an ambulance when it is illegally parked. You don’t stop it in
Out of the parking lot lurched the terrorists, up past the Red Lion pub, whence a couple of piss-heads surveyed them apathetically, then round the corner on to Whitehall and they were gone from Barlow’s view. He turned and double-timed down the tunnel towards Westminster Hall.
Dimly in the Scotland Yard Ops Room they could hear the noise of an ambulance; but it was the one that had been sent to assist the pool of blood in Tufton Street. All the evidence seems to agree that at this point, barely a minute before the President was due to open his mouth, the authorities had still failed to make any connection between the missing ambulance and the vehicle which had attracted such attention in Norman Shaw North.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell pressed 16 on his phone and spoke to Grover. ‘Did we get through to Derby Gate?’
It took Grover a moment or two to find out the state of play. ‘We tried to raise them, but there was no answer, and now it seems to be engaged.’
Purnell raised his eyes to Bluett, and the American stared unfathomably back.
In the booth at Derby Gate the policemen were trying to raise the Met Ops Room, since it was by now the considered view of them both that the ambulance was worthy of attention.
‘It’s bleeding engaged,’ said the first policeman to the second policeman.
Bleeding Koran, thought the second policeman. They’d need more than the bleeding Koran if this thing turned out bad.
‘Well, Bluett, old man,’ said Purnell, trying to assert his authority in the mental arm-wrestle. ‘It looks like we’re going to let the programme proceed.’
‘Yup,’ said Bluett, sticking his cigar in his mouth and looking tough. ‘Anything else would be a surrender to turr.’
Part Two
THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1000 HRS
‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen.’
The President looked over the lectern at upwards of 800 heads, goggling at him on either side of the central aisle. He was going to enjoy this, he thought. Whatever you said about the Brits, whatever their snobberies and limitations, they understood the relationship between the present and the past. They never pretended that their system of government was some ash-and-aluminum example of perfected modernity. They knew their democracy was an inherited conglomerate of traditions, bodged together, spatchcocked, barnacled and bubblegummed by fate and whimsy.
That’s why, goddammit, he kept in the my lords bit. They might have been expelled or in some other way neutered by Blair (he was hazy on the details). But look at these guys, standing on the dais with him: get a load of their tights, their shapely calves, trimmed by tennis and hoofing it at posh nightclubs. Check out their crazy wigs, glowing like woolly haloes in the clerestory light. Dig those funky buckles and black satin rosettes like heraldic tarantulas crawling down the back of their tailcoats. Look at this fat guy next to him, this Scottish fellow who obviously ate nothing but fry-ups, with the rosy face and the whisky nose. Now this fellow, from what the President understood, had been the product of a Glasgow steel mill, and his hands were heavy and scarred with swarf. He spoke with so thick an accent that when the President had taken delivery of some freaky mug of Winston Churchill, he had barely understood a word. But he was the Speaker! He was in charge of this place, and in terms of troy ounces of bling-bling, he was more sumptuously attired than P Diddy himself.
He went on: ‘It is a great honor to be speaking here today, and a rare honor, and I am proud to be speaking to you on a day when we commemorate a relationship that has had many triumphs and many perils. I know it is fashionable to say that the Special relationship does not exist. I have heard they say it in your Foreign Office, and in Foggy Bottom, in the State Department. But I know it exists, and you know that special friendship exists, and we know how much together we have achieved in the last hundred years, not least in the two great world conflicts whose successful conclusion we memorialize today.’
The President looked out at the vast windfarm of flapping programmes as his listeners struggled to keep cool. It wouldn’t go down as a brilliant speech; he did not do brilliant speeches. But it had the small, additional merit that he believed every word of it, more or less. ‘We stood firm in the Cold War, and we joined in bringing freedom and democracy to countries that were denied them for forty years. Together now, we work to liberate a region of the world’ — this was the bit, to be frank, that he was worried about. Neocon though he was, he could imagine that this passage might grate with some of those Labor fellows, the Democratic Liberals, or whatever the hell they were called, and possibly even, for Chrissakes, some of the Conservatives. There were liberal squishes everywhere, these days, and he had been warned by the Ambassador that some of the MPs might try to make names for themselves by walking out —’… a region of the world where too many people are still forbidden from exercising their basic right to free assembly and free speech .
Because he still had a reflex eye for these things the President noticed a good-looking blonde dressed smartly who was sitting three rows back on the left, and tilting her chin and the planes of her cheeks as if his words were some cooling shower to be caught and savoured on her skin. In front of her he dimly noted the swept-maned foreign guy, who had the air of some kind of composer or art critic, and next to him three Arabs, a girl and two men.
He looked at them now with the first stirrings of curiosity. One of them stirred abruptly in his seat. Was that a little protest brewing? But the President had no time, and his eyes flickered back to the big 28-point block capitals of his text.
‘And I want to remind you of the origins of this great but mysteriously deprecated relationship, because its birth, like so many other births, was also the moment of greatest vulnerability. It was Oscar Wilde who said that we are two nations divided by a common language,’ (the French Ambassador yawned so widely that Cameron began to feel reassured) ‘and it would be fair to say, Mr Speaker, that there are some of your great traditions which doubtless through our own inadvertence we have failed to inherit. It is sometimes said that we lack the British sense of irony.’
A thousand toes curled: oh God, was he about to say how much he enjoyed the works of Monty Python? ‘We do not as a rule drink our beer warm.’
The President simpered at the Speaker and the Speaker simpered back. In the game of tasteless presents the Scotsman had been out-generalled by the Texan: the appalling gargoyle mug of Sir Winston had been requited by a pair of cowboy boots in scarlet leather with the word ‘Speaker’ tooled on the shins.
‘We do not populate our society with personages calling themselves knights or lords, which I think sometimes is a shame though I am afraid there are still people who complain that political office in our republic may be passed in dubious circumstances from father to son …’ This sally earned the President his first desultory round of applause and reluctant laughter. The President gave his aw shucks expression and squinted his buzzard eyes on the script. He was coming to the meat of it.
‘But perhaps the most obvious difference to an Englishman in New York or to an American arriving in London is that we do not drive on the same side of the road. It was that curious distinction, adopted on I know not what principle by our founding fathers which was almost fatal to this relationship at its moment of inception. It was in 1931 on Fifth Avenue that a great Englishman stepped into the traffic and was surprised to find it moving in an unexpected direction. We today must thank providence that the taxi driver braked before his fender connected with the form of—’
By this stage the audience of MPs had settled back. For a short moment some of them had hoped for an attack on the tyre approval of European motor cars, but they knew where he was going now. In any Anglo-
