Seventy-Two Virgins (28 page)

‘Pickel?’ he said. He knew all about Pickel.

‘That’s right,’ said Bluett. ‘He’s the boy, the one we had on the roof.’ A computer screen had already provided an image of Pickel’s countenance looking as usual like a freshly cattle-prodded bullock. ‘And he’s madder than a shit house rat—at least in my experience.’

‘Is he still armed?’ asked Purnell.

‘I’d be amazed if he wasn’t.’

‘But does he know the score? Does he know not to shoot?’

‘How the hell would I know? All I can tell you for certain is that Lieutenant Pickel is armed with an M-24 sniper rifle capable of firing bullets at 834 metres per second and that he don’t miss.’

As it happens, this was no longer true: that is, at the moment he dropped through the hatch, Pickel had his rifle strapped around his shoulders and the strap had caught on the latch of the hatch. The strap might have turned into Pickel’s noose, had he not released himself before dropping ten feet on to a platform built beneath the flèche. He arrived almost silently, like Errol Flynn dropping from the mizzenmast to the deck.

He crept to the edge of the platform, and absorbed first the dreadful scene being enacted beneath him. Then he looked up and saw his gun glinting in the light from the open hatch and dangling uselessly ten feet above.

‘Has everybody handed over their mobiles?’ There was a silence, broken only by coughing and whimpering. The girl Bénédicte was moving up the aisle, dragging two bulging binbags of phones.

Dean looked at the audience and wished he could control his patella. It was as though it was on an invisible string, and someone was jerking it up and down. That’s what people meant, he realized, when they said that their knees were shaking.

He couldn’t believe the calm of Haroun and Habib, walking up and down as if they owned the place, sticking their guns in the bellies of the USSS men. He tried to control his own breathing, and to fill his lungs with the confidence of his creed. He remembered what Jones had said so many times:

‘There is a special reward for those who go out and fight, and a special place for them in heaven, and a lower place for those who receive no hurt and sit at home.’

Yeah, thought Dean, and breathed out.

He hoped they were watching him in Wolverhampton; he hoped the magistrate was watching him, the one who had given him 400 hours of moss-picking; he hoped his foster-father was watching him now. Above all, in the angriest part of his teenage heart, he hoped he was being watched by that beautiful girl he had called Vanessa, Vanessa with the sweet white smile and the fat red kissy lips, whom he had trusted with his heart, and who had turned out to be a fornicating traitor.

Kill them all, thought Dean, as anger came to his aid; kill all the people who call you a coon; pluck out their eyes, cut off their heads, pull out their intestines with your bare hands.

For a moment he looked cruel and dreadful, and hung his Schmidt in the callous posture of some Sierra Leonean child guerrilla. He tried out a thin smile, and watched as Haroun, Habib and the two other Arabs started to round up the USSS men.

‘Sir,’ whispered an agent to the Ops Room, ‘they want me to remove my two-way.’

‘Me too, sir.’

‘Mine too, sir. Ouch.’

‘Don’t worry, boys,’ said Bluett. ‘Just cooperate and do what they say. Hand over your stuff. We’re going to git all you boys out of there in no time.’ One by one the Curly-Wurlies were ripped out of the ears of the USSS men and thrown on the flags in the middle.

Then the agents were made to sit cross-legged on the floor in the central aisle.

Bluett gave a blubbering moan of grief as he saw the humiliation of his best men. ‘Well, at least they haven’t got Cabache yet,’ he said, ‘and fuck knows what we are going to do with Pickel.’

Jones the Bomb gripped the lectern and paused. The President turned and looked at the terrorist leader. He thought of making a light-hearted remark, something about carrying on with the sermon while the collection was being taken. In spite of his growing conviction that he was about to be killed, the President was conscious not of the audience in the hall — he didn’t really give a stuff about them.

He was thinking about the millions of Americans who would already be watching, apathetically glomping their Cheerios and studying him on breakfast TV. They would be checking for signs of leadership, of masterfulness.

He opened his mouth.

