Seventy-Two Virgins (29 page)

The Editorial Director (Politics) had already gathered her papers. She walked out with as much composure as she could manage, sealed herself in the executive toilet, burst into tears, calmed down and mentally drafted a press release announcing her resignation.

Back in the office of the Director General, it fell to another black polo neck to sum up the meeting. ‘I know you’re all going to hate me for saying this,’ he said, knowing that in fact they would be rather pleased, ‘but I think we should remember that our first mission is the Reithian mission to explain and frankly,’ concluded the Director of Political Editorial (£102,000 pa plus car, perks, bomb-proof state-sector pension), ‘if you go for the see-no-evil option on a thing of this scale, you know what I mean, looking at the medium to long term I genuinely and sincerely believe that we could be totally and utterly stuffed in terms of what we end up.’

‘Yeah,’ said several polo necks approvingly.

‘I mean,’ added one, ‘we’re the people’s broadcaster aren’t we? And it’s up to us to let the people speak.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

1036 HRS

Jones could see that his idea was taking hold in the imaginations of his audience. They were staring at him with silent respect, busily excogitating their options.

With mounting confidence he completed his conditions. ‘If you vote no, people of the world…’ he shook his head, as though to concede that this was of course an option open to the global audience, though one he doubted they would pursue…

‘If you vote no, people of the world, if you vote in favour of the most brutal and powerful country since the Roman Empire, then it goes without saying that we will obey. We will release your Caesar to rule over you in the summary and arbitrary way with which you will all by now be familiar. In fact there is only one circumstance in which we, I, would dream of harming this man and that is if you vote yes, yes to release the Guantanamo prisoners, and they are not sent home.

‘There is a flight tonight from Miami to Lahore, changing at Frankfurt. If I’m right it will become clear in the next few hours what the world thinks of American imperialism and there will be plenty of time for them to be put aboard. If the world votes yes and America says no, then I will have no choice.’

He turned and leered at the President. The President did his best to leer back. But even in long shot, the TV audience could see a hollow look, an involuntary working of the Adam’s apple.

In the ministries, banks and news organizations of the earth, it was a reaction immediately detectable by those with a nose for fear, and it was viewed with every emotion from despair to satirical hilarity.

Slumped in his seat near the front, the French Ambassador saw it. He shook his Beethoven hairdo. Confounded and depressed though he was, the énarque in him admired anything cruel and brilliant, and the terrorist plan was both.
‘C’est géniale, ça,’
he said and decided that his chances of surviving today were about 5 per cent.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Cameron, gripping his arm.

‘Hem?’
said the French Ambassador, as though surprised to find he was in the presence of other human beings.

‘You said something just now. Do you mean that you think this guy’s a genius?’

‘Not a genius, of course not, but the plan is certainly brilliant.’

‘But do you think he is, like, cool?’

‘It is certainly cool,’ wheezed the French diplomat, ‘to carry out an operation such as this.’ Cameron tried to compute it all. She tried to make sense of the Frenchman’s actions, but mainly of her own actions and the actions of the man on her right.

She turned to the love object, who was now sitting in the chair vacated by Benedicte, but facing her. She took him in slowly with the anguish of one beholding a much-loved relative on the mortuary slab. She looked first at his long tapering fingers which now held her own with the gentle and winning insistence she had felt so often. She looked at the leather patches on his tweed jacket that he wore even in the heat of London in July and which heaven knows, he wore in Baghdad during the bombing.

She looked at his strong chin with its hint of bristle and then at the humorous and intelligent crinkles around his eyes and she looked into the eyes themselves. They were still Adam Swallow’s eyes: soulful, thoughtful, humane. Surely this was still a profoundly decent man.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘But why did you …’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But you made me get those passes.’

