Seventy-Two Virgins

A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.

At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.

In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.

Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.

By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.

She coped with all that, and she endured his jelly-like answers about censorship and abortion; so she was thrilled when he seemed to take some sort of stand on gay marriage. His answer was indistinct, no doubt deliberately so, but she heard him say something to the effect that gay marriage was ‘a bit rum when you consider that marriage is normally thought of as taking place between a man and a woman’. Whoopee!

At once it was as though she had chanced upon a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views. He was actually AGAINST something, she thought, almost hugging herself with excitement. He was against a cause espoused by people who might actually VOTE for him. And then, of course, came the disappointment.

She was charged with drafting an answer to a letter from a constituent, who sought the joys of matrimony with his same-sex ‘partner’. She wrote a rather fierce letter, if not exactly consigning the man, an IT consultant, to the licking tongues of hellfire, then at least making it pretty clear what she, or Roger Barlow, whose name and superscription appeared on the letter, thought of the whole project. To her amazement he had crossed it out and written, ‘Good on yer, matey, go right ahead. Frankly I don’t see why the state should object to a union between three men and a dog. Yours sincerely.’

‘But excuse me,’ she said, and her lips grew tight and her eyes larger and more beautiful than ever, ‘I thought you were against it. That’s what you said in the church.’

‘Oh did I?’ said Roger. His own eyes were merry and dark. ‘No, I think what I said, in the interests of total accuracy, was that it was a bit rum, and to say something is a bit rum is a long day’s march from saying that you are against it. A long day’s march.’

‘Right,’ said Cameron.

There were still ways she admired him. He worked prodigiously hard. He got things done. By dint of 5 a.m. vigils, and by writing innumerable letters, he undoubtedly lifted the odd pebble from the mountain of suffering that oppressed the losers of Cirencester. He cared a lot about some of his projects, and yet sometimes she couldn’t help wondering about his IDEALS. His VALUES. His CORE BELIEFS.

Sometimes, it occurred to her, when she listened to Roger waffling about pornography or abortion, the mullahs had a point. No wonder the Christian churches seemed in permanent confusion and decline, and no wonder Islam was the fastest-growing religion in this country.

As they walked through the checkpoint and over the zebra crossing, the noise of the protesters became overpowering. They had whistles and rattles and bongos and steel drums. There was one man so covered in badges denouncing America that he looked like a pearly queen.

Seeing Barlow, he picked up his megaphone and bawled, ‘There’s that tosser, whatsisname! It’s that jerk thingummy! It’s old whodjamaflip, the complete prat. Sorry I can’t remember your name, my old china, but I hope you accept that my sentiments are sincere. Come on everybody, let’s have a chorus.’ And he began to warble raggedly, jabbing a finger in the direction of Barlow and Cameron as they scuttled past. ‘You’re shit, and you know you are, you’re shit and you know you are …’(repeat to fade).

Cameron scowled at the man, piqued in her basic sense of loyalty. She tried accelerating her gait, in the hope that Roger would walk faster.

Much earlier that morning she and Adam, her boyfriend, had been brushing their teeth in the Amigo hotel, Brussels. She had been nuzzling him, unable to speak for foam and love, when he spat out his own mouthful of Colgate and made a peculiar request.

She had agreed without thinking; of course she had. But now that she was with Roger, and now that she could hear the square full of the sounds of hate, it seemed a more difficult and dangerous proposition.

She felt uneasy that she had handed over Roger’s car park pass; though Roger the cyclist had long since lost track of it, and probably didn’t even know she had it in her handbag. Now she was dubious about the ethics of the other request that Adam had made.

‘It’s completely outrageous,’ Adam had told her, as he outlined the callous discrimination against the journalists from Al-Khadija. ‘They just want to make a film about parliamentary democracy. Aren’t we supposed to be in favour of that kind of thing?’

She didn’t have to do anything difficult, he said: she just had to pick them up, and obviously he couldn’t do it himself because he didn’t have a researcher’s pass. And, by the way, could she get one for him, too?

