The Walking Dead

'Shit and gone,' the Engineer said. 'Used and gone. But is it only a picture on a shirt of The Threatened Swan that has defiance? Is he determined enough? Is he strong?'

'I'll twist his arm out of its socket, or break it, to make him strong and able to walk…You've seen enough?'

'He has the shoulders and chest to take the vest…I have seen enough.'

Beneath them, the young man had dropped his bag on to the ground by his feet. He looked around him, waiting for the approach. Both Ajaq and the Engineer did the drills familiar to them. They watched for tails, for the surveillance people. To both men, the obvious and unspoken concern was that the youth who was a 'walking dead' had been identified, had been allowed to go on and enter a network. But they saw no tails from their vantage-point, no surveillance. It was this obsession with detail that had kept them alive and loose in the Triangle to the west of Baghdad.

'Have you seen yet the one who meets him?'

'No. He will be here, I am sure — but I cannot do everything.'

'Already, my friend, you have more burdens than one man should carry' the Engineer said sombrely.

They walked away, and the postcard from the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, of a painting created three and a half centuries before, of a swan with webbed claws apart, wings raised to fight and neck twisted in anger, was torn into many pieces and dropped on to a coffee shop table.

The morning was not yet finished, but the day had already been long; The meeting at the coast, the extraction of the packet from the boat's kitchen, the retrieval of monies, the settling of the matter of the boat's driver, more than five hundred kilometres of driving with the Engineer at the wheel and the return to the capital — he was drained. Ajaq needed to sleep before he met the young man. When he had slept he would have the charm and the mesmerizing gaze in his eyes that would calm the one who wished for martyrdom. And the Engineer, also, needed sleep because his fingers must be nimble and supple for the circuits and the wiring.

For part of Muhammad Ajaq there might have been, here, a sense of homecoming. Half of his heritage, his blood, was here. He hated that half…That blood had fashioned him, made him what he was.

They walked in the rain away from the station.

* * *

The body floated face down. It was wedged under the slats of the pontoon at the far extremity of the marina's spider legs. The pontoon rested on large plastic drums that gave it buoyancy and also prevented the body being carried by tide or current from under the pontoon. It was beside the berth of a luxury launch that, when the boating season for weekend sailors started, would be the same centre of envied attraction as it had been since the Joker of the Pack had first been moored at Kingswear. Unless a member of the marina's permanent staff or a yachtsman came along that far pontoon, then stopped and peered directly down through those slats, the body might remain undiscovered for several days. If Dennis Foulkes was not seen for a week or two that would not have been remarkable, and his absence from the Joker of the Pack would arouse no suspicion. The launch, tethered to the pontoon, was closed up and none of the portholes or bridge windows gave a view into the galley. An opened bottle of whisky lay on the tiled floor, which was stained below it. When the body was found and retrieved, and the hatches forced open, an impression would be left of a lonely man drinking to a state of intoxication, then coming on deck, losing his footing, slipping, falling — and drowning. A subsequent post-mortem would find whisky traces in his stomach tubes, and marina water in his lungs, no marks of violence on his skin. A forensic search of the launch would identify no other individuals as having been present in the galley on the night of Dennis Foulkes's death: they had worn disposable rubber gloves. The CCTV camera at the marina's gate would not show the arrival of individuals and their walk through the reception area: they had come by dinghy on a route beyond the reach of the lens. A sniffer dog, with an excellent nose, trained by the police or Customs, might have located the faint traces of explosives in a galley cupboard: the chance of such a dog being used, when the scenario of the cadaver's death was so obvious, were minimal. The killing had been done with care.

Its legs and arms splayed out, zebra stripes of light on its back, the body lay — unfound and unmourned — under the pontoon's slats, the last tied knot of a conspiracy's small loose end.

* * *