‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said Purnell.
‘What in the name of holy fuck?’ asked Bluett.
No fewer than five separate CCTV cameras were recording the fast advance of an ambulance, licence plate L64896P, and bearing the livery of the Bilston and Willenhall Primary Care Trust, round New Palace Yard towards the old glazed wrought-iron porch which is the Members’ Entrance to the House of Commons.
‘Abort, abort, abort, abort, abort,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
‘We don’t abort yet, my friend,’ said Bluett. ‘We got snipers on the roof. We shoot on goddam sight.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
1010 HRS
Jason Pickel was still alone on the roof, waiting for Indira to come back, and yet he was surrounded by people. There were camp Plantagenets with tilted necks and two fingers raised in benediction, or they would be raised if the fingers had survived a century and a half of sulphur and pigeon dung.
There were carved princesses whose pie crust drapery had been eaten away by wind and rain. And there were beasts. There were heraldic animals on the roof of a kind not conducive to anyone’s peace of mind. Jason stared at the gargoyle before him, crouched over the gutter. The elements had played leprosy with his features. Pollution and precipitation had made streaks on the limestone beneath his clammy paws as though they dripped black blood. His tail was nearly gone, his ear had been chewed off by time, his eye and nose had been devoured and his fanged jaws were open in a perpetual scream.
That’s me, thought Jason Pickel. That’s what they did to me. Because it might have been all right, he had long since decided, if that English reporter had shown the slightest sense of responsibility.
He had put Pickel’s name in the story. Of course the US Army was good about it. He had been given counselling and support. It had been made clear to him that there was no question of inquiry or any other disciplinary procedure. But out there on the peacenik internet the name Pickel became a synonym for callous murder. When Iraqi rebels shot down helicopters full of American soldiers heading off R&R, or when GIs were bumped off on street corners, the website polemicists always reminded their readers of the Pickel business.
It was just one example, they said, of the brutal fire-and-forget approach of the occupying power. In a long and balls-aching article in some left-wing magazine Barry White had returned to the subject. Was it not outrageous, he suggested, that the families of Pickel’s victims were living without sanitation or electricity, deprived of their breadwinner, while Pickel lived it up in Iowa? A group called Wiltshire Women against War sent him a round robin letter addressed to Sergeant Pickel US Army. Some BBC producer had even rung his ex darling Wanda, and suggested he was a war criminal, and would Wanda like to come on a day-time TV show, and he wasn’t too sure that Wanda had disagreed.
‘Paw,’ said Jason Junior one day when they were ambling along a mall in search of ice cream, ‘how many guys did you kill out there in Eye-raq? Was it twenty?’
‘No, son.’
‘Because Carl’s mum said you killed twenty.’
‘No, Junior, there were six poor souls that died.’
‘So was it you against six, then? I wish I could have seen it.’
‘No you don’t, kiddo.’
‘I would of got my gun and aimed at them and
At the memory of this conversation Jason was filled with such a flood of sentimental self-pity that his sniper’s vision became blurred.
When the ambulance cleared the security barrier and braked noisily in front of the Members’ Entrance, he was lost in meditation on the injustice of the world, and the willingness of citizens in a democracy to persecute those that protect them. He had so many denunciatory letters from anti-American ginger groups, from Balham to Helsinki, that he at one stage thought of changing his name. Now he wondered again: what kind of name did he want?
Down below him Jones the Bomb pulled the handbrake and got out of the driver’s cabin. Sixty feet above him the sharpshooter rested his barrel on the gargoyle’s ears and brooded again on the options.
For Pickel read gherkin, thought Pickel. Or perhaps O’Nion? He looked absently at the ambulance men as they disembarked and then he looked again. Thought has no language. Our synapses work too fast for any verbal articulation and the same goes a fortiori for a US Army sharpshooter. The process of ratiocination is conducted in what computer programmers would call a machine language, in which concepts are spliced and bumped together at the speed of light, and it is only in retrospect that we can identify the path of our logic.
In the non-articulated machine language of thought, the following ideas tripped like bouncing electrons across his mental screen.
Dark men.
White van.
Ambulance.
Getting out.
Something funny.
Bulky waistcoats.
Terrorists.
Shoot them.
Dark men.
TV crew.
Could be nothing.
Could be something.
No time.
Dark men.
White van.
Car in Baghdad.
Could be innocent.
Could have been innocent.
No time.
Shoot first.
Wait a second.
Jason Pickel’s pulse rate climbed. His palms began to sweat. He applied one big pale unblinking eye to the telescopic scope and located Habib in his sights.
The cross-hairs met exactly over the terrorist’s breastbone, and a bar of sacred music started playing in his brain. He did not articulate the words, and he’d never worked out why that particular Anglican hymn was always associated in his mind with this terminal moment. The tune was ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’.
Now the four men were moving over the cobbles towards the curlicued porch of the Members’ Entrance. And all the while Jason Pickel was reminding himself that there could be a wholly innocent explanation, and all the while keeping Habib in his sights.
‘What’s all this, then?’ asked one of the two policemen at the Members’ Entrance. They were both in shirtsleeves, and carrying short nose submachine guns.
‘Someone has been hurt!’ yelled Jones the Bomb. ‘He is injured.’ At this stage, in all logic, the plot should have been thwarted. It was just conceivable that an ambulance — through the fault of no one in particular — could get past two police barriers. But it was incredible in retrospect that Jones, Dean, Haroun and Habib, should have somehow bluffed their way past two more armed and highly capable officers. And when the Metropolitan Police came to analyse what had gone wrong, they did indeed find it difficult to blame anyone.
When six months later an inquiry under Lord Justice Rushbrooke produced its findings, the conclusion, insofar
