The Walking Dead

The hands that had laid out the items he would meld together in a killing device were thick and pudgy inside thin surgical gloves. He was in his forty-fourth year, was built like a bull, had rippling muscles. He smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. He had not prayed since the deaths of his family, and before that only on the holiest of festivals to please his mother. He had fought in the Iranian war on the front of the Faw peninsula, had been in the humiliation of the retreat from Kuwait, and had reached the rank of major in a battalion of the Republican Guard, specializing in ordnance, when the Americans had launched, four years back, their campaign of Shock and Awe. Then his unit had dispersed in confusion. He had joined the fledgling insurgency and had met the Scorpion. He valued the day of their meeting, under the searching gaze of aircraft circling overhead. In a sewer ditch, with bombs falling and missiles, with death close, they had met…The fingers matched the bulk of his body yet they were nimble and he could control their movement to the most subtle degree. The devices he made — if handled correctly — always worked, always, and many hundreds of graves, and more graves in the cemeteries of America, were filled as proof of his fingers' delicacy.

He would not see the underbelly target, he had no need to. When the youth with the swan on his chest walked to the target, Tariq— the Engineer of destruction — would be long gone, far from his work.

Bent over the waistcoat, grinning to himself, thinking of where the straps would be sewn, how much thread was necessary to hold the weight of the sticks, what length of wire would run from the batteries to the button switch, how easy to make the detonation for the boy, he heard the light rap at the closed door.

Concentrating, his mind filled with problems and' solutions, he murmured, 'Wait — a moment.'

And he did not realize that he had spoken in Arabic.

The door opened. He felt a draught against his cheek. He saw the girl. Anger sprawled through him. 'Get the flick out. Close the door.'

But she did not, was rooted, and her mouth was sagging open as if in shock. He could not hide what was laid out on newspaper across the table — the explosives, the detonators and what she had brought him.

'You never come in here. Never.'

She stammered, a tiny voice, that food was ready.

'And tell the rest of them. You, they, any of you never enter my room.'

She fled. The first of the tears had welled in her eyes — and she was gone. She hadn't closed the door. He went to it, kicked it viciously. Paint was dislodged by his toecap and flaked to the carpet. The door slammed. In a Triangle town or in Mosul or Salman Pak to the south, if a foot-soldier had come into his room and had seen the detail of his work, the Engineer would have shot him. Straight out into the yard, ankles kicked away, hair grabbed, pistol cocked and trigger pulled — shot dead. She, they, saw his face each time he emerged from the room allocated to him. He did not know them, there were too many of them — and they had not earned his trust.

For the first time since he had left all that was familiar to him — as he peeled off the gloves — he felt a sense of unease.

But he left the room, locked the door after him and went to the table. The girl, red-eyed, set a bowl of spice-scented curry before him and his mind drifted to the weight that the waistcoat would carry, the thinness of the shoulders and chest that would be inside it.

Ibrahim paced. He had not been out of the room for the whole of the day and into the evening. No explanation had been offered to him, not by the Leader, whom he had not seen since the huge hands had taken his fingers and held them with gentleness, and not by the fat one, Ramzi, who brought him food that was each time more foul than the last.

He had thought that by now — nine days since he had been chosen in the desert — he would be walking closer to God, in the company of those who were his brothers. The room had not been cleaned since he had come and the sign to tell staff not to disturb him hung outside on the door handle. He could only pace and pray. What comfort he could find, other than when he faced the window and prayed, was in the memory of the photographs in his room at home, on the far end of the Corniche in Jizan, of his eldest brother and his middle brother. Did they wait for him, beside God, in Paradise? Would he find them? His solitude strained the strength of his Faith. He heard laughter and shouting, a television's music, from the rooms above and below him; lavatories were flushed and water sprayed from shower heads. His eyes shut, he walked the number of strides on the carpet that the walls allowed…Would they know him?