The Walking Dead

Staring at the ceiling, Faria blustered, 'It is better you stay in your room. You should be in your room.'

He retreated and shut his door on them. Nothing was as he had believed it would be. Again, and it was the same each day and each evening, they isolated him. From the moment he had been chosen in the desert and had sat close to the Leader, he had believed that he would be asked to express his desire as to the sort of target he would walk towards, and also asked what he wished to achieve by the sacrifice of his life…but he was shut away. His desires, wishes, were insignificant.

He could hear the movements in the room next to his, where the waistcoat was prepared, and he remembered the feel of its weight on his shoulders. Then, beyond his door, the argument broke again.

Syed's voice: 'I am telling you, do my washing.'

Faria's voice: 'Do your own washing, I have the meal to make.'

'You did his washing. You will do mine.'

'I will not.'

'My mother or my sister does my washing.'

'Then take it back to them and they can slave for you.'

'You take his washing, so why is mine different from his?'

Faria's voice, rising: 'Because — because he is different. Are you an idiot? Can you not see that? Different—'

Syed's voice, yelled anger: 'Women should do washing. You should do my—'

A door opened. The shout of the man who had so calmly, like a tailor, checked the fall of the waistcoat over his chest and stomach: 'Can you not be quiet? Do I fucking care who washes, who does not? I do my own washing. I have work to do, intricate work, and you disturb me. Where I am, I wash my own clothes — maybe in the river, maybe at a well, maybe under a stand pipe, maybe in a ditch. I wash my own because my wife is dead, killed by my enemy, and where I fight I do not have a servant. Get that fucking washing off the floor. I tell you, where I have come from you would not, any of you, survive a single day as a fighter. Your only use to me would be with a belt round your waist, and then I would not care whether there was filth on your clothing, whether you smelt like a fox's arse. And a fucking minute after the explosion of the belt I would have forgotten your name, your face.'

He heard the front door slam.

A minute later, through the crack in his curtains, he saw the man who had made the waistcoat pace in fury on the grass.

She had done his washing because he was different.

Would he be forgotten? Would she forget him?

He sank down on the bed and his head dropped into his hands.

* * *

'You're back. Let me pick up where I left off. I was talking vulnerability.'

Dickie Naylor grimaced. 'Sorry, et cetera. I've only a few minutes, Joe, then another meeting.'

'So, the Saudi boy who lodged the shrapnel inside me was a student of economics, probably with an intelligence quotient higher than mine, and he killed twenty-two men. Some of them were queueing for lunch and some had just sat themselves down at a table. He wounded a whole lot more, and I was one of them. Embedded in his bomb were ball-bearings, two-inch nails and one-inch screws, and it was one of those that robbed me of my sight. That was at the Marez garrison camp in Mosul — it's the forward operating base at the airport. The boy is unimportant, might as well have been a parcel in the post. The man who brought him out of Saudi, who collected the intelligence required to get him into our mess hall, who oversaw the documentation he needed, and the transport and the safe-house for the night before, is a master of his trade. He is the Scorpion…

'Of course you risk failure against a man like that. You, Dickie, you have the assistance of gadgets and staff alongside each step you take. You have computers, you have telephones with land-line connections and analogue and digital systems, you have assistants, you have a line manager who guides you, you have a building that is secure and protected. What does he have? He lives like a fugitive, sleeps rough, cannot use any form of telephone and is constantly aware, around him, of the sophistication of his enemy's arsenal. But he has the charisma of leadership, and will enforce it with ruthlessness.

'He had a prisoner, an American boy from Utah and from the 1^st Infantry Division. There was a charade of negotiation but the boy was doomed to have his throat sawn through. The boy, clever and brave, escaped his hell-hole — but was recaptured and murdered. The Scorpion would have thought one of the guards helped the boy to that short moment of freedom. His reaction: he personally killed fifteen, fifteen, of the men charged with the boy's imprisonment, which made certain he had the right one, the traitor…He is that ruthless. But, and I live in hope, by coming here he may have made a mistake. In his game, mistakes have fatal consequences. How are we doing?'

'I have to be gone,' Dickie said.

* * *

It was the chance that Ramzi had waited for.