Seventy-Two Virgins (39 page)

‘Pisser,’ hissed Pickel, squinting again through the sight.

‘…did not say a few words on a subject which…’

In the ambulance in New Palace Yard, William Eric Kinloch Onyeama had fully regained consciousness, with no assistance from the emergency services, and was struggling to get up. His chest hurt like hell, as though he had been involved in a car crash.

His long brown fingers reached for something to help him upright, and wrapped themselves round some wires which were protruding from a box.

‘…is evidently controversial, and which arouses strong opinions across the globe . .

‘Say something interesting, you silly man!’ yelled Jones the Bomb, who was fed up to the back teeth with British parliamentary procedure. He stood still and pressed the button to activate the automatic dialling system.

Pickel had the vein in his sights. He began the squeeze on the trigger, so delicately that he could not possibly disturb the barrel.

‘All right, you tosser,’ said Roger Barlow. ‘I say to hell with you and the rest of you chippy, pathetic, pretentious, evil, envious, Islamic nutcases. I say vote for America!’

‘Sit down!’ screamed Jones the Bomb. ‘Sit down and shut up.’

And just as Pickel pulled the trigger, Jones jerked the President forward a foot and a half, and placed the crown of the presidential head in the path of the thyapentine sodium dart as it was dispatched with a muzzle velocity of 3,100 feet per second.

‘Ow,’ said the President. ‘What the fuuurggghh …’

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

1125 HRS

‘You fools,’ said Jones. The Yanks were attacking. He pushed again at the mobile, and the number flashed on the screen.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

It took only a second for the stuff to begin to work on the President, who weighed less than a sixth of the average white rhino. He toppled forward. The dart was sticking out of the top of his head. It looked terrible on TV.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

And as the President went down he dragged Jones down with him. The mobile spilled out of his hand.

DIALLING, said the screen as the mobile spun across the flags.

Pickel knew what he had to do. With what the citations would call a characteristic disregard for his own safety, he flung his seventeen stone off the little wooden platform beneath the flèche, and abseiled from the ceiling. He aimed at the form of Jones, and in order to hit him he threw himself forward. He went too far and too fast.

ENGAGED, said the mobile.

Pickel landed awkwardly, at 34 miles an hour, on the fifth step, twelve away from Jones the Bomb. Oxlike though it was in dimension and construction, his left tibia was cleanly snapped by the violence of his arrival.

Jones was now crawling towards the mobile, and thinking what an idiot he had been. He had dialled himself! He panted as he tried to lug the inert mass of the President across the old striated shale. All he had to do was dial Dean or Habib, he thought; and it may or may not be an indication of some ultimate failure of his character that he did not think to activate by hand the detonator on his own jacket.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

As Jones crawled towards the mobile the broken-limbed Pickel crawled up the steps towards Jones. His gun was gone, but he had his knife, and he had the courage of a wounded lion as it charges down the rifle of some mock-brave white hunter.

Hardly bothering to look, Jones turned his Browning round and shot Pickel in the chest. The 9 mm bullet ripped through the trapezius of his right breast, scraped a rib and a scapula, and lodged in his vast sternocleidomastoid withers. The damage was very severe. And still that great heart beat on. Army knife to the fore, he slithered on up the stairs to save his Head of State and Commander in Chief.

In his shame and rage, Adam made forward, to help the injured man. But Cameron held him back.

Five steps to go, reckoned Pickel, now in tremendous pain from both his chest and his leg. Four more agonizing tiger-crawling steps, and he would give Wanda and Jason Jr something they could be eternally proud of.

Three more steps and he would expunge any guilty memory of the incinerated car in Baghdad.

Two more steps and he would wash away the stain that had been left on his name by that pisser Barry White.

If he had managed one more step, he would have been upon Jones the Bomb and the President, as they advanced in a crumpled pushme-pullyou across the floor.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

But Jones did not wait for Pickel’s arms to come within swinging distance. He aimed the Browning at Pickel’s head and shot at him again.

