Seventy-Two Virgins

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE 1000 HRS

‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen.’

The President looked over the lectern at upwards of 800 heads, goggling at him on either side of the central aisle. He was going to enjoy this, he thought. Whatever you said about the Brits, whatever their snobberies and limitations, they understood the relationship between the present and the past. They never pretended that their system of government was some ash-and-aluminum example of perfected modernity. They knew their democracy was an inherited conglomerate of traditions, bodged together, spatchcocked, barnacled and bubblegummed by fate and whimsy.

That’s why, goddammit, he kept in the my lords bit. They might have been expelled or in some other way neutered by Blair (he was hazy on the details). But look at these guys, standing on the dais with him: get a load of their tights, their shapely calves, trimmed by tennis and hoofing it at posh nightclubs. Check out their crazy wigs, glowing like woolly haloes in the clerestory light. Dig those funky buckles and black satin rosettes like heraldic tarantulas crawling down the back of their tailcoats. Look at this fat guy next to him, this Scottish fellow who obviously ate nothing but fry-ups, with the rosy face and the whisky nose. Now this fellow, from what the President understood, had been the product of a Glasgow steel mill, and his hands were heavy and scarred with swarf. He spoke with so thick an accent that when the President had taken delivery of some freaky mug of Winston Churchill, he had barely understood a word. But he was the Speaker! He was in charge of this place, and in terms of troy ounces of bling-bling, he was more sumptuously attired than P Diddy himself.

He went on: ‘It is a great honor to be speaking here today, and a rare honor, and I am proud to be speaking to you on a day when we commemorate a relationship that has had many triumphs and many perils. I know it is fashionable to say that the Special relationship does not exist. I have heard they say it in your Foreign Office, and in Foggy Bottom, in the State Department. But I know it exists, and you know that special friendship exists, and we know how much together we have achieved in the last hundred years, not least in the two great world conflicts whose successful conclusion we memorialize today.’

The President looked out at the vast windfarm of flapping programmes as his listeners struggled to keep cool. It wouldn’t go down as a brilliant speech; he did not do brilliant speeches. But it had the small, additional merit that he believed every word of it, more or less. ‘We stood firm in the Cold War, and we joined in bringing freedom and democracy to countries that were denied them for forty years. Together now, we work to liberate a region of the world’ — this was the bit, to be frank, that he was worried about. Neocon though he was, he could imagine that this passage might grate with some of those Labor fellows, the Democratic Liberals, or whatever the hell they were called, and possibly even, for Chrissakes, some of the Conservatives. There were liberal squishes everywhere, these days, and he had been warned by the Ambassador that some of the MPs might try to make names for themselves by walking out —’… a region of the world where too many people are still forbidden from exercising their basic right to free assembly and free speech .

Because he still had a reflex eye for these things the President noticed a good-looking blonde dressed smartly who was sitting three rows back on the left, and tilting her chin and the planes of her cheeks as if his words were some cooling shower to be caught and savoured on her skin. In front of her he dimly noted the swept-maned foreign guy, who had the air of some kind of composer or art critic, and next to him three Arabs, a girl and two men.

He looked at them now with the first stirrings of curiosity. One of them stirred abruptly in his seat. Was that a little protest brewing? But the President had no time, and his eyes flickered back to the big 28-point block capitals of his text.

‘And I want to remind you of the origins of this great but mysteriously deprecated relationship, because its birth, like so many other births, was also the moment of greatest vulnerability. It was Oscar Wilde who said that we are two nations divided by a common language,’ (the French Ambassador yawned so widely that Cameron began to feel reassured) ‘and it would be fair to say, Mr Speaker, that there are some of your great traditions which doubtless through our own inadvertence we have failed to inherit. It is sometimes said that we lack the British sense of irony.’

A thousand toes curled: oh God, was he about to say how much he enjoyed the works of Monty Python? ‘We do not as a rule drink our beer warm.’

The President simpered at the Speaker and the Speaker simpered back. In the game of tasteless presents the Scotsman had been out-generalled by the Texan: the appalling gargoyle mug of Sir Winston had been requited by a pair of cowboy boots in scarlet leather with the word ‘Speaker’ tooled on the shins.

‘We do not populate our society with personages calling themselves knights or lords, which I think sometimes is a shame though I am afraid there are still people who complain that political office in our republic may be passed in dubious circumstances from father to son …’ This sally earned the President his first desultory round of applause and reluctant laughter. The President gave his aw shucks expression and squinted his buzzard eyes on the script. He was coming to the meat of it.

‘But perhaps the most obvious difference to an Englishman in New York or to an American arriving in London is that we do not drive on the same side of the road. It was that curious distinction, adopted on I know not what principle by our founding fathers which was almost fatal to this relationship at its moment of inception. It was in 1931 on Fifth Avenue that a great Englishman stepped into the traffic and was surprised to find it moving in an unexpected direction. We today must thank providence that the taxi driver braked before his fender connected with the form of—’

By this stage the audience of MPs had settled back. For a short moment some of them had hoped for an attack on the tyre approval of European motor cars, but they knew where he was going now. In any Anglo-American context his name was the name invoked with liturgical predictability.

—Sir Winston Churchill. If that taxi had not braked, ladies and gentlemen, we in the United States would have lost the most fervent advocate and admirer to be found in all the ranks of European statesmen. If that taxi driver had not braked that vital friendship between the British Prime Minister and President Roosevelt would never have been forged. If that New York cabby had not been paying attention then your country would have lost its greatest wartime leader and the history of the world would have been bleak indeed.’

Bleak indeed! thought Sir Perry Grainger, who fancied himself as a bit of a rhetorician and never turned down an invitation to debate at the Oxford Union: that was a bit of a diminuendo, that wasn’t exactly a climax for his ascending tricolon. But it was consonant with the general crapness of the speech, he thought.

Sir Perry was out of sorts. It had been embarrassing enough to present the leader of the free world with a Toby jug, worse to find the Americans had nothing for him, only a pair of boots for the Speaker. ‘Mm,’ he said as the President wittered on about Churchill’s American mother and his odd habit of nudity in the White House. Like so many men faced with a choice between thoughts of nudity and listening to a speech, his mind wandered.

Nee-naw, naw-nee went the ambulance, straight through the traffic lights at the end of Whitehall. Quite a large proportion of the police manpower had now been diverted to suppressing the threat from Raimondo Charles, and those who did watch its progress made instinctive waving-on gestures.

As they turned into New Palace Yard, through the big wrought-iron gates, Jones hit the siren button on the far right of his console, and the machine changed its note.

