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, like Robert De Niro’s lalloglossia when he is hit repeatedly on the head at the end of
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.
Jones turned and looked back at Dean as they waited to cross the traffic.
‘Remember what it says in the Holy Koran, my young friend.
“‘Slay the unbelievers wherever you can find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush for them everywhere.”‘
‘Yeah,’ said Dean miserably. ‘Right.’
‘We will perform the jihad against the Kuffar, the unbelievers.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Remember that Allah is our ally, and they have no ally. We are the lions, Dean, we are the lions ready to set out. We will assault with speed, with the heart of a volcano, with the bombardment of thunders.’
The ambulance moved across Whitehall to the right, and Dean felt his mood lift.
‘Think of the
The ambulance slowed as it approached a red and white boom that controlled access to their intended car park. Habib smiled, and so did Haroun.
Yeah, said Dean, he guessed he would like that, really.
It was no coincidence that Dean was born in March 1988, nine months after Margaret Thatcher’s last election victory. His father was the manager of a previously union-ridden Black Country autoparts factory, and believed he had much to celebrate that night.
Already he relied on immigrant labour, many of them Muslim women, and it made his blood freeze to think of a return to the closed shop. Dean never knew his name or occupation, and for the time being all we need to know is that towards 3 a.m. on the morning of Friday 9 June a Midlands businessman called Sammy, of Viper Wipers, was cruising the Bilston Road in search, as he put it, of a ‘bit of black’.
There is no need here to rehearse the details of that melancholy transaction: the slow prowling of the Ford Granada Ghia 2.1 down the sooty sodium streets, over bridges and culverts that had been here since the age of Telford and Macadam. We must take it that Dean’s biological father cruised on, his eyes like an unblinking snake, past pairs of white girls in white socks, shivering on corners, until he found what he wanted. Neither party would remember exactly where or how Dean had been conceived. Was it beneath this spindly smokestack which 200 years ago had been a symbol of England’s industrial dominance?
Was it beneath this hideously echoing arch, dripping with slime? And how did life begin? Was it a burst condom, that triumph of nature over artifice, or did Dean’s father pay some trifling bonus for unprotected sex?
And yet when the feature writers came to look back at Dean’s childhood and adolescence, they had to admit that England had done him proud. His mother had almost immediately given him up for adoption, and since he was only the faintest coffee colour, he was fostered with a white family who appeared on the face of things to express all that was most honourable about bourgeois Britain.
Dennis and Vera (or Vie) Faulkner were in their late forties when Dean came into their lives. They were considered by the system to be towards the upper limit of the age range, but there was some sympathy for Vie in the chilly hearts of the adoptocrats. She had been one of the would-be mothers who participated in Robert Winston and John Steptoe’s first attempts to create a test-tube baby. It had worked for the others. It had worked for Louise Brown. It hadn’t worked for Vie.
She loved little Dean. She boiled eggs for him every day (in fact, his first act of rebellion was to announce, ‘No more eggs!’) and Dennis, a fanatical monarchist whose family roots were in Northern Ireland, would puff around the garden, teaching him football and cricket. He went to a Montessori school, and learned to glue bits of spaghetti on paper, the discipline now known as Key Stage One. He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School, and though academically undistinguished he showed some talent for water polo.
You simply could not pretend that he was unhappy in that quiet house in Wednesbury. He went on holiday with Dennis and Vie, and learned to put up with the curious glances. When people at school made the mistake of asking ‘where he was really from’ he learned to blank them and to say that he was really from Wolverhampton. From time to time — about once every three years — he would receive small sums of money in badly hand- addressed envelopes, and Dennis would hand them over with a grimace.
All children probably fantasize, from time to time, that they are not really the offspring of their parents. Is there any half-sensitive kid who has not speculated that he was in fact discovered in a capsule in the Himalayas, concealed among the eggs of mutant pterodactyls from the planet Krypton? It was different for Dean. From the word go, Dean had unambiguous physical evidence that he was the subject — the victim — of a swap, and all his life he had to cope not with narcissistic fantasies of otherness, but with the secret thought that he wasn’t meant to be here at all.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t love Dennis and Vie. Mostly he did love them. It was just that sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if they loved him as much as they would love a natural child; and then he felt alienated. Matters came to a head shortly after his sixteenth birthday. He was growing tall, with an honest and engaging smile, and his skin, after some early unruliness, was clear and good. He went with Dennis to the golf club, and earned tips for caddying.
He helped Vie in the Sue Ryder shop. Dennis was an executive with Otis elevators, or had been until his retirement, and hoped that Dean might one day join the company. ‘Get with Otis,’ he would tell his adoptive son, ‘get with Otis and go up in the world!’
