The Walking Dead

Bedsprings squealed with growing intensity and a faster beat. What he knew about sex, about the physical matter of copulation, had been learned from textbooks in the library of the School of Medicine. He had never talked of it with his father, or — of course not — with his sisters: his parents' bedroom, when his mother was alive, had been at the far end of the villa from his own room and solid walls would have blocked out the sounds of lovemaking. Above him, over the now swaying lightshade, there was a thin layer of plasterboard, then planking, a similarly worn carpet, a bed with springs that sank and rose and howled. He had the image, and it had been hard in his mind since the imam had talked of it, of the young women who waited for a martyr in the gardens of Paradise, and their nakedness, but — in his mind — when he advanced on them and bent to touch them, there was always a distraction that snatched them away. He had never touched a woman. Boys who had been with him at the university, or at school in Jizan, had talked endlessly of women, even told stories of prostitutes they had paid in the cities, but Ibrahim had thought they lied.

It fascinated him.

Before he went to the gardens, where virgins waited for him, he would never know the feeling of a woman's body. His hands' palms were tighter against his ears. He summoned the image of his father, whom he loved, and called to him shrilly in the night. From a great distance, his father seemed to smile on him. He heard his father speak of pride in his youngest, the same pride he had spoken of when the eldest and the middle sons had been reported dead in the jihad against the infidels of Russia and America. He saw his father sitting in the deep-cushioned chair in front of the wide-screen television with the cinema-standard speakers, and thought- his father blessed him for his courage.

There was a cry overhead, a groan and silence, and the swing of the lightshade slackened. He let his hands fall from his ears and rejoiced: he had his father's pride.

* * *

'It is what his father told us today.'

'Why'd he call your people?' Hegner asked softly.

'Because of love and because of fear.'

'Wouldn't he have felt proud of his boy's actions?'

'Pride perhaps in former times, at the loss of two sons, but not in the loss of a third, all that remains to him…and fear now at the consequences of silence.'

Of all the Americans, of the Bureau and the Agency, working from the Riyadh embassy, only Joe Hegner would have had that late-evening call from the head of counterintelligence in the Kingdom. Only Hegner had the status, the reputation and the friendship to have been invited to come in the darkness to the Mabatha interrogation centre, south of the capital city Only this dogged zealot from the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have had a limousine chauffeur drive him behind privacy windows out of Riyadh, past the Ministry of Interior complex and through the high gates of what staffers at his embassy called the 'Confession Factory'. He sat now in a comfortable chair beside the senior man in that section of the mabaheth, with a cocktail of fruit juices at his elbow.

'I am exceptionally grateful for this information you offer me.'

'It is natural, Joe, that it should be given you.'

'And already I have a scent on this.'

'The nose, Joe — and I say it with respect — is the best.'

He had access where for others of the Bureau and the Agency none existed. He had never concerned himself with the reasons that it was given him, because that would have been time wasted, and he thought time too precious. The trust had existed before he had gone on permanent posting to Baghdad and the insurgent war in Iraq, but had been cemented when it became known — after his injuries — that at the end of his immediate convalescence he had demanded to be posted back to the Kingdom. The trust had borne fruit. On his last visit from Washington, the director of the Bureau had spent forty-eight hours inside the embassy compound, kicking his heels, then been fobbed off with junior functionaries. A month before that, the director of the Agency — in spite of hourly telephone demands from subordinates — had not been granted an audience for three days. The door opened for Joe Hegner, and the carpet rolled out.

'I thought, Joe, you would wish to know of this matter.'. 'I do, sir, and I appreciate it.'