the imam. Yeah. Dean felt sick as he thought of Vanessa writhing on the floor of the stock room.
‘Thirty-five per cent of women in Britain have been abused,’ said the imam, ‘usually by someone known to them. In the Muslim religion, women are to be loved and respected, and not treated like a piece of meat.’
Yeah. Dean thought of Vanessa/Lucy Goodbody (the very name was now a provocation) and how she treated her own sexuality. He thought how she had obviously liked the piece-of-meat approach, and he shuddered with horror and desire and incomprehension.
He discovered that Islam meant surrender. It meant obedience. It meant a union with God and with the word of God, unmediated by human agency. It also meant specifically a rejection of a world which had rejected him. When he left Feltham six months later, there were all kinds of outreach workers ready to reach out for him, but Dean was now on a different conveyor belt.
It was at the Finsbury Park Islamic Welfare Centre, where he went to pray, that he fell in with the man called Jones. Jones was the disciple and lieutenant of a one-eyed, one-armed cleric who had survived and prospered despite, or perhaps because of, all the hatred heaped upon him by the tabloid papers. Faith was flowering here, in the most unpromising surroundings. Hard by a thundering railway bridge was a kind of concrete cattle yard, and here the faithful came in their hundreds, from all over the world, five times a day, to hear the militant Islamic teaching of the one-eyed mullah.
‘The American Christian fundamentalists want to bring about Armageddon, which is preparatory to the second coming of Christ,’ said the priest. His audience sat on the tarpaulins, listening with glassy appreciation.
‘It is planned to have the first homosexual prime minister.
‘They wish to clone human beings.
‘They wish to legalize child prostitution.
‘Marriage with animals will become legalized.
‘The women will be allowed to beat the men with rods, like in the American jails.
‘There will be microchipping of the entire population.
‘GM crops will be introduced.’ Yeah, thought Dean: you should see some of the things we used to sell at RitePrice.
‘They want to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque.’
Slowly Dean became not just spiritually awakened and doctrinally literate. He became politically engaged. They had videos at the Islamic Welfare Centre, documenting the struggle against the Israeli occupation; and they had videos narrating and celebrating the sacrifice of the suicide bombers.
He learned of Richard Reid, the heroic young man from South London, who tried to blow up his own shoe. He heard of other would-be heroes, who had so far gone undetected by the authorities: the sock bomber, the pants bomber, the vest bomber, the biro bomber and — most rare and admirable —the bra bomber.
Sometimes, after he had been brought to an ebullition of anger, he started to wonder whether he might be made of the same stuff. And so did Jones — Jones the Bomb.
‘Remember,’ said this prince of philosophers after their first tutorial, ‘he who does not fight is not a true believer.’ Every word Jones uttered seemed to slide into place like a sweetly smacked nail. Now, as they sat in the Norman Shaw North car park, Jones the Bomb repeated those words. Dean found he needed no further prompting.
With dextrous shelf-stacker’s hands he assembled the team’s gear, like a man in charge of a parachute jump or a dive. They had a big DSR37OP Sony Camcorder, with no battery, to be carried by Habib. They had two big fluffy grey sound booms, though anyone who knew anything about TV would spot that this was unnecessary, and one of the sound booms was no longer grey.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dean, for such, since his conversion, was the limit of his profanity, ‘the bloody warden has bleeding bled on everything.’
‘Never mind, Dean,’ said Jones.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
0924 HRS
‘All right,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell to Colonel Bluett, ‘let’s be practical. The President is due to start speaking at ten a.m. In all candour, I think if we haven’t found this blasted ambulance by then, we should activate Option Minicab.’
Bluett winced. Minicab was the emergency exit. It meant bundling the two Permanent Protectees into the Black Hawk, flying straight to Northolt, and putting them aboard Air Force One, the blue-painted 747.
‘Shee-,’ he said. It would go down as one of the most lamentable lapses in Presidential security since they shot Ronald Reagan. ‘Let’s run that tape again,’ he said. Through the eye of a CCTV camera mounted on the Barry Tower of the House of Lords, they watched the ambulance make its jerky progress up Millbank. The shot was grey and fuzzy, but the licence plate L64896P was clear enough. Though they didn’t know it, they also watched Barlow and Ziggy Roberts, moving in ten-yard leaps and making Chaplinesque gestures.
‘That’s our guys,’ said Bluett, as they watched the ambulance being stopped by Joe and Matt the USSS men. ‘What are they frigging playing at?’
‘It’s no one’s fault,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
‘That,’ said Bluett, ‘may or may not turn out to be the verdict of history.’
‘So now it goes up Whitehall, and then I am afraid we lose it.’
‘We lose it?’ said Bluett.
‘Well, it seems one of the cameras has been vandalized.’
‘Sheee-it,’ said Bluett.
‘There’s a lot of ill-feeling against the congestion charge, you know.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
0926 HRS
The last Jason Pickel had seen of the ambulance was when it turned right, out of his field of vision, into Norman Shaw North. He had keen enough eyes to see that it had three Mediterranean or Middle Eastern types in the front seat, and though he knew he shouldn’t be prejudiced, he was getting those Dad flashbacks again.
‘Go on,’ said Indira the friendly sniper, as he croaked to a halt, and once again checked his hand for tremor. ‘What happened then?’
Jason got a grip and continued. ‘You British have a great poet, Wystan Hugh Auden.’
‘Mmm.’ Indira couldn’t remember much about Ordon.
In his poem “Icarus” he makes a good point about any human disaster. Something terrible may be happening in one place, but just down the road people are getting on with their lives. In one corner of the canvas a tragedy is happening, a boy failing into the sea. But the ploughman gets on with his ploughing. The boat sails on.’
‘Yeah,’ said Indira, thinking he was a nice chap, the big depressed Yank, but hoping very much he wasn’t about to recite poetry — or maybe he already was?
When he ran out into the street, and after the sunlight went off like a firework through his shades, what he mainly noticed, said Jason, was this incredibly peaceful scene. There were kids fishing in the Tigris, right by the American cantonment. In an instant, even while he could hear the screams of warning from the road, he took in their feet splayed in the mud, the way they cast their lines beyond the biblical rushes and the wavelets glittering. Then he saw the car coming down the road. The sweat was already coursing over his eyebrows and stinging his corneas, but he couldn’t brush it away because he was carrying an Ml 6 and a mobile, and anyway, there was no time.
‘Stop or I fire!’ yelled Sergeant Kennedy.
‘Stop!’ shouted GI Kovac.
‘Stop!’ shouted Jason. ‘What part of stop don’t you understand?’
