'Don't speak to me like—'
He closed the call. He strained to hear the grunts — damned if he could understand them but Hegner had his recorder switched on and scrawled. longhand on a pad. He had never before, in forty-one years of married life — some happy, some miserable, some tolerable — cut off his wife in mid-sentence.
He heard the voices.
'Stubborn gentleman, Donald, isn't he?'
'Very stubborn, Xavier, a gentleman decently, dedicated to his cause. But he's coming along, slow and steady.'
Hegner said, 'Here's where we're at, Dickie: no further down the road of a target, but the kid'll be walking, so it's not a car bomb. And we have, so far, three in the cell. No biog, brief on occupations, nothing on recruitment. Khalid is a cab driver. Syed serves up fast food. There's a girl, Faria. That's where we are. I think you should phone it in.'
He did not recognize it as dismissal.
Naylor gulped, said, 'Just stay with it, the cell and the target. He must know something of the target — the shopping centre, New Street station, the airport, the bus station. Damn it, that city has a population of a million souls. I must have a location in Birmingham and timing. That is the absolute priority must have them.'
He hurried away into the night, into the rain.
He crossed the old concrete strip where Lancaster bombers had been armed and ghosts walked. He went into the big Nissen hangar where he assumed the aircraft had been repaired after flak damage, and where more ghosts roamed, and he groped for the car door.
Naylor shut himself inside and thought that there he would be safe from the wounds of the screams, and he rang the assistant director, told him of the little that had been extracted in the last hours: names and bare details of employment. He finished with, 'But you should know, Tristram, that I have emphasized to them both most forcefully that the priority — I called it an "absolute priority" — is the location and timing. That's it. Sorry it's not more.'
He did not know that Joe Hegner said, 'I'd like a drink. Make it coffee, black and no saccharine. I think, guys, that it's time to change tack. I don't give a rat's ass about foot-soldiers, meet up with them too many days of my life and they hold no interest for me. I reckon there was a man with them, and I don't have a name and don't have a photograph, who made their world go round, put the tick in the clock, a facilitator. I want to hear about him — don't often get close to him, but I am now and to lose the chance would piss me off…After coffee, and whatever you guys are having, I reckon it's appropriate to plug the wires into the juice.'
She lit the candle. Before the evening had come, and the darkness, she had worked alone at clearing a space for them in the back room of the semi-detached house. The boy had not helped her, had squatted down against a wall, his eyes glazed, vacant, and he had watched her but had done nothing. She had heaved aside the crumpled, dust-coated carpet and had made thick clouds of rising dirt. She had pushed, needed all her strength, to manoeuvre the settee to the room's centre. She had found a broom in the kitchen, without a handle, and a dustpan, and she had swept and made more clouds. The man was against the other wall, opposite the boy, and she had had to drag the edge of the carpet out from under him, and sweep round his feet. From him, also, there had been no assistance. She made a cleared, cleaned space in the house of her father's friend's cousin, who would not have visited it for a year since the doors and windows had been boarded up, plywood and planks nailed on to prevent access, and would not come — most likely — for another year. By then more dust would have settled and the traces of their presence would have gone. She had worked dutifully, as she would have done at home when she cleaned for her father, her brothers and her mother, who was an invalid confined to her bed. Last, secure inside its bag, which was knotted at the neck, she had laid out the waistcoat and had been careful not to bend it; she had left it near to the door on top of the crude carpet roll. For hours then, without speaking, without moving and without food to eat and water to drink, as the darkness had thickened round them, they had sat in their silence and their thoughts, and she had not been thanked for what she had done.
She had brought the candle from the cupboard under the cottage's kitchen unit. She struck the match and it blazed, and she lit the wick. The flame burned upwards, brightly.
Faria saw the boy's face, blinking as if the light was an intrusion on his peace, and then there was confusion across it, and his eyes were dull, without life. She remembered what she had seen of his face when he had crawled — prodded forward by the man — through the loosened plank at the bottom of the back door. Then, on his face, she had seen despair, and she had tried not to look at it as she had worked on the room, but she saw it now and the same misery was closed over it…And she saw the man's face. It was cold and indifferent. She tried to smile, to match the faint warmth of the candle's flame.
The man asked quietly, 'Why did you light it?'
'Was I wrong to?'
'Did the dark frighten you?'
Was he laughing at her?
She bridled. 'No, I'm not afraid of it. Might have been when I was a child, but—'
He interrupted and his voice was distant, as if he talked to himself, not to her. 'The darkness is a friend. Throughout each day I pray for the darkness. The enemy has night-vision glasses and infrared that identifies a body's heat, but I can move with freedom in the darkness.' He looked away, as if the exchange of words was meaningless and the breath used on them wasted.
She had been kneeling by the candle, but she eased back and sat on the settee, its cushions, where a smell of age and damp reeked, sagged below her. She leaned on the arm and turned to the boy. Her smile was wider and making it cracked at the scar on her face. The knitted skin itched. What to say? He needed kindness, support. What was not hollow? She did not know.
'Are you all right, Ibrahim?' It was meant as kindness but its emptiness echoed round her.
He gazed at her and his eyes were wide open, stared at her. 'Is this where we stay, until…?'
She glanced at the man, saw his shrug. She said softly, 'It is where we stay.'
'Where do I wash?'
'I'm sorry, where..?'
He blurted, 'I have to wash, and to shave my body, spray on scents when it is clean and shaven. Where do I do that?'
She looked at the man. To Faria, he seemed to roll his eyes. Did it matter? She remembered what she had read: the bombers in Lebanon and Palestine, the martyrs, washed, shaved and put on perfumes before they walked to or drove a car at a checkpoint or a shopping mall. She saw it in the man's gestures and the backward toss of his head:, in Iraq, the bombers were on a conveyor-belt and sometimes they were prepared — dressed in a belt or a waistcoat or handcuffed to the steering-wheel of a vehicle — in a grove of palm frees beside irrigated fields, and they had no opportunity to wash, shave and anoint themselves, and went to God and to Paradise dirty. They smelt of sweat when they died. The man did not care. She leaned further across the settee's arm and let her hand rest on the boy's.
She said, 'I will help you to wash. When I go out to buy food I will bring back a razor for you, and scents. I promise I will.'
Across the room from her, the shadows on his face, she saw the man nod — so briefly — as if he approved her answer. She thought she had played her part well, and she squirmed. If he had not been there, the man, she would have taken the boy in her arms, held him against her breast, and would have fried to give him comfort from her warmth…but he was there and watched. But she left her hand on the boy's. He was so far from his home, and so distant from what he knew, so long separated from the commitment made to his recruiters — and in. the man's bag, beside his knee, was the video that condemned Ibrahim. The boy would die in a foreign land… Faria shuddered, and she held his hand tighter.