The Walking Dead

They traipsed away from him towards a bus stop. He used his mobile and broke the box round them. The approach would be in the morning, when the wife had softened the Tango some more and made him pliant. His usual line, which he used when it was a carrot job, played on his lips: 'There are no consequences, no kick-backs. You do me a favour and I do you a favour, and we forget about it. I promise, it'll be like it never happened…Except that the financial worry in your life is removed. Believe me, nothing will be different.' That was what Benny Edwards would say to the Tango and it was all true: nothing would be different.

* * *

In the first shower of London's evening, Ajaq walked the pavements. He cut across great squares and passed the seats of government and power. He went alongside the black-painted barriers of concrete that protected buildings from the approach of a car under their walls, a car that might have been low on its chassis under the weight of a half-tonne of fertilizer explosive. He was so far from his home, and so close to his blood. Great edifices towered over him. He passed policemen, made huge by the bulletproof vests under their top coats and noted their readiness to shoot: magazines loaded, a finger laid on a trigger guard, a machine pistol hung from the shoulders…but they did not know him. They were at the mouth of an Underground station, watching the surge of the crowds that pitched down the steps. They were in doorways. They were behind the gates that shut off a cul-de-sac, and Ajaq knew it was the workplace of a great enemy, the Americans' lap-dog.

It was confirmation of the tactical decision he had already taken.

The centre of the city, where its authority lay, was hunkered down as if it awaited the inevitability of attack. Barricades and guns were its defence. He thought of it as the Green Zone, Baghdad, where the Americans lived with their allies and collaborators and where security was tightest. It amused him to walk among them, to feel the brush of bodies against his. There was, and Ajaq recognized it, a particular and peculiar thrill when he moved in the heartland of an enemy and was not known; he was merely a face in the crowd, anonymous.

The decision had been his and had been made four weeks before he had started out on his journey. It had not been queried by those who had created the organizational web in which he now crawled. The decision was that the protected city its ministry buildings, its sprawled labyrinth of train tunnels, its guards and weapons should be ignored. He had chosen to strike where the forces of his enemy were weakest. He thought of an underbelly that was soft, where a knife could dig deep, and where panic would be greatest. The decision had been committed to a handwritten note, a fine nib fashioning the coded characters on two sides of a single sliver of cigarette paper, which had been taken by courier across frontiers and boundaries to the cave or the compound in the Tribal Areas where the leaders of the base existed. He had never met them. The Engineer had, but Muhammad Ajaq had not. No counter-command had been issued, and every aspect of their planning was effective, had earned his admiration. He assumed that those men, the leaders, would sit each evening with a battery-powered radio or television downloading the satellite and would flick the channels, listening for news of his success.

He went past the parliament building and a massive clock struck the hour. He came to a garden and passed into it through a gateway. He crunched along a gravel path and approached a floodlit statue of coal-black figures, who stood in submission but with dignity — as if they were beaten but not defeated; he read that they were The Burghers of Calais, and that the sculptor was Rodin, but he did not know what 'burghers' were or where Calais was. There was an image of pride about those men that stayed with him as he crossed the garden, came Out on to the pavement and went past a great grey stone building where lights burned in every window. Two men came out of its swing-door entrance and stepped in front of him, which made him check his stride, but there was no apology that he was impeded and no acknowledgement of him — as if he did not exist.

'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.