So guiltily she tried to force Roger’s pace, and turned her eyes away from the crowd, and didn’t look twice at the white emergency services vehicle chuntering slowly round the corner to her left.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

0857 HRS

‘So one of our chopper boys thinks he saw an ambulance?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘Did he get the roof number?’

The Deputy Assistant Commissioner was thinking that there was a case for passing it on to the pilot of the Black Hawk.

‘No,’ said Grover. ‘He can’t remember it, and anyway he says it was half covered up by a tow-truck crane.’

‘A tow-truck?’

‘S’what he says.’

‘Well, where’s this tow-truck? Christ on a bike.’

Dragan Panic sighed. He was only second in the queue, but he seemed to have been here for some time.

At Horseferry Road police station Duty Officer Louise Botting was dealing with another victim of crime.

She was a woman of about fifty, with grey hair, and perfectly attired for cycling. She had a helmet with a red reflector, fluorescent yellow zig-zags on her torso, and an air of Anglo-Saxon indignation.

‘I feel a bit silly reporting it, but I feel it’s my duty. It’s just so uncivilized.’

‘I know, madam,’ said Louise Botting, and passed her a form.

‘Do you know why they do it?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘Is there ever any chance of catching them, do you think?’

‘Well, there’s always a chance, I s’pose.’

Behind her in the queue, Dragan groaned.

‘What I would like to know,’ said the woman loudly as she left, ‘is what kind of person would steal my bike seat?’

No one in the room felt able to answer, least of all Dragan, who now bent towards the counter, his muscles still trembling with exertion.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ asked Louise Botting.

‘They killed the traffic warden, didn’t they,’ said Dragan.

‘Did they?’ asked Sergeant Botting, and then listened with mounting amazement. At one point she interrupted him. ‘Did you say you were removing an ambulance?’

‘I told him not to. I was going to tell him not to.’

‘And why are you covered in mud?’

Dragan thumped a weary fist on the attack-proof glass, like a drunk in a benefit office. ‘I swear I am telling the truth.’

Louise Botting summoned the station commander, and together they took a full statement.

‘Are you saying you lifted this ambulance? Right. And where is this ambulance now? They drove off, you say, and you are sure they are Muslim terrorists. I see, Mr Panic. Now, what’s your address? No. 10, Eaton Place, SW1. You’re sure about that. I see.’

Then the station commander took a call, and when he explained its contents to Louise Botting, she looked at Dragan Panic with new and wondering eyes.

She filled in an Initial Crime Report, and timed the incident for 9 a.m.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

0900 HRS

BONG Big Ben struck nine, and on the roof of the Commons, Pickel quivered again.

BONG The cavalcade effortfully turned right towards Chelsea, and the leaves of the Embankment waved beneath the passage of the Black Hawk.

BONG The Ambassador of the French Republic, M. Yves Charpentier, told his official driver to follow the Mall down to Parliament Square and make for St Stephen’s Entrance. Then he sat back on the blue velour of the Renault and buried his nose in the hot black scented crown of his mistress, Benedicte al-Walibi.

BONG In a cave in the tribal areas of Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border, the BBC’s coverage of the state visit was being closely monitored on TV.

BONG The British Prime Minister sat in his small office in Downing Street and gave heartfelt thanks, once again, to the protocol ruling which meant he did not have to attend the speech in Westminster Hall; the theory being that he had proposed the President’s health last night at Windsor, and that was enough. John Major, it had been pointed out, was not there for Nelson Mandela. Nor for Bill Clinton, if his memory served him correctly.

BONG Colonel Bluett of the US Secret Service had decided that it was time to take a more active role in the security operation, and was now being driven in a blacked-out Ford from Grosvenor Square to Scotland Yard.

BONG In the White House in Washington, the Presidential red setter had a beautiful dream, in which he sunk his teeth into the neck of the Presidential cat.

