Seventy-Two Virgins (16 page)

‘It’s a different world, mate.’

‘You can say that again.’

The second policeman’s attention was briefly diverted to the
Sun
newspaper, which carried a big picture of Jordan’s breasts. After a moment’s thought he said: ‘So every ambulance has to carry the Bible, too?’

‘I ‘spect so.’

‘What if it’s a Hindu accident victim? Do they have to carry the Bhagavad-Gita?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘What about the Book of Mormon?’

The two coppers brooded again. ‘Tell you what,’ said the first policeman, ‘I reckon we just go and have a squint at that ambulance.’

‘Right you are.’

They shut the door of the booth behind them and wandered slowly over; with the result that they just missed the all points alert phone call, inviting them to keep an eye out for a stolen Wolverhampton ambulance, licence plate L64896P.

Inside that fatal machine Jones allowed himself to reflect, for one second, that so far they had been incredibly lucky. It could only be the will of Allah, blessings be upon his name, that they had not yet been detected.

Much of their plotting was amateurish. He thought with a shudder of the scene in the motel last night. But there was one detail which was both brilliant and revolutionary, and which would be copied by other terrorist cells. It was due entirely to him, the man whose passport said he was called Jones.

He was not called Jones, of course, but that was the name in which he enrolled at Llangollen, and which his fellow-students smirkingly accepted.

High above that North Welsh town, not far from the ruins of Dinas Bran and looking out over the foaming ale-coloured River Dee, are the delightful premises of a former mental home. Under the Learning and Skills Council it had been turned into a teacher training centre, where Welsh was dinned into the skulls of graduates, with a view to passing on this weird creole to the listless children of Denbighshire. The institution was then promoted into an Adult Education Centre, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Wales. Finally, in the great Stalinist push to expand the numbers in tertiary education, the place was rebaptized ‘Llangollen University’.

Here Jones had arrived two years ago, and spurned the useless courses that occupied most of the students. He did not do Media Studies or Gender Awareness in Film. He did that proper old-fashioned twenty-first-century British university course. He majored in hairdressing, and was known to his sniggering fellow-students as Jones the Hair.

But his main interest seemed to be in the thick, sweet, colourless, odourless liquid which is applied to hair in pomades and unguents. ft is called glycerin, C
₃
H
₅
(OH)
₃
, and when treated with nitric acid (HNO
₃
) and sulphuric acid (H
₂
SO
₄
) it produces something very remarkable.

One night there was a noise from Jones’s room. Some drunken Media Studies louts had been out at the Wild Pheasant, and they burst into the toejam and cigarette infested quarters of Jones the Hair. He was lying stunned and blackened on the floor, and was known ever after as Jones the Bomb.

A few weeks later, he secretly propounded an advance in bomb-making techniques, which looks simple, like so many good ideas, but it had never been done before. It is true that a mobile phone has already been used as a bomb: in January 1996 Israel’s internal security agency Shabak used an exploding phone to assassinate Palestinian bomb mastermind Yahya Ayash, known as the ‘Engineer’. He blew his mind out on a call, as the Beatles sang. But until Jones hit upon the wheeze, no one had used a series of Nokias in suicide jackets.

Each jacket contained about six kilos of explosive and a small detonator. Sewn into a little pouch next to the detonator was the mobile. When the phone rang, a current was passed along a small wire, which in turn caused a bridge wire to heat-function, as physicists say: to get hot. This in turn ignited a match element, which set off the primary explosive of the detonator. This set off the secondary explosive of the detonator. This in turn detonated the nitro-glycerine, which means that this substance was resolved, with incredible speed and violence, into nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide and oxygen. At this point, traditionally, the suicide bomber’s head would fly off as though drop-kicked by Jonny Wilkinson, and in a confined space the ball bearings in the jacket would cause carnage and havoc. That was the idea.

Jones had all their numbers preset on his speed-dial. He couldn’t dial all four at once: that would not be necessary; but he could ring them up one after the other, and get them on the blower, so to speak.

But there was one obvious point that had been oppressing Dean ever since their rehearsal.

‘It’s not fair, sir,’ he said to Jones in what he hoped sounded a casual voice. ‘You can dial us but we can’t dial you.’

‘It is fair, Dean. It is what we agreed.’

‘Yeah, but how does your bomber jacket go off? You can’t dial yourself, can you?’

‘That is secret, Dean.’