‘I know, but I swear …’

‘I signed for them,’ said Cameron. As is the case, alas, with all of us, Cameron’s sense of guilt was greatly exacerbated by the certain knowledge that she would be exposed. Everyone would know that she had been instrumental in importing these maniacs to the Palace of Westminster and, oh lordy, her father would know. As soon as she thought of that man whose hot-dang, straight-up and magnificently unnuanced world view had until recently served as the template for her own, she felt so bad again that she toyed with the notion of weeping. And then Cameron thought, stuff it, I’m not going to cry, I’m going to find out what’s really been going on here.

‘Adam.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you promise that you will tell me the absolute truth?’ Her voice was high, as though she had some sort of pressure on the base of her windpipe, but it was firm.

‘Yes,’ said Adam, and his brown eyes were unblinking, ‘I swear it.’

‘And that,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘is more or less all I have to say. It goes without saying that there must be no attempt to tamper with the television coverage of this event. For every channel that shuts off this fascinating broadcast for political reasons I will execute, shall we say, one hostage. Maybe we will start with that one over there. He seems to have survived.’

He waggled his automatic at the Dutchman, ear now swaddled like Van Gogh, and Hermanus Van Cornelijus looked back with loathing. ‘Of course it is always possible that America will behave with unthinking violence, so let me say for, what, the third time, that if they kill me they will also’ — he tapped his padded breast — ‘kill the 43rd President. He will not be the first civilian to die from what Americans and their allies call friendly fire, but he would certainly be the first President. As to my own death and the death of my colleagues, let me quote the Holy Koran: “the nip of an ant hurts a martyr more than the thrust of a weapon, for these are more welcome to him than sweet cold water on a hot summer day”.’

Recessed into the lectern was a glass carafe from which Jones the Bomb refreshed himself greedily, letting the drops trickle down his throat. He wiped his mouth and looked at the erstwhile most powerful man in the world as if to say, ‘Not for you, sonny.’ The President pursed his lips.

In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the male egos were spooling madly in all directions. They were not thinking what they were doing; they were thinking how they would be held to have done when this business was over. One mind, a young female mind, was sitting in a corner and considering logically the problem that Jones had posed. ‘Hey,’ she said to herself, looking up from her notes, ‘hey, I know what!’ she yelled. No one was listening.

The Ops Room had become an ops floor, with every computer terminal the object of discreet and overt competition between the operatives of Britain and America. Colonel Bluett of the USSS seemed slowly to be gaining the upper hand. By sheer weight of men and
materiel
at his eventual disposal, he was becoming the Eisenhower of the equation and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was being thrust into the role of Montgomery.

‘Not there, you dummkopf, there!’ yelled Bluett. He was now pacing around, a limp cigar hanging from his mouth in blatant imitation of Colonel Kilgore. At any moment you expected him to puff out his barrel chest and announce that Charlie don’t surf or that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.

Without looking, he took a mobile phone from an aide and yelled into it: ‘Bluett! Not there, there!’ He pointed at a scale model of Westminster Hall, which was hastily being bodged together with the help of a guidebook on top of one of the tables.

‘Yes sir,’ he said, for it was Washington on the line, in this case the Secretary of State. ‘We’ve identified six of them, including the girl who came in with the French Ambassador. That’s right, sir. The only guy we can’t get a fix on is the young one. Seems to be some British kid, petty criminal, misfit, something like that. Yessir, yessir, we’re working on that right now. What’s that you say?’

He lunged at the model and picked up two green toy soldiers. Cradling the mobile, he grabbed a magic marker and labelled one of them POTUS, before putting them back, facing in a slightly different direction.

‘Do any of them have a history of suicide bombing? Gee, sir, I don’t think you can have a history of suicide bombing. I think he might have a history of attempted suicide bombing, but—’

‘I’ve got it.’ This time the female detective, whose name was Camilla, secured the attention of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, who was desperate to shut out the noise of Bluett.

‘You know what, darling,’ he said, smiting his forehead when it was explained to him, ‘you’re flaming well right.’