And that might have been the end of Jason Pickel. By the laws of ballistics the bullet should have entered his brain and killed him instantly. He would have died far from home, fighting on a foreign flagstone, in the protection not just of the President, but of British citizens, as many brave Americans have died before.

And later the news would have been brought to his wife, at that moment running the early morning bath for another man.

Except that Jones’s trigger finger was just closing when his gun arm was kicked sharply at the elbow by Roger Barlow, who felt that his speech had not been exactly coherent, and that now was the time for action, not words.

‘You idiot MP!’ said Jones, and would have blown Roger away with the bullet meant for Pickel; only his gun now jammed.

‘Yo! Roger!’ sang out his beautiful research assistant, and Adam saw her exultant eyes, and wished they had been turned on him.

But Jones the Bomb was not finished yet. By dragging and shoving the recumbent President, whose anaesthetic dart waggled absurdly from the top of his skull, he had at last extended his fingers to within six inches of the master Nokia.

At which point Dean stepped forward, and kicked it aside.

‘No!’ shrieked Jones the Bomb, and Habib ran after it, directing a hideous Arab imprecation at the Wulfrunian recruit.

Across Westminster Hall, the audience was now screaming and shouting instructions, and rising from their places in fear.

Adam was saying how much he wished he had a gun, but Cameron was not listening to Adam. She was looking at the back of the head of Jones the Bomb, as he crouched over the President, spitting and waving his Browning.

There was a little bald spot in the greying crown. She knew what she wanted to do. Her eyes went to the group of heraldic figures behind the black railing. Before she could ask to borrow it, the necessary object was thrust without a word into her hand.

‘Come on, you idle bastard,’ shrieked Jones at the comatose form of the President, as he scrabbled feebly after Habib and the Nokia, trying with one hand to slide the bolt and unjam the Browning. Now he would shoot him. No, he had better shoot himself. Or should he shoot Dean?

He realized that he must have only one or two bullets left in the magazine. He was sitting there, crouched over and grizzling with irritation when Cameron came up behind him…

And before she could act she found that Roger had materialized beside her, and taken the ancient artefact with a wink; and because he was her boss, she naturally deferred to him.

Then Roger drew back his arm with a wristy motion he had first learned as a child when thwacking the tops of the thistles in the meadow, and hit him very hard, on the base of the skull.

Jones the Bomb said not a word, and subsided prone over the President’s motionless shins. Black Rod smiled to see his eponym put to such good use. It was there to protect the House of Commons, and it had done its job.

But now Habib had found the phone, and handed it to Benedicte. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘or I will detonate the dirty bomb. There is another bomb in the ambulance, my friends, and this time it is the beeg one!’ She called up the menu screen, found what she wanted, and pressed.

DIALLING, said the screen of the master mobile.

‘It is all your fault!’ screamed Benedicte. ‘We played fair, and you did not, and now we must all die!’

In the ambulance in New Palace Yard, Eric Onyeama the parking warden was feeling woozy again, and his bloodied hand pulled harder on the wires that were linked to the funny little box on the floor of the ambulance.

CONNECTING, said the mobile.

‘Ooof,’
said Eric, and sat up on the gurney, and out of the box popped first a red wire, and then a green one.

CONNECTING, said the mobile.

‘Death to America!’ cried Benedicte. ‘Death to imperialism! I die for Palestine and to avenge injustice.’

CONNECTION FAILURE, said the mobile.

And then the klieg lights went
phut,
and the hall was plunged into comparative darkness, and the upper air of the chamber was full of a blizzard of glass. Through every window in the building crashed the special forces of Britain and America, and they executed their task of saving life with pent-up rage and professionalism. Of the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques, all the four who were still conscious and willing — Benedicte, Habib and the two Arabs — were arrested unharmed. The only casualties were Barry White and Chester de Peverill, who were running to escape at the North End, when they contrived to cushion the fall of the left arm and right breast of Philippa of Hainault, which had been dislodged by Agent Cabache, and now fell victim to a stun grenade. These objects, as a result, were undamaged, and able to be replaced with no obvious ill effects. Which was more than could be said for Chester and Barry, who sustained a range of contusions, none of them very severe.

