Chapter Two

SPECTATORS STARTED GATHERING early in the morning, as soon as they saw the barricades going up and the special team of carpenters erecting the platform. Public announcements about impending executions are rare in the kingdom but, by cellphone and text message, the word always spreads.

Within hours, large crowds were streaming into the car park and, by the time a twelve-year-old boy – the Saracen’s best friend – drove past with his father, he knew exactly what it meant. It was a Friday – the Muslim day of rest – and the traffic was terrible so it took the kid over an hour to get home. He immediately grabbed his bicycle and rode eight miles to tell his friend what he had seen.

Fearing the worst, mentioning nothing to his mother or sisters, the Saracen got on his dirt bike, piled his friend on board and headed for the Corniche, the road that runs beside the Red Sea into downtown Jeddah.

Just as the two boys caught sight of the sea, noon prayers had finished at the main mosque and hundreds of men were spilling out to join masses of spectators waiting in the parking lot. In the harsh summer light the men in their stark white thobes made a stunning contrast to the knots of women in their black abayas and face veils. Only little kids in jeans and shirts added a splash of colour.

Executions are about the only form of public entertainment permitted in Saudi Arabia – movies, concerts, dancing, plays and even mixed-sex coffee shops are banned. But everybody’s welcome, women and kids too, to see someone lose their life. Eschewing such modern innovations as medical injections or even the firing squad, the Saudi method seems to be a real crowd-pleaser: public beheading.

It was close to 110 degrees on the Corniche that day, the heat bouncing off the asphalt in shimmering waves, as the dirt bike threaded rapidly through the weekend traffic. Up ahead, chaos was unfolding: the road was being torn up for a new overpass, construction machinery blocked all but one lane and cars were tailed back for blocks.

Inside his sweltering helmet, the zoologist’s son was also in chaos – frightened almost to vomiting, desperately hoping it was an African drug dealer being taken to the platform. He couldn’t afford to think that, if he was wrong, the last he would see of his father would be him kneeling on the marble, the flies already buzzing, the silver sword disappearing in a fountain of red.

He looked at the impenetrable traffic ahead and swung the dirt bike off the shoulder and, in a whirl of dust and debris, blasted into the badly cratered construction site.

Despite the size of the crowd gathering for the display, there was little noise in the parking lot – just the murmur of voices and the sound of a mullah reading from the Qur’an over the mosque’s public address system. Gradually even the quiet voices fell silent as an official car made its way through the cordon and stopped at the platform.

A powerfully built man in an immaculate white thobe got out of the vehicle and mounted the five steps to the platform. A polished leather strap ran diagonally across his chest and terminated on his left hip, supporting a scabbard which held a long, curved sword. This was the executioner. His name was Sa’id bin Abdullah bin Mabrouk al-Bishi and he was acknowledged as the best craftsman in the kingdom, his reputation built primarily on a procedure called a cross amputation. Far more difficult than a simple beheading and meted out as punishment for highway robbery, it requires the rapid use of custom-made knives to cut off a prisoner’s right hand and left foot. By applying himself diligently to this process, Sa’id al-Bishi had over many years steadily raised the overall standard of Saudi Arabia’s public punishments. Only occasionally now did the public see an executioner having to keep hacking at a prisoner’s head or limbs to detach them from his body.

Returning greetings from several onlookers, al-Bishi had barely had time to familiarize himself with his workspace when he saw a white van push through the crowd. A policeman lifted a barrier and the air-conditioned vehicle stopped next to the steps. The crowd craned forward to catch sight of the occupant as the rear doors opened.

The zoologist stepped out of the van into the cauldron barefoot, blindfolded by a thick white bandage, his wrists handcuffed behind his back.

Among those watching were people who knew him, or thought they did, and it took a moment for them to recognize his features. God knows what the secret police had done to him in the previous five months, but he seemed to have shrunk – he was a shell of a man, broken and diminished at least in his body, like those translucent old people you sometimes see in retirement homes. He was thirty-eight years old.

He knew exactly where he was and what was happening; an official of the so-called Ministry of Justice had arrived at his cell forty minutes earlier and had read him a formal decree. It was the first he knew that he had been sentenced to death. As two uniformed cops led him slowly to the steps of the platform, witnesses said he raised his face to the sun and tried to straighten his shoulders. I’m sure he didn’t want his son and daughters to hear that their father didn’t have courage.

On the Corniche, gridlocked drivers watched with a mixture of disgust and envy as the dirt bike blasted past, using the construction site as a private freeway. Damn kids.

