Seventy-Two Virgins (21 page)

At the mention of the word ‘discrimination’, the policeman stiffened. Jesus, but he hated that word.

‘I have been working here for twelve years, sir,’ he said, ‘and I can assure you that I treat everyone the same . .

‘I know that, officer,’ said the politician, and his voice was like ginger beer, as it might trickle from an earthenware cruse on a hot summer’s day, to quench a thirsty shepherd boy. ‘I would not presume to tell you what to do.’

Haroun began steadily to draw the spike out of his trouser leg. Habib said something in Arabic.

‘As you know, sir, my duty is to prevent access to the Palace of Westminster to any person or persons I see fit. I am not saying you are a security risk, by the way,’ he said to Dean, ‘but ..

‘Now look here,’ said the minister, and a frown had clouded his pallid brow, ‘I really think . .

And so he might have continued, with one of those don’t-you-know-who-I-am speeches he had given at perhaps a dozen check-in counters, when he had turned up late for a flight, with no better excuse than his own laziness and conceit. Matters might have seriously deteriorated. The puncture kit was now fully extracted from the sock, and was scintillating in the gloom.

Jones saw it, rested his fingers on Haroun’s shoulder, and transmitted a message of calm and control. ‘My dear sir,’ he said to the politician, ‘I am most terribly grateful for your help. But it is clear we have reached an impasse, and the last thing I want to do is cause any difficulties for our friend here.’ He smiled at the policeman. Haroun smiled, and so did Habib.

They all beamed, like a bunch of Lebanese waiters who have been told to provide a birthday cake, gratis, for an orphan.

‘So let us go back,’ he said, coming out through the door, ‘and see if we can find the document you have rightly requested,’ he said, as the party straggled upwards and backwards to the car park in Norman Shaw North. Jones the Bomb set a brisk pace, conversing ceremoniously with the copper.

The politician fell in with Habib. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, looking at the terrorist’s T-shirt, ‘isn’t that extraordinary!’ Habib tried to hunch together the flaps of the suicide bomber jacket. There, smudged over the chest slogan, was a bloodstain. It was hand-shaped, presumably came from the blood of Eric the parkie, and had been made in the course of their bags-I-not struggle over the bomber jackets. ‘Llangollen 3rd VIII University,’ he read out. ‘Isn’t that a coincidence? Do you know that I am the MP for Llangollen?’

Habib gave a soft smile. Behind them walked Dean, who was trying to avoid the gaze of Haroun, while whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’.

As soon as they emerged from the tunnel, they could hear the football-terrace roar from the square. It was now the middle of the passion of Raimondo Charles. As the Yankee fists pounded the glossy head of that innocent but irritating man, the wails of his supporters carried round the corner from Whitehall. It was quite frightening.

The minister decided to spend no more political capital on this incompetent TV crew, and with a final leer at Dean, he tootled off. He was going to watch the President’s speech on television. Having been almost excessive in his gratitude to the emanations of the British state, Jones the Bomb turned to his underlings.

‘Dean, you know how much I value you. You know how crucial you are to this operation, and how much the Sheikh, may Allah be with him, esteems the contribution you make. But I must confess that there are times when I wonder whether you do justice to your natural abilities.’ Haroun spat at Dean’s feet.

‘Luckily,’ continued Jones, ‘I have already made plans for this contingency.’ He took out the car key. ‘This is why we are using an ambulance.’

Dean looked at him with the hunger of an eight-year-old being offered a ride on Disney’s space mountain. ‘Hey man,’ he said, ‘I know what. It’s time for a bit of the old
nee-naw, nee-naw,
innit?’ Then, once again, a film of fear came over his eyes.

Westminster Hall was now crowded to capacity, and here and there a terse dispute was taking place over the few unbagged seats, and the ethics of ‘reserving’ the chairs with scrawled bits of paper. Corpulent young MPs of all parties looked stonily into the distance, shifted their bottoms, and refused to meet the eyes of the peeresses who hobbled around in the hope of chivalry. Cameron was getting on famously with the French Ambassador and his girlfriend. She saw Adam walk up past her on her right, picking his way through the crowds against the wall. She waved, but he did not seem to see her. It was growing hotter and hotter under the klieg lights, and people were beginning to bend the programme, with its twin emblems, the Portcullis of the Commons and the Presidential Seal, and to fan their wide-pored faces. There was a sennet or a tucket or a fanfare and suddenly here they were.

