Seventy-Two Virgins

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX 1024 HRS

Across the hall, behind pillars, behind doors, at strategic points in the audience, in helicopters overhead and wherever the speech was being monitored on television, American security men gasped or swore or howled and pulled out their weapons, just as the news was breaking in their Curly-Wurlies.

They were too late. ‘That will do, Mr President,’ said Jones the Bomb, clicking the handcuff over the President’s limp wrist. Then he held their hands up together, as the umpire raises the hand of a boxer to show that their fates are now conjoined.

That was it, thought Jones. He had done it. Whatever happened now, he would join the ranks of the immortals for this action. In Mecca, in Medina, in all the holy places of Islam, babes unborn would lisp the name of Jones. He was also aware that he was very likely to be shot dead in the next ten seconds, unless he could explain to the shooters that this was a bad idea.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, taking the microphone, ‘it will be simplest if I do the talking from now on. I should like to begin by pointing out to anyone who is thinking of shooting me that the bomb I am wearing is connected by electronic sensors to my heart and will detonate as soon as it senses that there is no pulse.

‘If that happens, America will lose a president, Britain will lose much of its government and the rest of you will be in a very bad way. So here, as they say in the movies, are my demands.’

Cameron had already worked out what Benedicte and the two other Arabs, the ones sitting in front of her, would do next. The insight had been granted to another part of her brain, just as she watched Jones clicking on the handcuff. She was more interested in the behaviour of the French Ambassador. With what seemed now to be utter predictability, the man in the djelabah reached down under his seat in the movement she had seen him rehearse. He flipped off the brass plaque. It clacked backwards on to her toes, chipping the varnish.

‘Hey,’ said Cameron, and then regretted the incongruous pettiness of her complaint.

Here, the plaque reminded her, was the spot where Thomas More, patron saint of politicians, had been condemned to death. There was a point there somewhere, thought Cameron as she looked at the wrenched-off memorial, screws awry. The man’s hairy wrist shot down into the darkness to produce a plastic bag marked ‘RitePrice’ out of which he removed two Schmidt MP rapid fire submachine guns, and gave one to his neighbour, and then produced another bag.

‘Mais Bénédicte,’ said the French Ambassador, turning to his girlfriend. The girl looked at the older man. She was beautiful, thought Cameron, with full red lips and skin that was startlingly pale for a Palestinian Arab.

‘Et alors?’

‘Mais non,’ he shouted, and flung out an arm to restrain the two men as they rose. Benedicte al-Walibi kept her eyes fixed on the Ambassador but with one hand she tapped her Arab colleague on the arm, borrowed a Schmidt and shoved the muzzle hard into the soft fold under her lover’s ribs.

‘Tais-toi, chéri,’ she said.

Out of the corner of her eye Cameron became suddenly aware that the Dutch Ambassador was on the verge of heroism. His father had fought the Nazis. His uncle had been present as one of the negotiators when South Moluccan terrorists had hijacked a Dutch train and started to massacre the passengers. He knew that violence sometimes had to be matched with violence for the salvation of society; and anyway he was full of the battle adrenalin and suppressed fury of one who has been freshly bombed by an ostrich egg.

He made a nostril noise like a kettle coming to the boil, and was on the point of hurling himself upon Benedicte when she whipped round and poked him in the chest with her gun. ‘You shut up too, bald man,’ she said. He slumped back.

When Cameron looked at him, with his morning dress streaked with the embryo of a flightless bird, with his expression of a stunned mullet, she felt instantly overcome. It was the shocking inversion of feminine aggression, it was the sight of the President, her President, handcuffed and humiliated. It was the gross impropriety of the submachine guns in this place to which even Parliamentarians were not allowed to bring their swords.

Along the bottom of her lashes brimmed tears as big as planets. She blinked. They splashed to the floor, on the plaque and on her feet. She looked up through the blur and saw someone walking through the rows towards her, unchecked by the gunmen.

He was someone she wanted to see, the man who would explain everything or at least provide her with a theory. ‘Oh Adam,’ she said, ‘thank God.’

In the Scotland Yard Ops Room there was a moment of hush. Like all men in such positions, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell and Colonel Bluett of the USSS were contemplating not just the imminence of carnage in Westminster Hall and the assassination of a president. They foresaw clearly the immolation of their own careers.

‘Jesus Christ, what are we waiting for? I’ve got twenty-one guns in that hall.’

Without consulting Purnell, the American flipped open the switch that connected him to the earpieces of the men in the hall.

‘Boys, this is Bluett. Who has got a line on these guys?’

From their vantage points around the hall, the lynx-eyed USSS men started to whisper their options into the Smarties on their lapels.

‘Negative, sir: I’ve got a man with an Uzi at my gut.’

‘Negative, sir: I’m way back here.’

‘I got him, sir. I got that sucker whenever you want.’ It was Lieutenant Alan Cabache.

High up and recessed into the east wall of Westminster Hall, just under the corbels of the hammerbeams, is a series of huge murky alcoves; hard to make out at any time, and almost invisible now in the overhead glow of the TV lights. In one of these alcoves Lieutenant Cabache had been waiting for an hour, hidden by the ancient friable skirts of Philippa of Hainault. He was covered with soot, and his legs ached from being braced against Philippa’s rump. But it was all about to pay off.

Now he secretly slid his Glock barrel under Philippa’s left breast and drew a bead on Jones, just fifty feet away, down and to his right.

‘I got him, sir,’ he repeated.

‘Then whack him!’ said Bluett.

‘NO,’ said Purnell. ‘For God’s sake, man, you heard what he said!’

‘What’s that, Stephen? Are you countermanding me here?’

‘Too damn right, I am. You heard what he said. As soon as he dies, his fucking bomb goes off.’

‘You believe that?’

Across the hall, the USSS men listened in despair. Who the hell was in charge here?

‘I do believe it until we somehow find evidence to the contrary.’

‘You do believe it.’ A note of doubt had crept into Bluett’s voice.

‘Shall I shoot, sir?’ asked Cabache, as quietly as he could.

‘NO,’ said Purnell.

‘Uh, wait up, Cabache. Well, what do you frigging propose, Mr Commissioner?’

‘Sir, I’ve got Downing Street on the line.’ The Prime Minister, the head of MIS, the Cabinet Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the head of Counter-Intelligence and a new minister for Homeland Security were being hustled into Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, or Cobra. Normally, their number would have included the Home Secretary, but the Home Secretary was in Westminster Hall.

Now Purnell spoke to the British Prime Minister, on a secure’ mobile, as he was jogged by his own agents towards the electronic nerve centre of Downing Street.

Like Purnell and Bluett, the Prime Minister had instantly seen that these events could be fatal to his career. So there was one point he stressed in his brief conversation with Purnell, namely that he, the Prime Minister, was taking political responsibility, of course, but no ‘operational’ responsibility. It would be quite wrong, the Prime Minister said, for him to second-guess the split-second decisions of the experts. That was why he, the Prime Minister, was going to leave such decisions to Purnell.

‘With full cooperation, of course, with the Americans,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘Cooperation, sir?’ said Purnell.

‘And consultation.’ Then the line went dead as the British leader was patched through to Washington.

‘The first thing we do,’ said Purnell, ‘is find out about this business with the sensors. Is it possible to make a suicide bomb jacket like that?’

‘I dunno, sir,’ said Grover.

‘Well don’t hang around,’ said Bluett. He didn’t know whether he was entitled to give orders to Grover, but he was damn well going to give orders to someone.

The President and Jones the Bomb stood at the head of the congregation like a shackled pair of slaves about to be auctioned. As he waited for his yokemate to outline his demands the President looked and was not reassured. He saw a nose so hooked that Jones could easily touch it — and sometimes did, to the horror of anyone sitting opposite him in the Tube — with the tip of his tongue. He saw the bags under his eyes, shiny and dark as plum sauce; and now the eyes with their odd vibration were upon him.

‘Out of the way,’ hissed Jones.

The President was taken aback. ‘Say what?’

‘Move,’ said Jones, shoving on the handcuff.

‘Listen buddy, we’re kind of hooked up here. If you want to let me go you’ll be doing the right thing.’

‘Shut up and move and say nothing more or else you’ll be shot.’ The President understood. So far they had been sharing the lectern, like a couple of pop stars crooning into the same microphone, and now Jones wanted to take charge. The President shuffled to the left and Jones began. He had been here a couple of times to case the joint and had picked up some of the essential history.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, listen very carefully to me and do exactly as I say and no harm will come to you. I know that this is a traditional introduction to a speech by a lead terrorist, but in this case it happens to be true.

‘Hundreds of years ago, more than 350 years ago, a king was put on trial on this very spot. His name was Charles and he was a bad king. He took the money that belonged to the poor people. He was oppressive and he acted in a way that was arrogant and outside the law. He believed that he had some kind of divine right to do what he wanted and so they brought him here and they put him on trial and then they chopp-ed off his head. In the country where I come from it is of course the practice that if people commit great crimes their heads are chopp-ed off. You like to say that this is barbaric and so I point out that all your great British democracy, all your Parliament comes from that moment when the King’s head is chopp-ed and was that not the right thing to do?’

‘No,’ said Sir Perry Grainger, speaking for Henley-on-Thames in the royalist rump of Oxfordshire. ‘It was completely wrong, and anyway, it’s not chopp-ed, it’s chopped.’

‘Shut your face,’ said Jones the Bomb, and located that bright red object eleven rows behind Cameron and the French Ambassador as he faced the hall and on the left.

‘Well, you did ask,’ said Sir Perry, but Jones had unstuck a Browning taped to the small of his back.

‘Don’t say another word or I will shoot.’

‘All right, all right, keep your hair on.’

The noise of the automatic was so loud, reverberating off the flat flags and walls, that some thought the end had come and that Jones had let off his bomb.

The bullet was travelling in roughly the direction of Sir Perry, but connected first with the Dutch Ambassador’s left ear. This was protected by a sturdy German-built hearing-aid, which clattered to the floor while the bullet flattened itself harmlessly 150 yards away against the far wall. The Dutchman groaned and started to bleed. Cameron put her arm around him. It really wasn’t his day. A few seats away a distinguished lady peeress began to cry. A small puddle of pee formed beneath her chair. Black terror settled on the crowd.

‘That bad king was put on trial by the people of England,’ Jones resumed, ‘and his head chop— his head was cut off.

Today’ — he jerked the handcuff and the President’s arm jerked in response — ‘we have another bad ruler and another trial. This is a man who rules the world by force. He abuses human rights; he invades countries without any international authorization, just because he can, because he has the power. With his discriminatory trade policies he is keeping one billion people, the poorest people on earth, living on less than one dollar per day. With his depleted uranium shells he has been killing babies in Afghanistan.’ At this the President rolled his eyes.

‘Shut up,’ said Jones, catching the movement from one of his panoptic irises.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ said the President.

‘Be quiet, you idiot!’ said Jones and stuck his face so close, gun next to his cheek, that the President observed not just the eyes, but the awful pathology of a zit that had arisen when Jones was sixteen and exploded when he was seventeen, leaving a star-shaped depression in his forehead. The President was quiet. In the silence he could hear the sobbing that was spreading down the rows and the confused whispering of the security men into their lapels and the desperate chatter of the helicopter rotors overhead.

‘Today is not just the trial of this bad man,’ said Jones. ‘It is the trial of America. Before the eyes of all the people of Britain and before the eyes of all the people of the world, I bring you this bad man to this place of history so that he and his country may answer for their crimes. But I do not presume to be the judge myself, I do not seize and abuse the law like this man does,’ and he shook the cuffs again, so the President jerked like a crash dummy, ‘nor will I even impose the death penalty like this man does’ — jerk jerk — ‘to poor mentally defective Negroes in Texas. Instead, everyone in this hall will have the chance to speak, yes, to speak in favour of him or against him, just like in a court of law, and then the world will judge him. Yes, the whole world will judge America and in a minute I will explain how it will be done, but first I must ask you all to surrender your mobile phones and I must ask all police and other agents to give up their weapons. Please throw them in the aisle; that’s right, hurry up or else I’ll shoot again and this time I may not miss.’

‘Sir, it looks like he could easily be telling the truth on the heart sensor thing. Athletes buy them.’

‘Thanks, Grover,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

‘Athletes?’ said Bluett.

‘Yessir. There’s a thing called an exercise heart rate sensor. You could easily wire it up so that if the heart fails to beat for five or ten seconds, then it would complete a circuit and set off the detonator.’

‘You see,’ said Purnell.

They stared at the TV images of Jones the Bomb, which were now being watched in almost every country on earth. He looked mad enough to do anything.

‘Shall I fire, sir?’ asked Cabache, still locked in intimacy with Philippa of Hainault.

‘Hold your horses, Cabache,’ said Bluett.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN 1027 HRS

Dean stood at the top of the steps, looking out over the audience, as Benedicte and the four other Arabs moved up and down the aisle, harvesting the mobiles in big black sacks and disarming any obvious security men.

The cameras were allowed to function — indeed, they were essential for Jones’s plan — and a close-up of the terrified kid was now flashed across the nation’s TV screens and round the world. His large expressive eyes were so wide that the whites entirely surrounded the irises; his lips were grey, and he was holding a Schmidt, given to him by Benedicte, as if it were an adder.

In the house in Wolverhampton, Paulie was sitting on a scummy orange beanbag and eating Alpen with water, waiting to go in for the late shift at RitePrice.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Nah.’ He put his face right next to the screen, so that his features were bathed in the strobing panicky colours of his former colleague’s skin.

‘I just do not believe it,’ he said. And the reaction was much the same in other parts of Wolverhampton.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Price the Cheese, and a ladle of whey dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor of the swish new cheesorium he had constructed with the insurance.

Next door, in the same old house in Wednesbury, Dennis Faulkner was so stunned that he thought he was having another little blip. He rose from his antimacassared Parker-Knoll and tried to loosen the tartan tie at his throat.

‘Huk hwork hwark,’ he said, and crashed back down again, knocking over various pottery objects ranged on the sideboard behind the chair.

There was even one person in the audience who thought she recognized Dean. She had been shivering, and praying, and crying with fear, and then she had opened her eyes and seen him. It couldn’t be him; and yet it had to be.

In the Ops Room Bluett flipped the switch again, so as to communicate directly with his agents in the hall.

‘This is Bluett,’ he said.

‘And this is Purnell,’ said Purnell.

‘Right. This is both of us,’ said Bluett. ‘They’ve taken my guns, sir,’ said one USSS man. ‘Mine too.’

‘Mine too, sir.’

‘I’ve still got a clear shot, sir,’ said Cabache.

‘Do not, repeat not, attempt to take these guys out. Please cooperate, and encourage the civilians to cooperate.’

‘Ye ssir.’

‘Sir?’ said one agent.

‘Yes.’

‘What happens now? Do you guys have a plan?’

‘We’re working on that right now.’

There is an iron railing at the top end of Westminster Hall, equipped with a gate which is used to control access by the public as they come in through St Stephen’s Entrance. Behind that fence was ranged an exotic collection from the great bestiary of British ceremonial. There was the Lord Chamberlain, an office now held by an epicene young coke-head whose family name may be found in the pages of Shakespeare.

He was wearing buckled shoes, tights, a stock and the kind of frilly frock coat favoured by Sir Mick Jagger in his Sympathy for the Devil phase. There was a man whose technical name was Silver Stick, but whose wife called him Algy, a superannuated army officer whose creaking calves now sheathed in black silk had once propelled him over the tryline victoriously at Twickenham half a century ago. There was Rouge Dragon Poursuivant and Garter King of Arms and a man called the Earl Marshal whose job it was at the State Opening of Parliament every year to carry something called the Cap of Maintenance.

There was the Speaker and his clerks, all braided, wigged and frogged, and there to one side, standing nearest the gate and fingering with wet grip the old ebony staff, surmounted by a lion, which had been the mark of his office since it was created by deed patent in 1350, was the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, there, because he is Serjeant-at-Arms of the Lords, and it falls to Black Rod to officiate at all such encounters between Their Lordships and distinguished visitors.

Poor Black Rod. He had fought at Korea. With the utmost dash, gallantry and dispatch and with signal disregard for his own safety, he had led his SAS detachment by rope ladder up the cliffs of Aden. When he had successfully applied for his current position after seeing an advertisement in The Times, it was in the belief that he had all the calm and cunning to deal with any threat that might befall the Upper House; and now he had been out-manoeuvred.

Not since he had been a teenage lance corporal and guarded the wrong pylon in the freezing drizzle of Salisbury Plain had he experienced such a military reverse.

As Dean looked at Black Rod, he saw that his expression was shared by almost all the representatives of Britain’s spavined junker aristocracy. They fingered the ancient maces and swords and pikes and halberds and rods by which it was their sworn duty in principle to defend this place, and a mood rose off them like a vapour. It was not alarm or fear. It was shame.

‘I say,’ whispered Silver Stick to the Earl Marshal, easing his sword perhaps half an inch out of his scabbard. ‘You know what I think?’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said the Earl Marshal.

‘But I really feel we ought to do something.’

‘Just don’t even think about it.’

‘It’s all very well saying that, but…’ Silver Stick was going to point out that a large proportion of his male relatives had died in engagement so heroic as to be ludicrous, charging machine gun nests with nothing but a whistle and a swagger stick, abseiling down smokestacks into the Bessemer converters of the Ruhr. But he knew that the Earl Marshal’s family had been in re-insurance before being raised to the peerage by Lloyd George, and he did not want to appear snobbish.

‘What about the element of surprise?’ quavered Silver Stick, voicing the secret thoughts of all the halberdiers, pike men and rod wielders who stood impotently around.

‘I think you’d find it was surprisingly stupid,’ said the Earl Marshal. He had no need to articulate the odds.

Even if Silver Stick could get round the fence and skewer the lead terrorist without precipitating a torrent of Uzi or Schmidt bullets, there was the prior problem.

If Jones the Bomb was to be believed, his death would be automatically followed by a detonation that would kill them all.

‘But do you think they can possibly be serious?’ said Silver Stick.

‘I have a terrible feeling that they are.’ The flower of England’s chivalry and nobility stared out at the expanse of Westminster Hall.

