The parkie looked at him.
That was just it. He had watched the vehicle like a tethered goat. He had seen the men get out, leaving it parked in a disgracefully dangerous position.
He had seen them shamble into the Tivoli for breakfast. He didn’t believe for one minute that they were ambulance men. They were the first ambulance men he had ever seen in scruffy old T-shirts and jeans, and he didn’t see why they should be in possession of an ambulance belonging to the Bilston and Willenhall NHS Trust.
‘Please, let us pay now.’
‘No, you must come to the pound.’
‘Why?’
‘You must establish that the vehicle is yours.
‘But I have lost the papers.’
‘Then you must come to the pound.’
The man called Jones went to the cabin of the ambulance and rootled in the glove box. He came back with a brick of cash, like the wodge the winner has at the end of a game of Monopoly, or what you get for a fiver in Zimbabwean dollars. Eric frowned and pretended to study his Huskie.
‘Please do not force me to beg,’ said Jones.
‘I ain’t forcing you to beg, sir.’
‘My sister is pregnant.’
With every second that passed, Eric was surer that he had done the right thing. Now if they had said that they were taking the Duke of Edinburgh on a secret assignation with a nurse from St Thomas’s hospital, that would have been one thing.
If they had said that they had a freshly excised human liver on board, and that it needed to be transferred in ten minutes to a terminally alcoholic football player, or if they had claimed to be part of Scotland Yard’s counter- terrorist unit, they would have appealed to his imagination.
But to say that his sister was pregnant — that was sorry stuff. He looked at the four of them. He noticed that the youngest one was staring at him in a funny way, as if terrified.
Am I really so frightening? wondered Eric Onyeama, king of the kerb. He continued to tap into the Huskie.
‘L64896P’, ‘Tufton Street’, ‘02, 62’ … The details were soon pinged into space, and stored in irrefutable perpetuity in the Apcoa computers. Somewhere in cyberspace the electronic data began to team up with other groups of electrons; in less than half a second they were having a vast symposium of sub-atomic particles, and among the preliminary conclusions would be that the vehicle was from Wolverhampton.
He looked up again, and saw the kindlier-looking one, Habib, who was cleaning his teeth with a carved juniper twig. But where was the other one?
Haroun had vanished.
He had stolen inside the machine and he was searching for something.
He knocked aside a cervical collar-set. He brushed a mouth-to-mouth ventilator to the floor. Ha, he thought to himself. This would unquestionably do the job, he decided. He extracted the prong of a pericardial puncture kit, and tested its needle point on his finger.
CHAPTER FIVE
0835 HRS
‘Looks like a killer,’ said Purnell. He gave a small shudder as he looked at the file on Haroun Abu Zahra, a slim docket. ‘What do we know about him?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Grover, ‘but the Yanks are pretty keen on talking to him as well. There is one thing, though.’ He paused, as all subordinates will when they are keen to emphasize some tiny advance.
‘Our lads were talking to the Travelodge, and they said there was something most peculiar about their room.’
‘After they’d left?’
‘Yeah. There’s a picture by some posh artist on the wall, of a naked girl, you know, a print.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Tits out, very tasteful and all.’
‘Go on.’
‘And they had turned it to the wall. Twenty minutes later they checked out.’
‘Wackos.’
The phone went in the outer room. They both knew it was Bluett.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell looked at the clock on the wall.
‘They’ll be on their way, won’t they?’
‘No way of stopping them now,’ said Grover.
No fewer than fifteen BMW 750 police motorcycles were engaged in sheepdogging the traffic out of the way of the slowly oncoming cavalcade.
Now they were approaching Junction 4 for West Drayton and Heathrow, and seeing the signs the President looked over to his right.
He tried to spot the two Boeing 747-700s, painted in the eggshell blue livery of the President of the United States; but no sign. Perhaps they had been tactfully concealed in a hangar.
After the airport the wailing host of outriders and motorbike voortrekkers took the red route that runs from Heathrow to London. They shovelled the taxis aside and cowed the cursing commuters.
One woman tried to see into the tint-windowed limos and crashed her Nissan Micra into the back of an expensive but vulnerable Alfa 164. The ensuing delay added an average of fifteen minutes to the journeys of more than 1,000 motorists.
As the traffic thickened down the Charing Cross Road, it occurred to Roger that this security business would be no joke. What if he couldn’t even get into his office?
Cameron. That was the answer.
Cameron would have all the passes necessary.
He reached into his breast pocket for his mobile, since he was all in favour of using his bike as his office.
Damn. Oh yes. He’d thrown it away the other day when it rang at the wrong moment. Straight out of the car window, as it happened, on the M25, landing safely in some buddleias in the central reservation.
He negotiated the Palio of Trafalgar Square and howled round into Whitehall. And here it was.
A fence. Ribbons of aluminium fences, and policemen in fluorescent yellow, sprouting like dandelions in the grey of the stone and the tarmac, and the
‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to dismount.’
‘But I’m a Member of Parliament.’
The policeman looked at him with open disgust.
‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Sheba, sir.’
And so it went on as Roger was shunted in a ludicrous arc westwards of the place to which his electors had sent him. Every time he attempted to penetrate the cordon of fencing he was sent off again in search of some mythical entry point.
‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t take your bike through here.’
At one point, to his shame, he snapped at the men in blue.
‘What’s wrong with my bike?’
‘It’s a lethal weapon, sir.’
‘You can say that again. It’s almost killed me several times.’
‘Now don’t try to be funny, sir. I’ve seen these things packed with explosives. I’ve seen what they can do.
