Seventy-Two Virgins

‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘Piss off and die.’

‘Eh?’ Barlow gasped.

‘Not necessarily in that order,’ said Jones.

Barlow looked for guidance to the warden. There was something badly out of whack here. When all was said and done, were they not, he and the warden, part of the same team?

He made the law, the warden enforced it. They were like two china dogs, bracketing the sacred texts of statute.

‘I’m sorry … ?’ he said, pathetically.

Tee hee hee, sniggered Eric Onyeama, and shook his head at the busybody. He felt sure he had seen dis man before, maybe in church, or at a meeting of parents and teachers. But if Roger was looking for an ally now, he was out of luck.

‘De man is right,’ he said. ‘You must go away.’ And Roger did. For once he felt he could have made a difference. He could have improved things here. He cycled on. Was it getting hotter, or was that the sweat of embarrassment?

That man told me to piss off, he told himself. And die, too. He wondered whether anyone had seen his humiliation.

Had Barlow not been so mortified, he might have seen Haroun issue from the side of the van and pass something to Jones. The leader of the gang of four now looked at his watch and decided it was time to bring matters to a close.

‘Please be so kind as to put the ambulance down now, and stop this damnfoolery.’

Hey dere, said Eric to himself. The Huskie was chirruping back to him.

I knew it, he thought. The ambulance had been reported stolen last night, from Dymock Street, Wolverhampton.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Jones’s voice had an evil snit to it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Eric, thinking fast, ‘but you must come with me to the pound.’

‘I’m going to ask you one last time: give us back our vehicle.’

‘You have broken de law.’

‘No,’ sneered Jones: ‘you broke de fucking law. You lifted the thing off the ground while we were here.’

‘I am sorry, but that is wrong.’

‘You IDIOT! Tell him to put the ambulance down. Tell him to do it now.’

In defence of its parking attendants, men and women who must put up with some of the worst abuse known to this coarsened, selfish and irresponsible age, Westminster Council gives them cameras.

These are used not just to record the offence, but also to deter the protesting traffic offender just as he is about to bust a blood vessel or commit a common assault. Now Eric took out his Sony DSU-30 digital camera, and left the Huskie hanging by his neck. As he was doing this Haroun was creeping unseen up the side of the tow-truck.

In his hand he held a nasty-looking piece of medical equipment which was, did he but know it, a thorax draining kit. The man called Jones began to swear – never a good sign for those who had dealings with this horrid person.

‘Omak zanya fee erd.’ Your mother committed adultery with a donkey.

‘I am sorry?’ beamed Eric, who had decided to call the police.

‘Yen ‘aal deen ommak!’ barked Jones. Damn your mother’s rooster – a deadlier insult than you might think, if only to an Arab.

‘What for do you need an ambulance anyway?’ asked Eric, and he took a couple of quick shots of Jones: billhook nose, grubby neck, short grey-flecked hair and peculiar eyes.

‘It is for the disabled,’ said Jones.

‘Who are the disabled?’

Haroun tiptoed round the front of the Renault and prepared to lunge at Dragan Panic.

‘I don’t see a disabled person anywhere,’ repeated Eric. ‘Show me the disabled person.’

‘Here is the disabled person,’ said Jones.

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

The last noise Eric heard before he fainted with shock was the ripping of his own pericardium as it was punctured by the pericardial puncture unit. Then there was a scraping noise as the spike hit something hard that might have been bone.

‘Help me,’ shouted Jones to Dean, the nineteen-year-old, as he caught the falling warden.

Dean watched, mouth agape, as his boss buckled under the weight; and then leapt forward to help him arrange the traffic warden in the gutter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

0841 HRS

Dragan the Serb had been weaned on tales of heroic assassination and glorious betrayal. From the Battle of Kosovo Pole onwards, Serbs have learned to glory in a sense of victimhood. But today he decided to give the national myth a miss.

He pushed away Haroun and his spike, and thudded off, weaving and shoulders hunched, as though with every yard he expected a bullet in his back from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He sprinted from the Muslim extremists, down Tufton Street, past the (former) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, and turned on to Great Peter Street. He weaved one way, he ducked the other.

