Seventy-Two Virgins

‘What happens now? Do you guys have a plan?’

‘We’re working on that right now.’

There is an iron railing at the top end of Westminster Hall, equipped with a gate which is used to control access by the public as they come in through St Stephen’s Entrance. Behind that fence was ranged an exotic collection from the great bestiary of British ceremonial. There was the Lord Chamberlain, an office now held by an epicene young coke-head whose family name may be found in the pages of Shakespeare.

He was wearing buckled shoes, tights, a stock and the kind of frilly frock coat favoured by Sir Mick Jagger in his Sympathy for the Devil phase. There was a man whose technical name was Silver Stick, but whose wife called him Algy, a superannuated army officer whose creaking calves now sheathed in black silk had once propelled him over the tryline victoriously at Twickenham half a century ago. There was Rouge Dragon Poursuivant and Garter King of Arms and a man called the Earl Marshal whose job it was at the State Opening of Parliament every year to carry something called the Cap of Maintenance.

There was the Speaker and his clerks, all braided, wigged and frogged, and there to one side, standing nearest the gate and fingering with wet grip the old ebony staff, surmounted by a lion, which had been the mark of his office since it was created by deed patent in 1350, was the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, there, because he is Serjeant-at-Arms of the Lords, and it falls to Black Rod to officiate at all such encounters between Their Lordships and distinguished visitors.

Poor Black Rod. He had fought at Korea. With the utmost dash, gallantry and dispatch and with signal disregard for his own safety, he had led his SAS detachment by rope ladder up the cliffs of Aden. When he had successfully applied for his current position after seeing an advertisement in The Times, it was in the belief that he had all the calm and cunning to deal with any threat that might befall the Upper House; and now he had been out-manoeuvred.

Not since he had been a teenage lance corporal and guarded the wrong pylon in the freezing drizzle of Salisbury Plain had he experienced such a military reverse.

As Dean looked at Black Rod, he saw that his expression was shared by almost all the representatives of Britain’s spavined junker aristocracy. They fingered the ancient maces and swords and pikes and halberds and rods by which it was their sworn duty in principle to defend this place, and a mood rose off them like a vapour. It was not alarm or fear. It was shame.

‘I say,’ whispered Silver Stick to the Earl Marshal, easing his sword perhaps half an inch out of his scabbard. ‘You know what I think?’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said the Earl Marshal.

‘But I really feel we ought to do something.’

‘Just don’t even think about it.’

‘It’s all very well saying that, but…’ Silver Stick was going to point out that a large proportion of his male relatives had died in engagement so heroic as to be ludicrous, charging machine gun nests with nothing but a whistle and a swagger stick, abseiling down smokestacks into the Bessemer converters of the Ruhr. But he knew that the Earl Marshal’s family had been in re-insurance before being raised to the peerage by Lloyd George, and he did not want to appear snobbish.

‘What about the element of surprise?’ quavered Silver Stick, voicing the secret thoughts of all the halberdiers, pike men and rod wielders who stood impotently around.

‘I think you’d find it was surprisingly stupid,’ said the Earl Marshal. He had no need to articulate the odds.

Even if Silver Stick could get round the fence and skewer the lead terrorist without precipitating a torrent of Uzi or Schmidt bullets, there was the prior problem.

If Jones the Bomb was to be believed, his death would be automatically followed by a detonation that would kill them all.

‘But do you think they can possibly be serious?’ said Silver Stick.

‘I have a terrible feeling that they are.’ The flower of England’s chivalry and nobility stared out at the expanse of Westminster Hall.

The heat seemed to have intensified under the TV lights and the audience flapped their programmes ever more desperately, like the spastic batting of a butterfly’s wings as it dies against a window. The old English soldiers stood on the dais and looked at this innocent multitude. They looked with expressions as stony as the very sculptures that dotted the hall.

They looked with the hollow eyes of men who have failed in their first and defining constitutional duty. Black Rod clutched his eponym and was at a loss.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 1028 HRS

Roger Barlow sat sprawled in his seat near the back, looking up at the hammerbeam ceiling, and gave way to fear, and to glassy despair. He’d bungled it. He’d bogged it up. He could have been a hero. Now he had been proved right and Chester de Peverill had been proved wrong and the only consolation was that Chester de Peverill was as likely as any of them to get blown to smithereens.

One of the Arabs was coming down the aisle waggling his gun and urging them all to speed up. ‘Give mobile,’ he said, ‘give mobile.’

De Peverill chucked his across on to the stone floor. ‘You had better give him your phone, Rog,’ he said.

‘I don’t have one,’ said Barlow. He hoped he sounded surly, rather than frightened. He didn’t like mobiles because you couldn’t trust the blighters. They were technological Judases, he thought as he stared at the ceiling. There had been a godawful moment the other day when his blinking mobile had contrived quite independently to dial his wife.

He was somewhere he really shouldn’t have been, not for his own good, and he was in the company of the woman in whom this ghastly reporter from the Mirror was now taking such an interest. The woman in question seemed deliberately to have exposed her bosom, and she was looking at him imploringly. ‘Oh please,’ she droned, ‘you promised. Do it for Eulalie. It’s a fantastic investment.’

Roger had smiled at her, because he really wanted to make her happy, or at least stop bugging him, and then he thought he must be going mad. He could hear the voice of his conscience.

It was this tiny voice squeaking at him from his breast pocket like Tinkerbell, ‘Darling is that you? Hello. Hello.’

‘Oh hi, darling,’ he said, when he twigged. ‘Hi, did you call me?’

‘No I didn’t call you, you must have called me.’

‘No I didn’t call you, you definitely called me.’

‘Oh mm, oh good, how are you?’

‘Oh I’m all right, how are you? You sound as though you’ve been running.’

It had been, all told, quite a sticky conversation. And then another time he was waiting to vote late at night and would you believe it, her mobile accidentally dialled his and left a long message. It must have jostled up against something in her handbag or been squeezed in some unexpected way and he found himself listening to his wife walking down the street when he thought she was at home. Pok pok pok went her heels, and then she seemed to arrive somewhere, and then he found himself listening with paranoid fascination as she engaged in some extended transaction, full of ambiguous pauses, with some chap or other; and when the message ended, Roger was so wrung out that he decided mobiles were instruments of temptation and that he would have no more to do with them.

He folded his arms, ignored Chester and gazed aloft at the woodwork.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 1030 HRS