The car rolling slowly towards them was a Chevrolet GMC, a big white shiny machine of a kind that could be seen all over Baghdad. Like every other example, the car had the letters TV extravagantly striped all over it in masking tape. It meant nothing. There were more ‘TV’ cars currently cruising Baghdad than there were TV stations on the planet. The Chevrolet GMC was the favoured vehicle of every Baathist kingpin turned looting gangster. Plenty of well-attested sightings had put Saddam himself behind the wheel of a GMC. The orders of Jason and the rest of the detail were clear. If the vehicle failed to stop within a reasonable delay, they were at liberty — no, they had a duty — to protect human life, Iraqi or American, from possible terrorist attack.
‘Jesus Christ,’ screamed Barry White the Limey journalist. ‘What are you fucking well doing? He’s not fucking stopping, is he?’
‘Please keep calm, sir,’ said Jason Pickel, and dropping the satphone still connected to his stunned and possibly faithless wife, he raised the carbine to his shoulder and shouted clearly, ‘Driver, unless you halt I will open fire on the count of three. One.’
By some instinct the little fishermen of the Tigris flung themselves face-first into the reeds.
‘Two.’
It does not take much to rob a British tabloid reporter —or indeed a broadsheet reporter — of his dignity, even if he has a hairstyle like Michelangelo’s Moses. ‘We’re all going to fucking die,’ shrieked Barry White as he hurled himself into the ditch, knocking over the last geranium as he went.
‘Three.’
Because he had no choice, Jason Pickel opened fire, first at the windscreen and then at the bonnet.
‘It’s all right, Jason,’ said Indira, touching his hand and noticing the vibration for the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought, if she and Jason actually had to DO something today.
Oh come on Cameron, darling girl, thought Adam Swallow. He looked at the ambulance and strained his ears for the sound of Islamic prayer. On no account must she see the mutilated man, or even see the men coming out of the ambulance.
He looked at his watch and yearned for the sight of her; partly because he was anxious, and partly because his feeling for her was turning day by day into the most heart-squeezing, throat-choking crush he had ever had on a woman.
In the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons there was a flap. The doorman at St Stephen’s Entrance had just rung to say the President was on his way, and by their calculations he was almost ten minutes early.
The telephone rang again. ‘It’s the French Ambassador,’ said Sir Edward Luce, the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms, a spare, kindly man. ‘He says it’s about his partner, and he wants to speak to you personally.’
‘His partner? What am I supposed to be doing with the French Ambassador’s floozy?’
‘He calls her his
There was a silence in the Speaker’s glorious apartments. The clock ticked a beat or two. Out of his nostrils came the soft, stertorous noise of a man digesting the traditional sheet-metal worker’s breakfast of chitterlings and black pudding. But the Speaker’s mind whirred with great precision as he worked on the problem of the French Ambassador’s mistress.
Outside the Thames ran softly in the sun; inside the velvet brocaded wallpaper soared in plum and bottle green, like the luxurious trousers of some nineteenth-century clown, until it met the demented whorls and volutes of the Pugin entablature. Ranged at the back of the room was a glass-fronted case containing the gifts which successive Speakers had received from visiting dignitaries: a silver spittoon from the Speaker of the Chinese People’s Assembly; a whip, its handle inlaid with topaz and jacinth, from the Majlis of Free Afghanistan; a drum from Uganda; a model ship from Moscow, and so on.
There was a rapping on the oak without. The Speaker stood.He clenched his buttocks. He stitched on his broadest smile.
But it was not the President who entered. It was— Sir Perry Grainger, an MP for more than a quarter of a century, Chairman of the All-Party Foreign Affairs Committee, and a man of almost stratospheric pomposity.
‘I am so sorry to raise this now, but the matter has only just come to my attention.’ Sir Perry advanced to the middle of the carpet and beamed. It was an amphibian Roy Jenkinsesque beam of frightening intensity and insincerity.
‘Someone has this morning informed me of the nature of the token which you will present on behalf of the House of Commons to the President. Is, ah, that it?’
Sir Perry’s eye fell on the frankly unmissable object that stood on the Speaker’s desk.
‘Sir Perry,’ said the Speaker, as patiently as he was able. ‘You may not like it, but the President is going to be here any second.’
‘My views are in a sense immaterial, but I think that there are many people, on both sides of the Atlantic, who might describe it as vulgar tat.’
‘But I chose it myself,’ said the Speaker, ‘didn’t I, Sir Edward?’
‘You did, sir. You went to some considerable trouble.’
‘I think it’s just the job,’ said the Speaker.
‘It’s certainly rather jolly,’ said Sir Edward.
‘The Americans are nuts about Churchill,’ explained the Speaker. ‘He’s a hero to them. They canna get enough of him.’
Sir Perry looked at the enormous Toby jug of the wartime leader: mauve-cheeked, gooseberry-eyed and waving a V sign. ‘But the gesture is obscene.’
‘Not in America,’ said the Speaker. ‘In America,’ he demonstrated for Sir Perry’s benefit — ‘they use only one finger. I tell you what,’ he continued, with the arm-round-the shoulder voice he used for when the fix was coming, ‘I believe that many colleagues on all sides of the House would think it right if you, Sir Perry, were to present him with this sign of transatlantic good wishes.’
‘Well, I am not sure, Mr Speaker …’ Vanity began to struggle with good taste in Sir Perry’s mind, a short, one-sided conflict.
‘The President is on his way now, sir,’ said a man in tights, sticking his head round the door.
‘And furthermore,’ said the Speaker, as he reached into a humidor and produced a gorilla’s fistful of nine-inch cigars, we will stuff it with Sir Winston’s personal smokes.’
‘But surely those aren’t Winston’s cigars?’
‘They are now. Wah. I have spoken,’ said the Speaker.
‘But do you—?’
‘I have spoken. That’s what I’m paid to do,’ and he raised his palm like a chief.
‘Sir Edward, please ring the French Ambassador with my compliments, and tell him that he and his Palestinian doxy are fully expected in Westminster Hall. Their seats will be in the diplomatic section. This is the House of Commons, and no one tells us what to do, and certainly no foreign government.’
‘Mr President, sir, it is an honour.
And still Cameron sat on the bench in the corridor outside the Pass Office, not twenty yards from where Adam waited. She stared at the photos, of Jones with his livid mask, the slightly fatter one in the skullcap, the one with the killer eyes, and a young, good-looking boy. Was this really a TV crew?
Then she began to persuade herself that it must be, mainly because she had never known Adam to be wrong about anything.
Now that the President had gone inside, the shouting died down a little. The hard-core chanters continued to curse America, assisted by a steel band, but other protesters were taking things easy.
The July morning sun was gaining heat, and here and there it was almost what newspapers call a carnival
