they had disabled Her Majesty’s TV aerial, and she had been unable to watch Channel Four racing. Conversation at dinner had been strained.
‘I jes lurve to watch the horses,’ the President said. ‘Most afternoons I take a nap in the Oval Office, and I whack on that TV and watch a race. Don’t you watch the races, ma’am?’
‘Hmmf,’ said the Queen.
This morning her TV was still on the blink, and so she felt no particular obligation to watch the speech that was about to take place, without her, in Westminster Hall.
POTUS in two, came the whisper from the smarties on the lapels of the USSS men.
In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the London police were still analysing the implications of the news from Horseferry Road. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell: ‘How many ambulances are there right now in the Westminster area?’
‘I don’t know. A hundred. Tops.’
‘If all this is true, we’ll find the damn thing in five minutes. Roll the CCTV camera film. Oh, another thing. Your dead traffic warden is meant to have recorded all the details in his Huskie, isn’t he?’
‘Ye ssir.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for? We’ll be able to find out all about it from the Apcoa computers. There can’t have been that many illegally parked ambulances in Tufton Street.’
‘Right, sir. I just wondered, sir, given that the whole thing is about to start in a few minutes, whether we should, you know, tell the Americans?’
‘I’ve got 14,000 officers in Central London. We ought to be able to find one rogue ambulance without involving 950 trigger-happy Americans.’
‘Righty-ho, sir… But hang on, sir, I’ll have to tell Colonel Bluett we’re raising the alert threshold. What if he wants to know why?’
‘Tell Bluett to call me,’ said the ranking British officer. Before they could dial him, Bluett was on the line.
POTUS in one minute said the headsets.
The ambulance lolloped down towards the police booth that guarded the Norman Shaw car park. Roger’s open sesame was waved; the tank trap went down; the metal boom went up.
The fatal machine had penetrated the walls of the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, pregnant with arms. Jones parked it smartly and out of the way, in Bay 20 of the small tarmac yard.
As he walked towards it, using a spare visitor’s pass from Cameron to clear the turnstile, Adam suddenly felt a fierce flush of righteousness. The logic of the ambulance now seemed obvious to him, and as he looked at the tinted side window, he speculated murderously about the condition of the poor man within.
He and Cameron had been together in his Holborn flat when, trawling the antiwar websites, he had come across the archive of horror from Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t so much the cruelty that got her, the hooding and beating and killing. It was the female involvement, and the way the whole thing was conducted with the simpering, grinning crassness of pornoloop America.
‘Now I understand it,’ Cameron had said, when they looked together at one of the unprintable images, of a naked Iraqi corpse, and a rather pretty Virginia girl brainlessly mugging for the camera. ‘Now I understand how you could become a suicide bomber.’
Of course, he couldn’t tell Cameron about the stunt that Benedicte had outlined to him, and in which he was collaborating. He knew that she would be prevented by her obligation to Roger, and her instinctive deference towards the office of the President of the United States of America.
So they had worked out a story about a TV crew; and when the truth emerged, he would of course take the heat, and he knew she would forgive him.
As he walked towards the van, he wondered how exactly they would bring the injured man in, and what his injuries were. Would he need a wheelchair? Would they use a stretcher?
He wouldn’t stay to find out, because his plan was to be there in the hall when they entered. He wanted to see the expression on the face of the President.
No one of importance had resigned, in the wake of the scandal. None of the crack-brained neocons had really been confronted with the full awfulness of their doctrines. Now was the time for a reckoning.
It would be worth it.
From the driver’s window, Jones was gesturing at him to stay back.
‘Everything all right?’ said Adam.
‘Please wait,’ said Jones in a whisper. ‘It is the time of prayer.’ Jones wound up his window again, and Adam nodded, and removed his presence some way.
He wished Cameron would hurry up.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
0914 HRS
Now the noise was rising from the square, to mark the imminent Presidential arrival, and the crowd was flagellating itself with posters, denouncing everything American from bombs to powdered baby milk, like distraught mullahs at an ayatollah’s funeral.
And Cameron’s anxiety was rising with every one of her accelerating steps, as she went down the cloister, her papers clutched to her bosom. Roger watched her go, and so did several others.
Just then a taxi pulled up outside the Members’ Entrance. The occupant got out, tipped, and was rewarded with a blatant fistful of blank receipts. It was Felix Thomson, who had spent the last few minutes sitting in the back while rubber-gloved officers subjected the taxi to prostatic indignities, scoping and palping for bombs, and gazing with dental mirrors at the undercarriage.
‘Ah, Felix,’ said Roger, and they adopted attitudes as transparently insincere as Molotov hailing Ribbentrop.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Felix, shaking his grey locks.
‘And how is Felix this fine morning?’
‘Felix is little short of superb,’ said Felix.
‘I saw your proprietor the other night,’ said Roger, who knew how to irritate a journalist.
‘Ah,’ said Felix, and made a face of holy hypocrisy, like a cardinal discussing the health of the Pope.
‘I think I should let you know that he thinks the media are a seething mass of mushy-minded anti-American pinkos, especially on his own papers.’
‘You amaze me.
‘Not that you’ll be doing any of that anti-American stuff today, not in your sketch.’
‘I’d sooner be dead,’ said Felix.
‘The usual knockabout?’
‘Good, clean fun.’
‘Tremendous.’
Felix had turned to go, fishing for his press gallery pass. Roger Barlow felt temptation welling up. ‘Hey Felix.’
‘Yes old man?’
‘I wonder whether I could beg a favour off you.’
‘Provided it doesn’t mean reporting one of your speeches.’
‘No, no, it’s nothing, it’s … Well, you know in newspapers .
‘Yes.’
‘Well, in newspapers you chaps probably have a pretty good idea in the morning what you are going to put in the paper that day.’
‘Well, I don’t have the faintest idea.’
‘Not you, I mean the chaps in general. The top chaps, what do you call them, the sub-editors and things, don’t they draw up some kind of list of the main items of the day?’