Whoo-whup, whoo-wup, whoo-wup, said the ambulance, and the blue madness throbbed and strobed at its temples.

With the despairing entreaty of an emergency vehicle it approached the last security boom between the President and Jones the Bomb.

Cameron heard it, and knew in her heart that something was badly wrong. Adam heard it, and felt deeply puzzled. Surely this wasn’t the plan? Or was it? What had Benedicte intended?

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO 1007 HRS

Doo-whup. doo-whup, said the ambulance. In their black-painted booth, the police looked at it with bafflement. Under any normal circumstances, a vehicle was to be stopped before the tank-trap. It would be asked to ease gently over a device fitted with lights, cameras and mirrors, so that its underside could be properly surveyed. Its bonnet would be lifted, and only after a search lasting perhaps five or seven minutes would it be allowed down the cobbles and towards the colonnade and Westminster Hall. But these were not normal circumstances. The President had just begun speaking, according to their timetables. It might be, as the seconds crawled by, that to stick to routine was madness. The hand of authority hovered for a fraction over the phone, and over the red buzzer that lifted the boom; and for a fraction that hand hesitated between its options.

Such was the thickness of the ancient walls and so tiny the windows, that the audience in Westminster Hall had hardly heard the earlier sirens, let alone the tropic surf of the crowd.

This one was different. It sounded as though it was approaching the south of the hall by New Palace Yard and it was getting closer.

Up on the roof above the Press Gallery, deserted by Indira and with no one to keep him company but his gun, Jason Pickel now looked at the ambulance with all the acuity his training had imparted.

He had caught sight of the vehicle earlier, as it left the car park, because he could see perpendicularly between the blocks right down Cannon Row. But then it was lost in the buildings of Derby Gate, its siren muffled for the next seconds as it moved from Whitehall to Parliament Square. At first it did not occur to him to wonder why the British emergency services had stationed an ambulance in Norman Shaw North, nor did he attach any real interest to the emergency. Perhaps some conscientious old biddy had sustained a heart attack. Perhaps, God help him, some policeman had used too much force to restrain a rioter and bloodied his or her obstreperous nose. From his vantage Jason could make out the odd detachment of media representatives with their cameras and sound booms.

‘Vermin,’ he thought. ‘Cockroaches.’ And he looked at them as genocidally as a Hutu beholds a Tutsi. If it hadn’t been for that Daily Mirror guy, thought Jason.

It is always a tricky moment in life and literature when a returning warrior opens his own white picket gate and walks up to the terrifying ambiguities of his own frost-paned front door. The Greeks called it nostos, the moment of return, and nostalgia is technically the longing for what should be a joyful occasion, but often isn’t, of course.

Odysseus came back to find his house overrun by strange men trying to go to bed with his wife. Agamemnon returned to find the little woman in apparently good spirits. He gave her a loving kiss and said he was glad to be back after ten years. She congratulated him on capturing Troy. ran him a bath and stabbed him to death.

‘Jason, honey,’ his wife Wanda had exclaimed, with every sign of enthusiasm. But he was made nervous by the brightness of her eye and put off by her red lipstick.

In the days that followed he had entertained doubts about his wife, more than entertained them. He had invited them round, given them bed and board in his heart, he had listened with gloomy resignation as the doubts rabbited on into the night, refusing to take the hint no matter how much he coughed and stretched and signalled that their welcome was outstayed. And then she had clinched matters. She had referred to what had happened in Baghdad as a ‘massacre’, and lamely tried to excuse herself.

Pickel had hit the table, and she had cried. Two days later Wanda announced that she would be going scuba diving every evening after supper at the local pool. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back until 10.30 p.m., and although she always seemed showered and shampooed, she sometimes smelled of chlorine and sometimes did not.

Jason would stand by the big picture window of the living room and wait until he could see her headlights come down the street; then he would quickly go to bed and pretend like a child to be asleep.

After a while he asked to be transferred, and nine months later, thanks to his skill as a sharpshooter, here he was.

About twenty feet below him, in one of the tall, badly ventilated chambers of the Parliamentary press gallery, a journalist opened a drawer. It had to be here somewhere. It just had to be .somewhere. His fingers skittered like hamsters in litter until he found it.

‘There,’ he thought, pocketing an expenses form. It was the quickest way to make money and would give him something to do during this wretched speech.

As he rode down in the lift to the ground floor and Westminster Hall, he looked into the polished brass of the doors and admired for perhaps the 20 billionth time, his fantastic meringue of hair. Barry White pushed out his lips as if to blow himself a kiss.

Roger Barlow might not have admitted as much but he was naturally fitter than most men of his age. Late nights, cigarettes, alcohol: none of them had removed a certain undergraduate stamina. But now as he scooted back towards the colonnade, up the stairs, down the stairs, round the corner, along the corridor, he was starting to feel that burning sensation you get in your lungs at the end of a cross-country run.

The soles of his shoes were leather and he found it hard to gain traction on the polished tiles. His coat flapped, his shirt tails came out, his spongy elastic cufflink exploded, his cuffs waved in the air, and his tie slip-streamed behind him. In the fond imagination of one Commons secretary who crossed his path he had the air of a man who had just burst through a hedge after running through a garden having climbed down a drainpipe on being surprised in the wrong marital bed.

‘You gotta help,’ he gasped to that kindly face. ‘Yes Roger, she said. She felt the contrast between his hectic grip and her own, which she knew to be a lovely cool and calming thing, redolent of cold cream, and she transmitted through her palm her willingness, at least in that instant, to help him in any way he chose.

‘We’ve got to get the ambulance,’ he said.

‘That’s all right, Roger,’ she said pointing up to the gates of New Palace Yard. ‘I think it’s on its way.’

Roger made a plosive noise, snatched away his hand and ran out of the colonnade on to the cobbles and up towards the gate where the ambulance was now dawdling before the barrier. Whop-doo-whop, it said, and now Barlow still had twenty yards to run before he reached the police box, where there must be men of good sense. He could just about see through the darkened panes of the booth where the coppers appeared to be having an argument. One of them was on the telephone and Barlow wondered who the hell he could be talking to, who could leave him in any doubt — surely to goodness old Stogumber, the Pass Office man, had let everyone know that this ambulance was travelling under false colours?

He was almost at the booth, waving his arms, when to his amazement he saw the boom go up. The ambulance yowled through the gap, bonnet bouncing, lights flashing. For a split second he stared into the eyes of Jones the Bomb. He stared for long enough to see that Jones would have no hesitation about running him down and then he jumped out of the way.