The heat seemed to have intensified under the TV lights and the audience flapped their programmes ever more desperately, like the spastic batting of a butterfly’s wings as it dies against a window. The old English soldiers stood on the dais and looked at this innocent multitude. They looked with expressions as stony as the very sculptures that dotted the hall.

They looked with the hollow eyes of men who have failed in their first and defining constitutional duty. Black Rod clutched his eponym and was at a loss.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 1028 HRS

Roger Barlow sat sprawled in his seat near the back, looking up at the hammerbeam ceiling, and gave way to fear, and to glassy despair. He’d bungled it. He’d bogged it up. He could have been a hero. Now he had been proved right and Chester de Peverill had been proved wrong and the only consolation was that Chester de Peverill was as likely as any of them to get blown to smithereens.

One of the Arabs was coming down the aisle waggling his gun and urging them all to speed up. ‘Give mobile,’ he said, ‘give mobile.’

De Peverill chucked his across on to the stone floor. ‘You had better give him your phone, Rog,’ he said.

‘I don’t have one,’ said Barlow. He hoped he sounded surly, rather than frightened. He didn’t like mobiles because you couldn’t trust the blighters. They were technological Judases, he thought as he stared at the ceiling. There had been a godawful moment the other day when his blinking mobile had contrived quite independently to dial his wife.

He was somewhere he really shouldn’t have been, not for his own good, and he was in the company of the woman in whom this ghastly reporter from the Mirror was now taking such an interest. The woman in question seemed deliberately to have exposed her bosom, and she was looking at him imploringly. ‘Oh please,’ she droned, ‘you promised. Do it for Eulalie. It’s a fantastic investment.’

Roger had smiled at her, because he really wanted to make her happy, or at least stop bugging him, and then he thought he must be going mad. He could hear the voice of his conscience.

It was this tiny voice squeaking at him from his breast pocket like Tinkerbell, ‘Darling is that you? Hello. Hello.’

‘Oh hi, darling,’ he said, when he twigged. ‘Hi, did you call me?’

‘No I didn’t call you, you must have called me.’

‘No I didn’t call you, you definitely called me.’

‘Oh mm, oh good, how are you?’

‘Oh I’m all right, how are you? You sound as though you’ve been running.’

It had been, all told, quite a sticky conversation. And then another time he was waiting to vote late at night and would you believe it, her mobile accidentally dialled his and left a long message. It must have jostled up against something in her handbag or been squeezed in some unexpected way and he found himself listening to his wife walking down the street when he thought she was at home. Pok pok pok went her heels, and then she seemed to arrive somewhere, and then he found himself listening with paranoid fascination as she engaged in some extended transaction, full of ambiguous pauses, with some chap or other; and when the message ended, Roger was so wrung out that he decided mobiles were instruments of temptation and that he would have no more to do with them.

He folded his arms, ignored Chester and gazed aloft at the woodwork.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 1030 HRS

‘Sweet Lord,’ he thought, ‘there’s something moving.’ He could have sworn he saw something up there where the huge transoms of oak melted into darkness. He thought of pointing it out to Chester and then decided against.

The mystery of Westminster Hall is how a space so vast can yet be so old. Even when it is bright outside, a man can stare at someone in the far corner and be unable to pick out his features. There is a total surface area of 1,547 square metres and somehow they roofed it in an age before steel girders and ferroconcrete. How? They, or rather Richard II, employed a man called Hugh Herland, who built the biggest and most technologically advanced hammerbeam roof in the world. At the end of each hammerbeam, Herland carved huge angels bearing coats of arms and staring down at the proceedings 90 feet below. The angels’ faces are now a good ruddy wood colour, but for most of the six centuries of their existence, they have been black. In the winter, and indeed for much of the year, the cold seeps up through the clammy riverbank on which the flagstones are set. To take the chill off the grim mediaeval hangar, the occupants would light fires and because the braziers sent up such smoke, it was necessary to make primitive openings in the roof. These chimney holes have long since been turned into hatches for use by electricians or death-watch beetle inspectors; and the biggest chimney hole, not far from the north door, had been covered with a flèche, a folly of Victorian gothic spindles that rose from the spine of the roof.

Jason Pickel had found an inspection hatch in the bottom of the flèche; and through this he now inserted his booted feet and the knife-like creases of his fatigues. For a few seconds his legs swung in the darkness. The hatch was tight and it was hard to see below. There must be a platform beneath him, he reasoned. Why the hell else would they build a hatch here?

He lowered himself as far down as he could, straining with his biceps as though exercising on the parallel bars. He pointed his toe and probed the obscurity beneath. His toecap connected with a beam. ‘Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,’ hummed Pickel, as he prepared for his plunge. ‘Save in the Cross of Christ my God,’ he whispered. ‘All the vain things that charm me most I sacrifice them to his blood.’ Yup, a sacrifice was called for and there was no higher cause. Flipping his arms above his head, like the two handles of a corkscrew when the cork is ready to be drawn, he disappeared through the hole.

In his Black Hawk Captain Ricasoli spotted the movement and jabbed with his finger. ‘Whoa boy,’ he said over the open mike system. ‘Did you see that?’

‘What’s that?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell from the Ops Room, where sovereignty over the disaster was still alternating uneasily between the Metropolitan Police and the USSS.

‘I just saw some guy go through a hole in the roof,’ said Ricasoli.

‘Did you authorize anyone to go through the roof?’ asked Bluett.

‘Nope.’

‘You must have done.’

‘Sorry, chummy it must be one of yours.’

‘Whoo boys,’ said Ricasoli, crackling in from his vantage point, ‘It must be Pickel.’

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell of the Metropolitan Police drew the microphone towards him, and a few inches away from his American co-gerent.

‘Pickel?’ he said. He knew all about Pickel.

‘That’s right,’ said Bluett. ‘He’s the boy, the one we had on the roof.’ A computer screen had already provided an image of Pickel’s countenance looking as usual like a freshly cattle-prodded bullock. ‘And he’s madder than a shit house rat—at least in my experience.’

‘Is he still armed?’ asked Purnell.

‘I’d be amazed if he wasn’t.’

‘But does he know the score? Does he know not to shoot?’

‘How the hell would I know? All I can tell you for certain is that Lieutenant Pickel is armed with an M-24 sniper rifle capable of firing bullets at 834 metres per second and that he don’t miss.’

As it happens, this was no longer true: that is, at the moment he dropped through the hatch, Pickel had his rifle strapped around his shoulders and the strap had caught on the latch of the hatch. The strap might have turned into Pickel’s noose, had he not released himself before dropping ten feet on to a platform built beneath the flèche. He arrived almost silently, like Errol Flynn dropping from the mizzenmast to the deck.

He crept to the edge of the platform, and absorbed first the dreadful scene being enacted beneath him. Then he looked up and saw his gun glinting in the light from the open hatch and dangling uselessly ten feet above.

‘Has everybody handed over their mobiles?’ There was a silence, broken only by coughing and whimpering. The girl Bénédicte was moving up the aisle, dragging two bulging binbags of phones.

Dean looked at the audience and wished he could control his patella. It was as though it was on an invisible string, and someone was jerking it up and down. That’s what people meant, he realized, when they said that their knees were shaking.

He couldn’t believe the calm of Haroun and Habib, walking up and down as if they owned the place, sticking their guns in the bellies of the USSS men. He tried to control his own breathing, and to fill his lungs with the confidence of his creed. He remembered what Jones had said so many times:

‘There is a special reward for those who go out and fight, and a special place for them in heaven, and a lower place for those who receive no hurt and sit at home.’

Yeah, thought Dean, and breathed out.

He hoped they were watching him in Wolverhampton; he hoped the magistrate was watching him, the one who had given him 400 hours of moss-picking; he hoped his foster-father was watching him now. Above all, in the angriest part of his teenage heart, he hoped he was being watched by that beautiful girl he had called Vanessa, Vanessa with the sweet white smile and the fat red kissy lips, whom he had trusted with his heart, and who had turned out to be a fornicating traitor.

Kill them all, thought Dean, as anger came to his aid; kill all the people who call you a coon; pluck out their eyes, cut off their heads, pull out their intestines with your bare hands.

For a moment he looked cruel and dreadful, and hung his Schmidt in the callous posture of some Sierra Leonean child guerrilla. He tried out a thin smile, and watched as Haroun, Habib and the two other Arabs started to round up the USSS men.

‘Sir,’ whispered an agent to the Ops Room, ‘they want me to remove my two-way.’

‘Me too, sir.’

‘Mine too, sir. Ouch.’

‘Don’t worry, boys,’ said Bluett. ‘Just cooperate and do what they say. Hand over your stuff. We’re going to git all you boys out of there in no time.’ One by one the Curly-Wurlies were ripped out of the ears of the USSS men and thrown on the flags in the middle.

Then the agents were made to sit cross-legged on the floor in the central aisle.

Bluett gave a blubbering moan of grief as he saw the humiliation of his best men. ‘Well, at least they haven’t got Cabache yet,’ he said, ‘and fuck knows what we are going to do with Pickel.’

Jones the Bomb gripped the lectern and paused. The President turned and looked at the terrorist leader. He thought of making a light-hearted remark, something about carrying on with the sermon while the collection was being taken. In spite of his growing conviction that he was about to be killed, the President was conscious not of the audience in the hall — he didn’t really give a stuff about them.

He was thinking about the millions of Americans who would already be watching, apathetically glomping their Cheerios and studying him on breakfast TV. They would be checking for signs of leadership, of masterfulness.

He opened his mouth.

‘Shut up,’ said Jones.

The President closed his mouth like a guppy.

‘Here is what’s going to happen now, my friends,’ said Jones, ‘and let me remind you that if you try to kill me then my neighbour dies too. It’s like in chess: you cannot move this piece without a discovered checkmate. Yes?’ The President composed his features into what he hoped was a mask of defiance.

Jones went on: ‘My colleagues and I represent a group called Islamic Jihad, or the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques, and there are many injustices we would like to correct. It is now too long that the Zionist entity has been occupying illegally the homeland of my brother Arabs. We would like that to end. We would like an end to the brutal slaughter of families in Nablus, Hebron and Ramallah, the killing of people who have nothing, who have no weapons, by missiles fired from the helicopters given to the Zionist entity by the Americans. Of course we would like the final removal of the infidel bases from the lands that are holy to Islam and we would like to see an end to the corrupt and vicious regimes that are supported by the American taxpayer and by the CIA. We also demand an end to all the torture and brutality in Iraq, and all the guilty to be sent to war crimes trial in The Hague.’

This was too much for the President. He had to say something here. This was a vital part of his political identity.

‘Hey,’ he raised his eyebrows in that characteristic look of befuddlement. ‘We sure as hell got rid of Saddam, didn’t we?’

Jones kept his eyes on the crowd as he whacked the President backhanded and still holding the gun over the top of his head.

CHAPTER FORTY 1033 HRS

It was the moment for many people that the Westminster Assizes became truly frightening. It was that camera frame, the President wincing with pain, his forelock buffeted out of place, that made the front page of the evening papers around the planet.

Watching in the front row, the First Lady screamed for the first time, and began to cry. Sitting two along from her the Home Secretary realized that even if he survived this day, he would have to resign. From his vantage point in Cobra, the Prime Minister meditated not so much on the safety of the President or the crowd, but on the future of his government.

In the Shalimar all-night deli and coffee joint in Brooklyn, to take one of countless examples, the movement provoked shock. ‘Shee,’ said Johnson Calhoune, a security guard preparing for the morning shift, removing a doughnut from his mouth. ‘That ain’t right.’ and the owner of the Shalimar, an Afghan, agreed that it certainly was not.

In the Ops Room, Bluett was white with hate and rage. ‘Cabache,’ he said to his remaining operative, ‘have you still got that sucker in your sights? Why don’t you just blow his head off now—?’

‘NO, CABACHE,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘don’t shoot. Tell him not to shoot, Colonel.’

Bluett balled his fists. He went purple. He groaned.

‘OK Cabache, easy there,’ he said.

‘Yessir,’ said Cabache.

Jones the Bomb twitched the orientation of his skull, with an almost mechanical movement, like a desert fox. He looked up and squinted into the alcove.

‘You,’ he said, pointing his Browning at Philippa of Hainault, ‘come down.’ Cabache descended, and was escorted, hands above his head, to join his colleagues in the aisle.

‘I’m sorry, my friends,’ said Jones, whose breathing was ragged for a second or two, ‘but it is hard to think of any other way of making the point that this fellow is no longer in charge. To resume,’ he said, ‘there are many evils for which this man is responsible, but I’m a realist. I know how much will be quickly accomplished in your democratic system. That is why in the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, we in the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques are today confining ourselves to one demand. You know the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. You know they’re being kept in brutal and degrading conditions. They’re blindfolded. They’re made to kneel in the sun. Some of them are just boys. Some of them are from this country. They have not even been charged. They’ve not been given access to lawyers and this’ — he spat so plentifully that the drops hit the mike like a pebble on a drum — ‘from a country that presumes to lecture the rest of the world about the application of human rights. We do not even ask for them to be released, we ask only what is natural and what is right: that they be sent back to face trial in the countries where their crimes were allegedly committed. This the President can grant. This he can do quite simply, but I believe he will need some persuasion.’

In the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard there was now barely room to stand. Psychologists, counter-terrorism gurus, hostage crisis wallahs and Special Forces representatives were trying to make themselves heard. Purnell and Bluett continued their invisible arm-wrestle, and everyone was pointedly refusing to talk to a svelte young female MP who was, so she claimed, the Under-Secretary in the new Department for Homeland Security. ‘I see, yes,’ she kept saying in a bewildered way, ‘I see, yes.’ The shambles had nothing on the White House, where the Vice-President and the Secretary of State had both been roused from their beds and were in the cabinet rooms surrounded by the National Security adviser, the Defence Secretary and assorted other staffers, each vying to produce the most decisive response.

‘I want a total news blackout.’

‘Gettoudahere! This thing is running live on all channels.’

‘Let’s send in the Seals.’

‘Yeah, right, and watch the President get turned into lasagne on breakfast TV.’

‘Get me the British Prime Minister.’

‘He’s on line one, and he’s talking to the Secretary of State.’

‘But I’m the Vice-President.’

‘Sweet Christ, will someone here say or do something sensible.’

Dawn was just peeping over the low hills of Missouri, when a wing of stealth bombers headed in boomerang formation for Europe, startling the ducks and convincing an itinerant drunk that he had seen the first wave of an alien invasion.

‘I will not be doing the persuading,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘and I hope never again to have to use my persuader here. It is up to all of us to do the persuading and up to everyone watching around the world.’ He consulted his watch. ‘It is now 8.34 p.m. in Australia. Some of you will be making a nice cup of Milo after your tea. I urge you, if you have views on this question, to ring up your local TV station and give a very simple answer to a very simple question: Do you believe that America should send the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay to have a fair trial in another country? Yes or No. People of the world have your say. We will stay here all day,’ said Jones frothily. Dean noticed that rhetoric had given him wings. ‘We will wait until Australia has gone to bed and China has voted. We will wait until India and Russia and all the lands of Islam have given their opinion on this simple question that cries out for resolution. We will wait for Europe and for California, and if they vote to release the prisoners, and if you, sir, will come to this microphone and announce their release, then I swear that in the name of all that is holy, that you will all be released and the President of the United States will be unharmed. And if the people of this planet vote not to release the prisoners, the illegal captives of America, then of course it is very simple for us.’

In the office of the Director General of the BBC they were holding a crash meeting of a kind that was by now being held in the chancelleries, banks, newsrooms and foreign ministries of capital cities, day lit and benighted, across the planet. The honchos could see what was coming. There were rules about this, handbooks to be consulted.

They were about to be asked to collaborate on the biggest terroristic media stunt in history. ‘It’s very simple,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics), a handsome woman in her fifties with strong traditional opinions, whose appointment was the relic of some forgotten Tory administration. ‘We will have to refuse any cooperation whatsoever. Tell the switchboards immediately.’

‘Hang on,’ said the black polo necks.

‘We can’t stop people ringing up,’ said a man with an earring. ‘And what about everyone else?’ He meant the enemy, independents and satellite television. ‘They’re bound to take the calls.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics), ‘this is really too important. We will never forgive ourselves if we respond to a terrorist outrage by going whoring after ratings.’

‘Yes, well I’m sorry, too,’ said one of the 40-something polo-necked men who was in fact the Political Director (Editorial), who had recently been recruited at a cost of £113,000 to the licence payer, to neutralize the Editorial Director (Politics). ‘But frankly folks, if I may interject at this point, I think we are never going to forgive ourselves if we sub-optimize the handling of a major news event.’

‘But we can’t be morally neutral in this.’

‘It’s a story, isn’t it?’

‘You mean you think the Corporation should do the terrorists’ work for them?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m just saying it’s a matter of legitimate public interest.’

‘What is?’

‘Well, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Well, what percentage of BBC viewers think the Americans should do like he says and release all the remaining Guantanamo prisoners.’

‘For God’s sake, Joshua,’ said the Editorial Director (Politics).

‘I don’t want to be provocative or anything,’ said the Political Director (Editorial), ‘but the last time I looked the BBC was entirely funded by the licence payers of this country and not by the CIA.’

The Editorial Director (Politics) had already gathered her papers. She walked out with as much composure as she could manage, sealed herself in the executive toilet, burst into tears, calmed down and mentally drafted a press release announcing her resignation.

Back in the office of the Director General, it fell to another black polo neck to sum up the meeting. ‘I know you’re all going to hate me for saying this,’ he said, knowing that in fact they would be rather pleased, ‘but I think we should remember that our first mission is the Reithian mission to explain and frankly,’ concluded the Director of Political Editorial (£102,000 pa plus car, perks, bomb-proof state-sector pension), ‘if you go for the see-no-evil option on a thing of this scale, you know what I mean, looking at the medium to long term I genuinely and sincerely believe that we could be totally and utterly stuffed in terms of what we end up.’

‘Yeah,’ said several polo necks approvingly.

‘I mean,’ added one, ‘we’re the people’s broadcaster aren’t we? And it’s up to us to let the people speak.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE 1036 HRS

Jones could see that his idea was taking hold in the imaginations of his audience. They were staring at him with silent respect, busily excogitating their options.

