she came out of the shower.
She knew exactly what she looked like as she came back into his presence. She had dried herself and was wearing only a short silk thing with straps. She was looking — this may sound crude, but it is no less than the truth — like a lingerie model only cleverer and, if anything, with bigger breasts.
He had turned, and picked her up, and carried her on to the bed. Now, in the small hours, she remembered that just before then he had started shoving something he was reading into his bag, and zipped it up.
She brooded on this detail. There had definitely been a touch of furtiveness in his manner.
‘Oh boy,’ she breathed to herself in the dark, as the obvious answer struck her. He was married. He not only had a wife in Surbiton, he had a brace of kids. Make that a gaggle. And she had caught him reading their school reports. With a grim and mounting certainty, she peeled back the coverlet and placed her high-arched feet on the carpet. He was still breathing steadily.
But as she reached into the bag, and prepared to extract the document, she could feel the pain preparing to course through her system. Perhaps his admiration for Islam had encouraged him to enlist a small assortment of wives. She held up a cardboard folder in the tangerine light from the street.
‘SACEUR,’ it said at the top, in capitals and then, ‘US Military:
Restricted,’ and it gave that year’s date. With a ludicrous sense of jubilation, she put it back and slipped into bed.
It was just some boring address book, she thought; and, believe it or not, Cameron made no connection as she eventually drifted off between its presence in Adam’s bag and their earlier visit to NATO.
The anomalies had popped up only now, as a corpse will surface only some time after a drowning, and she wanted an explanation.
‘OK,’ said Adam. ‘All right.’ He spoke in dead tones, unable to meet her eyes. ‘You’re perfectly right. I’ll explain.’
It takes huge upper body strength to climb upwards and backwards on the inside of a roof with nowhere for your hands and feet to go but the joists. And the joists offered no proper purchase, nothing about which he could curve his fingers. Insofar as he was able to grip the wood at all, it was by means of the sheer pressure he was able to exert with his fingers and thumbs.
But Pickel was remarkably strong; his hands were like those of a farmer or a manual labourer, pumped up by squeezing squash balls to double normal human size. He was also maddened with frustration, furious with himself for missing in the yard and then losing his gun, disgusted at the drivel rising like pollution from the debate below.
As soon as he had whacked the guy who was holding the President, thought Pickel, he might quietly drill a couple of holes in that hinky chef dude, the one who didn’t like sausages.
He didn’t know what was wrong with the world: a bunch of towelhead sickos, threatening to kill the President of the USA and some faggot Limey stands up and makes a speech attacking hamburgers.
Rage impelled him up the inside of the roof, and all he needed, he told himself, was speed and a clear run and absolute concentration. So it was unfortunate, as he looked up to check that he was aiming for the hatch, that he should receive a surprise. There was a face silhouetted in the hatch and the face was saying something to him.
‘Hey Pickel,’ whispered the person and removed his gun from the latch. One of Pickel’s hands slipped off the joist, his foot came off the joist two below. For an instant Pickel hung above the audience, eyes bugging, joints popping, on the point of descending so violently on to the orating Chester de Peverill that he would surely have turned him into the hamburger the chef so deplored.
With a grunting convulsion, Pickel managed to regain control. He shot back down the ladder of joists as fast as he could, to take the strain off his arms, and he reached for the beam again.
He jammed his toe into the corner, just to wedge himself like a human piton. His toecap connected with the ancient tennis ball. After almost 500 years of seclusion, the ball rolled six inches off the beam and began the long drop back into play.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
1052 HRS
The President was among the first to see it: one of the advantages of having your eyes close set together, like Bjorn Borg, the tennis champion, is you can focus on balls a long way away. He thought it was a grenade, perhaps tear gas, the opening gambit of some desperate rescue plan. His first thought was that he was going to die.
Haroun didn’t see it. He couldn’t really concentrate on anything much at the moment except the build-up of molten lava in his lower abdomen. He was damned if he was going to urinate in front of all these shameless foreign women, like some incontinent child. It would be a haram, a disgrace; and so he was staring at the wall to avoid their eyes and hoping to distract himself from the urging of his medulla oblongata by counting every one of the big grey stones that made up the right-hand wall.
Barlow did see it, because he happened to be staring up again, praying that a thunderbolt would descend and destroy Chester de Peverill, leaving nothing but a pile of ash smoking in his Timberland loafers. He saw a small object detach itself from the area of blinding white below the TV lights. He saw the thing grow bigger in the 2.1 seconds it took to fall, and though he flinched, he knew with a sudden unarticulated joy — because he had a good eye for a ball — that there was a reasonable chance it would fall on the head of the prating prat beside him. Which it did.
Women screamed in the rows around him. Men screamed, too, and shouted and swore. ‘What was that?’ shouted Jones as the Arab gunmen and woman whipped round and the ball rolled under the chairs. Everyone looked at the space in the rafters from which the ball had come. They blinked. They squinted. They listened to the noise of the helicopter, which now seemed to be directly overhead.
They couldn’t be sure whether they could see something up there, or whether it was the green and purple blotches left on the retina by the scalding TV lights. Jones thought it important to assert his command of the situation.
‘Die, infidel son of a whore,’ he said and loosed off a round from his Browning in the general direction of Pickel. The American sniper was gone. With a single fluid lunge he had travelled up and back, wrenching his trapezius muscles but successfully gaining the hatch that led back to the fleche.
The combination of the gunshot and the little leather bomblet had frazzled the President’s nerves. He had given up alcohol many years ago but seldom had he felt more in need of a stiff one, or a cigarette. ‘Say buddy,’ he said to Jones, ‘would you have a piece of gum?’
‘Come on,’ he yelled at the President, putting the ball on the lectern, picking up his gun and yanking on the handcuffs. It was time to activate plan B. Jones had worked out long ago that he would need a fallback position. The British and the Americans were bound to come up with a response, and the longer he and the President stood on the dais, the more vulnerable he would be.
‘Dean, follow me,’ he ordered, and gave instructions to Haroun, Habib and the rest of the Arabs to keep charge of the crowd. Dragging the President in his wake and waving the automatic, he marched down the aisle. To