Fifty yards away, on the other side of the crowd control barriers, the two large Americans looked up from the agreeable business of beating up Raimondo Charles. Information was crackling into their ears via the Curly-Wurly tubes and they both turned to stare at the ambulance as it went through the gates into New Palace Yard. They dropped Raimondo back on the turf, bloodied and visibly reduced as a risk to presidential security. ‘Bastards,’ said the journalist. Though he was not in truth badly hurt, this marked his transition from a right-wing to left-wing polemicist.

‘Yer bastards,’ agreed a member of the crowd and others added their curses. The security men stood like bovine robocops as more news was pumped into their ears. Then as one, they reached into their blazers and drew out their big Glocks with the weird plastic oblong barrels.

The crowd screamed, and a figure emerged from their ranks.

Many artists have memorialized that pathetic moment when the battle is done, and the crows circle, and the warriors lie with broken helms and spears knapped asunder on the greasy grass, and the womenfolk come out to mourn. So Sandra the nanny, she who had chucked the ostrich egg, stood in pietà-like lamentation over the bashed-up Raimondo.

‘Oh Raimondo,’ she said.

‘Sandra,’ he replied, introducing for the hell of it an extra quaver into his voice.

‘You meathead,’ she shrieked at Matt, ‘I threw the egg, not him.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Joe, turning. ‘We have to go right now.’

With a yelp Sandra leapt up and fastened her limbs on his back, digging her fingers into his ears.

And as the siren wail could be heard moving round the yard, the American President had reached a moment of glutinous sentimentality. For ages his team had been looking for a testimonial to the special relationship by a British Prime Minister other than Winston Churchill. They had checked out Macmillan, but he was mainly famous for that crack, allegedly made to Eden, that the British were Greeks to the American Romans. Macmillan’s point was that the Brits were learned, subtle and subservient, while the Americans were crude, energetic and dominating. This displeased the President’s speechwriters as being patronizing to just about everyone. Also, it sounded kind of kinky, like something a prostitute might stick on a card in a phone booth. ‘Greek Service Available’, ‘Roman Offered,’ ‘I’ll be Greek to your Roman’.

Then they had found a few useful phrases from Margaret Thatcher, but were told that you could not mention Thatcher approvingly at a London dinner party any more, let alone in an important Presidential speech.

They briefly investigated the works of Edward Heath. A White House staffer read a book called Sailing in the hope that it might contain a reference to the beauty of transatlantic links, or an account of the shock of joy in the breast of that old matelot as he spied the coast of Newfoundland. He was disappointed. Heath did not seem to like America much.

The White House researcher did not bother to consult the oeuvre of Major or Wilson or Callaghan on the ground that any citation would lack the necessary uplift, and everyone had frankly forgotten about Sir Alec Douglas Home. So it was with a joyful cry that late one night in the West Wing a bright intern called Dee came upon the following emetic passage recited by A.J. Balfour to a Pilgrims’ dinner on his return from a visit to America in 1917: ‘We both spring from the same root. Are we not bound together forever? Will not our descendants say that we are brought together and united for one common purpose, in one common understanding —the two great branches of the English speaking race?’

Of course it was over the top and yet in a funny way it caught the imagination of hundreds of people in the hall. MPs thought mawkishly of the conflict they barely remembered but which their parents and grandparents certainly did, and perhaps took part in. Cameron felt a flush on her neck. How odd, she thought: for all his bumbling inarticulacy, this President had somehow captured her anterior feelings about Britain and America, before they had been stewed with the cynicism of Adam and his friends.

She liked the idea of two branches. For some reason she momentarily visualized this happy pair of boughs against the bright blue sky. She and Adam were the ultimate twigs of each vast ramification, caressing in the upper air before bringing forth their buds. Her eyes searched for him now, and found him standing up against the wall on the right on her side of the chamber.

He looked back at her so humorously, his teeth contrasting with his fabulous tan, like a row of Orbit sugar free chewing gum tablets, that she felt oddly ashamed. She felt embarrassed at having succumbed yet again to the pan Anglo-Saxon myth and bashful about loving him so much.

He mouthed something. Instinctively she knew the word must be ‘bollocks’.

She sent back reciprocal waves of approval and between them the French Ambassador gave a saurian wink: ‘C’est bien de bollocks, ça!’ he whispered.

With a ping of sadness, Cameron whisked away her vision of the Anglo-American branches, as one might hide one’s embarrassing painting at the school exhibition. Of course Adam was right, and she knew one of the points he would make.

Britain slavishly followed America in the war on terror. She helped her take out the Taliban. British taxpayers coughed up more than 5 billion pounds to gratify the neocons of Washington and remove Saddam Hussein. Whither thou goest I will go, said Britain to America as Ruth said to Naomi. When the war on terror yielded its first spoils and British subjects were arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of being members of Al-Qaeda, Britain dutifully assented to their incarceration without trial, without due process, without any regard to the ancient principle of habeas corpus in a mysterious camp in Cuba.

From time to time the men were pictured in the British press, kneeling blindfolded behind barbed wire or being ferried on stretchers in their orange prison suits when they engaged in a hunger strike. British citizens were being held without charge or access to lawyers in the a-legal extraterritorial fourth dimension of an American army camp on a communist island on suspicion of being on the slightly more anti-Western side of a war between two sets of bearded Islamists somewhere in Central Asia. It requires concentration, however, to remain scandalized over a matter of principle.

Soon the British public had forgotten about the infamies of Camp X-ray, eclipsed as they were by the scandals of Abu Ghraib. The Prime Minister made the deathless remark that he would not seek the return of these Britons to Britain because there would not be much chance of securing a conviction. He got away with it, so completely was Britain prepared to subordinate her interests.

And how had the Americans behaved, Adam would say, when Britain was fighting her own war on terror? Irish Republicans blew up pubs and fish and chip shops, and cars and rubbish bins. They tried to blow up the stock exchange in Canary Wharf in plots that could have been as calamitous as the bombing of the Twin Towers. They murdered and maimed hundreds of civilians, and yet Americans moronically passed round the hat for them in Boston and in New York. American Presidents invited IRA leaders to the White House and shook hands with them on the lawn in defiance of the wishes of Downing Street.

They didn’t care whether they gave legitimacy to these cruel and bitter men; they cared about the Irish vote. And when Britain wanted to extradite Irish terrorist suspects to the UK to face the due processes of the law, Washington did not want to know.

‘That,’ said Adam, ‘is the American idea of a war on terror.’ Now she could hear — as could everyone else in the hall — the perplexing noise of a siren moving round the yard outside. It could be a police car, thought Cameron; it could at a pinch be a fire engine.

But deep in her guilty heart she knew it must be an ambulance. She looked again for Adam, but now he had his back to her.