Haroun watched him go.

‘Leave him,’ called Jones. ‘We have no time.’

Dean already felt he had good reason to be admiring of Jones, but he was amazed at the self-possession with which his boss now began to unload the ambulance from the tow-truck.

‘Whoa,’ he called, as the telescopic arm of the crane jerked into life, and the vehicle was thrust out into the street.

The arm was powered by three separate hydraulic lifts, the first capable of carrying 2,500 kilos, the second 1,700 kilos and the third 1,300 kilos; and in theory they were well capable of lifting a three-and-a-half-tonne ambulance.

But Jones was in such a hurry that he neglected the basic laws of physics.

‘Hey!’ said Dean, as the white machine was swung out over the street, like some mad mediaeval siege engine.

Haroun gave a curse – something nasty about a dog. Dean guessed – and even Habib broke off from flossing with his juniper twig.

‘Yow need to come back a bit,’ shouted Dean over the roar of the Renault engine.

The front wheels of the tow-truck were now on the verge of leaving the ground; black smoke was coming from the exhaust; the whole thing was about to keel over, and Dean instinctively ran to drag the body of Eric the warden out of the way.

‘It is fine, it is fine,’ shouted Jones, and flipped the next toggle, so that their stolen machine crashed back towards them and bust a taillight on the bed of the tow-truck.

‘Do it like this,’ called Habib quietly in Arabic. Habib was also called Freddie, and came from a good Lebanese family. He was a Takfiri, a man who masked the ferocity of his faith with a sympathetic worldliness; and he had spent enough time in gambling houses to understand the principles of the grabby machines you use to pick up a watch or a fluffy toy.

Together, and with what Dean thought was remarkable coolness, he and Jones worked out how to ease in the last extender arm and, in hydraulic pants, the van was lowered to the ground.

With the speed of Formula One pitstopmen they now undid the metal crabs and hessian straps, bunged them on the back of the tow-truck, and loaded poor Eric in the back of the ambulance.

Haroun paused only to read the sign on the side of the Renault.

‘How ees my driving?’ he said, and laughed, a horrible carking yelp.

It says something for the tranquillity that has descended on the Church of England that no one else observed these events outside Church House.

No one took any notice of them as they drove in full conformity with the laws of the road – apart from the taillight – in the direction of the Palace of Westminster.

They began thereby to catch up with Roger Barlow, who was waiting with his bike at a red traffic light, as all good lawmakers must.

CHAPTER NINE

0843 HRS

Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected. The sun would still, at the appointed date four billion years hence, expand to the girth of a red giant and devour the planet. In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail. The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behaviour of his brief human avatar.

It wasn’t the sex comedy side of things. It wasn’t the waste of money, the cash that should have gone into Weetabix and plastic guns for shooting him in bed.

It was the gullibility – that was what worried him.

Should he wait for the papers to present this appalling Hieronymus Bosch version of his life? Or should he try to give his account first, and thereby win points for frankness?

Hang on a tick: there was a colleague. Swishing down the pavement, hair cut by Trumpers, suit cut by Savile Row – it was Adrian (Ziggy) Roberts. Bright. Forceful. Decisive. Very far from completely unbearable; in fact, by any standards really rather nice.

Roger conceived a desire to talk to him, not least because he could see under his arm the early edition of the Evening Standard.

‘Ziggy, old man,’ called Roger Barlow, kerb-crawling on his bike.

‘Hombre!’ replied Ziggy.

‘You going to this Westminster Hall business?’

‘God no,’ said Ziggy, who had benefited from the most expensive education England can provide. ‘Can’t be arsed.’

Roger felt welling up in himself the urge to confide in a friend. A problem shared, he whispered to himself, is a problem halved.

‘Can I ask you something, Zigs?’

‘Of course.’

Roger looked at his colleague, his high, clear forehead, his myriad certainties. On second thoughts, no.

Ziggy counted as a friend, but it was, in the end, your friends who did you in. And quite right, too. That was what friends were for.