With mounting confidence he completed his conditions. ‘If you vote no, people of the world…’ he shook his head, as though to concede that this was of course an option open to the global audience, though one he doubted they would pursue…

‘If you vote no, people of the world, if you vote in favour of the most brutal and powerful country since the Roman Empire, then it goes without saying that we will obey. We will release your Caesar to rule over you in the summary and arbitrary way with which you will all by now be familiar. In fact there is only one circumstance in which we, I, would dream of harming this man and that is if you vote yes, yes to release the Guantanamo prisoners, and they are not sent home.

‘There is a flight tonight from Miami to Lahore, changing at Frankfurt. If I’m right it will become clear in the next few hours what the world thinks of American imperialism and there will be plenty of time for them to be put aboard. If the world votes yes and America says no, then I will have no choice.’

He turned and leered at the President. The President did his best to leer back. But even in long shot, the TV audience could see a hollow look, an involuntary working of the Adam’s apple.

In the ministries, banks and news organizations of the earth, it was a reaction immediately detectable by those with a nose for fear, and it was viewed with every emotion from despair to satirical hilarity.

Slumped in his seat near the front, the French Ambassador saw it. He shook his Beethoven hairdo. Confounded and depressed though he was, the énarque in him admired anything cruel and brilliant, and the terrorist plan was both. ‘C’est géniale, ça,’ he said and decided that his chances of surviving today were about 5 per cent.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Cameron, gripping his arm.

‘Hem?’ said the French Ambassador, as though surprised to find he was in the presence of other human beings.

‘You said something just now. Do you mean that you think this guy’s a genius?’

‘Not a genius, of course not, but the plan is certainly brilliant.’

‘But do you think he is, like, cool?’

‘It is certainly cool,’ wheezed the French diplomat, ‘to carry out an operation such as this.’ Cameron tried to compute it all. She tried to make sense of the Frenchman’s actions, but mainly of her own actions and the actions of the man on her right.

She turned to the love object, who was now sitting in the chair vacated by Benedicte, but facing her. She took him in slowly with the anguish of one beholding a much-loved relative on the mortuary slab. She looked first at his long tapering fingers which now held her own with the gentle and winning insistence she had felt so often. She looked at the leather patches on his tweed jacket that he wore even in the heat of London in July and which heaven knows, he wore in Baghdad during the bombing.

She looked at his strong chin with its hint of bristle and then at the humorous and intelligent crinkles around his eyes and she looked into the eyes themselves. They were still Adam Swallow’s eyes: soulful, thoughtful, humane. Surely this was still a profoundly decent man.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘But why did you …’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But you made me get those passes.’

‘I know, but I swear …’

‘I signed for them,’ said Cameron. As is the case, alas, with all of us, Cameron’s sense of guilt was greatly exacerbated by the certain knowledge that she would be exposed. Everyone would know that she had been instrumental in importing these maniacs to the Palace of Westminster and, oh lordy, her father would know. As soon as she thought of that man whose hot-dang, straight-up and magnificently unnuanced world view had until recently served as the template for her own, she felt so bad again that she toyed with the notion of weeping. And then Cameron thought, stuff it, I’m not going to cry, I’m going to find out what’s really been going on here.

‘Adam.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you promise that you will tell me the absolute truth?’ Her voice was high, as though she had some sort of pressure on the base of her windpipe, but it was firm.

‘Yes,’ said Adam, and his brown eyes were unblinking, ‘I swear it.’

‘And that,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘is more or less all I have to say. It goes without saying that there must be no attempt to tamper with the television coverage of this event. For every channel that shuts off this fascinating broadcast for political reasons I will execute, shall we say, one hostage. Maybe we will start with that one over there. He seems to have survived.’

He waggled his automatic at the Dutchman, ear now swaddled like Van Gogh, and Hermanus Van Cornelijus looked back with loathing. ‘Of course it is always possible that America will behave with unthinking violence, so let me say for, what, the third time, that if they kill me they will also’ — he tapped his padded breast — ‘kill the 43rd President. He will not be the first civilian to die from what Americans and their allies call friendly fire, but he would certainly be the first President. As to my own death and the death of my colleagues, let me quote the Holy Koran: “the nip of an ant hurts a martyr more than the thrust of a weapon, for these are more welcome to him than sweet cold water on a hot summer day”.’

Recessed into the lectern was a glass carafe from which Jones the Bomb refreshed himself greedily, letting the drops trickle down his throat. He wiped his mouth and looked at the erstwhile most powerful man in the world 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 materiel at his eventual disposal, he was becoming the Eisenhower of the equation and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was being thrust into the role of Montgomery.

‘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.’

‘FOUR!’

Christ on a bike, thought Roger. I really had better get up and do the business. It was no use trying to order his thoughts, he decided. It was like one of those moments when the whips come and haul you from the tearoom, and they say you’ve got to speak for fifteen minutes on the Fur Trappers Compensation Bill. And you say ‘awfully sorry’ but (a) you’re trying to finish a particularly dense and dry rock cake and (b) fascinating though the subject sounds, you don’t really feel you’ve got quite enough to say about it in the High Court of Parliament, at which the whips look threatening, smoothly mention recent infractions and leave you with no option.

Barlow got ready to stand and knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to be as vicious and as scathing as he dared towards these terrorists without provoking them to shoot him. He was damn well going to speak up for America and for what he believed in. Apart from anything else, he had worked out one thing. Whatever happened to the President of the United States, he wasn’t getting out of here alive. He had thought it through from the point of view of Jones the Bomb, and it was perfectly obvious that the loonies would have far more impact — a permanent global trauma — if they went ahead and blew the place up than if they became snared up in some double-crossing hostage deal with the Americans.

‘FIVE!’

Haroun looked at his boss, histrionically waving his automatic, and felt a twinge of annoyance. He didn’t hold with all this speechifying; he didn’t like this silly debating-society approach that Jones had introduced. He smouldered at the crowd and spat with a splatch on the flagstone occupied by the front row. This was not some stupid and degenerate Western reality TV show, some kind of Pop Idol votathon. This wasn’t I’m the President, Get Me Out of Here. This was a war and he, Habib and Jones and Dean and their Arab brothers and their — ahem — sister were fedayeen; they were ready to sacrifice their lives for a cause. That’s what fedayeen meant. Indeed it was doctrinally vital that this action of theirs should be construed as a military action. When they all died, as they surely would, sometime in the next few hours, Haroun believed that he would die as a soldier, a man engaged in Jihad; and this was theologically essential to Haroun because it is well known that the Holy Koran forbids suicide.

‘Whoever kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in hell,’ says the Koran, and it was part of the deal Haroun had made with himself that he would not be going to hell. On the contrary, he was going to a place more lovely and more perfect than you and I can possibly imagine.

Somewhere a blissful tent had been pitched for him in the clouds, piled with silken cushions, cooled by the perpetual trickle of holy water from a turquoise fountain of vaguely Mudejar design; and he would have some peace there, thought Haroun, peace after the miserable American-induced stress of this earthly existence.

He would lie back on the pillows and in one hand he would manipulate the celestial narghileh, bubbling away with hashish a thousand times more delicious than anything that could be found in the valleys of Afghanistan, and his other arm would be gently looped around the exposed stomach of the first of his statutory 72 almond-eyed virgins; and slowly he would ease off her filmy pyjama bottoms and prepare to enjoy her in a way that his imam had assured him was both decently spiritual and infinitely carnal. She would bend over him, bringing her breasts ever closer to his face, laughing low and praising him and dissolving all the onanistic wretchedness of his previous life and— Oh-oh, he thought. In the name of Allah, Haroun told himself, I had better be careful.

He found himself staring irresistibly at Cameron, just ten feet or so away in her low-cut top. He felt the surge of fundamentalist rage that inspires the pathetic Islamofascistic male. How much longer would Jones keep them among these harlots and jezebels? He stared with that perverted Wahhabi mixture of lust, terror and disgust at this portrait of sexually emancipated Western woman. He glared at her thighs and her unambiguously exuberant bosom and yearned to punish her, punish her entire society, punish America for her criminal role in pioneering feminism. He wanted to punish her for the inadequacies she made him feel, because he knew in his heart that she was more unattainable to him than the doe-eyed virgins of heaven; and there was a part of him, a secret half-acknowledged corner of his soul, that yearned for her on precisely those grounds.

It was above all that part of himself, that part that had been tempted, the part that collaborated with America and her values, that he wished to destroy. Oh, but he would purge himself, he would cleanse himself of the Western taint. With sweating fingers he touched the stitched pouch in which the one-way Nokia was stored, and waited for the moment when he could wash his soul in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire. ‘Come on, Jones,’ he thought.

‘SIX!’

But what would he say? wondered Cameron. It was a measure of her devotion to Adam, and indeed her awful inescapable feminine deference, that as Jones began to count, she had simply assumed the love-object would take charge. He was always haranguing meetings with brilliant and mordant paradoxes. Surely he would leap to his feet, shod in lovingly polished oxblood brogues, and somehow set things straight?

But Adam Swallow just stared back. She looked into his implacable eyes, and tried to read him. Was that the glare of a proud but innocent man? Or was he a cynical abettor of terrorists? And she remembered that he knew these people anyway, or at least she assumed he knew these people, because he had suborned her into securing their access to the premises. She felt her soul-sickness deepen and she turned to the front and saw Dean with his afro hair and his proud, pale, almost Nilotic features. He looked so young and so scared.

‘SEVEN! I MEAN IT!’

Dean was staring at Cameron and thinking she was one of the tastiest birds he had ever seen. Here he was, barely nineteen and about to splatter his guts over the walls. He would never know this girl, never talk to her. He might even be responsible for her death. He became aware that she was returning his look. His Sierra Leonean child-guerrilla smile became a guilty smirk, and he turned his face away.

‘EIGHT!!’

Verdommt Brits, thought the Dutch Ambassador and prepared to stand up himself, on the assumption that the terror chief could hardly shoot him for carrying out his orders.

Tiens, thought the French Ambassador, also girding himself for action. Perhaps he would be the first foreign diplomat in history to address a major parliamentary occasion.

They need not have worried, because at that moment, like the digits of a child’s cash register, about fifteen suits sprang up across the hall and now more were rising all the time as buttock after buttock unclove itself from the little gilt chairs.

‘Now that is more like it,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘but I don’t know whom to choose.’ He turned to the President, and the President noticed how the fellow was sweating under the TV lights and how a drop had run down his brow, irrigated the cyclopean zit depression and then trickling away into the long furry undivided caterpillar of his brow.

‘You choose the speaker,’ said Jones the Bomb. ‘Which of these people do you think will speak best for you?’

‘You know what?’ said the President, with a good approximation of geniality. ‘It’s not really my place, but I had the honour earlier today of meeting a gentleman who is in fact the Speaker of the House of Commons.’ He indicated the Speaker standing glumly with Black Rod and the rest of the worthies. ‘You should really ask him to take charge.’

‘I think not,’ said Jones, ‘and I say rubbish to the snob traditions of this so-called democracy. You pick the speaker, I mean the person to speak, and you do it now.’

The President gave his squint, which was intended faintly to recall Clint Eastwood at the point of spitting out his cheroot and firing at Lee Van Cleef, but which his opponents had likened to a half-witted buzzard. ‘OK, buddy,’ said the President, ‘let’s all keep calm here.’

He shielded his eyes and looked for a conservative-seeming fellow, someone with moderate opinions who would come over well before a global audience.

Far away to the back and to the right, rocking on the balls of his heels and with his thumbs on the seam of his trousers, Roger Barlow stiffened as he saw the presidential finger pointed straight at his breastbone with the inescapable challenge of Uncle Sam.

‘Oh brother,’ he murmured, and had begun to say ‘Ladies and g—’ when ‘LADEES and GENTLEMEN’, screamed the man on his right.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE 1038 HRS

It was Chester de Peverill who had risen a millisecond after him, and whose desire to star in the world’s biggest televised balloon debate was now a hormonal imperative. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Roger, ‘I thought he—’

‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said Chester, placing his hand on Roger’s shoulder and applying no uncertain pressure. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued, puffing his chest and seeking out the cameras as though he was about to explain the secret of a really good lamb casserole. ‘My name is Chester and I’ — he paused — ‘am a humble cook.’ He waited again, as though this assertion might provoke cries of ‘no, no, no’ or applause.

The President stared uneasily at him. So did Jones the Bomb. Roger sat back, folded his arms and gave way to the blackness of ungovernable shame.

‘I am not a politician. I’m not a world statesman. All I really know about is eating and drinking and that gives me what you might call a gut instinct for things. What’s the problem we’ve got here, folks? We’ve got a global phenomenon which is called anti-Americanism. It’s people everywhere hating America, innit? That’s the trouble and before we sort it out we’ve got to understand why people hate America and from my perspective, from where I sit, there’s a lot of factors that have to be taken into account.’

‘Shut up!’ shrieked Jones. ‘What are you trying to say? Are you an imbecile?’

Chester de Peverill looked stunned. ‘I thought you wanted someone to speak, you know for or against America.’

‘You must speak to the motion,’ said Jones, who had studied Erskine May on parliamentary procedure, along with everything else, at Llangollen.

‘The motion?’

‘Yes: that this house calls for the immediate repatriation of the Guantanamo prisoners.’

‘For trial,’ said the President.

‘Silence,’ said Jones, who had the air of a rattled bus conductor about to turn vicious with a bilker. ‘Do you believe the American illegally held prisoners should be sent back for trial in the place of their alleged crimes?’

Chester de Peverill went white. Like all the folksiest and most whimsical TV characters, he tended to duck hard political questions and it struck him that the stakes here were probably quite high. If only he had known. In the seventeen minutes since Jones the Bomb had first handcuffed the President, the TV audience had been growing like bacteria in a Petri dish. There were two cameras in the hall for the live coverage, going out on Sky and BBC News 24. One was trained on the President, and one on the crowd, and their terrified cameramen were feeding pictures across the world. Millions were ringing up other millions and telling them to get to a box and watch the most sensational daytime chat show ever produced anywhere. With every minute that passed the millions were turning into hundreds of millions. Within twenty minutes it is estimated that a billion people were aware by means of some electronic transmission — radio, TV or the internet — of the events in Westminster Hall. Only a small proportion had grasped Jones’s idea in all its sophistication, but that small proportion was numerically huge.

They understood the concept of interactive TV and that they were in some sense the jury. From Berlin to Baghdad, from Manchester to Manila, from Sidcup to Sydney, there were already myriads who had no principled objection to the wheeze. Of course, they were in many cases sickened and horrified by what was going on. Good people across the planet were full of loathing for Jones and his barbarous treatment of the President, and his shooting of the Dutch Ambassador; but there was also a large number of people, good people, who thought America had a case to answer, not just on the narrow question of Guantanamo Bay, but more generally.

As they prepared to ring their TV stations and record their votes, they were fascinated by this strange, long-haired, rubbery-lipped Englishman who said he was a cook. Much as their consciences warned them not to gratify the terrorists, there were millions who were also yearning to give the Americans a lesson and in the sheep-like way of all human beings, they wanted to see which way this cook would go.

Chester de Peverill goggled. Across the planet, audiences in sports bars went silent and trembling fingers turned up the volume on the zapper.

‘Right,’ said Chester.

‘Yes or no?’ said Jones.

‘What? You mean, yes they should be sent back?’

‘Of course that is the question: what do you think?’

‘Or no they should stay in Guantanamo Bay?’

‘Idiot!’ barked Jones. ‘Just answer the question.’

‘Of course I’m going to answer the question.’ The TV chef stared hopelessly around the chamber, as out of his depth as a soup-soaked crouton. Like all despairing examination candidates, he tried to get some extra purchase on the phrasing of the question.

‘Should the ILLEGALLY HELD prisoners go back FOR TRIAL?’ He stopped histrionically, hoping that he would give the impression that he was a man who knew exactly what he was about to say.

‘Spit it out, pal,’ said the President.

‘Well,’ said Chester, ‘if you want my honest opinion . .

‘That’s right,’ said Jones, flashing his teeth. ‘That’s the one we want. The honest one.’

‘My honest opinion is, er, yes. Yes, of course the prisoners should go back and I say that without having an anti-American bone in my body. In fact some of my best friends are Americans.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR 1040 HRS

It was the tipping point. Chester’s moronic answer, arrived at with all the ratiocination of a donkey hesitating between two equal piles of hay, was colossally influential. Across the word this mere cook, this faux-naïve student of onions and gravy, had given cover and legitimation to the millions who wanted to vote to give America a bloody nose.

As the calls poured in, TV bosses started opportunistically whacking up the cost per minute and even though the higher prices were flashed on the screen, the viewers kept on calling.

In the upper reaches of the BBC, the hierarchs were in semi-continuous delirium of self-importance as they wondered what to do with the data. Could they responsibly publish the news? Could they not?

‘Basically this is a devil and the deep blue sea job,’ said the Political Director (Editorial) to the Director of Political Editorial. ‘I mean, we’re stuffed if we do and stuffed if we don’t. If we suppress what’s coming in, everyone will say we’ve been leant on by the government, and if we just go ahead and publish the news, everyone will start screaming about anti-American bias of the BBC.’

‘Yeah,’ said the Director of Political Editorial with a look of joy. He knew, they all knew, everyone who cared to look up the internet political wonk sites knew that the news was bad for America. China had recently seen a prodigious growth in the number of TVs and telephones of all kinds, not that the Chinese saw any particular need to thank America for the benefits of capitalism.

‘Yes,’ cried liberated young Chinese girls in pencil skirts as they dialled the TV stations. ‘Yes,’ said Chinese Human Rights activists into their snazzy new Sony Ericssons. Never mind all that American think tanks had done to campaign against the Laogai, the Chinese gulags.

Yes, now was the time to hold America to account. They wanted those guys sent back from Cuba. Slowly, like some storm being incubated in the armpit of Africa before it starts swirling round and round, gaining speed as it moves over the Atlantic, drenching Bermuda, then breaking out with hurricane force over the coast of North Carolina, the unthinkable was starting to become the politically correct. A global conviction was being born, that it was forgivable, this once, to comply with a terrorist stunt.