First a group of trumpeters came on, in red and yellow tunics, white stockings, and odd little jockey caps. They lifted their long, valveless instruments, each with a heraldic flag suspended beneath it, and standing half a dozen on either side of the top dais, they parped a deafening salute.

Then came an assortment of dignified office-holders, mainly in tights, and all men. Then came a man walking backwards carrying a cushion with something on it, then the man carrying the Mace of the House of Commons, and then the Speaker of the House of Commons, and then there he was all this for one man in a plain blue suit.

Cameron was surprised — since she had never seen her country’s leader before, not in the flesh — by how tall he was. She felt herself flushing with simple patriotic pleasure and savoured the contrast between English flummery and the republican simplicity of America. He came down the steps from Central Lobby, shooting his cuffs and waiting until he and the First Lady could be escorted, with maximum pomp, to their chairs by the dais. Then the last echo of brass died away.

They stopped whispering and sniffing and bickering. In the silence that followed — and it seemed like silence, because the listeners automatically bleached out the quotidian noise of the emergency vehicle — the Speaker stood forward to speak.

CHAPTER THIRTY

0958 HRS

Roger Barlow and the man from Stogumber heard the siren and ran out of the Pass Office. Barlow established with a glance that it was the suspect ambulance. Blooming Bilston and Willenhall Primary Care Trust.

In the police booth they saw the machine hurtling towards them, flashing and wailing so loudly that it drowned out the noise of the telephone. Without a second’s hesitation, the first policeman brought the palm of his hand down flat and hard on the big red button which lifted the boom.

Roger ran after it. He waved. He shouted inaudibly at the men in the booth. No good. It is one thing to clamp an ambulance when it is illegally parked. You don’t stop it in
mid-nee-naw.

Out of the parking lot lurched the terrorists, up past the Red Lion pub, whence a couple of piss-heads surveyed them apathetically, then round the corner on to Whitehall and they were gone from Barlow’s view. He turned and double-timed down the tunnel towards Westminster Hall.

Dimly in the Scotland Yard Ops Room they could hear the noise of an ambulance; but it was the one that had been sent to assist the pool of blood in Tufton Street. All the evidence seems to agree that at this point, barely a minute before the President was due to open his mouth, the authorities had still failed to make any connection between the missing ambulance and the vehicle which had attracted such attention in Norman Shaw North.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell pressed 16 on his phone and spoke to Grover. ‘Did we get through to Derby Gate?’

It took Grover a moment or two to find out the state of play. ‘We tried to raise them, but there was no answer, and now it seems to be engaged.’

Purnell raised his eyes to Bluett, and the American stared unfathomably back.

In the booth at Derby Gate the policemen were trying to raise the Met Ops Room, since it was by now the considered view of them both that the ambulance was worthy of attention.

‘It’s bleeding engaged,’ said the first policeman to the second policeman.

Bleeding Koran, thought the second policeman. They’d need more than the bleeding Koran if this thing turned out bad.

‘Well, Bluett, old man,’ said Purnell, trying to assert his authority in the mental arm-wrestle. ‘It looks like we’re going to let the programme proceed.’

‘Yup,’ said Bluett, sticking his cigar in his mouth and looking tough. ‘Anything else would be a surrender to turr.’

PART TWO

THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

1000 HRS

‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen.’

The President looked over the lectern at upwards of 800 heads, goggling at him on either side of the central aisle. He was going to enjoy this, he thought. Whatever you said about the Brits, whatever their snobberies and limitations, they understood the relationship between the present and the past. They never pretended that their system of government was some ash-and-aluminum example of perfected modernity. They knew their democracy was an inherited conglomerate of traditions, bodged together, spatchcocked, barnacled and bubblegummed by fate and whimsy.