‘That posh suit,’ said Barlow. ‘Just tell me roughly how much.’ But Ziggy’s answer was lost in the noise of the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter. Blimey, thought Barlow: this was worse than the helicopter paranoia scene in Goodfellas.

‘Wait a sec,’ said the co-pilot of the chopper, as they bullocked over towards the Embankment. He craned backwards the way they had come, and the City of Westminster – touching in its majesty – was reflected in the black visor of his helmet.

‘I just realized …’

‘Say again?’ yodelled the pilot into the mike on his chin.

‘I think we just flew over it. It was on a tow-truck. I didn’t really take it in …’

‘On a tow-truck?’

‘Yeah, you know, a council truck.’

‘Bollocks,’ said the pilot. ‘No one lifts an ambulance.’

‘Go on, it’ll take thirty seconds. Just back there in that little street near Marsham Street.’

The pilot sighed and turned the joystick. ‘Well,’ he said a little later. ‘There’s your tow-truck, but I don’t see any ambulance.’

The co-pilot stared. It may have been unusual for an ambulance to be hoisted, but it was positively unheard of for a vehicle of any kind to escape the clutches of a tow-truck operator.

‘Where’s the driver, anyway?’ he asked himself.

Here, thought Dragan Panic. Down here! Look this way!

For a couple of seconds he jumped up and down, waving and staring at the police helicopter until his eyeballs began to ache from the glare.

No use. They couldn’t see him.

Dragan had a pretty good idea what he had witnessed: the shambolic beginning of something that might end with eternal loss and heartache for thousands of families. He had read about the idiotic punch-up outside Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11 itself, when the Islamic headcases left their maps and their Koran and their flight manuals in the stolen hire car. But mere incompetence was no guarantee of failure, as he knew from his own soldiering.

Dragan looked down towards Marsham Street. He saw a building site; he saw men in yellow hats and muddy boots. Tough men, who could help.

He was older and fatter than he had been as a purple-pyjamaed Serb MUP man, and he was soaked with sweat; and though he had absolutely no reason to love the United States, not after what they had done to Serbia, he stamped and grunted as fast as his Reeboks would carry him.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Help, please!’

Dark faces looked up.

Dragan put his hands on his knees in exhaustion, and began to explain to the immigrant builders that there was a plot against America.

CHAPTER TEN

0844 HRS

‘I’m starting to think we should warn the Yanks,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

‘You mean about the ambulance?’ said Grover. ‘What makes you think they don’t know already?’

But when Purnell came to dial Bluett he once again found himself changing his mind. Why raise the temperature?

He cleared his throat when Bluett picked up, and was on the point of improvising some excuse when the American cut in.

‘Mr Deputy Commissioner, we have a problem.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Purnell, ‘I know. I mean, what problem?’

‘We got reports of helicopter activity right over the cavalcade route, and the Black Hawk needs to go that way.’

‘…’ said Purnell.

‘We need that Black Hawk in the aerial vicinity at all times, and neither of us wants a mid-air collision.’

Purnell found his eyes closing, and he listened some more.

‘Unbelievable,’ he told Grover, when the conversation was over. ‘We’ve got just over an hour till the President starts speaking, and the Americans are fussing about the French Ambassador’s girlfriend. They say they don’t want her in the hall.

‘And tell the boys in the chopper to clear out of the way, would you?’

The trouble with today, thought Purnell, was that if something did go wrong, no one could say they hadn’t been warned.

BOMB SCARE HITS LONDON read Roger Barlow, continuing to steal shifty looks at Ziggy’s Standard; and then page after page about the state visit.

Of course there was nothing about him. He felt like laughing at his own egocentricity.

There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction, just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed. Maybe he wasn’t a genuine akratic. Maybe it would be more accurate to say he had a thanatos urge. By this time next week, he thought, there would be nothing left for him to do but go on daytime TV shows. Perhaps in ten years’ time he might be sufficiently rehabilitated to be offered the part of Widow Twanky at the Salvation Army hall in Horsham.

‘Catch you round, then,’ said Barlow to Ziggy.

‘Ciao-ciao,’ called Ziggy, the man of efficiency and ambition. He flashed his pink ‘P’ form, and was admitted to the security bubble.