In the Metropolitan Police Ops Room, both Purnell and Bluett were standing and shouting.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said Purnell.

‘What in the name of holy fuck?’ asked Bluett.

No fewer than five separate CCTV cameras were recording the fast advance of an ambulance, licence plate L64896P, and bearing the livery of the Bilston and Willenhall Primary Care Trust, round New Palace Yard towards the old glazed wrought-iron porch which is the Members’ Entrance to the House of Commons.

‘Abort, abort, abort, abort, abort,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

‘We don’t abort yet, my friend,’ said Bluett. ‘We got snipers on the roof. We shoot on goddam sight.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE 1010 HRS

Jason Pickel was still alone on the roof, waiting for Indira to come back, and yet he was surrounded by people. There were camp Plantagenets with tilted necks and two fingers raised in benediction, or they would be raised if the fingers had survived a century and a half of sulphur and pigeon dung.

There were carved princesses whose pie crust drapery had been eaten away by wind and rain. And there were beasts. There were heraldic animals on the roof of a kind not conducive to anyone’s peace of mind. Jason stared at the gargoyle before him, crouched over the gutter. The elements had played leprosy with his features. Pollution and precipitation had made streaks on the limestone beneath his clammy paws as though they dripped black blood. His tail was nearly gone, his ear had been chewed off by time, his eye and nose had been devoured and his fanged jaws were open in a perpetual scream.

That’s me, thought Jason Pickel. That’s what they did to me. Because it might have been all right, he had long since decided, if that English reporter had shown the slightest sense of responsibility.

He had put Pickel’s name in the story. Of course the US Army was good about it. He had been given counselling and support. It had been made clear to him that there was no question of inquiry or any other disciplinary procedure. But out there on the peacenik internet the name Pickel became a synonym for callous murder. When Iraqi rebels shot down helicopters full of American soldiers heading off R&R, or when GIs were bumped off on street corners, the website polemicists always reminded their readers of the Pickel business.

It was just one example, they said, of the brutal fire-and-forget approach of the occupying power. In a long and balls-aching article in some left-wing magazine Barry White had returned to the subject. Was it not outrageous, he suggested, that the families of Pickel’s victims were living without sanitation or electricity, deprived of their breadwinner, while Pickel lived it up in Iowa? A group called Wiltshire Women against War sent him a round robin letter addressed to Sergeant Pickel US Army. Some BBC producer had even rung his ex darling Wanda, and suggested he was a war criminal, and would Wanda like to come on a day-time TV show, and he wasn’t too sure that Wanda had disagreed.

‘Paw,’ said Jason Junior one day when they were ambling along a mall in search of ice cream, ‘how many guys did you kill out there in Eye-raq? Was it twenty?’

‘No, son.’

‘Because Carl’s mum said you killed twenty.’

‘No, Junior, there were six poor souls that died.’

‘So was it you against six, then? I wish I could have seen it.’

‘No you don’t, kiddo.’

‘I would of got my gun and aimed at them and pow, pow, pow, pow,’ said Junior, massacring the waddling crowd of shoppers. ‘Paw,’ concluded the six-year-old, swelling with inspiration, ‘if I’d been there I would of shot them all for you.

At the memory of this conversation Jason was filled with such a flood of sentimental self-pity that his sniper’s vision became blurred.

When the ambulance cleared the security barrier and braked noisily in front of the Members’ Entrance, he was lost in meditation on the injustice of the world, and the willingness of citizens in a democracy to persecute those that protect them. He had so many denunciatory letters from anti-American ginger groups, from Balham to Helsinki, that he at one stage thought of changing his name. Now he wondered again: what kind of name did he want?

Down below him Jones the Bomb pulled the handbrake and got out of the driver’s cabin. Sixty feet above him the sharpshooter rested his barrel on the gargoyle’s ears and brooded again on the options.

For Pickel read gherkin, thought Pickel. Or perhaps O’Nion? He looked absently at the ambulance men as they disembarked and then he looked again. Thought has no language. Our synapses work too fast for any verbal articulation and the same goes a fortiori for a US Army sharpshooter. The process of ratiocination is conducted in what computer programmers would call a machine language, in which concepts are spliced and bumped together at the speed of light, and it is only in retrospect that we can identify the path of our logic.

In the non-articulated machine language of thought, the following ideas tripped like bouncing electrons across his mental screen.

Dark men.

White van.

Ambulance.

Getting out.

Something funny.

Bulky waistcoats.

Terrorists.

Shoot them.

Dark men.

TV crew.

Could be nothing.

Could be something.

No time.

Dark men.

White van.

Car in Baghdad.

Could be innocent.

Could have been innocent.

No time.

Shoot first.

Wait a second.

Jason Pickel’s pulse rate climbed. His palms began to sweat. He applied one big pale unblinking eye to the telescopic scope and located Habib in his sights.

The cross-hairs met exactly over the terrorist’s breastbone, and a bar of sacred music started playing in his brain. He did not articulate the words, and he’d never worked out why that particular Anglican hymn was always associated in his mind with this terminal moment. The tune was ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’.

Now the four men were moving over the cobbles towards the curlicued porch of the Members’ Entrance. And all the while Jason Pickel was reminding himself that there could be a wholly innocent explanation, and all the while keeping Habib in his sights.

‘What’s all this, then?’ asked one of the two policemen at the Members’ Entrance. They were both in shirtsleeves, and carrying short nose submachine guns.

‘Someone has been hurt!’ yelled Jones the Bomb. ‘He is injured.’ At this stage, in all logic, the plot should have been thwarted. It was just conceivable that an ambulance — through the fault of no one in particular — could get past two police barriers. But it was incredible in retrospect that Jones, Dean, Haroun and Habib, should have somehow bluffed their way past two more armed and highly capable officers. And when the Metropolitan Police came to analyse what had gone wrong, they did indeed find it difficult to blame anyone.

When six months later an inquiry under Lord Justice Rushbrooke produced its findings, the conclusion, insofar as there was a conclusion, was that it was just one of those things. If the two armed policemen had been depicted by a cartoonist, they would have had big question marks in thought bubbles ballooning over their heads.

‘Huh,’ said their faces. ‘Why is an Asian TV crew getting out of an ambulance?’

They could see there was something louche about the business. Jason could smell it from sixty feet up, and Roger Barlow, who was still charging across the yard, knew it for ding-dang sure.

No, when they came to work out how a quartet of barely competent suicide bombers had finally penetrated Westminster Hall, they could not find it in their hearts to criticize the police, nor could they convincingly point the finger at the US Army sharpshooter, the Lieutenant formerly known as Pickel. Most newspapers leapt to the conclusion that he was suffering from a kind of nervous paralysis produced by his ‘Dad’ flashbacks.