‘But just because I love America,’ said Chester de Peverill, ‘that does not mean I support American foreign policy or American farm policy. They fill their beef with hormones and then they dump it on the markets of developing countries and destroy the livelihood of those farmers. Do you know what happened to the Vietnamese catfish industry?’ he demanded.

The audience in the hall coughed and fidgeted. The audience at large watched him with fascination. Even the Vietnamese catfish fishermen watching from their pool tables wondered quite how this was relevant.

‘The Americans wanted to encourage their own catfish producers, so they slapped such prohibitive duties on Vietnamese catfish that, you know, they had a very tough time of it.’ Chester was conscious that this was perhaps not the most powerful point he could make, given that the anti-globalization movement, to which he was in theory affiliated, was also in favour of tariffs and protection, but he ploughed on, amid general expressions of disbelief.

‘Do you know how many Americans have food poisoning every day? Two hundred thousand, and it’s no wonder when you consider the kind of gloop they eat. Have you ever eaten American cheese?’

‘Listen, Chester,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘why don’t you just put a sock in it for the time being?’

Chester paused. He was being heckled and he knew from the studio audience at Chester Minute that a good heckle can be turned to gold.

‘Well, my friends, what do we have here? It’s my old friend Roger. He’s a politician, you know.’

‘Do shut up, Chester,’ said Roger. ‘These people are murderers.’

‘And my old friend Roger doesn’t want to hear my view of American cheese, which strikes me in a way as being not that surprising, because what you get from politicians like Roger is just like American cheese, processed and heat-treated to the point of macrobiotic extinction; and what you get from me is raw, unpasteurized — and you know, for some people like Rog here, I suppose I may be just a little bit too pungent for his taste.’

The TV chef looked down almost affectionately at the politician. Chester was quite oblivious to his surroundings, with the Asperger’s syndrome, the quasi-refusal to relate to the feelings of other people, that begins to afflict those who spend their evenings in star dressing rooms and their days absent-mindedly scanning the face of everyone they pass to see if they have been ‘recognized’.

‘Its good to see you, Rog. You know, folks, at university he was known as Roger the Artful Todger and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s been up to some kind of beastliness again, whanging the old donger in the kedgeree I have no doubt, no offence, Rog.’

Roger grabbed de Peverill’s tie and pulled down hard.

‘Stop,’ cried Jones, who could hardly believe his good fortune in finding this advocate of his cause. ‘You there, leave him alone and you, yes you, Mr Cook, please continue with your interesting remarks.’

‘And do you know,’ said Chester, scowling at Roger with magnificent disdain, ‘that in spite of their pasteurized, homogenized, sterilized, emulsified, genetically modified and hormone-pumped food, the Americans eat so much of it that they are the fattest country on earth. We all know about the evils of the tobacco industry. We all know about the creeps and saddos who defend the right of every American school kid to bear arms, even if it means bearing an AK47 into the maths class and wiping out teach and sixteen pre-pubescent school children. But what, my friends, are we going to do about the real enemy of our values, I mean our European values, that have produced in France a country with 258 cheeses? The real enemy is not big oil, it’s not big tobacco, it is big food.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE 1043 HRS

Across the Far East the debate was going badly for America, or at least for the President. The Chinese were now voting for the return of the gagged and ski-goggled Guantanamo prisoners by 68 per cent to 32 per cent. In Malaysia the Yes vote reached a staggering 98 per cent. Even in South Korea, the country for which many young American soldiers had died, there was a 52 per cent majority of TV viewers in favour of the return of the prisoners and the story was certainly no better in Vietnam, where an apathetic public were scandalized afresh by the American insult to their catfish.

In Europe the polling was closer, and in some countries, notably Denmark, there was already strong and implacable opposition to anything that sounded like cooperation with a bunch of Islamic nutcases. Britain was proving staunch, at least so far, in that many people understood that a yes vote was a victory for the terrorists. As for America, slowly waking up, it was a different story.

Americans looked at this lank-haired chef, condescending to them about their diet, and decided they liked him about as much as they liked Osama Bin Laden. Of course, it was still early days, and even in countries like China people were delaying before casting their votes, as families feuded about the meaning of what they were doing. Phone sockets were ripped out of walls, handsets were hidden under cushions while decent people wrangled about the limits of respectable anti-Americanism. One Chinaman told his brother to go and copulate with a pangolin in a lake. He was stabbed with a letter-opener in the duodenum.

In Pakistan a man was so scandalized by his wife’s refusal to vote against the awful Rumsfeld Stalag in Cuba that he shouted ‘Ju te Marunga!’ which means ‘I hit you with my shoe, woman’, an insult she requited by braining him with an iron. All told, the internet number crunchers calculated that of the world’s TV viewers who had so far expressed an opinion, a staggering 61 per cent were ready to rub America’s nose in it, even if it meant going along with the boys from the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques.

And Chester de Peverill jawed on, protected by Jones. He began on the infamy of America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. He went on to America’s disgusting attempt to patent seeds that were the intellectual property of Third World farmers. Barlow and others had at one point tried to slow handclap him, but Jones was having none of it.

Jones wanted the debate, and yet he was growing increasingly antsy. For more than twenty minutes now he had held the Western world at his mercy, and he knew it would not be long before the imperialists struck back.

A man in a muddy tracksuit was being shown into the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard, accompanied by Sergeant Louise Botting of Horseferry Road. It was Dragan Panic, the tow-truck operative. He really didn’t like being surrounded by so many policemen, but he had been told that his cooperation was essential, especially if he wanted Indefinite Leave to Remain in Britain.

He was plonked in front of a TV, which appeared to be showing some boring parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall. Nobody watched the debates in Westminster Hall, not even the MPs who took part in them.

‘Is that them?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

At that moment the cameras were panning across the hall, to take in Benedicte and the two other Arabs, and so Dragan began to shake his head.

‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, when the President and Jones the Bomb suddenly filled the frame. ‘I know him anywhere, that creepy man. Bozhe Moi, my God,’ he said, when he identified the man in the other handcuff as the President of the United States.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked numbly.

‘That,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘is something we are having a look at now.’

It is well known that in his younger days Henry VIII of England was very far from the bloated fat-kneed creature of caricature. He was tall and lithe, with blond locks, constantly springing into the saddle and faring forth for a spot of falconry, and then springing down again to strum his lute and knock up some imperishable masterpiece like ‘Greensleeves’. He danced and sang in his lusty tenor and he also played tennis, which comes, as everyone knows, from ‘tenez’, the word you called out at courtly matches as you prepared to serve and as you instructed your opponent to get a grip on his racket. In 1532 he built a splendid indoor facility at Hampton Court, but at some point before that date he must have seen the possibilities of Westminster Hall, with its hard flat surface and its sheer walls offering the perfect ricochet shot. We know he must have played here because in 1923, when they were making repairs to the hammerbeams, they came across some brown and shrivelled objects in the eaves. They were of leather and stuffed with hair. They were among the first tennis balls. Their hair was shown on examination to be taken partly from a dog and partly from a human being, perhaps because the Tudors, like future generations, had a superstitious faith in composite materials.

One can imagine the scene.

It is a bright morning in the springtime of his reign, the sun strong enough outside to fill the hall with a blue smoky light. Enter Henry, determined to work up an appetite for swans stuffed with goose stuffed with vole, or whatever he is proposing to eat for lunch.

After a suitably deferential pause, he is followed by his partner, a nervous silken-haired young courtier called Sir Charles de Spenser. The King announces that he will serve. Sir Charles says this is a first-class plan.

The King is inspired to make a joke: ‘I may be born to rule,’ he says, ‘but I was also born to serve.’ Sir Charles laughs so much he appears to be on the point of vomiting. ‘Tenez!’ yells the King. He then bounces the ball with his racket for an off-puttingly long time. Sir Charles sways like an osier on the chalked baseline, feebly wondering which stroke it would be most politic to play.

Twang! The monarch’s first serve sails past his ear, comfortably out on all directions. ‘Bien joué, sire,’ cries Sir Charles, but the King is having none of it. Phtunk! He hits the next one with the wood and it dribbles into the net.

‘Good shot, my liege,’ exclaims the courtier, but no amount of flattery will coax Henry’s ball into the service court. The King is beginning to go red. A certain jowly savagery is creeping over his features, later to be captured by Holbein. He serves, he misses, his racket vainly harvests the air and yet the fruit drops on his head. A sinking dread is forming in the pit of Sir Charles’s belly. The King is angry.

‘I’ faith,’ he cries, snapping his racket over his vast knee, ‘I don’t believe it,’ and commands Sir Charles to serve. Palms wet, the courtier tosses up the little leather sphere and it plops over the net in a slow undulating dolly that even a maddened monarch cannot miss; and the King makes the most of it.

He brings his new racket forward in a gigantic forearm sweep and crashes the catgut into the leather with all the impetus of his seventeen stone. For a fraction of a second the ball is sucked back into the web of the racket, as the enormous physical force turns the strings into a kind of warpo model of the space-time continuum, and then kapoing, it breezes off and away, far over the head of the extravagantly cowering Sir Charles, off one of the side walls, up over the hammerbeams and then honk honk bonk, it bounces into some cranny known only to the architects.

Sir Charles de Spenser sinks to his knees, deciding that he had better make the most of it. The King’s shot, he declares, was glorious, it was passing glorious. ‘Odd’s bodkins,’ he says, the world has seen nothing so awesomely ballistic since Tamburlaine the Great pelted Samarkand with his trebuchet of skulls. The King decides he likes this man’s style and if Sir Charles fails to earn himself an earldom, he is at least spared execution; and if he loses graciously again, he might achieve a baronetcy.

And as for the ball, it lies alone, unseen and untouched, wedged on the upside of one of the beams, in a little dark coign, for almost half a millennium. Blacker and blacker it grows, as it is covered with the fumes of successive technologies: coal fires, gas fires, petrol engines. Empires wax and wane around it.

Britain is supplanted by America, whose very existence has only been revealed to Europeans forty years before the ball is whacked aloft.

So in principle the ball might stay there forever, lost in mid-rally, frozen in a perpetual present tense all of its own, except that it is now only inches away from Jason Pickel’s scrambling foot, and about to rejoin the narrative of history.

He could make his way back up to the gun, he reckoned, if he somehow hauled himself up the joists, which were about two feet apart. It would mean crawling upwards and backwards, hanging on like Spiderman. It would need amazing prehensile strength in his hands, but Jason had confidence in his physical strength; and he needed that rifle. Mind you, if he fell, it would be almost eighty-five feet and he felt a twinge for whomsoever he might land upon.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX 1044 HRS

‘My love.’ Cameron had decided to try tact, and she turned to Adam with what she hoped was a tender look.

‘Yes,’ said Adam, distantly.

‘When we went to NATO …’ Cameron hated to ask him this. She couldn’t bear to destroy him in her own eyes as, in one way or another, she had destroyed all her previous boyfriends; but details, recollections, oddities were now crowding in upon her memory and innocent acts of the loved one now seemed pregnant with suspiciousness.

‘Yes,’ repeated Adam. ‘When we went to NATO.’

Over their heads Chester de Peverill was ranting about GM crops and Frankenstein foods, while Haroun, Habib, Benedicte and her two accomplices played the muzzles of their Schmidts over the crowd, as if pretending to hose them with bullets.

‘You know when we went inside the main building to see Brady Cunningham.’

‘Of course. Brady Cunningham.’ He pronounced it the American way, as though describing a particularly wily piece of pork.

‘Did you know he was a friend of my father’s?’

‘Yes, of course I did. You told me he was.’

‘I mean before we went to NATO, before all the trouble, did you know we might meet him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably, ‘I don’t know what I mean.

What happened was this. Yesterday morning, before their drunken lunch at the Ogenblick, they had been out to NATO to protest against the President, who was making a speech to what is called the North Atlantic Council, comprising the nineteen NATO Ambassadors. As the reader will know by now, Cameron had mixed feelings about this, but went along with it because it was kind of amusing.

The dirty don and his wife were full of teenage insurrection. ‘You know in 1986 I think I went to demonstrate against the Greenham Women,’ he said.

‘We both did,’ said his wife.

‘Good Lord, how plastered we must have been. Anyway look at us now,’ he said, and the Mercedes shook with laughter. When they arrived at NATO HQ in Evere, on the Brussels ring road, they found themselves outside the perimeter fortifications of a building that looked like — and, indeed, had been constructed as — a suburban maternity hospital. As a quartet they did not really fit in with the rest of the crowd, who lacked their urbanity and air of mild derision. The mob was a smaller, more dedicated version of the one outside Westminster Hall today, with a higher proportion of nose rings and Socialist Worker Party badges and Yasser Arafat headscarves; and more angry brown faces.

So Cameron didn’t participate in the stuck pig squealing as the cavalcade arrived, nor did they make oink oink oink noises in honour of the police. Nor did they try to rush the steel fence, as the hard cases did at 11 a.m., just as the President was slated to speak. But when the dirty don accidentally dropped a half-empty champagne bottle, from which they had all been swigging, a group of three riot cops converged.

Their leader was a burly Fleming with a scraggly black beard over his pockmarked cheeks. He appeared to be shaking with anger. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the dirty don, hoofing the pieces together with his foot and putting them in a plastic bag. The cop, blue suited, black booted, demanded their passports. His hairy hand crawled over the shiny leather holster at his hip.

‘It just sort of slipped,’ said the academic.

‘Ayez lagentillesse,’ screamed the policeman, looking up from his methodical leafing, the veins standing out in his neck, ‘de parler un des deux langues de mon pays.’ Speak in one of the two languages of my country. Cameron wanted to tell him that they were on his side.

She and Adam agreed: they didn’t see why the whole world should speak English, just because the Americans spoke English. The don, who spoke fourteen languages fluently, and who could read the script of many more, came to her help. He tried to soothe the cop, he addressed him in good Flemish and then French and then German, since German is one of Belgium’s three official languages, with substantial German minorities in the eastern towns of Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith. But when faced with an outraged Flemish policeman, you have only limited options.

You can run, but he will have no hesitation in shooting you in the back. You can try to bribe him, an option which can be surprisingly successful, but which does not yet automatically occur to British people. You can weep and slobber over his boots, which is what he probably wants. What you must not do is patronize him and Stefan Van de Kerkhove, luitnant in the Belgian riot police, felt patronized by the erudition of the don.

They were all under arrest, he told them, in English. They were being taken to a nasty-looking Belgian police van, white with blue stripes, when Cameron had an idea. She took out her mobile and rang her father in North Carolina. Even at 6 a.m. eastern seaboard time, he was awake.

Her father rang Brady Cunningham, his old friend from West Point, who was now General Brady Cunningham and sitting in his office in the southern wing of NATO, not 100 feet from where they were standing. Within five minutes General Cunningham had sprung them from the clutches of the Flemish riot police and the four demonstrators were being offered coffee in the heart of the US delegation to NATO.

Cameron remembered the great tact with which Adam had handled the square-headed Costner clones of the American military. ‘Oh no, sir,’ he told the General, ‘we weren’t there as demonstrators, we were there as observers.’

In the New Scotland Yard Ops Room, they had given up trying to raise Pickel on his radio. ‘OK,’ said Bluett, ‘here’s what we do. Ricasoli says he went into the hall through a hatch in the roof, right?’

‘That’s correct, sir. That’s what he thinks.’

‘Get me a shot of the roof, an external shot.’

‘You mean a picture? You want a picture of the hall.’

‘We must have a camera somewhere.’ In a matter of seconds the requisite camera shot was found — from the top of the Treasury — and patched through to the Ops Room screens.

‘Ricasoli,’ said Bluett, dialling him up, ‘I want you to get someone on that roof and give some stuff to Lieutenant Pickel. I want you to land right here in the square in oh one minutes and pick it up. Have you got that?’

‘Yessir,’ said Ricasoli, who was just thinking that if it was all the same to Bluett he would rather not be the man to land on the roof.

‘If necessary, do it yourself,’ said Bluett.

‘I’m only asking this because I feel obliged to ask,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘but are you sure Pickel is the right man? You know we’ve got a very good shot, Indira Natu, who could be deployed very quickly.’

‘Pickel,’ said Bluett, ‘Pickel could shoot the moustache off a gnat at 1,000 paces. The guy’s a phenomenon. He may be a freak, but you want a rhino dart in that man’s neck, Pickel’s the boy to put it there for you.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Course, they do say he’s a bit funny sometimes, after what happened in Baghdad.’

‘I was going to mention that. In fact, the word was passed along from S019 that he’d been acting up a bit on the roof, seemed in a bit of a state, Nam flashbacks and all that sort of thing.’

‘Someone reported on Pickel?’

‘Yes, that’s it, the police sniper I mentioned. Of course, I should have asked you, but time was tight.’

‘You should have asked me what?’

‘Whether it was right to give orders to detain him.’

‘And you …

‘Er, yes.’

Bluett glared, secretly delighted that his opposite number had committed such a faux pas. Was it time for Bluett to blow it? he wondered. But as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner said, time was not on their side.

‘Just reassure me about one thing: this dart — you sure it’s going to knock him out in time?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the bright young officer who had thought up the idea. ‘It’s thyapentine sodium. It takes three seconds to put a rhino to sleep.’

‘And it won’t actually kill him or set off the bomb?’

‘Oh no. I mean, no, not at all.’

‘History is going to judge us, Mr Commissioner,’ said Bluett to Purnell, ‘history is going to judge us.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN 1049 HRS

‘And do you know how they make a cocktail sausage?’ Chester de Peverill asked. ‘They get all the fat they can’t sell in other cuts of meat, and then they add something called drind, which is dried pig rind which expands when you add water, and then they add mechanically recovered meat. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, do you know what mechanically recovered meat is? It’s what you get when you turn a fire hose on the carcass of the animal, a jet of unimaginable power, and you squirt off every scrap of fibre and gristle and tissue and you create a great slurry of unidentifiable swill, which you sieve into a pulp and then you add …’

Haroun walked with deliberate tread down the aisle, three paces per slab. He approached Habib, and their eyes met. Each knew what the other was thinking. Why did Jones insist on this foolery? Why were they listening to this disgusting infidel chef and his preposterous recipes for unclean food? The sooner they consummated their operation the better. Time was passing and the Americans were resourceful.

