with her.
Which was absurd, because ever since she was a tiny little girl, she had been told how beautiful she was. Sometimes she began to worry that she was going to lose it altogether — not her virginity, obviously, but her initiate status. Perhaps her hymen would actually regrow. At one point she seriously considered the rights and wrongs of an affair with Roger. Once you got over the nicotine-stained teeth, and the goofy sense of humour, there was something vaguely compelling about him: the gaunt face, the brown eyes that seemed perpetually amused, the beer-drinker’s thatch. She’d briefly taken to walking into his office and staring at him for no particular reason, but he hadn’t seemed to notice; and she had soon given up.
Just when she was about to abandon the English male as a contradiction in terms, she met Dr Adam Swallow, former Hedley Bull reader in International Relations at Balliol, now director of Middle East studies at Chatham House.
In contrast to Roger, with his gelatinous ability to see both sides, Adam was a believer, a man of ideological certainty.
The first word she heard him utter was ‘bollocks’.
That is, he said it once, and then he repeated it, and then he said it again.
He was sitting only two away from her in the Strangers’ Gallery in the House of Commons, as steeply shelving as an ancient amphitheatre. In principle, she should have been offended.
By the second, and certainly by the third bollocks she should, in all propriety, have said:
It was a big set-piece Iraq debate, on a weaselly Opposition motion, and the subject was Britain’s continuing commitment. Loads of members on both sides had given vent to little peeps of concern. Cameron thought Roger was making, by his standards, a respectable speech, jabbing his scrunched up notes and sometimes seeming quite emotional. From time to time, however, he let fall some parliamentary platitude, and this earned her scorn.
‘And I just want to say, Mr Deputy Speaker,’ he said somewhere near the beginning, ‘that this has been a very good and important debate with many excellent contributions. .
Cameron was actually groaning to herself, and wishing that MPs didn’t always use this formula to describe a series of shallow and repetitive speeches by people who, as often as not, had been gestapoed into performance by the whips.
‘Bollocks,’ said the man to her right with the Aztec profile, and she shot him an approving glance.
‘And it goes without saying, Mr Deputy Speaker, that we in this country have the best and most dedicated armed forces in the world, and I join other hon membs in paying tribute to the courage and professionalism with which every man or woman has been carrying out his or her duties.
Just as Cameron was wondering why it was necessary to extol ALL members of the armed forces, down to the last pistol-whipping NCO or fornicating Wren, the dark-haired young man exploded again. Some people shifted and snorted at the blasphemy.
At the top of the stairs behind them a man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a black tailcoat with a huge gold seal at his belly; and since he was shaven-skulled and had the physique of Big Daddy, Cameron divined that he must be a parliamentary bouncer.
The Aztec’s third interjection was provoked by what Cameron thought was one of Barlow’s best passages.
‘Many people on both sides of this House, and many people in this country, have the profoundest doubts about some of the reasons we were given for going to war. All those of us who took on trust the Prime Minister’s claims about weapons of mass destruction have reason to feel let down. We were told that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack on Britain in the space of forty-five minutes. We were told that Saddam was buying uranium from Niger.
‘These claims have not, to put it mildly, been vindicated, and I am sure that most people will have been as disgusted as I was by the Government’s attempt to cover its embarrassment.
‘And then we have had the appalling revelations from Abu Ghraib and other jails. There is no question but that we will pay a price for this disaster, and I am sure it is accepted on all sides of the House that nothing is more calculated to inflame Arab sentiment than the spectacle of female torturers.
‘But that still does not mean that the case for the war has been entirely vitiated.
‘I have recently been to Baghdad, with Unicef’ — he paused, looking as self-important as any other MP — ‘and I saw some pretty awful things. This is a country in many ways still in shock. The electricity supply is fairly ropy. The sewage system is frankly screwed up.’ Cameron winced, and there was an unintelligible intervention from one of the few Members who was listening. ‘But everywhere I went, I kid you not, I met people who were genuinely cheered and bucked up —no, in some cases overjoyed,’ he said, as though suddenly remembering a conversation, and there was a little catch in his throat, and people in the Chamber finally stopped gassing, and eyeballed him moodily, ‘yes, in some cases overjoyed to have been liberated by American and British arms from one of the nastiest and most unscrupulous tyrannies of modern memory.
‘To all those who opposed and oppose our allied action in Iraq, there is one overwhelming and unanswerable rejoinder: that whatever our intentions, the result was the freedom of a civilized people from a particularly miserable servitude, and of that I believe we can be very proud.’
There was quite a lot of hear-hearing on both sides of the House, and for the first time in a while, Cameron felt sensations of enthusiasm for her employer. So she was amazed, when the assenting groans had died away, to hear the Inca prince say Bollocks again, so loudly that he was heard by someone on the green benches.
This time Big Daddy in tails descended a few steps towards him, and if he had not risen of his own accord, it seemed quite likely that he would have been manhandled out.
That, however, was three months ago. To say that her feelings had changed would do scant justice to the endocrinal choir of happiness within. According to a reductionist account — probably from the pages of
Her hypothalamus was producing serotonin, giving her a broad benignity, and out of the substantia nigra of her brain came the really good thing, the boy from the black stuff, the most powerful and addictive of all the drugs in her personal self-generated pharmacopoeia.
It was the dopamine that gave her the sense of invulnerability, the hormone that lets a boxer take his punches and helps a rugby player to get knocked down and get up again. It was the dopamine, the clinching intoxicant of sexual love, which now propelled her through the concourse of Portcullis House, approving glances pinging off her from all sides. Without that drug it is doubtful she would have gone, as she did now, to the Pass Office.
CHAPTER TWENTY
0916 HRS
Bluett was in a considerable taking. The various US listening posts had put together enough snatches of conversation to conclude that something was awry.
‘I’m coming right over,’ he told Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, though in reality he was already on his way.
‘Tremendous,’ said Purnell. He waved at Grover, who was just coming in to tell him that the stolen ambulance had been located both on the CCTV and on the Apcoa computers.
‘The Ops Room is all yours. Can I ask why?’
‘I want you to explain why the alert status is now red plus.’
‘Tiff — I’ll see you in a short while, Colonel.’
‘No, I mean I want you to explain now.’
‘I think we may have an incident involving an ambulance.’
‘An ambulance, huh?’ said Bluett, as if he didn’t know.
