Seventy-Two Virgins

as there was a conclusion, was that it was just one of those things. If the two armed policemen had been depicted by a cartoonist, they would have had big question marks in thought bubbles ballooning over their heads.

‘Huh,’ said their faces. ‘Why is an Asian TV crew getting out of an ambulance?’

They could see there was something louche about the business. Jason could smell it from sixty feet up, and Roger Barlow, who was still charging across the yard, knew it for ding-dang sure.

No, when they came to work out how a quartet of barely competent suicide bombers had finally penetrated Westminster Hall, they could not find it in their hearts to criticize the police, nor could they convincingly point the finger at the US Army sharpshooter, the Lieutenant formerly known as Pickel. Most newspapers leapt to the conclusion that he was suffering from a kind of nervous paralysis produced by his ‘Dad’ flashbacks.

Look at the analogies, they trilled. ‘S obvious, innit!

Just like the fateful white GMC car of Baghdad, the ambulance challenged the poor Pickel to respect the sanctity of its insignia. The one was covered in duct tape spelling TV; the other had huge letters saying ambulance. No wonder, they postulated, that he had yibbed out.

Once again, they said, he saw dark young men of suspicious mien approaching in a mysterious vehicle.

Once more, he had only a few seconds in which to act. Either he could dispense lethal violence, or a calamity would befall those he was sworn to protect. At that critical moment, said the laptop psychoanalysts, Pickel’s brain flopped over and died like a jellyfish with sunstroke.

He couldn’t hack it, they suggested. They saw in their imaginations, and wrote without fear of contradiction, how the gun slipped from his wet fingers, how he vibrated like a medium, how his eyes rolled back like Baron Samedi and the perspiration spanged from his brow like the drops from a shaken colander.

His nostrils were filled with the flashback aroma of charred Iraqi, they said, and his throat, they suggested, was constricted by shame.

Not for the first time, they wrote rubbish. What happened was this.

With the help of the gargoyle’s shoulder, Pickel was on the point of saving the day. He could have put Jones down with one high velocity round, and then the others as well, because he was not only the quickest and best, but he was also full of desire to vindicate his actions in Baghdad.

This time he would get it right, he would be Pickel the hero, not Pickel the walnut, and voices in his head were urging him on. And not just metaphorically.

‘Come in Pickel!’ yelled the furry receiver in his ear. It was Captain Ricasoli of the Presidential Protection Squad, suspended in the specially adapted Black Hawk. And even as Ricasoli was telling him the horrible truth about the ambulance, Pickel was bawling out his orders over New Palace Yard.

Roger Barlow jumped, the terrorists turned as one, the policeman boggled.

‘Hold it!’ yelled the sharpshooter. ‘Hold it right there or I…’

Every sniper has the same phobia.

He takes his position as a big game hunter settles in his hide. He watches the tethered antelope and the trees, and the ripples on the river, and he stares so closely at the 180 degrees in front of him that he could draw it from memory. And in a hypnosis of intimate surveillance he forgets one possibility — that the tiger has been sensible enough to sneak up behind him and is about to bite his quivering rump.

So at the noise of the delicate subcontinental footfall Pickel turned around. Indira had not gone far away; she had merely climbed the ladder on to the pitched roof and stolen along the catwalk to a place out of earshot. There she had consulted her superiors and received unambiguous instructions from the Met.

Pickel was exhibiting signs of instability and she should do her best to disarm him, said her controller. It was only ten seconds later, so they later established, when the news came through about the rogue ambulance. They tried to reach the clever young Gujarati girl but she had turned off her radio, the better to steal up on her American colleague.

And now as he spun round she was almost upon him, looking at him with the motherly concern of a nurse in a loony bin.

‘No, Jason,’ she said and jumped him. She was brave, and other things being equal, right. Watching from the yard, Jones & Co were puzzled to see the American officer disappear into a tangle of limbs, as Indira practised her jujitsu. It was long enough for Habib and Haroun to slink out of shot, one behind the protection of the Members’ Entrance porch, the other in the lee of a policeman.