‘Why don’t we just kill him?’ hissed Haroun to Habib as they passed.

‘Soon, brother,’ replied Habib, keeping his eyes travelling around the crowd. ‘Soon, may it please Allah.’

Haroun listened to the change in the note of the helicopter that had been hovering above them, and then saw a shadow pass over the south window as the Black Hawk descended.

‘And then do you know what Big Food puts in your cocktail sausage, Mr President? Even in the ones you serve in the White House? They put tons of sugar and salt and a load of bread crusts to make it hold water. It’s disgusting, it’s evil, it’s’ — Haroun hawked violently, as though preparing to discharge a great custard gob of phlegm. He hoped to put Chester off his stride. He did not succeed.

Haroun discovered another reason why he was starting to feel uncomfortable: his bladder was still full after a night in the ambulance, and the coffee he had drunk in the Tivoli was now bursting to be liberated from his body.

Cameron sieved her memory, but still couldn’t think how Adam had done what she now suspected. They must have been in that office for all of fifteen minutes. They sat on oatmeal-coloured sofas, they chin-wagged absently with the General; and then they were escorted off the NATO premises with great friendliness, much to the surprise of the rest of the mob, who were still waiting for the President to reappear.

They got in a taxi; they went to the Ogenblick. How had he done it? She had to find the courage to ask him. ‘Adam,’ she said, still holding him by the hand, ‘did you take anything from Brady Cunningham’s office?’

Adam shut his eyes, feeling a weight of despair at his own folly. ‘Take something?’

‘That’s right. This feels real dumb, but I found something.’

‘You found something?’ He was frowning again. ‘Where did you find something?’

‘Well I’m ashamed to say this, but I have to get it off my chest. I found it in your bag.’

Adam took his hand away from hers.

‘My bag? You mean in the hotel? What were you doing looking in my bag?’

It must have been two in the morning. Cameron was lying awake, in a state of post-coital rapture. Outside, Brussels was subsiding into silence. The restaurants had taken in their great seafood still-lives; they had removed the huge tableaux of lobsters and langoustines and oysters and mussels, arrayed on beds of ice in whorls and fans, like mad Flemish genre paintings, trundled them inside the dining rooms and left them to drip in the dark. There was no noise save the odd police siren, the bray of some lost stag night reveller and the resistless metronomic breathing of the man she now thought she loved. As he lay there she studied the big square structure of his chest, with one muscular arm flung wide, and the hairs slowly rising and falling as he breathed. One part of her wanted him to wake up, and do that wonderful thing to her again; and as she studied him she started to feel a crushing sense of anxiety. What if he was in some way misleading her? What if he had no real feeling for her?

And in her paranoia, she remembered something earlier. Adam had been doing something with his bag when 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.

Tiptoe, tiptoe, she went across the carpet. She bent down. Had Professor Adam Swallow woken at that moment, he would have seen a sight to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. But he did not wake up, and as Cameron stealthily unzipped the bag, she prepared for the shock, and she constructed the necessary mental defences and excuses. She would find a moment to bring it up with him in a gentle, roundabout way, and she would try to draw him out. Maybe she would make some kind of little confession herself, as a way of getting the conversation going.

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.

Ponk went the ball on the head of the TV chef. De Peverill bellowed.

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 flèche.

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?’

‘Hssst,’ said Jones, as the tennis ball was recovered from under the chair of a hostage, and brought by one of the Arabs for his inspection. What in the name of the prophet? He held the sphere between finger and thumb, momentarily resting his gun on the lectern. It looked like a coprolite. He hadn’t a clue what it was, but it spelled mischief.

‘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 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, mesdames, messieurs, who wants to be the next?’

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.

‘Un instant, chéri,’ said Benedicte. ‘Ladies first.’

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 one of the most ill-judged speeches ever to have been uttered in this chamber.’

There were several strong expressions of assent. ‘Hear, hear,’ exploded Sir Perry Grainger, and others.

‘I think it pretty disgraceful, when our country is after all playing host to the President of the United States, that anyone should stand up and say anything which could be construed as supportive of those who were preparing to murder him, and indeed us.’

‘Hear, hear.’ Sir Perry was on his feet clapping wildly, as were some others. Roger turned to Chester de Peverill and gave a shrug, as if to say, you can’t win them all.

De Peverill also shrugged. What did he care? He needed controversy, and as his marketing people never ceased to remind him, the old bag’s generation were not commercially important. They weren’t the ones with the disposable income to buy his ‘Ripper Tucker’ © TV cassoulet, yours for £5.99 each.

‘I was only trying to be diplomatic,’ he grumbled. ‘Read the books. You should never confront these guys.’

‘All right, lady, all right, lady,’ said Benedicte. She admired Lady Hovell’s gumption, but it was time to show who was boss. ‘Lady be quiet now or else some bad thing is going to happen, right away.’

‘I will certainly not be quiet,’ said Lady Hovell. At the very top of the hall, behind their railing, the inspissated holders of Britain’s ancient courtly offices were beginning to stir. There was something in the Agincourt spirit of Old Ironpants that sent the sap rising in their limbs, as the xylem and phloem can pump unexpectedly in a half-dead oak.

‘You know what?’ said Silver Stick to the Earl Marshal. ‘She’s bloody right. If we all just charge her now while her back’s turned …’ He glanced across at Black Rod, and he could see the light of battle in his eyes, too.

Behind them the pikes and halberds quivered, as the spirit of these objects collectively remembered their roles in battles gone by. The Earl Marshal groaned. ‘But then they’ll just set off their bombs,’ he pointed at Habib and Haroun. ‘And the other chap is bound to kill the President.’

‘Oh all right,’ said Silver Stick. ‘Have it your way. Let’s all just hang around and wait to die.’ He sounded bitter, but he had to admit that the Earl Marshal had a point.

CHAPTER FIFTY 1058 HRS

As a TV spectacle, the events in Westminster Hall had lost some of their appalling fascination, after the departure of the President and Jones the Bomb. No one was really sure who the lady peeress was, though quite a few watchers agreed vehemently with what she said. The TV networks responded magnificently, however, to the shortage of more decent pictures of the President being humiliated.

At quite senior level in the BBC, it was decided they could cut away from the live coverage of Chester de Peverill and Old Ironpants. To the joy and distress of billions — still replicating at a Maithusian rate — they showed, again and again, the money shot of Jones clobbering the leader of the free world over the back of his head. They showed Jones firing at the Dutchman; they showed him holding up the enigmatic turd object that had dropped from the roof, while the President looked dumbly on.

The media hysteria had now reached levels not seen since the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997. And in fact the response was more hysterical because it was a running story, a breaking story, of unguessable consequences whose end could not be foretold.

Radio programmes of all kinds were being interrupted with the news that, ‘the President of the United States, senior members of the Government, and hundreds of others, are being held hostage at Westminster. A group calling itself the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques is demanding the release of all the remaining prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay. At least one person is believed to have been killed by the terrorists who are threatening to detonate suicide bombs. The Prime Minister has called for calm. We go live now to Westminster.’

And the news from the voting was still bad for America, though not as bad as it had seemed at first. Some countries, such as Saudi Arabia were reporting almost 100 per cent insistence that the prisoners be sent home. But there were odd pockets of support for the President. He might have thought that Russia, after her humiliation in the Cold War, would take the chance to put her boot on the neck of the old adversary. But no, the Russians had their problems in Chechnya. They took a dim view of Islamic terror. Maybe there was some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin), but it seemed that Russia, one of the most populous countries in the world, was voting heavily for America.

‘We can put it out,’ said the Director of Political Editorial, coming down to the BBC newsroom like Moses from Sinai.

‘They just green-lighted it. We can report the aggregate polling figures.’

The BBC had decided that since the information was out on the net, and since all other channels were already crunching the numbers, they might as well go ahead. With elaborate editorial throat clearing and issuing of health warnings, they did the work of Jones the Bomb.

They broadcast the news that of people calling TV channels to express a preference, 58 per cent now believed that the American President should release the Guantanamo prisoners.

Jones was almost incontinent with pleasure. He cachinnated like a gibbon, as the figure was flashed on the screen. ‘You see, you see,’ he cried, doing a little dance, which the poor President was obliged to echo. They were standing in room W6 watching the television. It was a small, poky windowless room, with a nondescript conference table and the chairs and carpets in parliamentary green. Cameron and Adam were standing behind them, he looking calm, she preparing herself to interrogate him further.

‘So go on then,’ gibbered Jones, thrusting his face close to the President. ‘You have seen the verdict of the world. The majority is clear. This time there are no hanging chads and stuffed ballot boxes, like you have in Florida. What do you say?’

‘Well,’ said the President, ‘well.’

It was dawning on him that he might have to take a decision. Alone, shackled to a lunatic, with three other weirdos, besieged in some dungeon-like meeting room of the British Parliament, with no one to advise him but the blurting television, he was being called upon to make a choice of enormous moral and political implications. For the first time in his career, he was deprived of the jowly counsel of the businessmen who formed the upper reaches of his administration. ‘Well, buddy,’ he said, ‘I think we should wait and see.

You say the verdict is clear, but I notice that the numbers have been changing a little. According to this fellow here,’ he gestured at the BBC with his free hand, ‘it’s come down from 61 per cent to 58 per cent.’

‘Coward!’ yapped Jones. ‘You do not even have the courage to do what the world wants you to do. We are the voice of the people of the earth. The poor people. The people that America abuses and insults and tortures. We are asking for one small thing. You do not have to give our comrades a Presidential pardon. We do not even say that they are all entirely innocent of crime. We only say they must be brought to trial in a country where they can receive a fair trial. Give the order, Mr President.’

Silence for a second. The noise of the helicopter, more muffled than in the main hall. Another crash, as though another tile had come off the roof. Then a mysterious vibration, as though the whole building were starting to shiver and purr like an ancient cat in its sleep. It was rain, falling on the roof, as a sudden drop in temperature released the thousands of gallons the heat had been holding in the sky.

‘No, sir, I can’t do that just yet.’

‘Give the order and you will go free. But if you fail to accept the verdict of the people, then it will be my pleasure and honour to kill you, even if I lose my own life.’

The President narrowed his eyes and looked again at the screen. The fellow seemed serious. Must be to do what he’d already done. The President didn’t want to die, not at all, not for the sake of the Guantanamo prisoners. His brain revolved, not normally the fastest process known to nature, but now accelerated by adrenalin.

He could pretend to capitulate and give the order, and then double-cross Jones the Bomb. But no, then people would think he was weak, and in any event, the terrorists might kill him anyway. But if he did nothing, people would also think he was passive and powerless.

‘Mr Jones, sir.’ It was Dean, putting his hand up to speak. Cameron watched him closely. ‘Mr Jones, I think we’ve done enough now: can we stop?’

Again and again Dean saw the mysterious round weapon drop from the roof. In his imagination it portended the inevitable retaliation of the superpower and its lieutenants. He saw men with guns dropping from the ceiling on ropes. Violent men, who shot without questions, and then kicked their corpses.

‘What do you mean, stop?’ said Jones impatiently.

‘Well, I think we’ve made our point.’

Jones glanced at the President and the others, as though to confirm that they had heard this impertinence. ‘Dean,’ he said in his softest and most murderous tones. ‘Shut up.’

‘They’re going to kill us, Mr Jones, and they’ll never let us out of here alive.’ Dean was aware that this was a paradoxical complaint, given what he had nominally undertaken to do.

‘But we’ve discussed this.’

‘I’ve been thinking, and I agree with yow, Mr Jones, sir. I agree with yow about everything, but I’m not sure .

‘You’re not sure what?’

‘I’m not sure that I, like, really want to die.’

‘Assuredly, Dean, if we die, angels will accompany us to our rest, and we will lay our heads on pillowy bowers, and we will live in the tabernacle of the blessed, where no rain falls, neither is there any snow, and the warm breezes play…’

Dean shouted: ‘I don’t care. Anyway, I like snow.’ For the first time that day Jones the Bomb looked taken aback. It was if a snake had been hypnotizing a rabbit and the rabbit had suddenly stuck its tongue out.

He glared. Dean bit his lower lip. He had been on the wrong side of the law before. Ever since the cremation of the neighbouring cheese laboratory, he had felt a fugitive, an alien, but never had he felt so lost in a jungle of fear, and now the great white hunters were coming for him, and he was among the rabid beasts that must be put down. Cameron stood up and moved towards him.

Dean resumed. ‘I’m just saying that I wanna …’

‘You want to surrender? Will you do nothing to help our brothers who are fighting and dying in Palestine?’

‘Well, I think I have helped you know, so I honestly think we’ve done our bit.’

‘Do you want to give into this world of pornography and decadence, and the abuse of womankind…?’

‘And freedom and democracy and the rule of law,’ said the President.

‘Quiet,’ said Jones the Bomb, yanking his chain. ‘Dean,’ said Jones, ‘you took a holy oath that you would join the ranks of the Shahid, that you would be a martyr.’ On the way down the corridor to room W6, Dean had looked quickly out of one of the leaded windows. He saw that the crowd was being dispersed from Parliament Square, and that the men in blue were being joined by men in green.

‘Listen, mister,’ said Cameron. ‘I think he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be a suicide bomber.’

‘What is it to you, woman?’

‘Don’t you woman me.’

‘Adam,’ snapped Jones at Dr Swallow, who stared levelly back. ‘She is your responsibility; kindly take charge of her.’

‘No one takes responsibility for me,’ said Cameron.

‘Yeah, Mr Jones, sir,’ said the President. ‘Welcome to Western civilization, buddy. Get with the programme.’

‘Hold your tongues the lot of you.’ He shoved his automatic into the President’s temple so hard that he winced. Then Jones pulled the gun away and pointed it at Cameron and then at Dean. There was a silence.

‘Well,’ said Cameron to Adam. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘There’s nothing I can say,’ he told the girl he loved.

‘I’ve been a fool, and I’ve been cheated. Cameron, I’m sorry.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE 1103 HRS

There was something amiss with Haroun, thought Benedicte. She knew the man craved martyrdom, but he was red-faced with impatience. He walked towards her with tiny steps, as though trying to keep a walnut between his knees.

‘Quickly,’ he said.

‘What is thees queeckly?’ she whispered. ‘It is time to blast these sons of goats and monkeys.’ ‘We must wait for Monsieur Jones to come back.’ ‘No! If I wait any more, something will happen.’ ‘What ees something?’

‘Something bad. To me.’

The Palestinian girl looked closely at Haroun. ‘Mais tu veux faire pi-pi, chéri?’

Haroun didn’t like Benedicte. Her chic white T-shirt unambiguously revealed the location of her nipples. She was not attired like a black-eyed one.

He jerked his chin.

‘But go on then,’ she chuckled, waving the muzzle of the Uzi at the swing doors. ‘We can manage.’

And if anybody laughs at me now, thought Haroun as he minced out, I will shoot them in the bladder.

‘Tootle pip,’ called Lady Hovell to his smouldering back, ‘you clear off, and take Ulrika Meinhof here while you are at it.’

The acting terrorist leader walked towards her down the aisle, noiseless in her Nike Airs.

‘I think I should warn you that you don’t scare me, young lady.’

‘Then you are brave but you are not smart.’

‘In fact, there is only one thing that really frightens me.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I am frightened of the disapproval of God.’

‘Ferme la gueule. How do you say it in English?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Shut you the fat gob.’

‘My advice is to follow that young man, find the nearest policeman, and hand over that gun.’

As the two women stood next to each other, the rain outside deepened in tone. The drops swelled and thickened to the size of currants, or even gulls’ eggs, and a great drumming came from the roof. A cloud of Turneresque blackness rolled across the London sky, and as the light died in the windows, strange shadows formed on the women’s faces.

‘Go home, dear,’ said the Baroness.

Benedicte stuck her snout right next to the ancient map.

‘Now is the time for the beeg silence.’ She raised the Uzi to her ear. ‘Or else the silence will be the long one.’

‘What you need, if you ask my opinion, is a nice husband.’

‘Shut your face, vieille putain!’

‘I’m no—’

Benedicte pulled the trigger. Even as far back as Barlow and de Peverill, the shots buffeted their eustachian tubes, as though someone was ripping calico just by their ears.

Lady Hovell clapped her hand to her heart. She sat down. Her eyes fell away from Benedicte, and at once she looked like anyone’s old grandma, just told a piece of bad news by the docs.

A noise went up from the audience, a small but unanimous exhalation. They knew that they had sustained a defeat.

Was Lady Hovell’s chin wobbling? Was that a crinkle on the jaw that had never trembled in forty years of sneering from men who weren’t fit to lick her boots? It was hard to tell. But as Silver Stick gazed at her from afar, tears formed in his ducts, of love and fright.

Frig me spastic, thought Jason Pickel, as the bullets ate into the main collar beam, just ten feet below him. That could have been a serious inguinal injury.

He squinted below, to check whether the mad A-rab bitch might fire again. Then slowly he looped the nylon rope round the crown post, tied it tight, and then began to slide it through two carabiners at his belt.

When he had finished, he crouched once again over the gathering, his big shoulders hunched, rifle ready, like an eagle as it waits for its moment.

Adam was still saying nothing, and Cameron was looking at the TV, trying not to hurt.

The BBC had a ‘Russian expert’, who was casting doubt on the oddly pro-American numbers from Russian TV.

She had to know about his theft. ‘So how did you take it?’

‘I am afraid I just put my newspapers and stuff on top of it, and then scooped it all up when we all left.’

‘So what are you, a spy?’

He groaned. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. But it’s got nothing to do with this business.’

‘And who are you supposed to be spying for?’

Dean watched their conversation. In particular, he watched Cameron, and noticed more detail: the tilt of her nose, the bangle on her wrist, the little white scar on her slender left arm. He shivered, and listened to the rattle of the rain. Not only had the temperature fallen, but the adrenalin was turning sour in his veins, leaving a hangover of fear.

Jones the Bomb spoke. ‘The door is open, Dean, my young friend.’

Dean looked at the door. On the contrary, it was shut.