Look at the analogies, they trilled. ‘S obvious, innit!

Just like the fateful white GMC car of Baghdad, the ambulance challenged the poor Pickel to respect the sanctity of its insignia. The one was covered in duct tape spelling TV; the other had huge letters saying ambulance. No wonder, they postulated, that he had yibbed out.

Once again, they said, he saw dark young men of suspicious mien approaching in a mysterious vehicle.

Once more, he had only a few seconds in which to act. Either he could dispense lethal violence, or a calamity would befall those he was sworn to protect. At that critical moment, said the laptop psychoanalysts, Pickel’s brain flopped over and died like a jellyfish with sunstroke.

He couldn’t hack it, they suggested. They saw in their imaginations, and wrote without fear of contradiction, how the gun slipped from his wet fingers, how he vibrated like a medium, how his eyes rolled back like Baron Samedi and the perspiration spanged from his brow like the drops from a shaken colander.

His nostrils were filled with the flashback aroma of charred Iraqi, they said, and his throat, they suggested, was constricted by shame.

Not for the first time, they wrote rubbish. What happened was this.

With the help of the gargoyle’s shoulder, Pickel was on the point of saving the day. He could have put Jones down with one high velocity round, and then the others as well, because he was not only the quickest and best, but he was also full of desire to vindicate his actions in Baghdad.

This time he would get it right, he would be Pickel the hero, not Pickel the walnut, and voices in his head were urging him on. And not just metaphorically.

‘Come in Pickel!’ yelled the furry receiver in his ear. It was Captain Ricasoli of the Presidential Protection Squad, suspended in the specially adapted Black Hawk. And even as Ricasoli was telling him the horrible truth about the ambulance, Pickel was bawling out his orders over New Palace Yard.

Roger Barlow jumped, the terrorists turned as one, the policeman boggled.

‘Hold it!’ yelled the sharpshooter. ‘Hold it right there or I…’

Every sniper has the same phobia.

He takes his position as a big game hunter settles in his hide. He watches the tethered antelope and the trees, and the ripples on the river, and he stares so closely at the 180 degrees in front of him that he could draw it from memory. And in a hypnosis of intimate surveillance he forgets one possibility — that the tiger has been sensible enough to sneak up behind him and is about to bite his quivering rump.

So at the noise of the delicate subcontinental footfall Pickel turned around. Indira had not gone far away; she had merely climbed the ladder on to the pitched roof and stolen along the catwalk to a place out of earshot. There she had consulted her superiors and received unambiguous instructions from the Met.

Pickel was exhibiting signs of instability and she should do her best to disarm him, said her controller. It was only ten seconds later, so they later established, when the news came through about the rogue ambulance. They tried to reach the clever young Gujarati girl but she had turned off her radio, the better to steal up on her American colleague.

And now as he spun round she was almost upon him, looking at him with the motherly concern of a nurse in a loony bin.

‘No, Jason,’ she said and jumped him. She was brave, and other things being equal, right. Watching from the yard, Jones & Co were puzzled to see the American officer disappear into a tangle of limbs, as Indira practised her jujitsu. It was long enough for Habib and Haroun to slink out of shot, one behind the protection of the Members’ Entrance porch, the other in the lee of a policeman.

Even so Pickel might have pulled it off, once he had sat on Indira’s head. He still had a clear shot at Jones, Dean and a good chance of hitting Haroun. He might still have earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. He might still have been graciously appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to the most excellent order of the British Empire, had he not spotted something out of the corner of his eye that made him think he was going mad.

It was that big puff of hair, that foaming crest he would know anywhere. It was that Limey journalist, it was that pisser of poison from the Daily Mirror. It was Barry White, who had used his disgusting good manners to seduce him with his satphone, and had fatally distracted him from his duties as a guard, and who had written his reputation into the dust, and his marriage into oblivion.

Barry White was ambling with his pass to the public entrance, thinking that the Mirror wouldn’t conceivably want more than a couple of pars about the speech, and plotting his assignation for lunch, wondering why the people in the yard were all staring at the roof, and quite unaware that one of his most conspicuous victims had drawn a bead on his head and was fantasizing about how it would look when he pulled the trigger.

When he was a child in Iowa, Pickel used to look forward to visiting old Grandmaw Pickel, a woman as profoundly religious as she was deaf, who had a fetish for growing gigantic vegetables. Every year she would compete at the Town Fair with extra-large marrows, super-size squashes, and prodigious zucchini. Late one August evening she had taken him to the pumpkin patch and shown him her latest entrant, a colossal orange globe glowing in the gloom. He had never seen anything like it. It had winner written all over it, and as the day of the fair approached all Grandmaw’s friends were invited to witness the almost visible expansion of its flesh, and to feel their morale sink.

Alas, Grandmaw had cheated. She had no special talent for manure; it was no priestly incantation that plumped the great gourd. When no one was looking she had tied a piece of cotton thread to the tap on the side of the house and she had run it to the pumpkin, and she had tied the thread to a needle, and stuck that in the top of the vegetable.

Then drip, drip, drip, she had opened the tap just a little and fed her pet continuously for weeks, with the pumpkin equivalent of anabolic steroids. Young Jason would never forget the moment of tragic revelation. On the day of the fair the whole family was assembled in the vegetable garden to see the raising of the pumpkin. Three male Pickels between them were scarcely able to hoist it on to a wheelbarrow, but Grandmaw wanted a photograph of herself holding it aloft, much as Hemingway would insist on commemorating the capture of an enormous marlin.

She reached down with both hands and gripped the freshly cut stalk as thick as a baby’s arm, and she straddled her legs into a squat-thrust and heaved. And because it was she whose beefy genes had made Jason so big and strong, she prevailed. With the triumphant grunt of a female Ukrainian shot-putter, she lifted it up, first to chest height, then to her head. She smiled for the camera, and the scene was seared in Jason’s memory, his grandmother backlit by the sun, and the fluorescent orange vegetable and everyone laughing and clapping.

Because all at once there occurred an event as sudden and horrifying as the conflagration of a hydrogen-filled airship. The pumpkin exploded. Fattened beyond endurance, unable to cope with the demands of gravity, the skin of the pumpkin popped like a balloon and splattered Grandmaw and Jason and everyone else with clods of waterlogged mulch and pulp and gunk.

Yeah, one moment a sphere, the next moment his grandmother holding nothing but a stalk, and that, thought Jason as he hummed his hymn and located Barry White in his sights, was what was about to happen to this guy’s head. Except that Indira, dazed and winded beneath him, chose that moment to fight back.