Even so Pickel might have pulled it off, once he had sat on Indira’s head. He still had a clear shot at Jones, Dean and a good chance of hitting Haroun. He might still have earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. He might still have been graciously appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to the most excellent order of the British Empire, had he not spotted something out of the corner of his eye that made him think he was going mad.

It was that big puff of hair, that foaming crest he would know anywhere. It was that Limey journalist, it was that pisser of poison from the Daily Mirror. It was Barry White, who had used his disgusting good manners to seduce him with his satphone, and had fatally distracted him from his duties as a guard, and who had written his reputation into the dust, and his marriage into oblivion.

Barry White was ambling with his pass to the public entrance, thinking that the Mirror wouldn’t conceivably want more than a couple of pars about the speech, and plotting his assignation for lunch, wondering why the people in the yard were all staring at the roof, and quite unaware that one of his most conspicuous victims had drawn a bead on his head and was fantasizing about how it would look when he pulled the trigger.

When he was a child in Iowa, Pickel used to look forward to visiting old Grandmaw Pickel, a woman as profoundly religious as she was deaf, who had a fetish for growing gigantic vegetables. Every year she would compete at the Town Fair with extra-large marrows, super-size squashes, and prodigious zucchini. Late one August evening she had taken him to the pumpkin patch and shown him her latest entrant, a colossal orange globe glowing in the gloom. He had never seen anything like it. It had winner written all over it, and as the day of the fair approached all Grandmaw’s friends were invited to witness the almost visible expansion of its flesh, and to feel their morale sink.

Alas, Grandmaw had cheated. She had no special talent for manure; it was no priestly incantation that plumped the great gourd. When no one was looking she had tied a piece of cotton thread to the tap on the side of the house and she had run it to the pumpkin, and she had tied the thread to a needle, and stuck that in the top of the vegetable.

Then drip, drip, drip, she had opened the tap just a little and fed her pet continuously for weeks, with the pumpkin equivalent of anabolic steroids. Young Jason would never forget the moment of tragic revelation. On the day of the fair the whole family was assembled in the vegetable garden to see the raising of the pumpkin. Three male Pickels between them were scarcely able to hoist it on to a wheelbarrow, but Grandmaw wanted a photograph of herself holding it aloft, much as Hemingway would insist on commemorating the capture of an enormous marlin.

She reached down with both hands and gripped the freshly cut stalk as thick as a baby’s arm, and she straddled her legs into a squat-thrust and heaved. And because it was she whose beefy genes had made Jason so big and strong, she prevailed. With the triumphant grunt of a female Ukrainian shot-putter, she lifted it up, first to chest height, then to her head. She smiled for the camera, and the scene was seared in Jason’s memory, his grandmother backlit by the sun, and the fluorescent orange vegetable and everyone laughing and clapping.

Because all at once there occurred an event as sudden and horrifying as the conflagration of a hydrogen- filled airship. The pumpkin exploded. Fattened beyond endurance, unable to cope with the demands of gravity, the skin of the pumpkin popped like a balloon and splattered Grandmaw and Jason and everyone else with clods of waterlogged mulch and pulp and gunk.

Yeah, one moment a sphere, the next moment his grandmother holding nothing but a stalk, and that, thought Jason as he hummed his hymn and located Barry White in his sights, was what was about to happen to this guy’s head. Except that Indira, dazed and winded beneath him, chose that moment to fight back.

Nothing could be worse, she decided, than the smegmatic oblivion of her current position. Rotating her head she bit what she took to be Jason Pickel’s inner thigh, but was in fact his left testicle.

‘Yowk,’ said Jason Pickel, and his finger withdrew from the trigger guard.

Barry White walked on, quite oblivious, round the corner of the Members’ Entrance and through the swing doors of the South Porch into Westminster Hall.