The Walking Dead

'Have you forgotten it's your wife you're speaking to? Where on earth are you? Dickie? Right, I'll be quick. What time will you be home tonight?'

'Won't be.'

'What time in the morning will you be home?'

'Don't know.'

'Perhaps you'd forgotten what's happening tomorrow. Mary — she sounded particularly disagreeable — rang to say that a car will pick us up at five; bring us in and fetch us home…Have you written your speech? Daddy's, when he left, was a great success because he'd written it out and kept it short and remembered only happy times, nothing maudlin.. I want you to promise me you won't drink, not like that Barney Weatherspoon who was pickled and made an ass of himself. Are you listening to me? Dickie, are you—?'

The scream ripped at his ears.

'My God, Dickie, what was that?'

'Nothing.'

And the scream came again, in agony.

'What's happening? Where are you, Dickie?'

'Nothing is happening. I'm nowhere. Can't talk. Sorry, dear.'

'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.'