‘Shut up,’ said Jones.

The President closed his mouth like a guppy.

‘Here is what’s going to happen now, my friends,’ said Jones, ‘and let me remind you that if you try to kill me then my neighbour dies too. It’s like in chess: you cannot move this piece without a discovered checkmate. Yes?’ The President composed his features into what he hoped was a mask of defiance.

Jones went on: ‘My colleagues and I represent a group called Islamic Jihad, or the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques, and there are many injustices we would like to correct. It is now too long that the Zionist entity has been occupying illegally the homeland of my brother Arabs. We would like that to end. We would like an end to the brutal slaughter of families in Nablus, Hebron and Ramallah, the killing of people who have nothing, who have no weapons, by missiles fired from the helicopters given to the Zionist entity by the Americans. Of course we would like the final removal of the infidel bases from the lands that are holy to Islam and we would like to see an end to the corrupt and vicious regimes that are supported by the American taxpayer and by the CIA. We also demand an end to all the torture and brutality in Iraq, and all the guilty to be sent to war crimes trial in The Hague.’

This was too much for the President. He had to say something here. This was a vital part of his political identity.

‘Hey,’ he raised his eyebrows in that characteristic look of befuddlement. ‘We sure as hell got rid of Saddam, didn’t we?’

Jones kept his eyes on the crowd as he whacked the President backhanded and still holding the gun over the top of his head.

CHAPTER FORTY

1033 HRS

It was the moment for many people that the Westminster Assizes became truly frightening. It was that camera frame, the President wincing with pain, his forelock buffeted out of place, that made the front page of the evening papers around the planet.

Watching in the front row, the First Lady screamed for the first time, and began to cry. Sitting two along from her the Home Secretary realized that even if he survived this day, he would have to resign. From his vantage point in Cobra, the Prime Minister meditated not so much on the safety of the President or the crowd, but on the future of his government.

In the Shalimar all-night deli and coffee joint in Brooklyn, to take one of countless examples, the movement provoked shock. ‘Shee,’ said Johnson Calhoune, a security guard preparing for the morning shift, removing a doughnut from his mouth. ‘That ain’t right.’ and the owner of the Shalimar, an Afghan, agreed that it certainly was not.

In the Ops Room, Bluett was white with hate and rage. ‘Cabache,’ he said to his remaining operative, ‘have you still got that sucker in your sights? Why don’t you just blow his head off now—?’

‘NO, CABACHE,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘don’t shoot. Tell him not to shoot, Colonel.’

Bluett balled his fists. He went purple. He groaned.

‘OK Cabache, easy there,’ he said.

‘Yessir,’ said Cabache.

Jones the Bomb twitched the orientation of his skull, with an almost mechanical movement, like a desert fox. He looked up and squinted into the alcove.

‘You,’ he said, pointing his Browning at Philippa of Hainault, ‘come down.’ Cabache descended, and was escorted, hands above his head, to join his colleagues in the aisle.

‘I’m sorry, my friends,’ said Jones, whose breathing was ragged for a second or two, ‘but it is hard to think of any other way of making the point that this fellow is no longer in charge. To resume,’ he said, ‘there are many evils for which this man is responsible, but I’m a realist. I know how much will be quickly accomplished in your democratic system. That is why in the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, we in the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques are today confining ourselves to one demand. You know the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. You know they’re being kept in brutal and degrading conditions. They’re blindfolded. They’re made to kneel in the sun. Some of them are just boys. Some of them are from this country. They have not even been charged. They’ve not been given access to lawyers and this’ — he spat so plentifully that the drops hit the mike like a pebble on a drum — ‘from a country that presumes to lecture the rest of the world about the application of human rights. We do not even ask for them to be released, we ask only what is natural and what is right: that they be sent back to face trial in the countries where their crimes were allegedly committed. This the President can grant. This he can do quite simply, but I believe he will need some persuasion.’

