Seventy-Two Virgins

American context his name was the name invoked with liturgical predictability.

—Sir Winston Churchill. If that taxi had not braked, ladies and gentlemen, we in the United States would have lost the most fervent advocate and admirer to be found in all the ranks of European statesmen. If that taxi driver had not braked that vital friendship between the British Prime Minister and President Roosevelt would never have been forged. If that New York cabby had not been paying attention then your country would have lost its greatest wartime leader and the history of the world would have been bleak indeed.’

Bleak indeed! thought Sir Perry Grainger, who fancied himself as a bit of a rhetorician and never turned down an invitation to debate at the Oxford Union: that was a bit of a diminuendo, that wasn’t exactly a climax for his ascending tricolon. But it was consonant with the general crapness of the speech, he thought.

Sir Perry was out of sorts. It had been embarrassing enough to present the leader of the free world with a Toby jug, worse to find the Americans had nothing for him, only a pair of boots for the Speaker. ‘Mm,’ he said as the President wittered on about Churchill’s American mother and his odd habit of nudity in the White House. Like so many men faced with a choice between thoughts of nudity and listening to a speech, his mind wandered.

Nee-naw, naw-nee went the ambulance, straight through the traffic lights at the end of Whitehall. Quite a large proportion of the police manpower had now been diverted to suppressing the threat from Raimondo Charles, and those who did watch its progress made instinctive waving-on gestures.

As they turned into New Palace Yard, through the big wrought-iron gates, Jones hit the siren button on the far right of his console, and the machine changed its note.

Whoo-whup, whoo-wup, whoo-wup, said the ambulance, and the blue madness throbbed and strobed at its temples.

With the despairing entreaty of an emergency vehicle it approached the last security boom between the President and Jones the Bomb.

Cameron heard it, and knew in her heart that something was badly wrong. Adam heard it, and felt deeply puzzled. Surely this wasn’t the plan? Or was it? What had Benedicte intended?

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO 1007 HRS

Doo-whup. doo-whup, said the ambulance. In their black-painted booth, the police looked at it with bafflement. Under any normal circumstances, a vehicle was to be stopped before the tank-trap. It would be asked to ease gently over a device fitted with lights, cameras and mirrors, so that its underside could be properly surveyed. Its bonnet would be lifted, and only after a search lasting perhaps five or seven minutes would it be allowed down the cobbles and towards the colonnade and Westminster Hall. But these were not normal circumstances. The President had just begun speaking, according to their timetables. It might be, as the seconds crawled by, that to stick to routine was madness. The hand of authority hovered for a fraction over the phone, and over the red buzzer that lifted the boom; and for a fraction that hand hesitated between its options.

Such was the thickness of the ancient walls and so tiny the windows, that the audience in Westminster Hall had hardly heard the earlier sirens, let alone the tropic surf of the crowd.

This one was different. It sounded as though it was approaching the south of the hall by New Palace Yard and it was getting closer.

Up on the roof above the Press Gallery, deserted by Indira and with no one to keep him company but his gun, Jason Pickel now looked at the ambulance with all the acuity his training had imparted.

He had caught sight of the vehicle earlier, as it left the car park, because he could see perpendicularly between the blocks right down Cannon Row. But then it was lost in the buildings of Derby Gate, its siren muffled for the next seconds as it moved from Whitehall to Parliament Square. At first it did not occur to him to wonder why the British emergency services had stationed an ambulance in Norman Shaw North, nor did he attach any real interest to the emergency. Perhaps some conscientious old biddy had sustained a heart attack. Perhaps, God help him, some policeman had used too much force to restrain a rioter and bloodied his or her obstreperous nose. From his vantage Jason could make out the odd detachment of media representatives with their cameras and sound booms.

‘Vermin,’ he thought. ‘Cockroaches.’ And he looked at them as genocidally as a Hutu beholds a Tutsi. If it hadn’t been for that Daily Mirror guy, thought Jason.

It is always a tricky moment in life and literature when a returning warrior opens his own white picket gate and walks up to the terrifying ambiguities of his own frost-paned front door. The Greeks called it nostos, the moment of return, and nostalgia is technically the longing for what should be a joyful occasion, but often isn’t, of course.

Odysseus came back to find his house overrun by strange men trying to go to bed with his wife. Agamemnon returned to find the little woman in apparently good spirits. He gave her a loving kiss and said he was glad to be back after ten years. She congratulated him on capturing Troy. ran him a bath and stabbed him to death.

‘Jason, honey,’ his wife Wanda had exclaimed, with every sign of enthusiasm. But he was made nervous by the brightness of her eye and put off by her red lipstick.

In the days that followed he had entertained doubts about his wife, more than entertained them. He had invited them round, given them bed and board in his heart, he had listened with gloomy resignation as the doubts rabbited on into the night, refusing to take the hint no matter how much he coughed and stretched and signalled that their welcome was outstayed. And then she had clinched matters. She had referred to what had happened in Baghdad as a ‘massacre’, and lamely tried to excuse herself.

Pickel had hit the table, and she had cried. Two days later Wanda announced that she would be going scuba diving every evening after supper at the local pool. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back until 10.30 p.m., and although she always seemed showered and shampooed, she sometimes smelled of chlorine and sometimes did not.

Jason would stand by the big picture window of the living room and wait until he could see her headlights come down the street; then he would quickly go to bed and pretend like a child to be asleep.

After a while he asked to be transferred, and nine months later, thanks to his skill as a sharpshooter, here he was.

About twenty feet below him, in one of the tall, badly ventilated chambers of the Parliamentary press gallery, a journalist opened a drawer. It had to be here somewhere. It just had to be .somewhere. His fingers skittered like hamsters in litter until he found it.

‘There,’ he thought, pocketing an expenses form. It was the quickest way to make money and would give him something to do during this wretched speech.

As he rode down in the lift to the ground floor and Westminster Hall, he looked into the polished brass of the doors and admired for perhaps the 20 billionth time, his fantastic meringue of hair. Barry White pushed out his lips as if to blow himself a kiss.

Roger Barlow might not have admitted as much but he was naturally fitter than most men of his age. Late nights, cigarettes, alcohol: none of them had removed a certain undergraduate stamina. But now as he scooted back towards the colonnade, up the stairs, down the stairs, round the corner, along the corridor, he was starting to feel that burning sensation you get in your lungs at the end of a cross-country run.

The soles of his shoes were leather and he found it hard to gain traction on the polished tiles. His coat flapped, his shirt tails came out, his spongy elastic cufflink exploded, his cuffs waved in the air, and his tie slip- streamed behind him. In the fond imagination of one Commons secretary who crossed his path he had the air of a man who had just burst through a hedge after running through a garden having climbed down a drainpipe on being surprised in the wrong marital bed.

‘You gotta help,’ he gasped to that kindly face. ‘Yes Roger, she said. She felt the contrast between his hectic grip and her own, which she knew to be a lovely cool and calming thing, redolent of cold cream, and she transmitted through her palm her willingness, at least in that instant, to help him in any way he chose.

‘We’ve got to get the ambulance,’ he said.

‘That’s all right, Roger,’ she said pointing up to the gates of New Palace Yard. ‘I think it’s on its way.’

Roger made a plosive noise, snatched away his hand and ran out of the colonnade on to the cobbles and up