‘You certainly can, sir.’
‘Stuart, you know my view that we should in all prudence tell the President and move him to a safe place until we’ve sorted this out. Where is he now, by the way, Grover?’ he said, turning to his aide.
‘He’ll be with the Speaker of the House of Commons,’ said Bluett, who had committed the President’s schedule to memory. ‘I respectfully say that we should spend the next eight minutes trying to find this goddam ambulance of yours.’
‘Right,’ said Purnell. Ever since he had been at primary school he had learned to fend off stress by stroking the underside of a table, where no one could see, and now he was stroking away like crazy. ‘Get me Derby Gate,’ he said.
Where Jones & Co. were trying on their equipment.
The skill of making a suicide bomber jacket is mainly in the sewing, and Jones knew plenty of women in the Finsbury area who were up to the job. One of the tasks facing the police, when they came later to sort out what had happened, was to analyse the ingredients. The results were banal.
The blue portabrace camera jackets, the Sony and the sound booms came from Euromedia in Hammersmith, a shop much used by the BBC. The wooden struts, used to separate the explosive charges, were of uncertain provenance, but seemed to have belonged to a fruit box, possibly one that had been used to contain Florida oranges.
The manager of RitePrice in Wolverhampton attempted to claim the batteries, though later, when his premises were stoned, he said that he had been trying to raise the profile of his store. As he complained to his insurers, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’
It was fairly clear that the ball bearings, in two sizes, came from B&Q.
The nitro-glycerine was easily and quickly traced back to a makeshift lab, which was discovered along with a fair number of toenail clippings under the Finsbury Park bed of Jones the Bomb. DNA tests on the toenails established that they came from more than one person, and rather like relics of the Beaker Folk, had been laid down in that site over a long period.
The Nokias had all come from a carphone warehouse in Wolverhampton, and had been paid for in cash, on a pay-as-you-talk basis, the day before. It was Dean’s job now to turn them on, make sure they were charged up to last at least six hours, and to insert them into the right pocket in the appropriate jacket.
‘Here you are, then,’ he said to Haroun and Habib, opening the back of the ambulance and passing out the jackets.
‘Nah,’ said Habib almost immediately, passing it back to the quartermaster. ‘This one is too tight for me. Give it me this one,’ he said, turning to Haroun and speaking in Arabic.
Habib found that Haroun’s waistcoat was also a bit of a squeeze.
‘You then,’ he said pointing at Dean, and offering a jocular Arab insult, such as an ill-mannered sheikh might bestow upon a slave. ‘Give it me this one, then.’
‘No, mush,’ said Dean, whose cockiness was coming back. ‘We’ve all got to have the right one.’ He looked back into the cab for help from Jones the Bomb, but Jones appeared to be doing something elaborate with his own jacket. His shirt was off and he was sticking things to his chest with masking tape.
Dean stepped back, crushing the fingers of Eric Onyeama. For a second he had the impression that the corpse flinched, but he had no time to worry about that.
Habib looked at him shrewdly, and then gabbled something at Haroun. ‘Why you no give it me him?’ he asked, putting a foot on the rear running board of the ambulance. The two Arabs lunged and winkled Dean from the darkness.
‘What’s the matter you?’ said Haroun, holding him from behind in a full Nelson.
‘This is all wrong,’ said Dean. ‘I’m meant to be in charge of this bit.’
Just as the two policemen reached their black booth, the phone stopped ringing again.
‘They’ll call back,’ said the first policeman.
They turned as one and looked back under the arch of the passerelle, towards the ambulance and the Embankment.
Like teenage sisters about to go to the disco, the enigmatic operatives were apparently squabbling over their attire.
Habib took Dean’s jacket, tried it on, and gave it disgustedly to Haroun. Haroun took Dean’s coat and gave it to Habib. Or was it that Habib mistakenly tried on Haroun’s jacket twice, before settling for the one he first thought of, while Dean and Habib simply swapped over and back again? Jones was getting cross.
By the time they had shut and locked the ambulance, and begun the prescribed route through Westminster Hall, Dean’s efforts at pelmanism had failed. They had done a three-card trick with the jackets.
As Roger Barlow ran back across the passerelle, he looked down again at the ambulance. It appeared to be deserted. Then he thought he saw a lupine figure, slinking through towards the Commons kitchens. Within a few seconds he had reached the Pass Office, still invigilated by the man from Stogumber. ‘Those passes,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘can you deactivate them?’
Conscious that the two policemen were only a matter of fifty yards behind, Jones led them fast along the ordained route. First they crossed the threshold into Norman Shaw North, scampering over a yellow sign painted on the tarmac saying ‘No pedestrians beyond this point’.
He then jinked confidently left and led them down past the post office sorting room, then past the kitchens, and then to the first secure door, where a pass was needed. Fixed to the wall, on the right, was the little plastic swipe card socket familiar to anyone who has tried to get into a modern hotel room. The conspirators bunched in the corridor, a little spinney of sound booms and microphones and camcorders.
There was a hush, as Jones inserted the pass.
The door gave a click, and shifted open a fraction. A green light came on. Jones smiled. Dean froze. The lead terrorist pushed open the gleaming brushed steel door and Dean knew in his writhing intestines that whatever happened, he would not go through it. He understood that if he went through that door, and round that corner, he would die. Even if he failed to die by his own hand, Haroun and Habib would do for him, sure as eggs were eggs.
These two now followed Jones through the door; and as Dean was standing there mute, the door shut behind them. At the click of it, Jones turned round and came back to look through the porthole.
‘Sorry,’ said Dean, ‘got held up.’ He held up the sound boom and mimed the act of snagging it on something.
‘Quickly,’ hissed the mission leader, his voice muffled by the door. ‘Stop being an old woman and use your card.’ Dean looked at the oscillating brown irises of the man called Jones.
Trembling, he put the plastic pass into the pocket. He tried it one way. He tried it the other way. As Jones began to curse him, he genuinely tried to get it right, jiggling the card so as to produce a better contact between the magnetic strip and the electronic reader.
At the very moment when it should have done the trick, his card ceased to function at all. Now Dean was on one side of the barrier and his collaborators were on the other. Haroun and Habib joined Jones at the porthole, banging their noses like sharks at an aquarium. They started all three of them to say terrible things.
Dean didn’t speak their language, but he took them to be proposing, roughly speaking, to gouge out his eyes and piss on his brains. ‘Oh I do wish yow would be quiet,’ he said, ‘it’s not my fault.’ Haroun started thumping the door, while Habib looked for a handle.
Had they spent perhaps another twenty seconds, they might have found the metal button, recessed in the tiles, that opens the door from the Commons side.
‘There you go,’ said a breathy voice. A figure appeared behind the three Arabs. It was a blazered and bouffant-haired junior foreign minister.
As he pressed the button he took a distinct pleasure in helping out these struggling journalists from a minority group. ‘After you,’ he said, holding open the door on the assumption that the trio wanted to go out.