BONG Roger Barlow’s four-year-old heir was sitting cross-legged at school, and looking intently at some pictures of king-killing in old Dahomey.

BONG Jones felt the first drop of perspiration emerge from his temple and run down his cheek.

As Roger and Cameron gained the entrance to New Palace Yard, a taxi drew up. The policeman bent down to look through the window, and then let them through. After twenty-five years everyone knew Felix Thomson. Barlow knew him, too, and offered a mock-salute which was returned, though perhaps a little more mockingly than Barlow, in an ideal world, would have liked.

The policeman at the gate once more demanded production of the pink slip, though for some reason they waved Felix Thomson’s taxi on without too much fuss. The vehicle rolled on a few yards down the cobbles to another barricade, a ramp with winking lights that came up and prevented access, just by the spot where Airey Neave had been blown up by the IRA.

‘No, sorry, sir,’ said the policeman. Barlow had made to follow the taxi, because he wanted to have a word with Felix Thomson, and now he was told this was not on. He’d have to go that way, through the turnstiles. Did he have his pass with him? He had his pass.

‘Oh Cameron, by the way, I have a terrible feeling I have to make a speech in the debate this afternoon.’

‘That’s right, Roger. The whips have been on to us twice already. They are expecting it.’

‘Oh lor’, sighed the MP, stopping. ‘Can you remember what it’s all about?’

Why the hell, wondered Cameron, couldn’t he ever concentrate on what she was saying? ‘I sent you a speech. I mean I sent you a draft of the speech. It was in your mail on Friday.’

‘Oh yes, and what’s the Bill about?’

‘It’s the Water Utilities Bill (England and Wales). The whips thought you might be interested in speaking on fluoridation.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Roger, ‘and what line am I taking?’

‘Well, I sort of presumed you would be taking a libertarian line. A lot of people have been writing in, saying how much they dislike fluoridation. They say it’s the nanny state.’

‘Nasty stuff, is it, fluoride?’

‘Well, it can be deadly poisonous, and they’ve done a lot of research on possible side-effects …’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Roger, ‘I know what it does. It causes premature baldness in rhesus monkeys, hypertension in rats, and it changes the sex of cuttlefish.’

‘If you say so, Roger.’ She tried shifting forwards. Adam would be waiting.

‘I mean, what if the whole libertarian argument is utter tosh? What if this stuff is really good for you, protects the nation’s teeth, mmm? I think of my parents’ generation. They never had the stuff and they had terrible trouble. I remember my father taking a great bite of an apple, and crack. Very psychologically damaging, losing your teeth. It’s all in Freud. You know, if you’re an elephant, and you lose your teeth, you’ve had it.’

‘I expert the same goes if you’re a lion.’

‘Good point,’ said Roger. ‘Here, just say aaah. Go on, open wide the pearly gates.’ Cameron had the surreal experience of offering her teeth for inspection to the Member for Cirencester.

‘See,’ said Roger, ‘inside every skull, thirty-two vital differences between the English and the Americans.’ As he was looking his research assistant in the mouth, he became aware of two people craning their necks to watch him from 120 feet up. It was Jason Pickel and Indira, their scopes glinting in the sun.

‘Can I stop now?’ asked Cameron.

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Barlow, and they resumed their walk to the wrought-iron porch of the Members’ Entrance.

‘You’re quite happy for me to check your teeth?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Ah,’ said Roger, brightening again. ‘Now that is what we call Barlow’s Law of the Displaced Negative. In principle you are saying that you are happy for me to look at your teeth, but there is a stray negative, the no, which simply needs to be removed from the beginning of that sentence and inserted between subject and predicate, to give the real meaning. You secretly mean, “It’s not fine.” To give another example, men are often asked, “Do I look OK in this dress?” and they answer, “No, no, you look great.” The displaced negative is a clue to their real thoughts. They should say, “Yes, darling, you look great.” The female equivalent is “No, no, darling, you have got masses of hair.”’