‘But if you go through that door now, remember that you will lose all chance of bliss. You have a chance now’ — he stared with his mongoose intensity — ‘to obtain the stone that is more precious than the world and anything that is in it. Remember, my dear Dean, that when the first drop of blood is spilled, the shahid does not feel the pain of his wounds, and all his sins are forgiven. He sees his seat in Paradise, and he is saved from the torment of the grave—’

‘Mr Jones, sir, I just don’t believe in paradise.’

The President looked keenly at him. No one ever got elected President of the United States without believing in paradise.

Jones made a sad face: ‘I know it is difficult, and I know it is frightening, and I know we all have moments when we feel we have lost our faith . .

‘You bet your sweet ass,’ said the President.

‘But I hope you still have faith in me, Dean. Do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Have faith in the person who has liberated you from the false values of Western decadence?’

Dean rose. He moved towards the door. ‘Mr Jones, I. No. Yes. I … No.’

That’s it, thought Roger Barlow, when Benedicte fired at the roof-beams. Get me out of this thing, dear Lord, and I promise I’ll be good. I’m fed up with being bad.

Here are all the good things I am going to do. I’m going to pick up my towels from the bathroom floor. I’m going to start listening properly when she talks to me. I’m going to communicate. I’m going to stay awake after lights out, because it’s always worth it in the end. I’m going to understand that the important thing is not to solve problems, but to discuss them. After fifteen years, I’m going to get the point that marriage is not a final act; it’s like a meeting of the European agricultural ministers, an endless negotiation of insolubles.

I won’t pick the corner of my toenails with a Bic biro lid. Ditto ears, or at least not at dinner parties.

I won’t open tins of tuna and then leave them under the bed. I won’t go to the fridge, take out a Waitrose raspberry trifle, eat it all, and then put back the licked-out plastic container.

I won’t lose my temper when we get lost, and then refuse to ask the way. I’ll stop farting under the duvet .

His eyes met the twitchy glare of Habib, who was walking down the aisle, swinging his gun like a sadistic maths master invigilating an exam.

It occurred to Roger that if he wanted divine intervention, he had better make some real concessions.

The noise from Benedicte’s gun carried out into New Palace Yard. It penetrated the ambulance, and entered the ears of William Eric Kinloch Onyeama. One lung was half-full of blood.

The pericardial puncture unit had made a neat hole in his chest. His thoracic diaphragm had been punctured, his pencardial membrane was in a bad way and his sternum was severely scraped.

But Eric Onyeama was alive, and he owed his life to the Huskie.

It was the tough little computer which had served as his breastplate, and which had borne the brunt of Haroun’s attack.

He had lost about four pints of blood; but the haemorrhage had slowed, and now he was coming out of his faint. He flapped an arm, and knocked a non-glass urine bottle to the floor.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO 1105 HRS

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said one of the Swat team that surrounded the ambulance. ‘There’s someone moving in there.’

‘Somebody open the doors.’

‘Cover me.’

With infinite care, and strictly according to the manuals, the Swat team inched towards the handle. Slowly, slowly, in the hope of not setting off some Vietcong-style booby trap, both the rear doors were swung wide. The Swat team stared within, their expressions full of the semi-sacred awe with which a man will look at the bottom of a woman’s handbag.

‘Strewth,’ said one. ‘It looks like a flaming abattoir in there.’

Eric the parkie was almost invisible in the tangle of medical equipment. His lower body was covered in a long spinal board, complete with head immobilizer and securing straps. His upper half was buried in a midden of oximeters, stethoscopes, thermometers, resuscitation masks, vomiting bags, gastric tubes, sterile surgical gloves and defibrillators. The whole assemblage was richly spattered with gore.

‘I think there’s someone there.’

‘Sweet Mary mother of God.’

‘Or part of someone, anyway. That’s definitely a foot.’

‘We’ve got to get him out.’

The Swat team leader looked at the ambulance man. ‘You’d better lead the way.’

‘Whoa,’ said the ambulance man. ‘This is an armed response situation. The rules clearly state that in armed response situations, it’s down to you boys.’

‘Hey, we don’t want to kill him.’

‘Yeah, and we don’t want him to kill us.’

‘Oh come off it.’

‘You come off it.’

So Britain’s emergency services began the now traditional act of worship before the altar of Phobia, the many-headed multiple-bosomed goddess of health and safety. With every pump of Eric Onyeama’s good and loyal heart the puddle of blood beneath him grew, and with every pump the beat grew fainter.

‘Help me you idiots,’ he said. But only his lips moved.

Adam took Cameron’s hand and led her away from the blare of the TV, to the back of room W6. As she felt those long, dark-haired pianist’s fingers, she tried to remember that this was a hand she thrilled to touch.

‘I’ll tell you who I’m spying for,’ he said, ‘of course I will. I’ll tell you in a minute. But I want you to believe me about something. I am not a terrorist.’

‘Then why did you make me do this?’

She still loved the intensity of his intellect; she loved his broad shoulders and thick curly black hair. Despite her depression, for an instant she persuaded herself she might also love the fact that he was a spy.

‘I thought — look you’re not going to believe me.’

‘Did you know they weren’t a TV crew?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re mad. You’re an active collaborator.’

‘No,’ said Adam with soft desperation.

‘Say, who is this fellow, anyway?’ The President watched as the man with the flowing grey hair was at last given the floor. ‘What’s that he said?’

The President reached for the zapper to turn it up.

Jones the Bomb snatched the gizmo away. ‘That is His Excellency Yves Charpentier, Ambassador of the Republic of France.’

‘Know him, do you?’

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE 1108 HRS

Haroun’s hasty footsteps echoed on the stone stairs. He was alone, save for the busts of dead white men and their scary dead white eyes.

He tried one door, then another. The fool English: did they expect a man to piss against the wall of their godless palaces? Well, he would have to, if this went on much longer. He turned a corner, and came face to face with a woman.

She was dressed in black from head to toe. She wore a helmet and her upper body was swaddled in Kevlar with a label saying Metropolitan Police.

She swung her gun on him. He turned his on her. By mutual consent they each slipped back around the corner and trotted in the opposite direction.

Oh, perhaps I should have asked her, thought Haroun, because things were starting to go critical in his lower abdomen. One by one the graphite rods of restraint were popping out of the radioactive pile, and meltdown was approaching.

Ah! But it was haram, a disgrace, to discuss such things with a woman.

He came to a door, of old rich oak and bossed with bronze. Praise be to the prophet, thought Haroun: it said GENTS.

Locked. Through his tears, he read a notice Sellotaped to the wood, in the name of the Clerk of Works, informing him that the convenience would be out of order, pending conversion to allow for disabled access.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, messieurs, mesdames,’ said the French Ambassador. ‘Since I believe that there is a strong possibility that this will be our last day on earth, I will speak briefly, and I will speak from the heart.’

Boy, thought the President, Yves here was one hell of a snappy dresser. The Frenchman was wearing an indigo suit of the most formal possible cut, but his shirt was patterned with blue horizontal stripes of varying tones and thicknesses. The whole thing was set off by a taramasalata-coloured tie, strobing under the TV lights and — yes — giving the impression of a pulsing from-the-heart sincerity.

‘I stand before you as the representative of a friendly nation, that bears nothing but amity and goodwill towards this country, which has been my home for the last three years, and also towards the United States.

‘For the avoidance of doubt, I wish to join the noble lady who has just spoken, in recording my contempt for the terrorists who are holding us hostage, and who threaten murder. When these events are investigated, and the criminals punished — as they surely will be — it will be discovered that some of our captors gained access to this hall through the invitation of myself and of my former associate.’

He stuck his chin at Benedicte. ‘I mean the lady with the gun. All I will say now is that I have been the slave to Aphrodite and that the goddess has ensorcelled my wits.’

Crikey, thought Barlow.

‘Typical Frog,’ said the President.

Jones the Bomb frowned.

‘Since the hour advances, and since I repose no faith in the mental equilibrium of our captors, let me speak only to the nation which I have the honour of representing. Français, françaises, concitoyens de la République, there may be many millions of you who are watching and indeed preparing to vote. There may be some of you who have already made up your minds, and are doing as these people would have you do — ringing up to express your wish to release the prisoners held by the Americans. If you have already voted, that is your privilege. If you have yet to decide, I beg you to listen.

‘We have a tradition, over the last fifty years or so, of providing the intellectual opposition to what is called le défi américain, which I might call the challenge of American cultural and political dominance. We have our own modest culture in France, our own literary, artistic and scientific achievement, which over the centuries some foreigners have been kind enough to praise. But it would be fair to say that sometimes we become so paranoid about America, which we call the hyperpuissance, that we become exuberant in our language.

‘One senior French politician recently attained notoriety by declaring that the ambition of the United States was nothing but, I quote, the organized cretinization of the French people. Our good friend the cook, who has just regaled us with his views at such generous length, alluded to the problem of the malbouffe, the hamburgerization of European cuisine. That is a discussion familiar to us in France.

‘It is also true that many intelligent people, and not just in France, but also in America, are sceptical of the manner in which the US government handles the problems of the Middle East. It is my belief that an injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, that Israel could remedy that injustice, and that America could do more to assist this process. There are also many of us who believe that there were better ways of handling Monsieur Saddam — no doubt a very bad man — than the invasion and all the problems it has brought in its train.

‘But, my friends, it is one thing to find fault with America. It is another thing to wish her destruction, and that, tragically, is the ambition of the deluded men, and woman, who hold us hostage today.’

Darn right, thought the President. Until that last bit, he had been meditating the modalities of a strike on Paris.

‘I do not know where he has gone, the strange personage who handcuffed himself to the President. But before he went, he compared the American head of state to Caesar, and I wish to dwell for an instant on that richly suggestive analogy. Yes, it is probably true that in her pandominance, modern America surpasses the Rome of the Antonines. She has bases in countries which only fifteen years ago were part of the Soviet Union. It is a fact that Rome never conquered Scotland. It has been one of my pleasures, as Ambassador to this country, to walk along the wall the empire built to keep out the painted tribes; and yet American planes flew from Lossiemouth to Iraq.

‘We all know the figures: the increment in US defence spending, the amount by which the Pentagon decided to increase defence spending last year, is greater than the combined defence budgets of Britain, France and Germany. It is surely right to call America in some sense an empire. But is she an evil empire?’

‘Of course she is evil, you conceited French stupidity!’ Jones the Bomb leapt up, trailing the President, and almost rubbed noses with the TV screen. ‘Benedicte, you must make him shut up and sit down.’

But the French Ambassador was coming to the point.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR 1112 HRS

‘So you expect me to believe that?’ said Cameron to Adam. ‘You thought they were going to wheel in some torture victim, just to embarrass the President?’

She paused, and scanned the face of her loved one, and was amazed by how much she wanted to believe him.

‘I know it sounds crazy now, but it’s all I’ve got to say,’ said Adam. ‘Now let’s just concentrate on getting out of here alive.’

Over the scuffed green carpet of room W6 Dean slithered in his trainers. He was now only a couple of yards from the handle. He turned and mouthed at Cameron. ‘Come with me.’

Cameron looked at him, and then looked quickly back at Adam.

‘Dean, my fine young friend.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dean instinctively. Jones the Bomb was still watching the TV, but he had good peripheral vision.

‘I will not stand in your way. I will always remember you fondly.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ He edged a foot closer to the door.

‘Your mother will be filled with joy over your heavenly wedding,’ said Jones.

‘My mother, sir?’

‘The same.’

‘Sir, what wedding?’

Jones smiled and slid his gunhand into the suicide jacket, and checked the Nokia.

Now Haroun was lost. He was sure he had been here before. Surely it was the same marble staircase, the one where he had met the policewoman. But if he had been here before, would he not have remembered that giant painting? It depicted the infidel Queen Elizabeth, her orange hair and pasty face, all lit up as she plotted some new act of aggression. Haroun spat and swore, and tottered on. He looked into the office of someone called the Rt Hon. John Prescott MP, and thought of urinating in the waste paper basket, but there was the risk of being interrupted by the woman. Heaven help me, he begged. Come down, O Power Divine, and give me the blessing of release. In the nuclear reactor in his loins the last carbon rod had blown out of the pile; the last drop of coolant had evaporated, and the corrupt and incompetent director had leapt into his jalopy and begun to drive for the coast.

Far above the Atlantic the boomerang of Stealth bombers was making good time, as Rome might once have sent her quinquiremes to crush a rebellion.

Jupiter Pluvius continued his percussion on the roof, and now the beat turned up again, as though the rain god were moving to some symphonic finale. Immediately beneath the tiles, Jason Pickel stared down at the sweating domes, the hats, the comb-overs and shilling-sized bald patches of the audience, ninety feet below. He looked through the sights for the umpteenth time and lined up the cross-hairs on two prominent objects, first Benedicte’s left nipple, then her right nipple. ‘Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?’ he hummed, ‘Or thorns compose so rich a crown?’ He couldn’t miss, he told himself. Well, he could, but he couldn’t.

Away at the back, Roger Barlow was partly hoping to speak, and partly hoping that he would be spared the ordeal, not least since the Frenchman was being so colossally sound. Yves Charpentier had a slightly irritating way of pushing out his lips and making an udder-milking gesture with his hands, but what he had to say was good.

‘Way to go, Froggie!’ he thought.

Barlow was also wondering what the hell was going on with Cameron. To judge by the way the Arabs had treated her and that fogeyish boyfriend of hers, there seemed to be some element of complicity. Oh dear, oh dear.

And she had seemed such a nice girl. Belief, idealism, fanaticism, mania: in Barlow’s mind they were all part of the same ghastly continuum. Would they blame him? Would they investigate the lackadaisical way in which he had hired her and supervised her?

Probably: once they’d finished ripping him to shreds about Eulalie. What should he do? Fire her?

Probably.

‘All right,’ said Cameron. She decided she would make up her mind about Adam later. ‘So whose spy are you? The Russians? The Chinese?’

Adam gave a rueful smile. He pointed to something on his lapel.

‘See that?’

‘What is it? A microphone?’

‘No, no. What does it look like?’

She shrugged. It looked like something from a game, a little red token of some kind. Maybe part of an army from Risk.

‘It is a florette of the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur.’

Cameron noticed the rather too professional way he said it, with plenty of rolling of the rs.

‘So you are spying for the Froggies.’

‘C’est ça.’

‘Bien je jamais.’

‘And one last thing, Dean,’ said Jones as the teenager turned the handle of the door. ‘I hope you will enjoy the attentions of the black-eyed ones, and remember that the black of their eyes is blacker than black, and the white of their eyes is whiter than white; and I hope that you will find them comely and submissive.’ Dean shivered. He looked at Cameron and opened the door.

‘Hey, Dean, wait up,’ said the President.

Dean halted in amazement.

The President turned to Jones the Bomb. ‘Hey, this black-eyed one stuff. Is that the black-eyed virgins, the seventy-two virgins in Paradise that you guys talk about?’

‘Such is the reward of the shahid,’ said Jones, stiffly.

“Cos I read something interesting ‘bout that,’ said the President.

‘Silence,’ said Jones. ‘You know nothing of this.’

‘Wait, wait. This might be useful for Dean to know. I read that there was a scholarly controversy about this black-eyed phrase, a real big fight.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jones.

‘It seems, from what I read, that black-eyed ones might not mean seventy-two virgin girls. They looked at the old Arabic there, and they now think it’s a mistranslation, and it really means .

‘What?’ said Dean.

‘Idiot,’ said Jones the Bomb.

‘… raisins.’

‘Raisins?’ said Dean.

‘Isn’t that something?’ said the President. ‘You blow yourself up thinking you’re going to get seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and instead you get seventy-two raisins. Kind of makes a difference, I’d have thought.’

‘Fool,’ said Jones, and raised the Browning as if to whack him again.

‘And another thing,’ said the President bravely, ‘is why is it so great if they’re virgins? Most folks would say that a little experience is… you might want to think about that, Dean.’

‘Enough,’ said Jones the Bomb.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE 1114 HRS

‘Non, concitoyens de France, I do not think America is an evil empire,’ said the French Ambassador. Out of that grey thatch a single drop of perspiration appeared and rolled down that high, pale forehead. He was a good-looking man, but certainly not a young man any more.

‘And franchement, mes amis, I do not think the comparisons with Rome are apt…’

Cameron got up and led Adam towards the television. The President glanced at them incuriously. Jones was muttering to himself; he sounded like a bag lady.

‘Look, Adam, he’s got the same thing as you.’ The cameras had a tight head shot, and the red thread of the Légion d’Honneur — a more discreet version of Adam’s florette — was just visible on the Frenchman’s lapel.

‘Why don’t you listen to what he has to say?’ There was a strained, almost giggling note to her voice.

The Ambassador continued. He had been trained at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in the ancient art of the suasoria, of arguing for whatever side of the case he happened to be on. Should Hannibal have crossed the Alps by the Iser Valley? Or should he have stuck to the Riviera? There was a time when Yves Charpentier would have been equally learned and fluent in support of either case. Today, as happens with all of us from time to time, he found his voice taking on the choky timbre of absolute sincerity.

‘Our friend the cook has told us that America would dominate the world with her nasty fast food. He deplores the hamburger, and so do I. And yet I must ask you all: Are you forced to eat this thing? Are you obliged to buy the dreaded Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinegar, instead of making your own vinaigrette? Are you obliged to support the ruthless profiteering of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? But no!

‘Yes, the men from McDonald’s have built their triumphant yellow arches across Europe, and it may interest you to know that in our country, people of France, the hamburger chain is growing faster than anywhere else on earth. But do they compel us to erect these monstrosities, as the victorious Roman generals erected their triumphal arches over the defeated Gauls? Non, mes amis. We build the arches ourselves, to gratify our own appetites.

‘Our friend the cook — whose recipes for dock leaf soup and placenta pie I have not yet had the good fortune to sample — told us of the many American soldiers who are deployed overseas. Well, I should not have to remind you, but there are many thousands of American soldiers still in France . .

‘Say what?’ said the President, scandalized for a second that his extensive briefing on Yurp did not contain this fact.

‘Chap doesn’t know what he’s on about,’ said Silver Stick, who had once been something in NATO.

