‘Ladies and gentlemen, listen very carefully to me and do exactly as I say and no harm will come to you. I know that this is a traditional introduction to a speech by a lead terrorist, but in this case it happens to be true.
‘Hundreds of years ago, more than 350 years ago, a king was put on trial on this very spot. His name was Charles and he was a bad king. He took the money that belonged to the poor people. He was oppressive and he acted in a way that was arrogant and outside the law. He believed that he had some kind of divine right to do what he wanted and so they brought him here and they put him on trial and then they chopp-ed off his head. In the country where I come from it is of course the practice that if people commit great crimes their heads are chopp-ed off. You like to say that this is barbaric and so I point out that all your great British democracy, all your Parliament comes from that moment when the King’s head is chopp-ed and was that not the right thing to do?’
‘No,’ said Sir Perry Grainger, speaking for Henley-on-Thames in the royalist rump of Oxfordshire. ‘It was completely wrong, and anyway, it’s not chopp-ed, it’s chopped.’
‘Shut your face,’ said Jones the Bomb, and located that bright red object eleven rows behind Cameron and the French Ambassador as he faced the hall and on the left.
‘Well, you did ask,’ said Sir Perry, but Jones had unstuck a Browning taped to the small of his back.
‘Don’t say another word or I will shoot.’
‘All right, all right, keep your hair on.’
The noise of the automatic was so loud, reverberating off the flat flags and walls, that some thought the end had come and that Jones had let off his bomb.
The bullet was travelling in roughly the direction of Sir Perry, but connected first with the Dutch Ambassador’s left ear. This was protected by a sturdy German-built hearing-aid, which clattered to the floor while the bullet flattened itself harmlessly 150 yards away against the far wall. The Dutchman groaned and started to bleed. Cameron put her arm around him. It really wasn’t his day. A few seats away a distinguished lady peeress began to cry. A small puddle of pee formed beneath her chair. Black terror settled on the crowd.
‘That bad king was put on trial by the people of England,’ Jones resumed, ‘and his head chop— his head was cut off.
Today’ — he jerked the handcuff and the President’s arm jerked in response — ‘we have another bad ruler and another trial. This is a man who rules the world by force. He abuses human rights; he invades countries without any international authorization, just because he can, because he has the power. With his discriminatory trade policies he is keeping one billion people, the poorest people on earth, living on less than one dollar per day. With his depleted uranium shells he has been killing babies in Afghanistan.’ At this the President rolled his eyes.
‘Shut up,’ said Jones, catching the movement from one of his panoptic irises.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ said the President.
‘Be quiet, you idiot!’ said Jones and stuck his face so close, gun next to his cheek, that the President observed not just the eyes, but the awful pathology of a zit that had arisen when Jones was sixteen and exploded when he was seventeen, leaving a star-shaped depression in his forehead. The President was quiet. In the silence he could hear the sobbing that was spreading down the rows and the confused whispering of the security men into their lapels and the desperate chatter of the helicopter rotors overhead.
‘Today is not just the trial of this bad man,’ said Jones. ‘It is the trial of America. Before the eyes of all the people of Britain and before the eyes of all the people of the world, I bring you this bad man to this place of history so that he and his country may answer for their crimes. But I do not presume to be the judge myself, I do not seize and abuse the law like this man does,’ and he shook the cuffs again, so the President jerked like a crash dummy, ‘nor will I even impose the death penalty like this man does’ —
‘Sir, it looks like he could easily be telling the truth on the heart sensor thing. Athletes buy them.’
‘Thanks, Grover,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
‘Athletes?’ said Bluett.
‘Yessir. There’s a thing called an exercise heart rate sensor. You could easily wire it up so that if the heart fails to beat for five or ten seconds, then it would complete a circuit and set off the detonator.’
‘You see,’ said Purnell.
They stared at the TV images of Jones the Bomb, which were now being watched in almost every country on earth. He looked mad enough to do anything.
‘Shall I fire, sir?’ asked Cabache, still locked in intimacy with Philippa of Hainault.
‘Hold your horses, Cabache,’ said Bluett.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
1027 HRS
Dean stood at the top of the steps, looking out over the audience, as Benedicte and the four other Arabs moved up and down the aisle, harvesting the mobiles in big black sacks and disarming any obvious security men.
The cameras were allowed to function — indeed, they were essential for Jones’s plan — and a close-up of the terrified kid was now flashed across the nation’s TV screens and round the world. His large expressive eyes were so wide that the whites entirely surrounded the irises; his lips were grey, and he was holding a Schmidt, given to him by Benedicte, as if it were an adder.
In the house in Wolverhampton, Paulie was sitting on a scummy orange beanbag and eating Alpen with water, waiting to go in for the late shift at RitePrice.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Nah.’ He put his face right next to the screen, so that his features were bathed in the strobing panicky colours of his former colleague’s skin.
‘I just do not believe it,’ he said. And the reaction was much the same in other parts of Wolverhampton.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Price the Cheese, and a ladle of whey dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor of the swish new cheesorium he had constructed with the insurance.
Next door, in the same old house in Wednesbury, Dennis Faulkner was so stunned that he thought he was having another little blip. He rose from his antimacassared Parker-Knoll and tried to loosen the tartan tie at his throat.
There was even one person in the audience who thought she recognized Dean. She had been shivering, and praying, and crying with fear, and then she had opened her eyes and seen him. It couldn’t be him; and yet it had to be.
In the Ops Room Bluett flipped the switch again, so as to communicate directly with his agents in the hall.
‘This is Bluett,’ he said.
‘And this is Purnell,’ said Purnell.
‘Right. This is both of us,’ said Bluett. ‘They’ve taken my guns, sir,’ said one USSS man. ‘Mine too.’
‘Mine too, sir.’
‘I’ve still got a clear shot, sir,’ said Cabache.
‘Do not, repeat not, attempt to take these guys out. Please cooperate, and encourage the civilians to cooperate.’
‘Ye ssir.’
‘Sir?’ said one agent.
‘Yes.’