In less than thirty seconds, about 200 officers had surrounded Dean, Cameron and the odd tableau of Jones and the President.

But as the squads of black catsuits with guns moved among the crowd, Dean spotted her again; and this time, shyly, she waved. It was Lucy Goodbody, aka Vanessa, she who had infiltrated RitePrice in Wolverhampton, and who had been sent by the
Guardian
to cover what they had imagined would be a torpid speech about the Special Relationship.

As Dean looked, he realized she wasn’t the Lucy Goodbody of his tortured imagination, the Lucy Goodbody whose flagrant X-rated enjoyment of sex with his best friend had so fried his ego and moved him half to madness. She was just a tired and frightened reporter with a spot on her forehead, visible even at this distance; and it wasn’t her fault, thought Dean, that she had fancied his friend more than him.

‘Yow roight, Vanessa?’ he waved, and began to grow up.

The cordite settled around them, and the fluffy wadding stuff from the inside of the warning shots, and the broken glass crunched underfoot as people made for the exits. No one took much notice of Dean and Cameron as they now huddled together on the stairs. He had his arm round her, and noticed that she smelled lovely. She was crying and crying and crying from shock and exhaustion.

‘Oi,’ said Dean, ‘don’t cry. Yer man — wotsisname?’

‘Adam.’

‘He really didn’t know anything about it. We told him a load of crap. I promise you.’

‘Really?’ She stopped and snivelled.

‘Yeah. Yow’ll be foine, love.’ She turned to him and because her lips were so trembling and vulnerable he kissed them. To his astonishment, they opened a little, and for a second she returned his kiss, and he could taste the inside of her mouth, and remembered why people talked about kisses being sweet. He knew she didn’t mean anything by it. He knew she was just kissing for the joy of being alive, and she knew she would never do it again. But for Dean it was a possession forever, and the joyous phenylethylamines coursed in his veins.

Well, thought Roger Barlow as he sat back down again, stone me. He was a bit stunned by his own recklessness; but one thing was for sure — they’d never bother with the Eulalie business now.

Eulalie! What a prat he’d been. Twenty thousand of his own hard-earned pre-tax pounds, sunk without trace in a lingerie shop called Eulalie, which, at least according to the
Daily Mirror’s
pestilential Debbie Gujaratne, was a front for a brothel. MP RUNS KNOCKING-SHOP was the headline he was dreading, but if tomorrow’s front pages were about his drivelling escapades with Eulalie, he would eat his hat. It was, no doubt about it, a good day to bury bad news.

Deep in their respective unconsciousnesses, Jones and the President lay on the stone dais, curled like twins awaiting their rebirth into a weird and unfair world.

Outside the rain had stopped. In that sudden summery way, the heat was on the street again, and the smell of dust and warmed-up dogshit up rose from the paving stones. The flags of Britain and America fluttered in the sun.

Up above London the clouds were no longer threatening, but high and white, fleecy and friendly. As he was passed carefully out of the ambulance, Eric Onyeama admired them, and knew he had a word for that fat, beautiful look. It would come back to him.

‘Wait,’ he said to his stretcher-bearers as he was carried round the front of the ambulance. He printed off a ticket from the Sanderson machine, and stuck it under the wiper.

‘Tee hee hee,’
said Eric Onyeama, and fainted again from loss of blood.

And later that day Roger cycled home, having dealt with Mrs Betts, the respite centre, and many other matters. He received something approaching a hero’s welcome. ‘You were on TV,’ said the four-year-old, and climbed his knee, with the others, the envied kiss to share; and they all daubed him with tomato ketchup, so he could be like the other people they’d seen on TV.

AUTHOR NOTE

The only implausibility in this story is to imagine that Jones & Co. could for a moment elude the police who guard the Palace of Westminster with such vigilance, tact and kindness.