‘Yes of course,’ said the Frenchman to those around him. ‘Do not look so surprised. Go to Normandy; go to Omaha, and Gold and Juno and Sword; and then go to see the receding vistas of white crosses on the huge green lawns which contain the remains of thousands upon thousands of the Americans who gave their lives for the freedom of my country, of our country, who sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Europe. Go to Flanders, and the Ardennes; go there, you fools who despise and deprecate America, go there and tell me that we the people of France do not owe the Americans an eternal debt, a debt which it is our privilege, in some small way, to pay back today.’

‘Well I’ll be danged,’ said the President, breathing out. He snapped a salute. ‘Allons, enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé.’

The Frenchman was about to make some other points; for instance that the ideological links between the American and French republics were in some ways stronger than the link between the United Kingdom and her former colony. He was going to point out that the Statue of Liberty had been presented to the people of America by the people of France, in 1885, in recognition of the centenary of America’s war of liberation from government by the very place in which they stood.

But by now his job was done. It is a feature of human nature to believe in that which is evidently strongly believed in; and there were millions in France who were deeply impressed by the passion of their distinguished representative. Many had picked up their mobiles to express one point of view, and were suddenly overcome with a sense of the frivolity of anti-Americanism, and voted the other way.

In the diners and lounges of America there was shock at this sign of gratitude from an unexpected quarter. There was amazement. There were fits of piteous blubbing.

‘Yay!’ whooped Cameron. She was blushing, and there were tears in her eyes of innocent joy. ‘See,’ she said, turning to Adam, ‘see what Yves really thinks.’

‘Of course he thinks that, and that’s exactly what I think, too.’

Jones stared at the Frenchman on the screen. His nostrils were as white and rigid as porcelain.

‘Shut up the pair of you,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘We will see what happens when the votes come in.’

The BBC announced that there had been some very heavy polling in India, where intercommunal riots had broken out in Mumbai and Delhi, so ferocious was the disagreement between Muslims and Hindus. The percentage in favour of release of the Guantanamo prisoners was back up to 55.

Jones’s eyes went to the door, whence he could hear Dean’s retreating footsteps.

Oh sweet Prophet, praise and honour to your name and may a thousand blessings be upon you, thought Haroun as he struggled with his fly. As he did so he noticed the horrible graffiti: ‘Vote Labour!’ ‘Death to the middle class.’ ‘Applications to be next Tory leader,’ someone had written on the bog roll dispenser. ‘Please take one.’ Was there no end to the degeneracy of these people and their politics?

His gun had been left in the sink, and the door, marked Gentlemen Members Only, was unlocked. But what did he care? In an instant he would attain relief.

Now the fly was open, and — what in the name of Allah? He had forgotten about the prophylactic towel. He swore, and with a lung-bursting, drowning desperation he tore at his trousers and sought out the safety pin he had used to fasten the towel to his loins.

His imam had given him a tip, you see: that he would need his genitals intact, in order to enjoy the seventy-two heavenly benefits of martyrdom. Now he couldn’t undo the beastly towel. He jabbed his finger on the pin. He bled on the sacred nappy.

He yanked and pulled on the towel, formerly the property — for some reason — of the Creech Castle Hotel, Taunton, and now the O-ring seal of his urethra began to expand. He couldn’t stop it. Shame was coming down the tracks like a derailed Cannonball Express.

America has an astonishing 99.3 televisions per 100 households, a density exceeded only by Taiwan. Almost the entire population of the East Coast was now watching the debate in Westminster Hall, and they were voting with a patriotism that stunned the data collators of the BBC.

‘It can’t be true,’ said one polo neck to the Director of Political Editorial. ‘There’s something on the wires saying that 127 million Americans have voted to keep the prisoners in Cuba. How many people live in America anyway?’

‘Sounds dead dodgy to me,’ said the BBC hierarch.

‘We can’t suppress it, can we?’

‘Nah, put it out,’ said the executive with a vanishingly tiny smile. ‘But if you can think of a health warning, so much the better.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX 1118 HRS

‘It is lies, all lies!’ railed Jones. ‘It is the Fox TV. It is propaganda and bullshit.’ But Jones could not stop the earth turning, and as dawn continued to break over America, and as the alarm clocks went off and the TVs went on, Americans voted in huge numbers to vindicate their right to bang up the towelhead nutters. In Iowa, Wanda Pickel and Jason Jr voted solidly for the President, and so did Mom’s new friend Howie, a realtor whom she had met on the set of a daytime TV show.

Now Jones could feel his majority slipping away; he was like one of those candidates who thinks he has won, on the night of the election, because they count the votes from the liberal urban areas first. Only as the votes start to come in from the shires, from the boneheaded conservative villages where they know right from wrong, does it dawn on the candidate that the race may be closer than he thought.

Dean, he noted, was now out of the door; and Jones began to count his protégé’s footfalls down the corridor. Another couple of seconds, he thought, and stroked the Nokia.

‘So I say in conclusion,’ perorated the Frenchman, ‘that to hate America is in a way to hate ourselves. It is a fact of human psychology that all our most vehement opinions, all our most passionate prejudices, are but the result of some internal argument, some unresolved tension in our own souls. If I may borrow the words of a great Anglo-Saxon writer, the rage of those who despise America is the rage of Caliban, staring at his face in the glass. It may seem odd to some of my countrymen that I should end my speech with the same slogan that you might hear from the lips of the President, if he were still with us. But I say these words with the utmost sincerity and respect. God Bless America, ladies and gentlemen, messieurs, mesdames, and I say it again—’

As Haroun finally disentangled himself from the towel, he was filled with that infantile ballistic joy that comes in the last second before the weapon is discharged. I am a missile, a sidewinder, a tank, he thought. I will shoot them all, he thought as he aimed at the sign saying ‘Shanks’. I will tear their bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.

‘God…’

High over the Atlantic warm Gulf winds were pushing the Stealth bombers faster than they had ever flown before.

Parliament Square was now a parade ground of crack troops: the Paras, the SAS. Men with blackened faces were running on rubber soles to take up positions all over Pugin and Barry’s palace. They scoped the gryphons in their sights. They primed the stun grenades. They checked the rope ladders.

In the Ops Room of Scotland Yard the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolis was twitching like a palsied ant. These lunatics could blow themselves up any moment, and yet Bluett the Yank seemed paralysed.

‘I really think we should give the command, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Of course the odds are not particularly bright, but we’ve got to give it a go.’

Colonel Bluett was staring at the cornflake-packet and Lego model of Westminster Hall. He could see the conflagration in his mind’s eye, the flesh charred and shrivelled like something left on a barbecue.

‘Waco,’ he said. ‘Waco had nothing on this.’

‘…bless …’

And I tell you what, thought Roger Barlow, as he cast around for other undertakings he could offer the Almighty, I really promise that I’ll put a lot more into my marriage, ‘cos I know that you only get out what you put in. Tell you what, God old bean, I’ll clean up the puddles on the bathroom floor, and I’ll even remember to put the sodding electric toothbrush on the charger … And oh all right (he winced), I’ll make stuff to eat, fish pie and whatnot, and perhaps I’ll roll up my sleeves and wear some gay pinafore like little Chester here.

‘…America!’

‘Goodbye, Dean, my child,’ said Jones. He pressed the button marked Yes on the Nokia. The number came up in the blue square on the screen. DIALLING, said the machine, and began to count the seconds.

‘No, I certainly wasn’t in on it,’ said Adam to Cameron, and for the first time in their relationship, it seemed, she noticed the odd little lentil-shaped convexity, the relic of a trapped follicle, perhaps, on his cheek. Was her love dying? She couldn’t believe it could; and perhaps, indeed, it was not. ‘Don’t be angry. The only thing I can assume is that Benedicte took us all for a ride.’

CONNECTING, said the machine. Somewhere in the ether one gang of chirruping electrons was introduced to another gang. They snuffled round each other; they started to speak each other’s language. They seriously clicked and began electronic intercourse. The corresponding mobile phone vibrated once.

The explosion could be heard all over the Palace, and in the square outside. It wasn’t a car backfiring, or a firework, or someone inadvertently putting a match to the intestinal vapours of a cow. It was an aggressive, percussive noise, the rattling of demons on the gates of Hell.

‘You morons!’ screamed Raimondo Charles, who was being made to kneel on the ground in Whitehall, not far from the Cenotaph, with his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘You hear that? Now they’re sending in the freaking Swat guys like this is Raid on Entebbe. Frigging idiotic cowboy shit-for-brains!’

‘Hey, knock it off, man,’ said a British captive.

‘Yeah,’ said another captive, a gloomy-looking pony-tailed fellow with a Motorhead T-shirt. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

Adam threw his arm around Cameron, but she hunched her shoulders and pulled away from him. ‘No,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Don’t.’

The President hurled himself to the floor; not out of any particular cowardice, but simply in deference to the many lessons he had been given in protecting POTUS in the event of a bomb. It is a measure of the violence with which he hurled himself that Jones the Bomb, still handcuffed to his captive, came too.

Benedicte spun round to see where the explosion had come from. So did Habib, and 1,600 eyes bugged from their sockets as the audience prepared to surrender to a full-blown Gadarene hysteria, kicking over the little gilt chairs and thinking, at last, of making a break for it.

Silver Stick dropped his silver stick, and then caught it again, like a conjurer, before raising it in the en garde position.

Dean jumped out of his skin, but only metaphorically. His skin remained attached to his body. He turned round, and rushed back down the corridor to room W6.

Pickel barely moved. Frig me dead, he thought.

And it was Haroun, of course, who Jackson Pollocked the walls and ceiling of the Gentlemen Members’ conveniences with his blood and brains. Perhaps it was because his circumstances were so confined, but the 5-kilo bomb did remarkably little damage to anything else. A light bulb was lost to his levitating brain-pan, and his teeth chipped the tiles. Various parts of him were trapped in the U-bend of the lavatory, but they presented no real problems to the forensic plumbers.

Did he attain Paradise, beyond that final orgastic delivery of urine? Was he transported on wings of angels to the soft bowers that await the martyrs in the islands of the blessed?

Does Haroun now live in a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and rubies, a sunny pleasure-dome as wide as the distance between al-Jabiyyah, a suburb of Damascus, and the Yemeni capital of Sana’a? Is he attended by 80,000 servants?

Does he eat of honeydew and drink the milk of Paradise? And finally, is this menu brought to him by seventy-two black-eyed virgins, so decorous and submissive as to assuage all the sexual indignities of this earth?

Or has he by now eaten his pitiful ration of raisins?

My friends, I have not the faintest idea. There, as they say in German, I am over-questioned. No narrator, whatever omniscience he may claim, can give you the answer to that one.

But I have my suspicions.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN 1119 HRS

Barry White had seen enough war zones to know when it was time to be gone. ‘Let’s make like hockey players,’ he said to Chester de Peverill, ‘and get the puck out of here.’ They rose to their feet. Across the hall, people were doing the same.

Their faces were pale and their ears were singing; but tongues that had cloven to the roofs of mouths were suddenly able to speak. It briefly occurred to those members of the British cabinet, who had sat for more than an hour in tapioca-like terror, that this was it: this was the moment for self-preservation.

Behind the black-painted rail at the top of the hall, Silver Stick and Black Rod and the Earl Marshal exchanged meaningful glances, like an escape committee at Colditz. They knew that the authority of the terrorists had been momentarily dissipated; and that if the whole crowd went amok together, they might yet prevail.

As soon as Habib heard the bomb, he whirled and stared at the door that led into the hall. He knew what had happened, and in spite of his religious training, which had taught him to feel nothing but gladness for the death of his brother, the tears ran down his cheeks.

He stood still, and closed his eyes. ‘Call out in joy, O my mother; distribute sweets, O my father and brother. A wedding with the black-eyed virgins awaits your sons in Paradise. Go with God, Haroun,’ he said, and for a second he listened with brimming eyelashes to the pagan mutterings of the crowd, growing in strength like pigs who have found their way out of the sty.

He heard them milling from their seats, knocking over the chairs, and he felt a sudden contempt. They were a different species. They were unclean. They were dogs and the sons of dogs. They had no right to be reckoned in the same category as Haroun, the pure, the martyr, the shahid.

He opened his eyes. He looked at the sweaty old peeresses, the New Labour MPs with their cruel and unfeeling promotion of liberal values, and the perpetually compromised Tories.

How could they rival the moral depth of a man who gave his life for a cause? He felt overcome by the hot hate of righteousness, and waved his Schmidt.

‘Sit down,’ he shouted, ‘or I shoot you.’

‘Sit down, everybody, or it will be the shooting time!’ yelled Benedicte, and she invisibly painted the crowd with her bullets.

The moment of opportunity passed. There is something very particular about the sensation of watching the black O of a loaded gun barrel moving across your abdomen, and several members of the crowd felt it now. In many cases, it loosens the alimentary system, and causes the pulse to rise and a green moment to happen to the cheeks. People sat down again. Resignation descended.

‘For crying out loud,’ said the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, ‘I am going to call Downing Street. Look,’ he said, and he found himself bubbling over with a point he had been wanting to make all morning. ‘It’s our bloody country, it’s our bloody city, it’s our bloody Parliament, and I am in charge here.’

‘Stephen,’ said Bluett, champing his cigar and bugging out one bright blue eye, so as to look like Colonel Kilgore at his most demented, ‘I want you to know how much I respect your right to say those things. But it’s my fucking President whose life is at risk there, Stephen, and we have a plan.’

‘But your plan isn’t working.’

‘Well, I wanna remind you here, Stephen, that this was a plan originally proposed by one of your officers.’

‘But it still isn’t working.’

‘It’s been cleared with the Vice-President, Stephen. It’s been approved at the highest possible level in the White House.

‘But this is just bonkers. It’s only because the SAS are British. And where is this bloody man Pickel, anyway?’

‘Listen, buddy, we’ve got 800 hostages in there, including the President of the United States. You talk about your SAS, and I want you to know I have the highest respect for the SAS, but I am a keen student of military history, and whenever those guys come through the windows a whole lot of people get killed.’

He grabbed the model, and pointed at room W6, which had been constructed out of an empty PG Tips box. ‘The President is here. Anyway, he’s outta sight. I say we wait for Pickel to get a shot at this leader guy.’

Purnell looked at his counterpart, and behind the braggart mask he saw the worry and the fear in those flickering blue eyes. There were several obvious points he could have made.

‘Yeah, Pickel,’ repeated Bluett, his voice fading to bleakness. ‘He’s our only hope.’

‘My dear Dean,’ said Jones, without skipping a beat. ‘My dear, dear Dean. I am glad you decided to come back. Perhaps you will come with us now and finish the job.’

The young Wulfrunian stepped through the doorway and back into room W6.

‘What happened, man?’ asked the President. ‘What was the bang?’

‘Someone died, I expect,’ said Dean.

He stared at Jones the Bomb. Somehow he seemed bigger, older, at least to Cameron’s eyes.

‘Well,’ she said brightly. ‘Now what happens?’

‘Ask the boss,’ said Dean evenly, staring at Jones.

A kidney bowl fell with a clang to the floor of the ambulance. Then a head brace, and a defibrillator. There was definitely something moving in there.

The police and paramedics had found a periscope for use in armed sieges, and they were peering into the dimness, one of the paramedics lying flat on the cobbles beneath the running board.

‘He’s alive,’ said the scout.

‘Can you see a gun?’ said another.

‘I can’t see a gun, though it’s hard to tell with all this mess. There’s blood everywhere.’

‘Of course there’s blood everywhere,’ said one of the nurses. ‘The guy’s been bleeding to death. I think we should just take a chance and go in.’

‘The rules are the rules. We’ve got armed and dangerous here.

‘I think we’re all being pathetic,’ said the nurse.

‘You go if you want to,’ said the paramedic, ‘but we won’t be insured and it’s ten to one he’s a fruitcake who wants to take one of us with him on the way to the seventy-two virgins of Paradise.’

‘I’m going in,’ said the nurse.

‘Well, at least wait until they bring the protective gloves.’

Jones was about to tell room W6 what to do, when the television said something that made Dean jump out of his skin.

‘I want to appeal now to my son, Dean,’ said a voice he had never heard before. He looked at the screen, and saw a curious middle-aged man, with a proud nose and curly hair, sitting in a lilac tracksuit on a beige sofa.

‘Who is that?’ asked Cameron, coming up and standing next to him.

‘Bogged if I know,’ said Dean. It was Sammy Katz.

As the feature writers would discover, to their immense pleasure, the former wiper manufacturer had known about Dean all his life. Five months after the night of his conception, Katz had come across the same girl, again, in the same godforsaken spot on the Bilston Road, plying the same miserable trade.

But now she was pregnant, and she had recognized Sammy Katz as a man who might well be the father of her child. We do not need to know the details of the subsequent desultory relationship (the embarrassed letters to Dennis Faulkner, Faulkner’s attempts to shrug him off, the pathetic presents, every five years, of low-denomination bills). All we need accept is that at this critical point in his life, Dean’s biological father had sprung from nowhere, and was sitting slumped before the cameras on the oatmeal settee of his lounge, and moaning about his feelings. ‘I feel I let yow down, Dean,’ he said. He looked fittingly weepy, since he was in TV’s traditional defeated sofa-ridden posture in which parents announce some terrible fact about their children. ‘I appeal to yow, Dean,’ he said, again. He didn’t care much what he said, since his overriding feeling was pleasure, after all these years, at appearing on TV.

‘You hear that, Dean, old pal,’ said the President. ‘He’s appealing to you.’

‘He doesn’t look much like you,’ said Cameron.

But Sammy Katz could not expect to last long at the epicentre of the biggest ever global media event; and after thirty-five seconds the moaning man on the Wolverhampton settee was banished by the schedulers in favour of news — amazing news — from the TV stations across the planet. Perhaps it was the explosion, muffled but audible on screen; perhaps it was more than an hour of being exposed to Jones & Co., but the peoples of the earth were beginning to change their collective mind. It might be that the global consciousness of our species — as Blake or Rousseau understood it — was being affected by considerations of right and wrong. It might have been a statistical error. But at the bottom of the screen was a big bi-coloured bar, rather like that used in televised rugby internationals to show which side has had the higher percentage of ball possession. For the first time the right-hand, blue side of the bar was bigger than the left-hand, red side of the bar. By 51 to 49 per cent, people appeared to be voting for America — even if it meant the retention of the prisoners in Cuba.