For the eighth time that morning, Barlow presented his bike for inspection by the authorities.

Roadblock was too modest a word for the Atlantic wall of concrete that the anti-terrorist mob had put in Parliament Square. Each lithon of black-painted aggregate was packed with steel and designed to withstand 83 newtons of force, or a suicide ram-raid with a Chieftain tank.

There was a gap through which cars were being admitted in drips, but all cycles were being stopped.

‘Whoa there, sir,’ said a sixteen-and-a-half-stone American man with a kind of transparent plastic Curly-Wurly coming out of his ear and disappearing into his collar. ‘How are we today?’

‘We’re fine,’ said Barlow shortly.

‘I can’t let you through without a pink pass with the letter P.’ Barlow had grown up in the Cold War, and when at school he had read Thucydides. It had been obvious to him that America was the modern Athens – energetic, pluralistic, the guarantor of democracy and freedom; and therefore infinitely to be preferred to the Soviet Union, closed, nasty, militaristic, the modern Sparta. But now, on being intercepted by an enormous Kansan, just feet away from the statue of Winston Churchill, he felt his gorge rise. His eyes prickled with irritation. ‘I am a Member of Parliament.

‘Oh, damn it all,’ he added; though as luck would have it his curse was lost in the noise of the Metropolitan Police Twin Squirrel swinging high and away towards Victoria.

Had he looked 200 feet behind him, he would have seen the ambulance come to a halt in the queue for the very same traffic lights-cum-checkpoint.

Sitting at the wheel, Jones swore. Any minute now the cavalcade would be upon them. He looked at the Americans, checking each vehicle with glacial deliberation, and checked his watch.

‘Aire fe Mabda’ak,’ he said, which means ‘My cock in your principles’.

The cavalcade was now approximately twenty-seven minutes away from Parliament Square. Apart from the outriders, it consisted of thirty black vehicles, a mobile operating theatre complete with the appropriate blood supplies and a specially adapted Black Hawk helicopter in a continuous hover, intended to snatch the principals in the event of an ambush. The two ‘permanent protectees’, as they were known to the 950 American agents in London, were in a Cadillac De Ville so fortified it was a wonder it could move. The armour plating was five inches thick and designed to withstand direct fire from a bazooka or a mine placed beneath it. There was a tea-cosy of armour around the battery, the radiator and the engine block, to minimize the risk of the fuel catching fire. The glass was three inches of polycarbonate laminate and instead of allowing the driver simply to look through the windshield, an infra-red camera scanned the heat signature of all the objects in the path of the car, and projected an image on the inside of the windscreen. But move the Cadillac did, though at something less than the US speed limit.

Permanent Protectee number one shuffled the papers of his speech and touched the hand of Permanent Protectee number two. It was an insane way to travel, but kind of fun. The cavalcade mounted the ramparted expressway at the end of the M4, and West London was spread out beneath them in the morning sun, like a beautiful woman surprised in bed without her make-up.

‘Gee,’ said the second Permanent Protectee, ‘ain’t that something?’

She smiled at her husband, but secretly she was worried. She had been reading the papers; she knew about the abortive raids on the Islamist cells. That was why she had furtively telephoned Colonel Bluett and begged him to take extra precautions.

Bluett had been frankly amazed, but also pleased to be made her confidant.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Never mind what the Brits say: that place is gonna be full of my people. I mean some of our top men.’

As the cavalcade began to crawl the last nine miles of its journey, a hatch was opening on the roof of the east wing of the Palace of Westminster, in the cool shadow of Big Ben. Out scrambled the sizeable figure of Lieutenant Jason Pickel.

He stood for a moment on the duckboards, 120 feet above New Palace Yard, listening to the honking of horns down the Embankment, the protesters bleating to each other, like ewes in some distant fold. He held out his hand and squinted at it.

‘Man oh man,’ he said to himself. He stopped the tremor by gripping his sniper’s rifle, and walked on down the duckboard until he found a point of vantage.

‘Are you all right, Jason?’ asked Sergeant Indira Nath, who had followed him up. Indira had been specifically deputed to stay with Pickel, on the orders of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell.