In the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard there was now barely room to stand. Psychologists, counter-terrorism gurus, hostage crisis wallahs and Special Forces representatives were trying to make themselves heard. Purnell and Bluett continued their invisible arm-wrestle, and everyone was pointedly refusing to talk to a svelte young female MP who was, so she claimed, the Under-Secretary in the new Department for Homeland Security. ‘I see, yes,’ she kept saying in a bewildered way, ‘I see, yes.’ The shambles had nothing on the White House, where the Vice-President and the Secretary of State had both been roused from their beds and were in the cabinet rooms surrounded by the National Security adviser, the Defence Secretary and assorted other staffers, each vying to produce the most decisive response.

‘I want a total news blackout.’

‘Gettoudahere! This thing is running live on all channels.’

‘Let’s send in the Seals.’

‘Yeah, right, and watch the President get turned into lasagne on breakfast TV.’

‘Get me the British Prime Minister.’

‘He’s on line one, and he’s talking to the Secretary of State.’

‘But I’m the Vice-President.’

‘Sweet Christ, will someone here say or do something sensible.’

Dawn was just peeping over the low hills of Missouri, when a wing of stealth bombers headed in boomerang formation for Europe, startling the ducks and convincing an itinerant drunk that he had seen the first wave of an alien invasion.

‘I will not be doing the persuading,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘and I hope never again to have to use my persuader here. It is up to all of us to do the persuading and up to everyone watching around the world.’ He consulted his watch. ‘It is now 8.34 p.m. in Australia. Some of you will be making a nice cup of Milo after your tea. I urge you, if you have views on this question, to ring up your local TV station and give a very simple answer to a very simple question: Do you believe that America should send the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay to have a fair trial in another country? Yes or No. People of the world have your say. We will stay here all day,’ said Jones frothily. Dean noticed that rhetoric had given him wings. ‘We will wait until Australia has gone to bed and China has voted. We will wait until India and Russia and all the lands of Islam have given their opinion on this simple question that cries out for resolution. We will wait for Europe and for California, and if they vote to release the prisoners, and if you, sir, will come to this microphone and announce their release, then I swear that in the name of all that is holy, that you will all be released and the President of the United States will be unharmed. And if the people of this planet vote not to release the prisoners, the illegal captives of America, then of course it is very simple for us.’

In the office of the Director General of the BBC they were holding a crash meeting of a kind that was by now being held in the chancelleries, banks, newsrooms and foreign ministries of capital cities, day lit and benighted, across the planet. The honchos could see what was coming. There were rules about this, handbooks to be consulted.

They were about to be asked to collaborate on the biggest terroristic media stunt in history. ‘It’s very simple,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics), a handsome woman in her fifties with strong traditional opinions, whose appointment was the relic of some forgotten Tory administration. ‘We will have to refuse any cooperation whatsoever. Tell the switchboards immediately.’

‘Hang on,’ said the black polo necks.

‘We can’t stop people ringing up,’ said a man with an earring. ‘And what about everyone else?’ He meant the enemy, independents and satellite television. ‘They’re bound to take the calls.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics), ‘this is really too important. We will never forgive ourselves if we respond to a terrorist outrage by going whoring after ratings.’

‘Yes, well I’m sorry, too,’ said one of the 40-something polo-necked men who was in fact the Political Director (Editorial), who had recently been recruited at a cost of £113,000 to the licence payer, to neutralize the Editorial Director (Politics). ‘But frankly folks, if I may interject at this point, I think we are never going to forgive ourselves if we sub-optimize the handling of a major news event.’

‘But we can’t be morally neutral in this.’

‘It’s a story, isn’t it?’

‘You mean you think the Corporation should do the terrorists’ work for them?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m just saying it’s a matter of legitimate public interest.’

‘What is?’

‘Well, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Well, what percentage of BBC viewers think the Americans should do like he says and release all the remaining Guantanamo prisoners.’

‘For God’s sake, Joshua,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics).

‘I don’t want to be provocative or anything,’ said the Political Director (Editorial), ‘but the last time I looked the BBC was entirely funded by the licence payers of this country and not by the CIA.’