It wasn’t the sex comedy side of things. It wasn’t the waste of money, the cash that should have gone into Weetabix and plastic guns for shooting him in bed.
It was the gullibility — that was what worried him.
Should he wait for the papers to present this appalling Hieronymus Bosch version of his life? Or should he try to give his account first, and thereby win points for frankness?
Hang on a tick: there was a colleague. Swishing down the pavement, hair cut by Trumpers, suit cut by Savile Row — it was Adrian (Ziggy) Roberts. Bright. Forceful. Decisive. Very far from completely unbearable; in fact, by any standards really rather nice.
Roger conceived a desire to talk to him, not least because he could see under his arm the early edition of the
‘Ziggy, old man,’ called Roger Barlow, kerb-crawling on his bike.
‘Hombre!’ replied Ziggy.
‘You going to this Westminster Hall business?’
‘God no,’ said Ziggy, who had benefited from the most expensive education England can provide. ‘Can’t be arsed.’
Roger felt welling up in himself the urge to confide in a friend. A problem shared, he whispered to himself, is a problem halved.
‘Can I ask you something, Zigs?’
‘Of course.’
Roger looked at his colleague, his high, clear forehead, his myriad certainties. On second thoughts, no.
Ziggy counted as a friend, but it was, in the end, your friends who did you in. And quite right, too. That was what friends were for.
‘That posh suit,’ said Barlow. ‘Just tell me roughly how much.’ But Ziggy’s answer was lost in the noise of the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter. Blimey, thought Barlow: this was worse than the helicopter paranoia scene in
‘Wait a sec,’ said the co-pilot of the chopper, as they bullocked over towards the Embankment. He craned backwards the way they had come, and the City of Westminster — touching in its majesty — was reflected in the black visor of his helmet.
‘I just realized . .
‘Say again?’ yodelled the pilot into the mike on his chin.
‘I think we just flew over it. It was on a tow-truck. I didn’t really take it in…’
‘On a tow-truck?’
‘Yeah, you know, a council truck.’
‘Bollocks,’ said the pilot. ‘No one lifts an ambulance.’
‘Go on, it’ll take thirty seconds. Just back there in that little street near Marsham Street.’
The pilot sighed and turned the joystick. ‘Well,’ he said a little later. ‘There’s your tow-truck, but I don’t see any ambulance.’
The co-pilot stared. It may have been unusual for an ambulance to be hoisted, but it was positively unheard of for a vehicle of any kind to escape the clutches of a tow-truck operator.
‘Where’s the driver, anyway?’ he asked himself.
Here, thought Dragan Panic. Down here! Look this way!
For a couple of seconds he jumped up and down, waving and staring at the police helicopter until his eyeballs began to ache from the glare.
No use. They couldn’t see him.
Dragan had a pretty good idea what he had witnessed: the shambolic beginning of something that might end with eternal loss and heartache for thousands of families. He had read about the idiotic punch-up outside Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9111 itself, when the Islamic headcases left their maps and their Koran and their flight manuals in the stolen hire car. But mere incompetence was no guarantee of failure, as he knew from his own soldiering.
Dragan looked down towards Marsham Street. He saw a building site; he saw men in yellow hats and muddy boots. Tough men, who could help.
He was older and fatter than he had been as a purple pyjamaed Serb MUP man, and he was soaked with sweat; and though he had absolutely no reason to love the United States, not after what they had done to Serbia, he stamped and grunted as fast as his Reeboks would carry him.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Help, please!’
Dark faces looked up.
Dragan put his hands on his knees in exhaustion, and began to explain to the immigrant builders that there was a plot against America.
CHAPTER TEN
0844 HRS
‘I’m starting to think we should warn the Yanks,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
‘You mean about the ambulance?’ said Grover. ‘What makes you think they don’t know already?’
But when Purnell came to dial Bluett he once again found himself changing his mind. Why raise the temperature?
He cleared his throat when Bluett picked up, and was on the point of improvising some excuse when the American cut in.
‘Mr Deputy Commissioner, we have a problem.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Purnell, ‘I know. I mean, what problem?’
‘We got reports of helicopter activity right over the cavalcade route, and the Black Hawk needs to go that way,’ said Purnell.
‘We need that Black Hawk in the aerial vicinity at all times, and neither of us wants a mid-air collision.’
Purnell found his eyes closing, and he listened some more.
‘Unbelievable,’ he told Grover, when the conversation was over. ‘We’ve got just over an hour till the President starts speaking, and the Americans are fussing about the French Ambassador’s girlfriend. They say they don’t want her in the hall.
‘And tell the boys in the chopper to clear out of the way, would you?’
The trouble with today, thought Purnell, was that if something did go wrong, no one could say they hadn’t been warned.
BOMB SCARE HITS LONDON read Roger Barlow, continuing to steal shifty looks at Ziggy’s
Of course there was nothing about him. He felt like laughing at his own egocentricity.
There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction, just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed. Maybe he wasn’t a genuine akratic. Maybe it would be more accurate to say he had a thanatos urge. By this time next week, he thought, there would be nothing left for him to do but go on daytime TV shows. Perhaps in ten years’ time he might be sufficiently rehabilitated to be offered the part of Widow Twanky at the Salvation Army hall in Horsham.
‘Catch you round, then,’ said Barlow to Ziggy.
‘Ciao-ciao,’ called Ziggy, the man of efficiency and ambition. He flashed his pink ‘P’ form, and was admitted to the security bubble.
For the eighth time that morning, Barlow presented his bike for inspection by the authorities.
Roadblock was too modest a word for the Atlantic wall of concrete that the anti-terrorist mob had put in Parliament Square. Each lithon of black-painted aggregate was packed with steel and designed to withstand 83 newtons of force, or a suicide ram-raid with a Chieftain tank.
There was a gap through which cars were being admitted in drips, but all cycles were being stopped.