Nothing could be worse, she decided, than the smegmatic oblivion of her current position. Rotating her head she bit what she took to be Jason Pickel’s inner thigh, but was in fact his left testicle.

‘Yowk,’ said Jason Pickel, and his finger withdrew from the trigger guard.

Barry White walked on, quite oblivious, round the corner of the Members’ Entrance and through the swing doors of the South Porch into Westminster Hall.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR 1011 HRS

‘Jeee-zus,’ said Jason, and tried to fight back. This time his finger clinched the trigger. The gun bucked.

The bang scattered the group in the yard. The bullet whined off the cobble and into a tree.

Jason shoved his left forefinger into Indira’s mouth as though to pacify a baby, and squeezed off two more rounds.

Even the sharpest sharpshooter finds it hard to cope with an Indian hellcat scratching and biting at his groin. Pyo-yowyoing the first went over the heads of the policemen and they rolled into defensive positions, behind the porch and out of the line of sight of the deranged Yank on the roof.

Thwok, the next round took off the gargoyle’s right ear and a fourth ascended in a steep parabola, to land unnoticed ten miles away in a garden in Highbury. Jason did not fire a fifth shot. Barry White had eluded him. Indira was once more quiescent. The British police officers were pointing their trembling carbines at the roof.

Jones, Habib, Haroun and Dean had slipped into the Members’ Entrance of the House of Commons, like deer suddenly lost in the woods. Roger Barlow ran after them.

On the roof Jason and Indira disentangled themselves, and stared at each other in a miserable post-coital way. ‘Where are you going?’ said Indira, as Pickel slung his rifle over his shoulder. But the American was off singing his song of crucifixion. ‘When I survey the wondrous cross,’ he hummed as he ran down the roof beam, sure footed as a marmoset, ‘on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss,’ he puffed down the stairs and sprinted along the parapet in the direction of Westminster Hall, ‘and pour contempt on all my pride.’

Pickel’s gun was not especially loud, and the four seal-bark shots meant nothing to most people in the hall, least of all the President, who chuntered gently on. To Cameron, whose ears were pricked for the unusual, it sounded potentially bad. And for some of the audience at the far end there was certainly a distraction in the noise of Jones’s entreaties, and the coppers falling over, and Jason Pickel’s shouted orders. Some of them vaguely paid attention to the banging of the swing doors in the Members’ Entrance, and the sound of running feet dimly in the corridor to their left.

But in the Ops Room, there was a kind of frenzy, and they boiled and thrashed and snatched at scraps of information, like a tankful of fish at feeding time.

‘We’ve got shooting,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘We’ve got shooting in the yard. Four shots,’ he said, holding the receiver to his ear.

‘Four shots?’ said Bluett. ‘Didn’t the tow-truck guy say there were four of them? Whoo-hoo. I bet damn Pickel has pegged those babies.’

‘What do you mean, pegged them?’

‘Shot their motherfucking asses.’

‘Let’s hope so, my old mate.’

Jones confidently led the way through the Members’ cloakroom, a route he had long ago identified as the least heavily secured. No eyes beheld him, even at this stage, as he pushed open the oak swing doors, save the sightless bronze orbs of one Randall Cremer, parliamentarian of the nineteenth century.

No alarms sounded, no sensors were triggered. For a moment he thought he would be able to complete the twenty yards of the cloakroom entirely unseen .

Whoosh, whoosh went the shoe brush, wielded with manic zeal by Woodrow Watson, Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford. He was standing in the corner of that dim silent place to which no one is admitted who has not been elected by the sovereign people of Britain. It is like a scene from a l950s film about public school life. There is rank upon rank of coat hooks, with red tape nooses into which MPs are supposed to put their swords, and long-forgotten macs and duffle coats suspended as if in some spooky human abattoir.

At the far end is a mirror, a TV screen, a letter writing set, some scurvy hairbrushes and an ancient set of electric scales, which tired, fat, dejected MPs mount and remount, jettisoning still more from their pockets, in the hope of achieving a favourable reading. At the near end by the swing doors from New Palace Yard, are the shoeshine things.

Here, since the break-up of his marriage, Woodrow Watson was spending more and more time. He fully understood the psychological meaning of his actions. By shining his shoes he was doing what he could to bring back lustre and perfection to his life. His heart was a mess, scuffed, battered, shredded. But the shoes could be made whole and clean. The more he hurt the harder he polished. Around Westminster his colleagues bickered and plotted. Speeches were made. Reputations rose and fell. But Woodrow Watson stood in the twilight and buffed. He was a buffer, he told himself. At fifty-six he was on the threshold of bufferdom, and this was his buffer zone.

First he ground the polish in, smearing it over the welts and into the cavity in the instep. Then he left one shoe to dry while whoosh, whoosh, he began his obsessive frottage. His standards were by now very high. He no longer accepted the sheen of a polished apple. Even when his wrist ached and the lactic acid was building in his bicep, and he had produced the kind of vitreous surface that would get top marks at Sandhurst, Woodrow Watson was not satisfied. He liked it when all the crinkly surfaces of the leather sparkled with tinsel points of halogen brightness. That was the good bit; that made him feel calm. As he rotated the shoe like an Amsterdam jeweller, he felt momentarily proud of his work and with that brief surge of self-worth, he was able to obliterate his wife’s desertion.

The trouble was that he needed his fix ever more frequently. He was getting through tins of taxpayers’ polish. His nails looked as though he’d been mining coal, and though that was once a proper function of a Labour MP, his colleagues knew what he was up to, and he was starting to feel ashamed.

So when the funny Asian- or Arab-looking TV crew burst through the door, Woodrow Watson tensed. Hardly daring to breathe, one hand clenching the shoe, the other poised in mid-buff, his eyes locked involuntarily on Dean.

Oh God, thought Watson. It’s probably a documentary about the peculiar habits of MPs. Blasted media. Don’t they know they’re not allowed in here?

The three others walked on quickly to the far door, but the young half-caste was still staring at him.

‘Yer gotta stop it,’ said the kid.

Watson thought he must be hallucinating. Who was this epiphany sent to piss around with his brain?

‘It’s madness,’ said the hallucination, and Woodrow Watson could take it no more.

He knew it was eccentric to stand all day polishing his shoes, but he was damned if he was going to accept any kind of counsel from this intruder, who had in any event, no right to be here at all. He unstuck his terrified tongue from the roof of his mouth.

‘You…You…’

But then one of the two Arab cameramen stalked back down the cloakroom. To the horror of Woodrow Watson, the young man stuck his face unconscionably close.

