of Fallujah was an underbelly. The home of my wife, my children, my mother and father was an underbelly. They should learn what was done to us in their name. They should be hurt where they are soft.'
The hands that had laid out the items he would meld together in a killing device were thick and pudgy inside thin surgical gloves. He was in his forty-fourth year, was built like a bull, had rippling muscles. He smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. He had not prayed since the deaths of his family, and before that only on the holiest of festivals to please his mother. He had fought in the Iranian war on the front of the Faw peninsula, had been in the humiliation of the retreat from Kuwait, and had reached the rank of major in a battalion of the Republican Guard, specializing in ordnance, when the Americans had launched, four years back, their campaign of Shock and Awe. Then his unit had dispersed in confusion. He had joined the fledgling insurgency and had met the Scorpion. He valued the day of their meeting, under the searching gaze of aircraft circling overhead. In a sewer ditch, with bombs falling and missiles, with death close, they had met…The fingers matched the bulk of his body yet they were nimble and he could control their movement to the most subtle degree. The devices he made — if handled correctly — always worked, always, and many hundreds of graves, and more graves in the cemeteries of America, were filled as proof of his fingers' delicacy.
He would not see the underbelly target, he had no need to. When the youth with the swan on his chest walked to the target, Tariq— the Engineer of destruction — would be long gone, far from his work.
Bent over the waistcoat, grinning to himself, thinking of where the straps would be sewn, how much thread was necessary to hold the weight of the sticks, what length of wire would run from the batteries to the button switch, how easy to make the detonation for the boy, he heard the light rap at the closed door.
Concentrating, his mind filled with problems and' solutions, he murmured, 'Wait — a moment.'
And he did not realize that he had spoken in Arabic.
The door opened. He felt a draught against his cheek. He saw the girl. Anger sprawled through him. 'Get the flick out. Close the door.'
But she did not, was rooted, and her mouth was sagging open as if in shock. He could not hide what was laid out on newspaper across the table — the explosives, the detonators and what she had brought him.
'You never come in here. Never.'
She stammered, a tiny voice, that food was ready.
'And tell the rest of them. You, they, any of you never enter my room.'
She fled. The first of the tears had welled in her eyes — and she was gone. She hadn't closed the door. He went to it, kicked it viciously. Paint was dislodged by his toecap and flaked to the carpet. The door slammed. In a Triangle town or in Mosul or Salman Pak to the south, if a foot-soldier had come into his room and had seen the detail of his work, the Engineer would have shot him. Straight out into the yard, ankles kicked away, hair grabbed, pistol cocked and trigger pulled — shot dead. She, they, saw his face each time he emerged from the room allocated to him. He did not know them, there were too many of them — and they had not earned his trust.
For the first time since he had left all that was familiar to him — as he peeled off the gloves — he felt a sense of unease.
But he left the room, locked the door after him and went to the table. The girl, red-eyed, set a bowl of spice-scented curry before him and his mind drifted to the weight that the waistcoat would carry, the thinness of the shoulders and chest that would be inside it.
Ibrahim paced. He had not been out of the room for the whole of the day and into the evening. No explanation had been offered to him, not by the Leader, whom he had not seen since the huge hands had taken his fingers and held them with gentleness, and not by the fat one, Ramzi, who brought him food that was each time more foul than the last.
He had thought that by now — nine days since he had been chosen in the desert — he would be walking closer to God, in the company of those who were his brothers. The room had not been cleaned since he had come and the sign to tell staff not to disturb him hung outside on the door handle. He could only pace and pray. What comfort he could find, other than when he faced the window and prayed, was in the memory of the photographs in his room at home, on the far end of the Corniche in Jizan, of his eldest brother and his middle brother. Did they wait for him, beside God, in Paradise? Would he find them? His solitude strained the strength of his Faith. He heard laughter and shouting, a television's music, from the rooms above and below him; lavatories were flushed and water sprayed from shower heads. His eyes shut, he walked the number of strides on the carpet that the walls allowed…Would they know him?