‘Chaps,’ he said, in such a way as to indicate that by chaps’ he meant chaps as opposed to guys. ‘Here is what we are going to do.’ It took Bluett only seconds to realize that his British counterpart had found the solution.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

1037 HRS

As his eyes soaked up the room, he could see the excitement. Some of his own men were now clustering around Purnell and making animated gestures. For all his swaggering, Bluett was essentially a bureaucrat and every bureaucrat knows what to do when your rival has a brainwave.

You go along with it. You extol it; and then you secretly find a way of sabotaging it, while making sure that you have distanced yourself from it in good time.

‘Fantastic,’ said Bluett, when the wheeze was explained to him. ‘There’s only one problem I see here, and that’s how do we get the guy into the hall. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but if this maniac sees someone pointing a gun at him loaded with a rhino tranquillizer then he is going to pull the ripcord — no question. And anyhow, what if it doesn’t knock him out?’

‘It will knock him out in a trice,’ said Camilla, the detective who had thought up the idea. ‘Hit him in the neck and he’ll be away with the fairies.’

‘That’s swell, that’s swell,’ said Bluett, pacing over to his mock-up and thinking the Brits could not be serious. What did they think this was? Daktari?

‘Show me how we get him in. There are at least six entrances to Westminster Hall, but they are all obvious, and they’ve got men with machine guns everyplace.’ With his magic marker he indicated the main access points, St Stephen’s Entrance, the entrance from New Palace Yard, the passageway entrance by which Jones & Co. had come in and then two sets of entrances on the left-hand side as the President looked at it, through doors that led to a series of debating chambers and meeting rooms.

‘Of course we could take them all out just like that’ — he flipped over a figurine violently, ‘but then we’d run the risk of disaster. I love this idea. I love it to death. My only question is how do we get a man in there without being seen. That’s why I want to hear from Pickel.’

The sharpshooter was at that moment invisible, shielded from view by the glare of the TV lights. He was filthy from soot and trying to think of a way of persuading his gun to slip off its hook and fall into his arms. He stood up to his full six foot two, and stretched his leg-like arms. The gun was still several feet too high.

He gave a little jump, and landed back heavily, missing the platform and resting on a high crossbeam. The beam held up well, but Pickel wobbled as he landed. ‘No,’ he thought. He was a brave man, but not a funambulist. ‘That’s enough jumping.’

Slowly on his hands and knees, he grovelled his way to the eaves in search of a way up, and listened, as he went, to the further ravings of Jones.

‘So,’ said the lead terrorist, ‘is there no one here in this birthplace of Parliamentary debate who has the courage to speak? Here is the building of Pitt, Fox, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill and the great George Galloway. Is no one prepared to say anything on the issue of the hour? Are you all cowards?’ he shrieked suddenly.

‘Easy, boy,’ said the President. ‘Last time a person tried to speak you shot him in the ear.’

‘Good point, my friend,’ said Jones nastily. ‘This time I have a different policy. If no one speaks by the time I count to ten, I will fire at a hostage. Yes, you again, why not, you miserable creature.’ He once more indicated the wounded Dutchman, who opened his eyes and regarded his tormentor with herpetic inscrutability.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, infidel dogs, the motion before the house is that America should release her illegal prisoners from their Cuban torture chambers. The world is watching, the world is voting. Who will have the courage to speak before the bald guy gets it?’

‘ONE!’

Dean looked at the faces of the politicians nearest him. Even with his limited knowledge of current affairs, he could tell that there were some quite famous people here. Wasn’t that guy the Home Secretary, inventor of FreshStart, to whose munificence with public funds he supposedly owed thanks and praise? Surely to goodness one of them would have the guts to stand up and say something snappy. Wasn’t that what they were trained for?

Their faces were pale with shock, but each was inwardly engaged in that art he had made into a profession: maximizing the chance of his own survival. In the breast of each one was the traditional competition between the fear of appearing an idiot and the lust to star on television.

‘TWO!’

Ziggy Roberts, best and brightest of the new intake, felt his mouth go dry. He could make his name for evermore. How many times had his speeches mentioned the concept of a golden opportunity’ which it was necessary to ‘seize with both hands’ with a view to going ‘forward into the future’?