as if to say, ‘Not for you, sonny.’ The President pursed his lips.
In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the male egos were spooling madly in all directions. They were not thinking what they were doing; they were thinking how they would be held to have done when this business was over. One mind, a young female mind, was sitting in a corner and considering logically the problem that Jones had posed. ‘Hey,’ she said to herself, looking up from her notes, ‘hey, I know what!’ she yelled. No one was listening.
The Ops Room had become an ops floor, with every computer terminal the object of discreet and overt competition between the operatives of Britain and America. Colonel Bluett of the USSS seemed slowly to be gaining the upper hand. By sheer weight of men and
‘Not there, you dummkopf, there!’ yelled Bluett. He was now pacing around, a limp cigar hanging from his mouth in blatant imitation of Colonel Kilgore. At any moment you expected him to puff out his barrel chest and announce that Charlie don’t surf or that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
Without looking, he took a mobile phone from an aide and yelled into it: ‘Bluett! Not there, there!’ He pointed at a scale model of Westminster Hall, which was hastily being bodged together with the help of a guidebook on top of one of the tables.
‘Yes sir,’ he said, for it was Washington on the line, in this case the Secretary of State. ‘We’ve identified six of them, including the girl who came in with the French Ambassador. That’s right, sir. The only guy we can’t get a fix on is the young one. Seems to be some British kid, petty criminal, misfit, something like that. Yessir, yessir, we’re working on that right now. What’s that you say?’
He lunged at the model and picked up two green toy soldiers. Cradling the mobile, he grabbed a magic marker and labelled one of them POTUS, before putting them back, facing in a slightly different direction.
‘Do any of them have a history of suicide bombing? Gee, sir, I don’t think you can have a history of suicide bombing. I think he might have a history of attempted suicide bombing, but—’
‘I’ve got it.’ This time the female detective, whose name was Camilla, secured the attention of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, who was desperate to shut out the noise of Bluett.
‘You know what, darling,’ he said, smiting his forehead when it was explained to him, ‘you’re flaming well right.’
‘Chaps,’ he said, in such a way as to indicate that by chaps’ he meant chaps as opposed to guys. ‘Here is what we are going to do.’ It took Bluett only seconds to realize that his British counterpart had found the solution.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
1037 HRS
As his eyes soaked up the room, he could see the excitement. Some of his own men were now clustering around Purnell and making animated gestures. For all his swaggering, Bluett was essentially a bureaucrat and every bureaucrat knows what to do when your rival has a brainwave.
You go along with it. You extol it; and then you secretly find a way of sabotaging it, while making sure that you have distanced yourself from it in good time.
‘Fantastic,’ said Bluett, when the wheeze was explained to him. ‘There’s only one problem I see here, and that’s how do we get the guy into the hall. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but if this maniac sees someone pointing a gun at him loaded with a rhino tranquillizer then he is going to pull the ripcord — no question. And anyhow, what if it doesn’t knock him out?’
‘It will knock him out in a trice,’ said Camilla, the detective who had thought up the idea. ‘Hit him in the neck and he’ll be away with the fairies.’
‘That’s swell, that’s swell,’ said Bluett, pacing over to his mock-up and thinking the Brits could not be serious. What did they think this was? Daktari?
‘Show me how we get him in. There are at least six entrances to Westminster Hall, but they are all obvious, and they’ve got men with machine guns everyplace.’ With his magic marker he indicated the main access points, St Stephen’s Entrance, the entrance from New Palace Yard, the passageway entrance by which Jones & Co. had come in and then two sets of entrances on the left-hand side as the President looked at it, through doors that led to a series of debating chambers and meeting rooms.
‘Of course we could take them all out just like that’ — he flipped over a figurine violently, ‘but then we’d run the risk of disaster. I love this idea. I love it to death. My only question is how do we get a man in there without being seen. That’s why I want to hear from Pickel.’
The sharpshooter was at that moment invisible, shielded from view by the glare of the TV lights. He was filthy from soot and trying to think of a way of persuading his gun to slip off its hook and fall into his arms. He stood up to his full six foot two, and stretched his leg-like arms. The gun was still several feet too high.
He gave a little jump, and landed back heavily, missing the platform and resting on a high crossbeam. The beam held up well, but Pickel wobbled as he landed. ‘No,’ he thought. He was a brave man, but not a funambulist. ‘That’s enough jumping.’
Slowly on his hands and knees, he grovelled his way to the eaves in search of a way up, and listened, as he went, to the further ravings of Jones.
‘So,’ said the lead terrorist, ‘is there no one here in this birthplace of Parliamentary debate who has the courage to speak? Here is the building of Pitt, Fox, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill and the great George Galloway. Is no one prepared to say anything on the issue of the hour? Are you all cowards?’ he shrieked suddenly.
‘Easy, boy,’ said the President. ‘Last time a person tried to speak you shot him in the ear.’
‘Good point, my friend,’ said Jones nastily. ‘This time I have a different policy. If no one speaks by the time I count to ten, I will fire at a hostage. Yes, you again, why not, you miserable creature.’ He once more indicated the wounded Dutchman, who opened his eyes and regarded his tormentor with herpetic inscrutability.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, infidel dogs, the motion before the house is that America should release her illegal prisoners from their Cuban torture chambers. The world is watching, the world is voting. Who will have the courage to speak before the bald guy gets it?’
‘ONE!’
Dean looked at the faces of the politicians nearest him. Even with his limited knowledge of current affairs, he could tell that there were some quite famous people here. Wasn’t that guy the Home Secretary, inventor of FreshStart, to whose munificence with public funds he supposedly owed thanks and praise? Surely to goodness one of them would have the guts to stand up and say something snappy. Wasn’t that what they were trained for?
Their faces were pale with shock, but each was inwardly engaged in that art he had made into a profession: maximizing the chance of his own survival. In the breast of each one was the traditional competition between the fear of appearing an idiot and the lust to star on television.
‘TWO!’
Ziggy Roberts, best and brightest of the new intake, felt his mouth go dry. He could make his name for evermore. How many times had his speeches mentioned the concept of a golden opportunity’ which it was necessary to ‘seize with both hands’ with a view to going ‘forward into the future’?
‘This is it, Ziggy, old man,’ he told himself. ‘This is the big one.’
‘THREE!’
Sir Perry Grainger toyed for a heartbeat with the notion that speaking in this debate would count as dancing to the terrorist tune and be therefore unacceptable. Insofar as he had a natural human desire to be inconspicuous after the demented terrorist leader had tried to shoot him, he justified it on that ground.
‘You shouldn’t play their games, Perry,’ one part of his brain told the other half; and the other half retorted vigorously: ‘Don’t be a wimp, Grainger, you fool. Did the people of South Oxfordshire send you to this place that you should keep silent on the greatest international crisis of our epoch, when hundreds of us, including the leader of Britain’s oldest and most important ally, are in mortal peril? You must speak, Grainger, you great dingbat, and speak for England.’