The young boy slid the bike past coiled fire hoses used to spray the overworked Bangladeshi construction workers and prevent them passing out from heat exhaustion, then weaved through a forest of concrete pylons. He had about seven minutes to reach the square.

I don’t think, even later in life, he could have explained why he undertook that wild ride. What was he going to do there? My own belief is that, in his fear and anguish, all he could think of was that he was of his father’s soul as much as his body and such a bond would accept nothing less than his presence. He swung the bike hard left, through a wasteland of piled debris, and flew even faster towards a road that fed into the square. It was blocked by a chain-link fence but, on the other side of bundles of steel reinforcing rods, he saw an opening just wide enough to squeeze through. Allah was with him!

He slid the bike even tighter left, slaloming through the bundles of rods, sending up clouds of fine dust, closing fast on the narrow gap. He was going to make it!

The zoologist, blindfolded on the platform, felt a hand fall on his neck and press him down. It belonged to the executioner and he was being told to kneel. As he lowered himself, the feeling of the sun on his face indicated that he was facing Mecca, forty miles away. Directly in its path was his house, and the thought of his wife and children sitting in its loving confines sent a shudder of loss through his body.

The executioner gripped the man’s shoulder – the swordsman had been here many times before and he knew the exact moment when a man might need steadying. A voice called out a command on the mosque’s public address system.

All across the square, stretching from the austere Ministry of Foreign Affairs building to the grass in front of the mosque, thousands of people knelt to face Mecca in prayer. As with all devout Muslims, the zoologist knew the words by heart, and he spoke them in unison with the crowd. He also knew their exact length: by any reasonable estimate, he had four minutes left on earth.

The boy, half blinded by the dust kicked up by his swerving bike, didn’t see one bundle of the steel reinforcing rods until a second too late. Protruding at least a foot from the others, one of the rods was already sliding between the spokes of his front wheel when he first registered it.

His reaction time was incredible – he hurled the bike to the side, but not quite fast enough. With the front wheel spinning, the rod tore the spokes apart in a fury of ripping metal. Chunks of thin alloy ripped through the bike’s gas tank and cylinder head, the wheel collapsed, the front forks dug into the dirt and the bike stopped instantly. The zoologist’s son and his friend kept going – straight over the handlebars, and landing in a tangle of flying limbs and spraying dirt. Badly stunned, the dirt bike fit only for the scrap heap, they were barely conscious.

By the time the first of the shocked motorists watching from the Corniche had reached them, the prayers in the parking lot had finished and the crowd was rising. The executioner stepped close to the kneeling prisoner and the whole square fell silent. The swordsman made a slight adjustment to the angle of the zoologist’s neck and those spectators near enough saw a few words pass between them.

Many years later, I talked to a number of people who were in the square that day. Among those I spoke to was Sa’id al-Bishi, the executioner. I had tea with him in the majlis – the formal reception room – of his home, and asked him what the zoologist had said.

‘It’s rare a man can say anything in that situation, ’ Sa’id al-Bishi told me, ‘so of course it stays in your mind. ’ He took a long breath. ‘It was brief but he said it with conviction. He told me: “The only thing that matters is that Allah and the Saudi people forgive me my sins. ”’

Al-Bishi fell silent and glanced towards Mecca – apparently, that was it. I nodded reverently. ‘Allahu Akbar, ’ I said in reply. God is great.

He took another sip of tea, gazing into the middle distance, lost in thoughts about the wisdom a man finds in his last moments. I kept looking at him, moving my head sagely. The one thing you don’t do in any Arab country is accuse a man of lying, no matter how indirectly.

As a consequence, I just kept looking at him, and he kept staring off at wisdom. Outside, I could hear the water tinkling from a fountain in his beautiful courtyard, the sound of servants bustling in the women’s quarters. Being state executioner must have paid pretty well.

Finally he began to move uncomfortably in his seat and then he shot a glance at me to see if I was just the quiet type or if I was really calling him on it.

I didn’t take my eyes off him, and he laughed. ‘You are an intelligent man for a Westerner, ’ he said, ‘so now let us discuss what he really said, shall we?

‘When I bent down to the prisoner I told him to expose as much of his neck as possible and not to move – this would make it easier on both of us. He didn’t seem to care, he just motioned me closer. Someone must have injured the inside of his mouth – an electrode, maybe – because he had trouble talking. “You know the king? ” he whispered.

‘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.

Thank you, Saudi Arabia, thank you.