The Walking Dead

Leaning across the table and her food, her eye and finger moved on to Ramzi. 'Is the Faith in you to do what he will?'

'I would have, if I had been selected.' His chest swelled. 'Already I told people that I was prepared for martyrdom. It is a disappointment to me that I was not chosen…Yes.'

Her gaze crossed three empty places and came to rest on Jamal. 'Would you walk with the vest against your body?'

'I don't know. I can't say. Many heroes have, in Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq, so many that we no longer know their names.' He giggled, childlike. 'Do I believe what many of those heroes were told? Do they go, in Paradise, to the virgins? Are the virgins waiting for them? There are imams who say the virgins are there…Perhaps I would do it if I believed in the virgins.'

There was a thorns of the same question. 'Would you, Faria? What about you?'

But doors opened. She seemed to see what she had read: heads spiralling into the air, severed at the neck, flying high, across the room and out through the open window. They fell to the grass and rolled there, like the footballs boys played with in the side-streets off the Dallow Road. She saw the heads of Khalid and Syed, Ramzi and Jamal…then her own. She did not have to answer. The places at the table were taken. She ducked her head and ate. She did not look up until her plate was dean. Then, nervously, she glanced around her. She was the first to finish. Her eyes met his.

Ibrahim smiled, then said with gentleness, 'That was wonderful and I compliment you. I am grateful.'

She gulped. None of the others had thanked her. Was he captured by the thought of virgins? She had never slept with a man, of course, and never would. Did he dream of the virgins in the gardens of 164.

Paradise, search and lust for them? She would not sleep with a man because she was scarred and would never find a husband, she knew it.

'It is not the same food as we eat at home but it was good, or better. It was excellent,' he said softly.

She flushed. A few days ago, before he had arrived, she would have thought that the final days of the countdown to the walk would have been spent in earnest collective prayer and political lecturing, with hectored statements of commitment. Her recruiter had told her, in the back room of a mosque tucked behind the main Dunstable road, that at the moment a Black Widow pressed the button as she stood on a bus filled with Russian paratroops and heading for Grozny she attained the height of bliss and would feel herself floating to another life. She would know for certain that she was not dead, but living and close to God. She stood up. Only he seemed prepared to stack plates to make it easier for her, but she shook her head briskly. She took the plates off the table, carried them through to the kitchen and brought back a bowl of fruit — oranges, apples and pears. She thought herself honoured to help him make his journey to Paradise. She put it on to the centre of the table.

There was a rasped question. 'Do we have bleach here?'

'I don't know,' she stammered. 'I have not looked.'

She saw the cold, glinting eyes of the one they all called their leader now as he reached for an apple. Again the voice whipped her: 'I have. I have looked under the kitchen's sink. There is disinfectant but not bleach. I want bleach and you should buy it tomorrow.'

She felt anger and hurt. 'Is the house dirty? I clean each day.'

'A big bottle of bleach. Buy it tomorrow.' The teeth crunched into the apple.

Faria went into the kitchen, ran the hot tap and started to rinse the saucepans. The water scalded her hands and…The thought was a thunderclap in her mind. The boy, so gentle and genuine, so dedicated to killing, pressed the button but his head did not fly, climb, soar — pressed the button and heard silence. A plate fell from her hand and cracked as it hit the draining-board. She was not criticized: there was no rebuke from the dining room. She could not believe anything would be more humiliating than to fail.

He stood alone. The rifles covered him. The shouts battered in his ears. 'See there, the mother-fucker's got a wire showing. It's done a flicking malfunction! Don't let the fucker run! He's mine, the mother-fucker's mine, Sergeant.'

They came from behind the roadblock's sandbag walls. They stormed out from the cover where they had crouched as he came closer to them. Traffic had backed off on the airport road; out northwest from Baghdad's centre. He was overwhelmed and was crushed down on to the Tarmacadam. A big black fist tore the switch from his hand. Tape went over his eyes and darkness surrounded him. Boots kicked him. He was lifted. He was thrown heavily on to a metal surface and heard an engine roar. A boot was at his throat. He was driven away.

He did not know then that three hours after his inability to achieve martyrdom, bright lights would be shone piercingly into his face. If he closed his eyes he would be slapped, and questions would rain down on him.

* * *

'Did you get food, Mr Hegner?'

''Fraid not, was in the air. I'll tell you, I'm mighty pleased you called me, and it was pure luck there was a flight coming over.'

'I can get you anything you want,' the intelligence officer said. 'A burger, sandwiches, fries?'

Just a coffee. I want to say that those grunts did a real good job. To get one of them suckers alive is a rare bonus. I wasn't thinking about lunch, just getting here. Now, is he doing it the Irish way?'

'I don't follow you, Mr Hegner.'

'The Irish have got the line on counter-interrogation resistance: "The best thing to say is to say nothing." Would you put him in that category?'

'No, Mr Hegner, he's singing. That'll be the shock. We did what you suggested last time you were over when you drew this scenario, put a woman interrogator with a kind motherly voice alongside him. He's from the Saudi town of Dammam, a university-grade economics student, and he was brought across the border about — we reckon from what he says — half-way between Hafr Al-Bain and Arar. That was thirty-six hours ago. You want to go face to face with him?'

'Not for me to break the lady's stride. But there's some questions I'd like to get answered.'

'Not a problem, Mr Hegner.'

He was driven to the holding cages. Cindy had done well. Within fifteen minutes of the first flash reaching Hegner's territory — a suicide fouled up — she'd tracked down an air-force executive jet that was lifting two senators from Riyadh to Baghdad on the next leg of their inspection tour, and the limousine had taken him from the embassy with no qualms about speed and stop lights. He was led, a loose hand on his arm, from the jeep to the outer gate, then keys clanked and he could smell the stench of the interrogation cage — same as it was anywhere — body odour and urine and pungent disinfectant. But she wore scent.

The intelligence officer had been brought to him. 'It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr Hegner. I feel privileged.'

'What I want to know, Captain, is whether he has met with two individuals. I hear whispers of them, murmurs on the wind. You see, the Saudi route he was brought through is one used by these two. The facilitator is known to me as The Scorpion, what the whisper calls him. The Engineer — more whispers and murmurs — makes the devices, and it's unlike his to fail. What I need to know, did he pass through their hands? If he did, where and when?'

'I'll do my best.'

Another coffee was brought him, and a chair into which he sank heavily. He heard the sounds of the cage around him. Men moaned, and there was the clatter of the guards' boots, the rattle of keys. His mind drifted. A young man, probably identical in background, dedication and motivation to the one now being interrogated, had walked into the garrison camp mess hall in Mosul. Joe Hegner, fresh from a speech to the division's officers on combating the newly flourishing weapon of suicide-bombing, had been queueing with intelligence analysts and had just asked for tuna hash, baked beans and grape juice, when the flash had come, the pain and the darkness…Everything afterwards had been — was — personal.