Cameron snorted, not altogether fondly. She was damned if she was going to ask Roger if she looked OK, mainly because she had no (real) doubts about the matter.

Finally she left Roger, berthing his bike in the cycle racks at the bottom of New Palace Yard. She felt she had done her best.

He knew about the fluoride speech. He was on top of the Betts case, and the plan to save the respite centre. He was, by his standards, under control.

Now she had to go quickly to find Adam.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

0908 HRS

Even though it was a warm July morning, the man outside the Red Lion pub in Derby Gate was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and faded cords. He had scuffed brown brogues from which emerged cheap towelling socks, one of which was blue, and one of which looked suspiciously like a trophy from the goody bag of Virgin Atlantic. When the authorities would come that evening to examine the contents of his wallet, they would confirm that he was Dr Adam Swallow, thirty-five, and that he had recently been travelling in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to judge by the few decayed and crumpled low-denomination bills he had saved from his trips. He was a reader at the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Oxford, and a plastic badge suggested that he was director of Middle Eastern studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. The innermost fold of his wallet contained a forgotten condom of great antiquity and no contraceptive value whatever.

He was tall and lean and dark, and sitting forward on the beer-splashed bench, and between his thick wrists he held a tabloid paper. He was chuckling.

The centre page feature was a tremendous tub-thumping why oh why piece by Sir Trevor Hutchinson, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Entitled ‘Our Shameful Surrender to Terror’, it dilated on the various erosions of liberty entailed by the current obsession with security. Was it not outrageous, whinnied Sir Trev, that the Queen was being served with plastic cutlery, aboard the royal flight, all these years after 9/11? He gave a vigorous description of the Metropolitan Police Maginot Line around the Palace of Westminster. He railed against the frogmen in the Thames, the boom that had been constructed in the river, to protect the Commons Terrace from a riparian boarding party, the glass barrier in the Chamber, that shielded the electors from their representatives, or vice versa, for the first time in our island story. And then he related his almost insane irritation, when boarding a flight from Heathrow to Inverness to fulfil an important shooting engagement, at being asked to produce his passport. There being 300 words to supply after this opening lungful, Sir Trev went on to deplore the general phobia of risk in today’s namby-pamby society, alighting on such diverse themes as the near cancellation, on insurance grounds, of the climactic firework display at the Henley Regatta, and the use of cup-holders and – splutterissimo – air-bags in the new American tanks which the army, in defiance of his advice, was on the verge of buying.

‘Good stuff, good stuff,’ chuckled Adam, who had written his own share of bilge in his time. He folded the paper carefully, and would have dropped it in the bin, had not the bins all been removed for security reasons from this part of Westminster. He checked his watch, stood up, and looked boldly out into the street, his bright brown eyes shining with tension. They should be here any minute, he thought.

Where was Cameron?

Now the drops were chasing each other down Jones’s pitted temples, and he could hear the chatter of the Black Hawk, coming up the Embankment with the President underneath.

He wondered if there was a sign on the roof, a visible identification code, and then began to feel the ambulance shrieking their crime to the heavens.

As he waited for the last lights to turn, he rubbed his palms together, and made little black worms of dried blood.

‘He says four of them killed the warden,’ said the station commander into the phone.

‘Killed a traffic warden? We all feel like that sometimes.’

‘No, I think he’s serious.’

‘Can he identify the ambulance?’

‘Sounds like he had to scarper pretty quick.’

‘We’d better get on to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner’s office.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said the station commander. ‘I’ll do that right away. I don’t suppose you know the number, do you?’

‘I’ll get back to you in a minute. You’ve sent someone round to Tufton Street, have you?’

‘Good thinking,’ said the station commander.

‘Does he have any idea where this ambulance has gone?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

0909 HRS

‘Continue for 200 yards,’ said the satnav in the ambulance, still yearning in its silicon soul for Wolverhampton and home, ‘and then try to make a U-turn.’