That’s why, goddammit, he kept in the my lords bit. They might have been expelled or in some other way neutered by Blair (he was hazy on the details). But look at these guys, standing on the dais with him: get a load of their tights, their shapely calves, trimmed by tennis and hoofing it at posh nightclubs. Check out their crazy wigs, glowing like woolly haloes in the clerestory light. Dig those funky buckles and black satin rosettes like heraldic tarantulas crawling down the back of their tailcoats. Look at this fat guy next to him, this Scottish fellow who obviously ate nothing but fry-ups, with the rosy face and the whisky nose. Now this fellow, from what the President understood, had been the product of a Glasgow steel mill, and his hands were heavy and scarred with swarf. He spoke with so thick an accent that when the President had taken delivery of some freaky mug of Winston Churchill, he had barely understood a word. But he was the Speaker! He was in charge of this place, and in terms of troy ounces of bling-bling, he was more sumptuously attired than P Diddy himself.

He went on: ‘It is a great honor to be speaking here today, and a rare honor, and I am proud to be speaking to you on a day when we commemorate a relationship that has had many triumphs and many perils. I know it is fashionable to say that the Special relationship does not exist. I have heard they say it in your Foreign Office, and in Foggy Bottom, in the State Department. But I know it exists, and you know that special friendship exists, and we know how much together we have achieved in the last hundred years, not least in the two great world conflicts whose successful conclusion we memorialize today.’

The President looked out at the vast windfarm of flapping programmes as his listeners struggled to keep cool. It wouldn’t go down as a brilliant speech; he did not do brilliant speeches. But it had the small, additional merit that he believed every word of it, more or less. ‘We stood firm in the Cold War, and we joined in bringing freedom and democracy to countries that were denied them for forty years. Together now, we work to liberate a region of the world’ — this was the bit, to be frank, that he was worried about. Neocon though he was, he could imagine that this passage might grate with some of those Labor fellows, the Democratic Liberals, or whatever the hell they were called, and possibly even, for Chrissakes, some of the Conservatives. There were liberal squishes everywhere, these days, and he had been warned by the Ambassador that some of the MPs might try to make names for themselves by walking out —’… a region of the world where too many people are still forbidden from exercising their basic right to free assembly and free speech .

Because he still had a reflex eye for these things the President noticed a good-looking blonde dressed smartly who was sitting three rows back on the left, and tilting her chin and the planes of her cheeks as if his words were some cooling shower to be caught and savoured on her skin. In front of her he dimly noted the swept-maned foreign guy, who had the air of some kind of composer or art critic, and next to him three Arabs, a girl and two men.

He looked at them now with the first stirrings of curiosity. One of them stirred abruptly in his seat. Was that a little protest brewing? But the President had no time, and his eyes flickered back to the big 28-point block capitals of his text.

‘And I want to remind you of the origins of this great but mysteriously deprecated relationship, because its birth, like so many other births, was also the moment of greatest vulnerability. It was Oscar Wilde who said that we are two nations divided by a common language,’ (the French Ambassador yawned so widely that Cameron began to feel reassured) ‘and it would be fair to say, Mr Speaker, that there are some of your great traditions which doubtless through our own inadvertence we have failed to inherit. It is sometimes said that we lack the British sense of irony.’

A thousand toes curled: oh God, was he about to say how much he enjoyed the works of Monty Python? ‘We do not as a rule drink our beer warm.’

The President simpered at the Speaker and the Speaker simpered back. In the game of tasteless presents the Scotsman had been out-generalled by the Texan: the appalling gargoyle mug of Sir Winston had been requited by a pair of cowboy boots in scarlet leather with the word ‘Speaker’ tooled on the shins.

‘We do not populate our society with personages calling themselves knights or lords, which I think sometimes is a shame though I am afraid there are still people who complain that political office in our republic may be passed in dubious circumstances from father to son …’ This sally earned the President his first desultory round of applause and reluctant laughter. The President gave his aw shucks expression and squinted his buzzard eyes on the script. He was coming to the meat of it.