The Walking Dead

He winced at the catalogue of disaster. He was not thirsty but sipped water from a plastic beaker as if that might moisten his dried, cracked lips. Joe Hegner never interrupted Cindy when she read aloud for him. The two unconfirmed Killed in Action soldiers might be sturdy white boys from Montana, where Hegner had been reared, or tough young black guys from Alabama, where he had done early years in his Bureau career. Each one, whatever part of his country they came from, was a wound to him. Part of that wound came from emotion, but more was from the failure of his professionalism. He was contemplating the scale of the attack on the gaol perimeter, estimating how many insurgent fighters had been deployed, considering the enormity of the use of five suicide merchants, pondering on the supply line — on a scale that Wal-Mart would not have sniffed at — of death volunteers his enemy could muster into line.

'That it?'

'Yes. Nothing else, thank God. That's what we have.'

'About as bad as it gets.'

'What are you thinking, Joe?'

It was the way they habitually worked. After she'd read to him, and he had assimilated what she'd told him, she would feed him anodyne questions that had the purpose of stirring the analytic juices in his mind. They had been together in Riyadh from three months before the launch of the invasion, had been together in the Green Zone from a week after the occupation of Baghdad to the December day in 2004 at the mess hail in the garrison camp at Mosul, and together once his convalescence had started in the Frankfurt military hospital. She had stayed at his side on his return to Riyadh. It was not a master-and-servant relationship — him an agent and her from the personal-assistant pool — or a relationship touched by sexual attraction, or unrequited affection, but had the stamp of elder brother and younger sister. He would have sworn that without her he would have been a finished, spent man; she would have said that meeting Josiah Hegner was the only meaningful event of her life. What hurt her most was that she was no longer permitted, by diktat of the Bureau, to fly with him for that one week in four when he returned to Iraq: then she lost the opportunity to watch over him. He was in his fifty-second year, and disfigured; she was thirty-four and attractive, but unavailable to any of the embassy staffers who pitched attention towards her. She waited for his answer.

'It's the scale of it that tells the story.'

'Five strikes in different locations and all within an hour of each other.'

'That's eleven in one sixty-minute slot, and five in just one strike.'

'Like they've a line of them backed up, and no shortages.'

'All coordinated. All put together by a single individual who controls them and wants to send a message to us. He is more important, so much more, than the fodder he's pushing forward. It's all about the coordination — it's about one man.'

In the old days in Riyadh, in his embassy office where an armed marine-corps guard stood sentry at the door, he had plastered the walls with photographs of the first men who had been identified as leaders of the insurgency. They were all gone. And 'one man's' image could not have gone on to the wall anyway because that man had neither a name that could be given him, nor did a photograph exist.

'But, Joe, you know who he is.'

'Yes. Yes.'

'It's the Twentyman, Joe. What are you thinking?'

'I've got a sense, almost a scent — but like he's signing off and moving on. Does that sound stupid, giving him that name? Christ, there ain't anything laughable about that bastard…but it's what he is, the Twentyman. He's the only guy who could do eleven suicides in an hour, four locations but — and this is my sense — it's as if he's heading for a rest or for new territory. Can't say which, but it has to be him — know nothing about him, only his quality. Has to be the Twentyman. I feel it.'

* * *

The flight was called, the departure of a KLM air-liner to Amsterdam.

He rose from the bench where he had waited for the announcement.