Seventy-Two Virgins

atmosphere in Parliament Square. Some began to disrobe, to flop down on the chlorous stringy grass. The smell of fried onions rose from a pair of mobile hamburger stalls. Spliffs and cigarettes were produced, and soon the gathering had created a nice little nephos of polyaromatic hydrocarbons and benzopyrenes, as noxious in its way as a Kyoto-flouting gas-guzzling American traffic jam.

There were girls with bare belly buttons, and girls with rings through their belly buttons. There were girls with rings through their eyebrows, and young men with shaven skulls and beards so ridiculously sculpted that they ran like hairy caterpillars down their chins. There were pikeys with whippets and Sloanes with toe-rings. Here was a dreadlocked young black man flogging the Socialist Worker; here were Sir Harold and Lady Antonia, fingering cans of Special Brew; and everywhere were people for whom this was only their second act of public protest, the first having been the countryside march. There was a curious confluence, in some old- fashioned English minds: a simultaneous hatred of government interference in country pursuits, and a hatred of interference in Iraq.

Odd friendships were being forged and new romances beginning. Here was Raimondo Charles, a forty-two- year-old American website journalist with a dashing picture by-line, in which he appeared to be cupping his hands around a joint.

Raimondo liked to think of himself as a womanizing international dog of war. One moment he might be ferried around the backstreets of Beirut, blindfolded, in a Hezbollah taxi, with a gun to his neck. At another he might be in a darkened room in Rpublika Srpska, hearing the whingeing confessions of an ex-warlord. Raimondo had once persuaded a woman to go to bed with him by claiming to be an investigative reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. This was only true in the sense that he had contributed an interview (spiked) with an interesting fellow who claimed to have slept with Madonna’s sister.

Now Raimondo had become part of the general anti-war movement — the people who thought the Pentagon was the greatest threat to global stability, and he was standing next to a very good-looking young woman, with an aristocratic manner. She had badges saying, ‘Keep Britain Farming’, ‘Blair Doesn’t Care’, and ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’. Raimondo busily stoked her indignation.

‘Yah,’ she said, ‘I think it’s just outrageous the way America refuses to sign that Tokyo protocol on climate change.’

‘Tchah.’ Raimondo shook his head in disgusted assent, and offered her a cigarette.

‘And then there’s that other thing, that Hague thingummy about war criminals. What I’d like to know is why the hell we have to sign up for it and they don’t.’

‘You bet.’

‘I’ve been reading this really good book, and you know what I think?’ Her eyes appeared particularly lustrous. Raimondo inched his muzzle closer.

‘I think America is a rogue state!’

‘You said it.’

‘And all we do in this country is poodle, poodle, poodle, like’ — she didn’t want to say poodle again — ‘like children who don’t know any better. I mean, why the hell this government had to do what it did, and the Opposition, ugh. I tell you one thing,’ she said, ‘I bet you they wouldn’t try to ban hunting in Iraq, whatever they say about Saddam.’

Not for the first time when making himself pleasant to a beautiful woman, Raimondo felt a fleeting challenge to his intellectual good faith. What she had said was balls. There have been only two governments in history that have preceded Britain’s Labour Party in initiating a ban on hunting with dogs, and they are Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Saddam banned the packs as somehow un-Baathist, though they have been a part of Mesopotamian life since Assurbanipal or Tiglath-Pileser set off in his chariot in search of a lion; and hunting survived only in the limited sense that Uday and Qusay Hussein would sometimes get up into a Hind Soviet-made helicopter gunship, fly over the marshes, and machine-gun anything larger than a rat.

He could have pointed this out, but for tactical reasons did not. ‘So where have you guys come from this morning?’ he asked, indicating the little coagulation of toff-ish protestors. Raimondo was a stealthy but dedicated snob.

‘Oh, we’re all down from Northamptonshire.’

‘Oh yes, whereabouts?’

‘From Knout, actually,’ she said, meaning the famous stately home.

At once Raimondo seemed to see something familiar in that freckled little nose. Could this be — but of course it was! — Sharon, Marchioness of Kettering.

Raimondo’s plans began to develop. He envisaged evenings with Sharon at Annabel’s; he seemed to see invitations to shoot. Perhaps, yes, why not, if he played it right, she might have him up to Northamptonshire for some eco-friendly blamming of the pheasant.

So he told her a little about Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and depleted uranium shells.

‘Talking of which,’ said the posh girl, finding a break in his recitation, ‘guess what I’ve got in my knapsack.’ She pulled it out. ‘Freshly laid this morning. And I’m jolly well going to chuck it at someone!’

‘Hold on,’ said Raimondo, and just as he was about to say what he thought of this plan, there was a blaring of sirens in the corner of the square. There were police cars, and then ambulances, and they were screaming round from Victoria towards the Embankment.

‘That’s funny,’ said Raimondo.

‘I wonder what happened?’ said the girl.

‘There’s a lot of violent men around,’ said Raimondo.

‘Crumbs,’ said the posh girl. ‘Shall we go and find out?’

‘Come on,’ said Raimondo, and began to lead her through the craning crowd. ‘I didn’t get your name.’

‘I’m Sandra. I work for her ladyship. I’m the nanny,’ said the girl.

The essence of being Raimondo is to get over this kind of disappointment quickly. ‘Sandra,’ he said, ‘now whatever you do, don’t throw that egg.’ He waved not just at the British policemen, but at fridge-sized Matt, and Joe, and the other American security men. ‘This place is swarming with security men from the most dangerous government on earth.’

Round the corner, outside Church House, assorted clerics were ministering to a sobbing woman, who had found a pool of blood on the pavement.

News of the horror fanned through the crowd, and was relayed to Purnell and Bluett in the Ops Room.

‘Right,’ said Bluett. ‘That certainly stands up this guy’s story.’

‘Colonel,’ said Purnell, ‘I hate to admit defeat, but I think discretion may be the better part of valour here.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I mean let’s knock this ceremony on the head.’

‘You gotta be shitting me, Mr Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

OK, thought Cameron, let’s get on with this; and she prepared to get up from the bench. She just hoped to God that Roger didn’t find out about it. After all, these passes were in his name, and if something went wrong, he would be in serious trouble.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 0935 HRS

Roger Barlow drifted on through the Members’ cloakroom, where the coat racks are hung with red ribbons intended for MPs to hang their swords. He contemplated polishing his shoes, but some chap was already there. As he wandered on towards the stairs, he passed the double doors into Westminster Hall, and peeped in. Of all the chambers in the Palace of Westminster, this was by far his favourite. With its floor that seemed to have been laid with the sarsens of Stonehenge, with its perennial dungeon gloom and aimlessly colossal vaulted hammerbeam ceiling, Westminster Hall thrilled him as much as it sometimes left tourists cold.

It spoke of an age before the prinking pomposities of Puginism. The lifeblood of democracy might flow now through other chambers, but Westminster Hall waited, like some great underused ventricle, for those moments