Cameron’s horror, he was staring at her as he advanced. She stared back, entranced by those wobbly brown irises in those bloodshot eyes.
‘Professor Swallow,’ he shouted. ‘Adam,’ he said, and Cameron found herself feeling no longer sick, but kind of spacey, detached in a personal bubble of horror. Oh my gosh, she thought, it’s true, it’s all true, and it’s all a goddamn lie.
Adam said something to Jones the Bomb in Arabic.
He said: ‘You’ll pay for this, you moron.’ But Cameron didn’t know Arabic, and looked at him with wild suspicion.
‘Come on, my love,’ said Adam, ‘we’ve got to go with them or they’ll kill us.’
‘They’ll kill us anyway.’
‘No they won’t. Maybe. I don’t know.’
The air immediately above the hall was now being churned so violently by the Black Hawk rotors that a tile was dislodged, and skittered ominously down the Himalayan shoulders of the building.
‘Hurry!’ shouted Jones to Adam and Cameron, and waved his Browning. Bobbing behind in the cuffs, the President hoped that the cameras could not see his expression as Jones and his party made for the exit.
On the left of Westminster Hall, as you face it from the north door, there is a curious stone balustrade with a low flight of steps leading up on either side. The banisters are decorated by carved stone heraldic beasts, chip- eared lions, a crack-horned unicorn and a stag missing part of his antler. Underneath the balustrade are steps leading to a set of swing doors which give access to a series of small meeting rooms called W1, W2, W3, W4, W5 and W6, where MPs encounter their constituents.
Here Jones hastened, having decided that room W6 was the most easily defended, being along a corridor, virtually subterranean, and only accessible by the one door from Westminster Hall. He stood on the steps and turned to ensure that his party was in order: the President, Cameron and Adam as hostages, and Dean, his skin now having an eerie Venusian tinge, bringing up the rear. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ yelled Jones the Bomb at the crowd. ‘If anyone tries to follow us he will die, or she.’
He was on the point of descending the steps when a voice from the crowd objected. It was Chester de Peverill, who had recovered from the shock of the ball on his head.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What about my speech: do you want me to carry on?’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
1053 HRS
‘My dear fellow,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘there is nothing that would give me greater pleasure. I will not be able to watch you in person, but I believe there may be a television down here. Carry on.’ And he was gone.
‘Actually,’ said Chester, ‘now I come to think of it, I think I’ve almost finished my speech. I might as well sit down.’
‘So soon?’ said Barlow. ‘Are you sure?’
There was a silence, and a kind of power vacuum. Despite his instructions, it was not clear which of the Arabs Jones had left in charge of the debate. Habib and Haroun disapproved, and in any case Haroun was now afflicted by a Chernobyl in his underpants.
He was starting to jig up and down, as children do, waggling his hand as though playing an imaginary guitar. Nothing could mask the incontrovertible and overwhelming pressure on his urethra. Several people in the audience noticed his demeanour. I don’t like the look of that one, they thought. Chap’s on crack cocaine.
The two other Arabs were chauffeurs from the Kuwaiti Embassy, and they hadn’t got the hang of Jones’s debate at all, so it was left to Benedicte.
She marched to the vacant lectern and yelped into the mike, ‘Come on, ladies and gentlemen,
Once again the forest of would-be speakers sprang up. Roger Barlow, Ziggy Roberts, Sir Perry Grainger, and a score of others. Benedicte’s eye fell on her lover, the French Ambassador. He was standing turkey-breasted, glaring haughtily at his girlfriend.
Not far from the Ambassador, on the other side of the aisle, a lady had risen. Her age was unclear but she was certainly no younger than seventy. Her silvery hair was cut short, and her attire was grey and white, and of almost nun-like severity. She was a peer of the realm, a former Home Office minister, a grandmother of twenty children.
She was Elspeth, Baroness Hovell, the scourge of the gay lobby, the abominator of abortion, the defender of corporal punishment (lovingly administered), and the only politician of any party to have the guts to question whether it was the business of the Treasury to use endless fiscal incentives to drive women out to work. In short, she was one of the few people there whose views and manifesto approximated to those of an Islamic fundamentalist, which was why she was known to her enemies — the right-on columnists, the stand-up comedians — as Old Ironpants, or the Mullah.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, ‘I hope it will not be thought too much of an insult to everyone here present, if I say that I believe our conduct, our collective conduct, is pretty pathetic. Like quite a few of us in this room I am old enough to remember the war, and I must say that this is not how we won it. We are being held to ransom by a bunch of terrorist louts, just a handful of them, and we sit here, and do nothing about it. I say …’
‘Please, madam, please,’ said Benedicte, interrupting as politely as she could. ‘You are not on the good path at all. You should be speaking of American abuse of human rights.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Lady Hovell, as though a ticket inspector had just sworn at her on the number 19 bus. ‘Did you say American abuse of human rights?’
‘That’s right, you must say whether the prisoners should be released.’
‘Well, I must say that strikes me as a bit hypocritical. What about your abuse of our human rights? Are you or are you not depriving us of our liberty?’
Oh Lord, thought Roger Barlow. The old bat’s going to get herself killed, or at least she’s going to get someone killed.
There were quite a few who seemed to agree. A neighbour tugged at her sleeve. ‘Sit down, Elspeth,’ hissed another.
‘I will not sit down,’ said the battleaxe. ‘It’s perfectly obvious they are relying on us to behave like sheep, and I’m afraid I don’t see why I should oblige.’
On the roof Jason Pickel was being given a swift and sketchy tutorial in the use of a rhino tranquillizer gun.
‘But the President’s left the room, and the freaking mother’s gone with him. What am I supposed to do ‘n’ all?’
‘It’s all right, Pickel: you go back down and wait for them to come out again.’ Ricasoli was hanging on to a rope ladder which was hanging from the Black Hawk, bucking in the air, and the captain was green with fear. Above them the skies were gravid with monsoon, and the whole thing was like a bad scene from America’s Indo-Chinese nightmare.
‘What if they don’t come out again?’
Ricasoli didn’t know the answer to that one. ‘They will, Pickel, they will.’
The burly sniper blinked his gingery lashes. ‘Whyn’t I abseil down into the hall, sneak into the room where he’s being held, and try to save him that way? It might be our only chance.’ He was thinking: it might be my only chance.
‘No, Pickel,’ said Ricasoli. ‘You do as you’re told. You’re the man, Pickel,’ said the quivering captain, knowing it was time to big up his subordinate. ‘You’re the best damn shot in the whole goddamn army.’
‘Watch this,’ said Pickel. And before Ricasoli could object, he picked out a leprous Victorian gryphon, ulcerated by acid rain, crouched on the roof 150 feet away. He pulled the trigger and the gryphon’s head exploded. ‘Clean through the eye,’ said Pickel, disappearing again through the hatch. Freaking Brits could pay for it.
‘And I speak up,’ continued Old Ironpants, the moralizing peeress, ‘because I believe we have sat through