‘Please, man,’ said Dean, ‘yow gotta get help.’ It was too much. The shoe dropped from one hand, the brush from the other.

He had to get help.

He knew he had to get help. But he didn’t need this squit to tell him.

Roger Barlow should easily have overhauled the four terrorists; and under any normal circumstances would have done so. But his legs were tired after so much running, and his feet were dragging.

The result was that he snared himself in one of the long black cables that coiled through the Members’ Entrance and fed the TV lights and the cameras. He tripped, and fell flat on his face.

As he put out his arms to break his fall, both hands somehow became caught up in other rubbery snakes of electric flex. He righted himself, and the writhing lianas wrapped themselves about his arms and shoulders.

Oh for the Lord’s sake, he said to himself.

Had Roger been in the mood for literary echoes, he might have caught his resemblance to the Vatican sculpture of Laocoon, who warned in vain of the Trojan horse, and who was devoured by sea-snakes.

Instead, he thought that even by his own energetic standards, he was making a bit of a berk of himself. He wondered what his wife and children would make of his performance, and remembered that it was the second time he had been shot at that day.

As the Oedipal four-year-old had once told him with a withering look, when refusing to unlock the French windows to let him in: ‘I am sorry. You are not an Aztec.’

The President had reached a delicate point in his speech. He had invoked the spirit of Anglo-American cooperation. He had taken his audience with him and stormed the Normandy beaches hand in hand. Churchill had been cited so often that the French Ambassador was calling for le sac de vomissement.

Now, however, he was required to justify Anglo-American cooperation in Iraq. He sucked, and gave a birdy squint around the hall. So when the camera crew slipped in through the door down on the far right, the President was one of the few who noticed. He also observed the flustered fellow who followed them, a few seconds later, and stared around.

Not that the President saw anything sinister in these arrivals. He was just thinking what a grim old place this was and wouldn’t it be nice if they covered those dungeon walls with paintings, but he got on with his homily. ‘It’s easy to have friends in the good times. Everybody wants to know a man when he’s up. It’s when you’ve taken a big knock and you’re down and you’re frightened. That’s when you find out who really cares. That’s how you know who your real friends are. And that’s how we in America feel about Britain.’ The President had felt so passionately about this bit that he had tried to draft it himself. He’d shoved in lots of biblical stuff about the road to Jericho and falling among thieves, and those who passed by on the other side.

The State Department had warned that his savage rebuke against the Priest and the Levite might be taken as some kind of reference to France and Germany, and the President had said too damn right it was a reference to France and Germany, but the striped pants would have none of it, not at a time of building bridges. So the President just got on with eulogizing Britain, the Good Samaritan, aware that his audience was becoming restless, and of the peculiar camera crew sidling fast up the right-hand wall.

Roger Barlow might have gone after them, and fully intended to raise the alarm. But he was intercepted. ‘Roger,’ cried someone, grabbing his arm and hauling him into the empty seat beside him.

‘Oh, hello, Chester,’ said Roger warily. He hadn’t seen Chester for more than twenty years, or at least not in the flesh. He had seen him plenty of times on TV. He had watched Chester Minute, de Peverill’s introduction to top speed cookery, and Chester Little Bit More. He had caught the tail end of Chester’s Gourmet Christmas, whilst vaguely searching for something smutty on the high number satellite channels. In a hotly contested field there was no one on earth whom Roger found more deliriously irritating, though he sometimes felt rather ashamed of his feelings. In his heart, he knew that the TV chef might be bumptious, but was basically amiable. It had begun at university, when Roger had expended Herculean effort on persuading a very beautiful girl to go out with him. Barely had he succeeded when Chester started to pester her with lewd invitations.

‘How do you know you prefer steak & chips,’ read Chester’s Valentine card, ‘When you have never tried foie gras?’ Roger thought this cheeky. To his slight annoyance his girlfriend thought it amusing. And so after university it was with some prickliness that he had watched Chester’s TV chef persona —laddish but just pissionate, pissionate about food — rise and swell, like one of his very own soufflés.

What the hell was Chester doing here, anyhow?

‘Oi,’ he gasped, as the Arab film crew continued up the left-hand wall.

‘What’s up mate?’ Chester whispered. Among the chef’s affectations, even though his family came from Godalming, was a faux Australian accent.

‘You see that lot there.’

‘Which lot, Roger, mon ami?’

‘The chaps with the cameras and what not.’

‘The film crew?’

‘Yes, I think something pretty ghastly might be about to happen.’ Roger lurched to his feet and several people nearby went ‘ssst’.

Chester gripped his arm again. ‘Sit down, Rog, or you’ll embarrass us all.’

‘But I think they could be Arab terrorists.’

‘If you want to make a complete wazzock of yourself in front of a thousand people while the President of the United States is speaking, you go right ahead.’

‘But it’s my fault they’re in here.’

‘Good for you, cocker, and frankly I’m glad to see that someone from your party is supporting a bit of ethnic TV.’

It came back to him that Chester de Peverill was thought to be stonkingly cool. His whole schtick was to recreate mankind as a hunter-gatherer with himself, Chester, leading the rediscovery of ancient flavours. He would be filmed scrumping for crab apples or gorging on offal rejected by even the most outré of game butchers. No weed or windfall was deemed too ridiculous for his hammered copper saucepans.

Across the Home Counties girls boiled up nettles for their men, so persuasive was his advocacy, and when suppertime ended in gagging on the hairy stalks, they didn’t blame Chester; they always blamed themselves for getting the recipe wrong. They loved his ‘I eat anything’ approach, with its flagrant sexual message.

At one point Chester’s PR people had let it be known that he had kept his wife’s placenta in a fridge and then fried it up with some little Spanish onions — a revelation that was false, but which did nothing to damage his popularity. ‘You poseur,’ Roger thought, not without admiration, ‘you shameless poseur with your clustering curls.’ But he stayed in his seat.

‘As you know,’ the President went on, ‘it has become a cliché to say that the terrorist is like a mosquito. He’s difficult to spot, he causes an awful lot of bad feeling, a paranoia wherever he goes, and his bite is lethal. That’s why it’s no use just standing in the dark and slapping ourselves. That’s why we decided to drain that swamp. We did it together in Afghanistan, we did it in Iraq. And I believe, in the words of Winston Churchill, that our liberation of those countries will go down as one of the most unsordid acts in history.’

The French Ambassador stuck out his tongue, placed his right index finger upon it and made a retching noise.

‘Whatever people now say, we know that Iraqi regime had developed weapons of mass destruction, and had Saddam remained in power, we can be certain that he would either have used them or shipped them to other rogue states around the world.’

