Like big black birds of prey alighting one after the other on a telegraph wire, the cars of the cavalcade came to a halt in line. Exactly abreast of the red carpet that spilled from the steps of St Stephen’s Entrance drew up the decoy Cadillac De Ville, and the crowd experienced a kind of orgasm of hatred.
‘Incoming!’ said the USSS men to each other, as the eggs volleyed over the road and the railings, and as soon as they splatted on the crimson cloth, the mess was cleared up by men in black tights with J-cloths. Then the second decoy Cadillac swooped in to land, and drew some more of the protesters’ ammo. Then the first two Cadillacs shifted forward, and the real De Ville slid into its berth, right slap next to the candy-striped marquee they had erected in front of St Stephen’s Entrance.
Inside were the battery of sensors and G-men that Jones had hoped to avoid by choosing his subterranean route. Permanent Protectees One and Two got out.
Almost unseen by the mob they slipped into the shelter of the marquee and went up the steps, hand in hand, for their first engagement, an audience with the Speaker of the House of Commons. Pressing up against the barricades, and the statue of Jan Christiaan Smuts, the crowd disgraced itself with its commentary.
When she entered the Pass Office Cameron found she was momentarily tongue-tied. Every yell and honk outside was turning into a beat of warning in her lovely head, that this was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Everyone knew the risks, and surely Adam could see that there was something weird about what he was asking her to do. Why was he rushing her? Why was she being given no real time to think?
Whatever you thought about the President, he was her leader, her head of state. If only in virtue of his office, he deserved her most devoted and assiduous protection.
She calmed herself down. Adam could not possibly have got this wrong. It was only a TV crew.
‘Yes, m’dear,’ said the man in the peaked cap, a cheerful father of three from Stogumber in Somerset, who would never forgive himself for what he was about to do. He knew Cameron’s face and liked it.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve come to pick up four press passes in the name of Roger Barlow.’
The man looked confused. ‘In the name of Roger Barlow? But he’s a Member.’
‘Yes, no, I mean they are one-day press passes and Roger Barlow has signed for them.
‘Okey dokey,’ said the guard, and after rustling in a drawer he produced four laminated badges. ‘Coo-er,’ he said, ‘I see Mr Barlow’s got some interesting friends. The Al-Khadija network, eh? Cameraman, soundman, producer and reporter. Very good. There you are, m’dear,’ and he handed them over, as a man might hand over four freshly microwaved Cornish pasties.
Cameron took them, and she was about to leave the Pass Office in search of Adam, when she felt faint.
She had been up since five a.m. — or four a.m., UK time — to catch the early flight back from Brussels. But that wasn’t it. She felt suddenly queasy, looking at these four photographs, which Adam had given her, and which he said had come from Benedicte.
There was a bench just outside the office, and here she sat, with her head forward to promote blood supply.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
0919 HRS
Inside the ambulance, Jones was giving instructions to Haroun and Habib.
‘We’ve got about thirty minutes until the beginning of the speeches. That means we’ve got fifteen minutes to get into Westminster Hall, which isn’t very long. As soon as the good doctor gives us the passes, we go.
‘Everything OK now, Dean, my child?’ he added, turning to look into the rank, blood-spattered shambles. ‘Or am I going to have to shoot you now?’
Dean looked out of the dirty side window. He could see a lowered security boom and Metropolitan Policemen in shirt-sleeve order and carrying machine guns, and, some way off, Adam waiting.
Now Jones knew from his briefings that they would be required to negotiate a series of tunnels to attain Westminster Hall.
As soon as Adam had gone to take his place in the hall, they would emerge, and go through the basement of Norman Shaw South, the Scottish Baronial building behind them. They had worked out a route past the kitchens and the post room. Then they would come up the stairs and tack diagonally across the ground floor of Portcullis House, and then under the road and down the escalator to the colonnade of New Palace Yard. It was a bit complicated, but could be accomplished in a shade over five minutes.
‘I’m coming, sir,’ said Dean. There was a small clonk, and Dean froze. Slowly he rotated his eyes to the floor. Was it his imagination, or had one of those parking ticket gizmos slipped off the warden’s chest? Surely he— No, thought Dean; no one could survive the loss of so much blood.
He squelched in search of the equipment.
Life had been tough for Dean since that dreadful night in Wednesbury. The magistrates had grasped pretty clearly what had happened, and in some ways they were even sympathetic. But he was still convicted, in a juvenile court, of arson. Price launched an action with more than twenty separate complaints, including destruction of intellectual property. He claimed that he had produced a new kind of hard cheese, dense, nutty and as fissile as Parmesan.
It was going to be unmistakable, he said, and he had already ordered the British racing green wax in which it was to be coated. He painted a picture of a revolution in taste, and not just in Britain. His green spheres would pop up in delicatessens across the planet.
‘And what were you going to call this cheese?’ asked the magistrate.
‘It was going to be Old Wednesbury,’ said Price, with tears in his eyes.
The magistrate had a holiday house in Normandy. He understood the backwardness of the British in the matter of cheese. He was enough of a patriot to resent the loss of Old Wednesbury.
‘Four hundred hours’ community service,’ he said.
Shock and disappointment had now crowded in so fast on Dennis and Vie that Dennis had a kind of blip, a small cranial embolism that noticeably slowed him down, and Vie, poor Vie who had loved Dean, contracted ovarian cancer, cruel irony of fate. She faded to bones and was gone.
Dean left school. He felt, and sometimes claimed, that he had been vice-captain of the school’s water polo team, even though that office was not recognized in the school’s constitution. Otherwise his record was unblemished by achievement.
He fell in with a bad crowd while performing his community service. It was a soft job, scraping graffiti off gravestones, and his fellow-convicts, Wayne and Paulie, had no desire to move on to the next task, trying to move the gum which clung like huge pale lichen to Wolverhampton’s desolate piazzas, testament to the frustrated oral desires of office workers prevented from smoking. Wayne and Paulie told Dean about the horrors of this Sisyphean task, how even if the gum came off the flag, it adhered so grimly to the scraper that it seemed nothing would shift it but a tactical nuclear weapon. So every night, when the cemetery was locked, Wayne, Dean and Paulie would shin over the gate, have some drugs, and then, like Penelope with her loom, they would busily undo the work of the day.
Here was the mossy tomb of Hannah, beloved wife of Tobias Horton, departed this world in the year of grace 1869. ‘SCMU’, wrote Dean. He meant to write scum, but was so stoned that dyslexia was added to his list of troubles.
Here were the higgledy-piggledy headstones of the Arbuthnot family, sticking out of the earth like carious teeth. ‘Fuck off, wogs,’ wrote Dean on the Arbuthnots. In view of his complexes, well known to his social workers, he thought this act unlikely to be blamed on him.
Shorn of Vie’s mediation, his life at home had become almost satirically bad, he and Dennis timing their routines so as not even to meet in the kitchen. After a year of drifting, and rejecting every solution that Dennis could offer, Dean was, as the politicians like to put it, on the conveyor belt to crime. Twice on the urgings of Wayne and Paulie he had been involved in attempted joy riding. Once he had been caught. Once he had served as a look- out while Wayne and Paulie burgled a house in Willenhall, a bosky street with quiet villas set well back from the lamps, the residence, did he but know it, of his natural father, whose wiper business had been wiped out by Tory