‘It is bullshit,’ said Jones. ‘It is the Jewish cabal who run the American media complex.’

‘Too bad, buddy. You lose,’ said the President. ‘If I were you I’d stick to your promise and let us all out of here.’

‘Shut up!’ said Jones the Bomb. He stuffed his Browning into his trousers and started waving his Nokia under the President’s nose.

‘See this?’ he said, wielding it like a TV zapper. ‘If I want, I kill you with this. If I want I kill us all.’

‘I don’t want,’ said the President. ‘Fact is, you sure as hell misunderestimated the great world public.’

‘You come with me, stinky pig,’ said Jones the Bomb, and yanked the presidential handcuffs in the direction of the door. ‘Follow me!’ he yelled at the others. Adam wearily obeyed, and Cameron and Dean brought up the rear.

“Ere,’ said Dean, as they moved down the subterranean green-carpeted corridor, with its old yellowy electric light, in the direction of Westminster Hall. ‘Is your name Cameron?’

‘And you’re Dean, right?’

‘Is he your boyfriend?’ said Dean, pointing at Adam, who was striding after Jones the Bomb.

Cameron chose not to answer this question, and asked:

‘That man on the TV, was he really your father?’

‘The hell should I know? What was his name again?’

‘I think it was Katz.’

‘Is that like the animals?’

‘It was with a K, I think.’

Dean pondered the ethnic implications of this. They passed the small window that gave on to Parliament Square, whose mullions were now treacly with water; and once again Dean snatched a glimpse of the hundreds — thousands? — of running, booted men, the APCs, the helicopters. It was almost twilit in the square, and there was something orange and thundery in the light.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT 1123 HRS

In the hall, Benedicte had once more subdued the crowd, and now she handed over to Jones. ‘We’re back, my friends.’ As announcements go, this one was less popular than Gary Glitter announcing his comeback to a thousand skinheads at the Slough Apollo. But this audience had neither the energy nor the courage to boo. There had been death in this building, and they knew there would be more before the day was done.

‘I know some of you have just heard a noise, a bang, and you may be worried. Let me reassure you that it was the American imperialists, who tried to recapture this ancient British Parliament, and who have been violently repelled, with great loss of American life.’

The President was about to speak, and then said nothing. Jones could tell that many of them didn’t believe him; but some of them did.

‘So let us show we are not afraid, by continuing our debate. I know it is the custom to speak for many hours here. Who would like the floor?’

Up in the rafters, beneath the flèche, Pickel now prepared his shot. He lined up the lead terrorist in his sights, and began to sing his executioner’s song, the moaning hymn to his own calvary.

‘Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.’

He’d missed in the yard, but there were extenuating circumstances there, with that pisser Barry White. This time he would do the business.

The neck was presenting itself to the cross-hairs, a stretch of stringy brown neck, with the muscles and veins standing out, there where the drug had to go in. It was a tough shot, but it was doable, and it had to be done now.

Well stuff this for a game of soldiers, thought Roger Barlow. He’d been waiting to speak for ages, and it was just like the Commons: you stood up and walked to the end of the diving board; you girded your Speedos and stared at the terrors below; and then someone else was called, and you sat back down again, and the adrenalin turned all manky and stale in your system. There was only one thing to be said for his terror of making his speech — every phrase of which was now supermasticated in his mind — and that was that it obscured his terror of being shot.

And if he spoke well, they might just knock that story on the head.

Listen, the editors would say to the sadistic girl who was persecuting him, we can’t do down Roger Barlow any more. Did you hear his speech on America? Did you hear him speak up for the President, and the transatlantic alliance?

Bad luck, they’d say to the vicious wheedling little Debbie Gujaratne. We don’t want any anti-Barlow stuff. Barlow is in, they’d say; Barlow is cool. And Debbie would gnash and spike her rotten little story.

Oh God, oh Gawd, thought Roger Barlow: why had he done it? Why had he put himself in this ludicrous position? And he thought back to the moment of failure, the woman with her shirt seemingly open to the waist, with her lip gloss, her black hair, her busy little fingers on his arm.

‘Oh Roger,’ she’d droned, ‘oh please. You promised,’ and he’d touched her cheek — Oh strewth, had they been snapped? — and reached for his wallet.

Oh Eulalie, Eulalie, he moaned. Unless he spoke up forcefully now, Eulalie was going to be his ruin.

He rose to his feet and tried to catch the eye of Jones the Bomb; and as he did so he tried to envisage the reaction of the Oedipal four-year-old, when the news of his folly broke over London like a thunderclap, and he was the butt of a thousand jokes.

‘Who is that man, Mummy?’

‘You are not necessary. Goodbye.’

‘Mr Chairman terrorist,’ he said firmly, causing a bit of a gasp in the back rows. ‘Ahoy there.’

Gently, gently, said Pickel the ace marksman to himself, drawing a bead on that hectic pockmarked neck.

Jones bowed his head, shaded his eyes, and squinted in the TV lights. Who was that at the back? He jerked his head forward again for a better view .

Keep still, you pisser, muttered Pickel. The neck was big in his scope; he could see the grime around the white neck of the T-shirt; he could see the pulse.

But it was no goddamn use if the sucker kept jigging, because the neck would just pass out of view, and he would be focusing on stone again.

‘My dear sir,’ said Jones the Bomb to Roger, thinking that whatever happened, this was the last speech. ‘The world awaits!’ And he stepped back to the lectern, and almost eighty-five feet above him Pickel cursed and felt the ache begin in his fingers.

Standing in a clot of embarrassment next to Jones and the President were Cameron, Adam and Dean. Cameron had started to cry, big tears chasing each other down her cheeks: not because she was terrified — though she was — but because the whole thing seemed so mad, and so interminable.

Dean felt at once overcome with sadness to see her tears, and appalled at the thought that he might be responsible. He was about to touch her arm, and comfort her, when Habib approached him.

‘It should have been you to die, not Haroun,’ said the Arab quietly, and Dean dropped his hand and stared out in misery once more at the audience, who stared in misery back.

And then he saw her. Yes it was. There could be no question. Five rows back. He looked straight into her beseeching eyes.

‘Mr Chairman terrorist, my lords, honourable members, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Barlow, ‘I really don’t have much to add to what speakers today have already said . .

‘Then shut up,’ said Jones the Bomb, bending to reach for the Nokia in his jacket pouch.

‘Damn,’ said Pickel.

‘…but on behalf of all the electorate of Cirencester, whom it is my privilege to represent, I believe I would be remiss if I…’

‘Get on with it!’ said Jones the Bomb, and looked down again at the green liquid crystal display of the Nokia, as he prepared to bring the operation to its predestined end.

‘Pisser,’ hissed Pickel, squinting again through the sight.

‘…did not say a few words on a subject which…’

In the ambulance in New Palace Yard, William Eric Kinloch Onyeama had fully regained consciousness, with no assistance from the emergency services, and was struggling to get up. His chest hurt like hell, as though he had been involved in a car crash.

His long brown fingers reached for something to help him upright, and wrapped themselves round some wires which were protruding from a box.

‘…is evidently controversial, and which arouses strong opinions across the globe . .

‘Say something interesting, you silly man!’ yelled Jones the Bomb, who was fed up to the back teeth with British parliamentary procedure. He stood still and pressed the button to activate the automatic dialling system.

Pickel had the vein in his sights. He began the squeeze on the trigger, so delicately that he could not possibly disturb the barrel.

‘All right, you tosser,’ said Roger Barlow. ‘I say to hell with you and the rest of you chippy, pathetic, pretentious, evil, envious, Islamic nutcases. I say vote for America!’

‘Sit down!’ screamed Jones the Bomb. ‘Sit down and shut up.’

And just as Pickel pulled the trigger, Jones jerked the President forward a foot and a half, and placed the crown of the presidential head in the path of the thyapentine sodium dart as it was dispatched with a muzzle velocity of 3,100 feet per second.

‘Ow,’ said the President. ‘What the fuuurggghh…’

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE 1125 HRS

‘You fools,’ said Jones. The Yanks were attacking. He pushed again at the mobile, and the number flashed on the screen.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

It took only a second for the stuff to begin to work on the President, who weighed less than a sixth of the average white rhino. He toppled forward. The dart was sticking out of the top of his head. It looked terrible on TV.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

And as the President went down he dragged Jones down with him. The mobile spilled out of his hand.

DIALLING, said the screen as the mobile spun across the flags.

Pickel knew what he had to do. With what the citations would call a characteristic disregard for his own safety, he flung his seventeen stone off the little wooden platform beneath the flèche, and abseiled from the ceiling. He aimed at the form of Jones, and in order to hit him he threw himself forward. He went too far and too fast.

ENGAGED, said the mobile.

Pickel landed awkwardly, at 34 miles an hour, on the fifth step, twelve away from Jones the Bomb. Oxlike though it was in dimension and construction, his left tibia was cleanly snapped by the violence of his arrival.

Jones was now crawling towards the mobile, and thinking what an idiot he had been. He had dialled himself! He panted as he tried to lug the inert mass of the President across the old striated shale. All he had to do was dial Dean or Habib, he thought; and it may or may not be an indication of some ultimate failure of his character that he did not think to activate by hand the detonator on his own jacket.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

As Jones crawled towards the mobile the broken-limbed Pickel crawled up the steps towards Jones. His gun was gone, but he had his knife, and he had the courage of a wounded lion as it charges down the rifle of some mock-brave white hunter.

Hardly bothering to look, Jones turned his Browning round and shot Pickel in the chest. The 9 mm bullet ripped through the trapezius of his right breast, scraped a rib and a scapula, and lodged in his vast sternocleidomastoid withers. The damage was very severe. And still that great heart beat on. Army knife to the fore, he slithered on up the stairs to save his Head of State and Commander in Chief.

In his shame and rage, Adam made forward, to help the injured man. But Cameron held him back.

Five steps to go, reckoned Pickel, now in tremendous pain from both his chest and his leg. Four more agonizing tiger-crawling steps, and he would give Wanda and Jason Jr something they could be eternally proud of.

Three more steps and he would expunge any guilty memory of the incinerated car in Baghdad.

Two more steps and he would wash away the stain that had been left on his name by that pisser Barry White.

If he had managed one more step, he would have been upon Jones the Bomb and the President, as they advanced in a crumpled pushme-pullyou across the floor.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

But Jones did not wait for Pickel’s arms to come within swinging distance. He aimed the Browning at Pickel’s head and shot at him again.

And that might have been the end of Jason Pickel. By the laws of ballistics the bullet should have entered his brain and killed him instantly. He would have died far from home, fighting on a foreign flagstone, in the protection not just of the President, but of British citizens, as many brave Americans have died before.

And later the news would have been brought to his wife, at that moment running the early morning bath for another man.

Except that Jones’s trigger finger was just closing when his gun arm was kicked sharply at the elbow by Roger Barlow, who felt that his speech had not been exactly coherent, and that now was the time for action, not words.

‘You idiot MP!’ said Jones, and would have blown Roger away with the bullet meant for Pickel; only his gun now jammed.

‘Yo! Roger!’ sang out his beautiful research assistant, and Adam saw her exultant eyes, and wished they had been turned on him.

But Jones the Bomb was not finished yet. By dragging and shoving the recumbent President, whose anaesthetic dart waggled absurdly from the top of his skull, he had at last extended his fingers to within six inches of the master Nokia.

At which point Dean stepped forward, and kicked it aside.

‘No!’ shrieked Jones the Bomb, and Habib ran after it, directing a hideous Arab imprecation at the Wulfrunian recruit.

Across Westminster Hall, the audience was now screaming and shouting instructions, and rising from their places in fear.

Adam was saying how much he wished he had a gun, but Cameron was not listening to Adam. She was looking at the back of the head of Jones the Bomb, as he crouched over the President, spitting and waving his Browning.

There was a little bald spot in the greying crown. She knew what she wanted to do. Her eyes went to the group of heraldic figures behind the black railing. Before she could ask to borrow it, the necessary object was thrust without a word into her hand.

‘Come on, you idle bastard,’ shrieked Jones at the comatose form of the President, as he scrabbled feebly after Habib and the Nokia, trying with one hand to slide the bolt and unjam the Browning. Now he would shoot him. No, he had better shoot himself. Or should he shoot Dean?

He realized that he must have only one or two bullets left in the magazine. He was sitting there, crouched over and grizzling with irritation when Cameron came up behind him…

And before she could act she found that Roger had materialized beside her, and taken the ancient artefact with a wink; and because he was her boss, she naturally deferred to him.

Then Roger drew back his arm with a wristy motion he had first learned as a child when thwacking the tops of the thistles in the meadow, and hit him very hard, on the base of the skull.

Jones the Bomb said not a word, and subsided prone over the President’s motionless shins. Black Rod smiled to see his eponym put to such good use. It was there to protect the House of Commons, and it had done its job.

But now Habib had found the phone, and handed it to Benedicte. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘or I will detonate the dirty bomb. There is another bomb in the ambulance, my friends, and this time it is the beeg one!’ She called up the menu screen, found what she wanted, and pressed.

DIALLING, said the screen of the master mobile.

‘It is all your fault!’ screamed Benedicte. ‘We played fair, and you did not, and now we must all die!’

In the ambulance in New Palace Yard, Eric Onyeama the parking warden was feeling woozy again, and his bloodied hand pulled harder on the wires that were linked to the funny little box on the floor of the ambulance.

CONNECTING, said the mobile.

‘Ooof,’ said Eric, and sat up on the gurney, and out of the box popped first a red wire, and then a green one.

CONNECTING, said the mobile.

‘Death to America!’ cried Benedicte. ‘Death to imperialism! I die for Palestine and to avenge injustice.’

CONNECTION FAILURE, said the mobile.

And then the klieg lights went phut, and the hall was plunged into comparative darkness, and the upper air of the chamber was full of a blizzard of glass. Through every window in the building crashed the special forces of Britain and America, and they executed their task of saving life with pent-up rage and professionalism. Of the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques, all the four who were still conscious and willing — Benedicte, Habib and the two Arabs — were arrested unharmed. The only casualties were Barry White and Chester de Peverill, who were running to escape at the North End, when they contrived to cushion the fall of the left arm and right breast of Philippa of Hainault, which had been dislodged by Agent Cabache, and now fell victim to a stun grenade. These objects, as a result, were undamaged, and able to be replaced with no obvious ill effects. Which was more than could be said for Chester and Barry, who sustained a range of contusions, none of them very severe.

In less than thirty seconds, about 200 officers had surrounded Dean, Cameron and the odd tableau of Jones and the President.

But as the squads of black catsuits with guns moved among the crowd, Dean spotted her again; and this time, shyly, she waved. It was Lucy Goodbody, aka Vanessa, she who had infiltrated RitePrice in Wolverhampton, and who had been sent by the Guardian to cover what they had imagined would be a torpid speech about the Special Relationship.

As Dean looked, he realized she wasn’t the Lucy Goodbody of his tortured imagination, the Lucy Goodbody whose flagrant X-rated enjoyment of sex with his best friend had so fried his ego and moved him half to madness. She was just a tired and frightened reporter with a spot on her forehead, visible even at this distance; and it wasn’t her fault, thought Dean, that she had fancied his friend more than him.

‘Yow roight, Vanessa?’ he waved, and began to grow up.

The cordite settled around them, and the fluffy wadding stuff from the inside of the warning shots, and the broken glass crunched underfoot as people made for the exits. No one took much notice of Dean and Cameron as they now huddled together on the stairs. He had his arm round her, and noticed that she smelled lovely. She was crying and crying and crying from shock and exhaustion.

‘Oi,’ said Dean, ‘don’t cry. Yer man — wotsisname?’

‘Adam.’

‘He really didn’t know anything about it. We told him a load of crap. I promise you.’

‘Really?’ She stopped and snivelled.

‘Yeah. Yow’ll be foine, love.’ She turned to him and because her lips were so trembling and vulnerable he kissed them. To his astonishment, they opened a little, and for a second she returned his kiss, and he could taste the inside of her mouth, and remembered why people talked about kisses being sweet. He knew she didn’t mean anything by it. He knew she was just kissing for the joy of being alive, and she knew she would never do it again. But for Dean it was a possession forever, and the joyous phenylethylamines coursed in his veins.

Well, thought Roger Barlow as he sat back down again, stone me. He was a bit stunned by his own recklessness; but one thing was for sure — they’d never bother with the Eulalie business now.

Eulalie! What a prat he’d been. Twenty thousand of his own hard-earned pre-tax pounds, sunk without trace in a lingerie shop called Eulalie, which, at least according to the Daily Mirror’s pestilential Debbie Gujaratne, was a front for a brothel. MP RUNS KNOCKING-SHOP was the headline he was dreading, but if tomorrow’s front pages were about his drivelling escapades with Eulalie, he would eat his hat. It was, no doubt about it, a good day to bury bad news.

Deep in their respective unconsciousnesses, Jones and the President lay on the stone dais, curled like twins awaiting their rebirth into a weird and unfair world.

Outside the rain had stopped. In that sudden summery way, the heat was on the street again, and the smell of dust and warmed-up dogshit up rose from the paving stones. The flags of Britain and America fluttered in the sun.

Up above London the clouds were no longer threatening, but high and white, fleecy and friendly. As he was passed carefully out of the ambulance, Eric Onyeama admired them, and knew he had a word for that fat, beautiful look. It would come back to him.

‘Wait,’ he said to his stretcher-bearers as he was carried round the front of the ambulance. He printed off a ticket from the Sanderson machine, and stuck it under the wiper.

‘Tee hee hee,’ said Eric Onyeama, and fainted again from loss of blood.

And later that day Roger cycled home, having dealt with Mrs Betts, the respite centre, and many other matters. He received something approaching a hero’s welcome. ‘You were on TV,’ said the four-year-old, and climbed his knee, with the others, the envied kiss to share; and they all daubed him with tomato ketchup, so he could be like the other people they’d seen on TV.