‘Oh shut up, in the name of Allah,’ said Haroun.

‘Can’t you work out how to make that thing stop?’ said Jones.

‘It is a sharmoota. It is a whore,’ said Haroun.

‘It’s just a machine.’

‘It is an American computer whore.’

Habib had been silent, playing with his prayer beads, a chunky collection of sickly lime-green onyx. He had smooth, rubbery, almost Disney-ish features, and crinkly hair which he concealed in all weathers beneath a woven black skullcap. Now he opened his sad brown eyes.

‘The man from the truck will tell them about us.’

‘What will he say? There are too many ambulances.’

‘He may have seen our number.’

‘Believe me,’ said Haroun, still fantasizing about what he might have done with that thoracic spike, ‘the heathen dog was too frightened. It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s him.’ He jerked his head towards the back of the van.

Jones took a still bloodied hand off the wheel as they came round into Whitehall. He pointed to a packet of surgical wipes on the dashboard, next to a Unison coffee mug.

‘Please pass me one,’ he said to Haroun in Arabic, and then read out the English motto on the side of the box: ‘“Clean hands save lives”. Indeed.’

‘He could ruin it for everyone,’ said Haroun in Arabic, passing the wipes like an airline stewardess.

‘I know.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Have faith,’ said the man called Jones, sponging the blood off his hands, and dropping the tissues on to the floor. They were talking about Dean.

Haroun and Habib, in slightly different ways, were possessed of animal cruelty. Both men had trained with him in the deserts, at the camps in the Sudan and at Khalden in Afghanistan. Habib’s tranquil exterior was deceptive, in that he liked to meditate on violence, and had devised some of the more baroque elements of the plan they were about to execute.

With his slanty eyes and triangular tongue, Haroun was like a priggish wolf. If that porky tow-van operator hadn’t beaten it so quickly, Haroun would have done for him with all the dispatch of a halal butcher slicing the throat of a sacrificial kid.

In the view of Habib and Haroun, therefore, it was absurd to have Dean in this operation at all. It was just because he was British. It was just because he was the local talent. It was tokenism. It was political correctness gone mad.

As for his terroristic temperament, he seemed to have absorbed far too much of the risk-aversion of the modern British male.

It had only been a few minutes since the violence outside Church House, but any self-respecting terrorist would surely by now have steeled his nerves. Dean, if anything, seemed to be losing morale by the second. He was sitting in the back, by the exsanguinating form of Eric Onyeama, and he was beginning to keen in a frankly off-putting way.

‘You guys,’ he said, sticking his head through the door, ‘are you sure we shouldn’t just knock this on the head?’ He said yow, rather than you, because he was from Wolverhampton.

‘Why don’t we just drive on here, and maybe we could like chill for a couple of days. Why don’t we do like the machine says, and go back to Wolvo?’

Habib looked at Haroun. Haroun looked at Jones. Dean caught the glances. It would on the whole be better not to end up like the poor traffic warden, yerked beneath the breastbone, with the bright bronchial blood still bubbling about the nose and mouth.

‘OK OK.’ Dean sat back down on the plastic banquette. ‘Forget I mentioned it.’ Jones bore to the right on Whitehall, about 100 yards short of the Cenotaph, and indicated that he wished to cross the traffic.

‘Please make a U-turn now,’ said the satnav, as soon as she understood what he was trying to do.

Haroun said something truly awful to the computer about what he would do to her mother’s rib cage.

Then he struck her on the fascia with a seat belt cutter. The machine started to squeak and gibber, sounding like Robert De Niro when he is hit repeatedly on the head at the end of Cape Fear.

Then she fell silent. The trouble was, thought Dean, she was right. Of all the great terrorist outrages of history, could any boast such screwed-up and hopeless beginnings? Dean tried to think himself into the mind of one who was about to fill the citadels of the West with death and despair, and to send a message to every dutiful Muslim of encouragement, gladness and strength. He sighed and blinked.