‘Yeah,’ said a satirical English voice, loud enough to be heard by ten rows forward and back. ‘Like America.’

It was Barry White, who had slipped efficiently into a seat near the back. It would normally have been unthinkable even for a tosser like Barry to heckle the President, never mind that he was leader of the free world, whatever that meant these days.

He was a guest of the country and it was just rude to talk during his speech. But there was something funny in the air, a pre-menstrual irrationality, the panting swollen-veined tension that precedes a downpour in July.

The President didn’t catch the remark but he saw its effect ripple out as a gust might catch a particular patch of corn as it passes over a prairie, turning up the dark undersides of the ears. ‘And we all know that there are people mad and sick enough to use those weapons.

‘Yeah, like you,’ said Barry White, and the crowd swayed around him again, some indicating that he should put a sock in it.

‘Upon innocent people.’

‘You said it, pal,’ said the heckler.

‘And to all those who blamed my country for overreacting to the threat, I say to them that the terrorist is no respecter of frontiers or nationalities. There were 67 Britons who died in the World Trade Center. There were 23 Japanese, 16 Jamaicans, 17 Colombians, 15 Filipinos, and …’

‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ said Barry White, to the disgust of those around him.

‘…a total of 32 other nations lost lives. It was an attack upon the world, and I believe that it has been the world’s fight that we in America have been fighting.’ The President had feared that this was the most controversial part of his speech. It had echoes of that line — those who are not with us are against us — which had particularly cheesed off the cheese eaters. He feared with one lobe of his brain that the British Labor guys would all stand up now, and whip off their jackets and reveal ‘Not In My Name’ T-shirts, or perhaps that this would be the moment for the walk-out. But no, he appeared to have got away with it. He had a feeling that someone was heckling him, but the guy was too British or too cowardly to do it properly. What he noticed again as he flickered his gaze around the mediaeval hall, was the odd progress of that film crew.

You know how you spot a gecko on a wall and one moment it is in spot A and the next moment, when you glance again, it has somehow moved undetected to spot B. So the four characters were moving up towards him, hugging the grey cliff of stone, waggling their cameras at him. Had he looked harder, the President might have noticed that they had changed the order of march, so that the mixed-race-looking guy was being chivvied along by one of the darker-skinned fellows.

The President was more interested in finishing the text on his lectern. ‘And never forget that among those who died on 9/11 were 58 entirely innocent Muslims. It cannot be repeated too often that this war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. We do not have any quarrel with any people in the Muslim world, and I want to say on a personal level as a Christian, how much I admire and respect their great religion.’ There was some uncertain clapping at this point. People could see that there was much to respect in Islamic culture. It was not obvious why this should be particularly moving to a Christian unless the President was somehow asserting his approval of mutually antagonistic and fundamentalist creeds of all kinds.

‘It is not Islam which drives young men and women brutally to take their lives and the lives of others.’

‘No,’ said Barry White in his irritating voice, much like Muttley, the dog that accompanies Dick Dastardly in the Wacky Races. ‘It’s the Israeli Defence Force.’

For some reason this sally was loud enough to reach a much larger section of the audience, and the President’s own ears caught the word Israel.

He scowled. He didn’t like it at all. He began to wonder whether indeed he would get to the end without some audience reaction so unacceptable that the US networks would be obliged to report it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE 1021 HRS

‘It is not Islam that turns these sad and impressionable young men and women to terror. It is those who knowingly pervert the teachings of that great value system, and who corrupt these young people, and who lead them into the path of evil.’ He looked up again and holy mackerel, the four Arab geckos had scooted a long way up the wall, they were there just off to his right, there where the skirt of grey stone steps began to rise from the floor to the dais from which he was speaking.

The President momentarily caught the eye of the leader. He was glancing up from his camera viewfinder and there was something in his manner that was, yes, reptilian.

‘Our struggle and our fight is with those who would turn a religion of peace into a utensil of torture and killing . .

The word ‘torture’ produced a predictable heckle.

‘… And I tell you all now, and I tell all those who may now be following this speech across the world, that as long as I am Commander in Chief, the United States will pay any price, we will bear any burden, we will travel any distance to track down those who would kill or harm our citizens or other innocents of the earths. My Lords, Ladies, Members of the House of Commons, Honourable and Esteemed Friends and Members of the British Cabinet …’

‘Hey!’ exclaimed Roger, quite loudly this time, as he saw Jones the Bomb begin his final scuttle towards the sweep of steps. ‘Sscht,’ said everyone. Chester de Peverill squeezed his arm in the most patronizing way, put his finger to his lips and winked. Roger gave up. He sat down and kept silent out of fear of embarrassment, the fear that prevents the Englishman from ever being as truly entrepreneurial as the American, the fear that causes him to be exceptionally prone to prostate cancer.

From his vantage point leaning against the far wall, Adam Swallow looked with amazement at the group. But where was the cripple? Where was the man from Abu Ghraib? He wheeled around to find Benedicte, and she refused to meet his eyes.

In the Ops Room, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was filled with sudden and evanescent satisfaction. ‘Quiet!’ he yelled at Bluett and the rest of the room. ‘I’m getting something about fatalities in New Palace Yard. What’s that? A dark-skinned man has been shot, in the ambulance .

What’s that? A traffic warden? Oh Jesus, we know about him. What about the others?. . . The others, for Christ’s sake. No, not the man on the roof. The man on the roof is on our side, you idiots. What happened to the four TV crew? What do you mean you thought they were just TV crew? You mean they aren’t dead? Then where the hell are they? Oh sweet Mary mother of God, don’t tell me you just let them in the frigging hall.’

‘Where,’ said Bluett, ‘in the name of God is Pickel?’

The President glanced down at a group of the most senior British politicians from the Government and the Opposition who were sitting in the first three ranks. To his very slight surprise he saw that between him and the higher echelons of British politics, crawling towards him up the steps, was that Arab film crew. It seemed that the game of gecko grandmother’s footsteps was about to come to an end.

The President had no time to pause, no time to think, but he thrust out his chin and filled his lungs.

‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of all the people of my country for your steadfastness, your courage and the clarity with which you have seen the risk we all face and the readiness with which you have responded and I believe that future generations will look back on this alliance of ours and ponder the marvel that once again we too, Britain and America, stood firm against evil. Because I am certain that no matter how bitter the struggle may be, no matter how irksome the security precautions we must take, the time will surely come when we will overcome the — what the hell?’

Whatever abstract noun was fated, in the view of the President, to be overcome by the Atlantic Alliance, that audience would never know.