The Walking Dead

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.