I Am Pilgrim(35)

‘It took me by surprise, but I said I’d had the honour of meeting His Majesty several times.

‘He nodded as if he expected it. “Next time you meet him, tell him this is what an American once said – you can kill a thinker but you can’t kill the thought,” he said.’ The executioner looked at me and shrugged.

‘And did you ever tell him?’ I asked. ‘The king, I mean.’

The executioner laughed. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Having seen the alternative, I enjoy having my head on my shoulders.’

I didn’t need to ask what happened next – other people in the car park that day had told me. As al-Bishi finished his brief words with the prisoner, a strong breeze sprang up off the Red Sea – nearly everyone mentioned it because it was so hot on the asphalt. The executioner stood up and drew his sword in one fluid movement. He took a single step back from the prisoner and measured the distance expertly with his eye before securely planting his feet.

The only sound was static from the mosque’s public address system. Al-Bishi held the long sword out horizontally, straightened his back and lifted his jaw to accentuate his profile – when I met him I couldn’t help but notice his vanity. One-handed, he swung the sword up high and, as it reached the apex of its arc, every eye in the square followed, almost blinded by the white sun directly above.

He paused, the sword dazzling, as if to milk the drama from the situation – then he locked his second hand around the handle and brought the blade down with breathtaking speed. The razor’s edge hit the zoologist square on the nape of the neck. Just as he had been asked, the prisoner didn’t move.

The thing everybody tells you about is the sound – loud and wet, like someone whacking open a watermelon. The blade sliced through the zoologist’s spinal cord, the carotid arteries and the larynx until the head was separated.

It rolled across the marble, eyelids flickering, followed by an arc of blood from the cut arteries. The zoologist’s headless torso seemed to float for a moment, as if in shock, and then it pitched forward into its own fluids.

The executioner stood in his unmarked thobe and looked down at his handiwork, the static on the public address was replaced by a Muslim prayer, a swarm of flies started to gather and the crowd in the square broke into applause.

The dead man’s young son – breathing hard from trying to run, badly grazed all down his left side, a handkerchief wrapped around one bloody hand – limped into the car park just after his father’s body had been loaded into the startling coolness of the white van. That was the reason the vehicle was air-conditioned – not for the comfort of the living but to inhibit the stench of the dead.

Most of the spectators had gone, leaving just the cops to take down the barricades and a couple of Bangladeshi labourers to wash down the marble.

The boy looked around, trying to see somebody he recognized to ask them the identity of the executed prisoner, but the men were moving fast to escape the wind, pulling their chequered headscarves down like Bedouin to protect their faces. On the far side of the patch of grass, the muezzin – the assistant to the mosque’s leader – was closing wooden shutters, sealing the building against what was looking more and more like a major sandstorm.

Whipped by the wind, the boy ran and called to him through the iron railing, asking him for a name, a profession. The muezzin turned, shielding his face from the sand, shouting back. The wind snatched away his voice so there was only one word the boy heard. ‘Zoologist’.

Footage from Saudi surveillance cameras monitoring the square – dug out a long time later – showed that the muezzin went back to his work and didn’t even see the kid turn away and stare at the marble platform, his body battered by the burning wind, his heart obviously consumed by utter desolation. He didn’t move for minutes and, determined to act like a man and not to cry, he looked like a windswept statue.

In truth, I think he was probably travelling fast: like most people who suffer great horror, he had come unstuck in space and time. He probably would have remained standing there for hours, but one of the cops approached, yelling at him to move, and he stumbled away to escape the cop’s vicious bamboo cane.

As he headed through the whirling sand the tears finally burst through his iron resolve and, alone in a city he hated now, he let out a single awful scream. People told me later it was a howl of grief, but I knew it wasn’t. It was the primal scream of birth.

In a process as bloody and painful as its physical counterpart, the Saracen had been born into terrorism in a windswept car park in central Jeddah. In time, out of abiding love for his father, he would grow into a passionate believer in conservative Islam, an enemy of all Western values, an avowed destroyer of the Fahd monarchy and a supporter of violent jihad.