Not that the British cops had any reason to think of Pickel as a risk. It was just that if they were going to have a Yank sharpshooter on the east wing roof – and Bluett was very keen – then there was damn well going to be a Brit to accompany him.

Indira was from the SO 19 Firearms Unit. She had huge eyes, rosy lips, and tiny, delicate hands, in which she now toted an Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, built by Accuracy International of Portsmouth, capable in the hands of an average marksman of bunching bullets within a couple of inches at more than 600 yards. In the hands of Indira, the gun could shoot the horns off a snail.

‘You OK?’ she repeated.

‘It’s just that something gave me goosebumps here. I guess you could call it Dad flashbacks.’

Dad flashbacks? wondered Indira. It sounded like something worrying from Sheila Kitzinger’s Baby and Child Care. She looked at her neighbour on the roof. He was big and blond, with a proud nose and heavy brow, and hands that made his rifle-barrel look like a pencil. He was dressed in olive drab fatigues, and had the name Pickel sewn in black capitals on his chest, as well as the American flag. She hoped he wasn’t going to blab about some deathbed reconciliation with the father who never loved him.

‘Yeah, honey, it’s like a Nam flashback, ’cept it’s about Baghdad.’

‘Tell me about it, Jason,’ said Indira as they settled down together. ‘Were you scared?’

‘Scared? Did you say scared? Jeez, I was—What the hell was that?’

The American went rigid as percussive waves filled the air. He instinctively eased off the safety catch and now BONG the second explosion assailed his eardrums.

The whole roof vibrated as Big Ben sounded the opening carillon of a quarter to nine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

0845 HRS

The great clock struck, and Jones cursed (something about a dog, again). The longer they stayed in this traffic jam, the higher their chances of being spotted. Surely the tow-truck man would by now have raised the alarm?

‘But why did he clamp us, sir?’ asked Dean.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Isn’t that why we got an ambulance, so this couldn’t happen?’

‘Have faith, Dean. Has not Allah looked after us? Think of the prophet in his youth, how he became a warrior for God.’

An electronic voice interrupted them. It was female, and spoke in an American accent.

‘Turn left now,’ she said. Haroun cursed. It was the satnav, determined to take the vehicle back to Wolverhampton. Much to the irritation of Jones and his team, they could find no way of silencing her.

‘Soon we will be in the belly of the beast,’ said Jones.

‘Make a U-turn,’ said the satnav, ‘and then turn right in 100 yards.’

The voice of the bossy little robot carried through the driver’s window, and might have reached the ears of Roger Barlow, who was now only a matter of a few feet away; except that he was turned away and bent over.

He was trying to lock up his bike against the railings of St Margaret’s, just until they sorted out this business with the pass.

‘Not there, sir,’ said an American.

‘Where?’

‘Not there, either, sir. I am afraid you will have to take it with you.’

‘But I can’t get into the Commons without a pass, can I?’ The USSS man shrugged.

Barlow stood on the pavement with his bike, like some washed-up crab, as the tide of traffic lapped through the gap and continued around Parliament Square. As he approached his fifty-second year, Roger was conscious that his temper was decreasingly frenetic. He had long since ceased to rave at airport check-ins. If his train was delayed for two hours, it no longer occurred to him to sob and squeal into his mobile. But there was something about being told what to do by this gigantic gone-to-seed quarterback that got, frankly, on his tits.

The Yank was wearing those clodhopping American lace-ups with Cornish pasty welts, a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a large blue blazer. He had the Kevin Costner-ish Germanic looks that you see in so many members of the American military.

‘Well, can I borrow your mobile? I need to get this blasted pass from my assistant.’

‘That’s not allowed, sir.’

Barlow was fed up with the moronic anti-American protesters who were fringing the square and bawling their questions about oil and how many kids Nestlé had killed that day. But he was also fed up with being treated like a terrorist, when he was a bleeding Parliamentarian, and the people of Cirencester had sent him to this place, and it was frankly frigging outrageous that he should be denied access by this Yank. Not that he wanted to be anti-American, of course.