‘Well, I think we should be all in this together.’ Nervous terror now propelled Dean’s tongue. ‘What’s the difference? It’s the four musketeers, innit.’

After this heretical speech, Dean opened the back door, without permission, and started to move the kit outside. In case this was a mutiny, Haroun and Habib went through the hatch to intercept him, and every time they stepped on poor Eric Onyeama, there was a nasty marshy sound.

Now Dean had begun to shift the jackets out through the back, and Haroun and Habib were obliged physically to restrain him. This was mad, thought Jones, and began seriously contemplating aborting the operation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

0940 HRS

Most MPs, even the most self-important, develop a kind of shuffling scamper from their offices to the Division Lobbies, from the Chamber to the TV studios of Millbank. If any of their constituents happened to spot them, they would get the impression of an exceedingly pressed and dedicated crew.

So no one looked twice at Roger Barlow as he loped across the ground floor of Portcullis House.

It could be nothing, Roger told himself.

By far the most likely thing was that Cameron had warned him of some arrangement — probably involving a Unicef delegation of Arab teenage journalists — and he had simply bleeped it out.

But the first thing to do was to find Cameron, and the most likely place was his office. So he went up the stairs in Norman Shaw South so as to cross by the passerelle that arched over the car park, and that took him almost directly to his office in Norman Shaw North.

And strike me pink, he thought, as he looked down from the passerelle to the left: there was that flipping ambulance again. It had to be the same one.

A darkish kid got out, holding some TV equipment, and gesticulating. Then he saw two Arabs hustle the dark young man into the back and close the door behind them.

‘Christ on a bike,’ muttered Barlow.

‘Everything all right, Roger?’ said Ziggy Roberts, scooting efficiently by, toting a bunch of girly swot papers about pensions, or the mobility component of incapacity benefit.

‘You never know,’ he called over his shoulder, in one of those phrases that made Roger want to punch the lights out of whoever said it, ‘it may never happen.’

‘But those chaps …’ said Barlow. The ambulance was shut, and gave no hint of its cargo.

‘I say, Ziggy, I couldn’t borrow your mobile.’

‘Yeah, of course. Oh sorry, I must have left it in the office.’

‘Bloody hell, Ziggy, look at that.’

Both men turned to look as the back door slowly opened again, as unobtrusive and sinister as the nocturnal opening of that hatch, thousands of years ago, in the underside of the Greek offering.

A dark head poked out like a tortoise, and then slowly withdrew. The door shut behind it. ‘Looks like an ambulance to me,’ said Ziggy Roberts.

‘Let’s bloody hope so,’ said Barlow, and double-timed across in search of Cameron. He was puffing a little when he opened the door, and found she wasn’t there.

‘What’s the matter with yow?’ demanded Dean, in the back of the ambulance. He struggled briefly in the grip of the two zealots, as they waited for their leader to apply discipline.

Haroun and Habib had worked before with young Dean, and Jones knew their views well.

Haroun and Habib belonged to the umma, the diaspora of aggrieved Islamic youth, whose hatred of the West was all the stronger because they lived in the West, and they were constantly exposed to its temptations and frustrations. Yes, their cause was officially Palestine, and yes, like so many men of their age, they watched the suicide bomber videos that are broadcast on satellite TV. They whipped themselves up with sentimental music, and sat in their bedsits, smoking, swearing, nostrils flaring as they saw the slow-motion balletic footage of the little kids (how expertly coached by their parents) provoking Israeli tanks to respond with shells to their stones.

They wept, as they saw the suicide bombers’ home movies, the pukey little speeches of thanks to their parents and above all to Allah, the pornographic lingering of the camera on their dynamite waistcoats. They wept, they coughed, they swore, they spat; and then, quite often, they would go and get some of the other kind of pornography, and behold the self-defilement of the Western woman; provided, of course, that this was accompanied by a proper dose of Muslim self-flagellation.

The previous night, for instance, they had all originally checked into a Travelodge near Luton. But Haroun had been so outraged, on coming out of the bathroom, to find Habib watching
Angels of Lust,
the comically bowdlerized British soft porn movie set in the NHS, that he had insisted on moving out.

‘It is the House of Sharmoota,’ he said. It is the House of Harlot.

Habib had been so ashamed, and so admiring of Haroun’s purity, that he had agreed; and Jones had sighed and driven on down the empty sodium-lit Ml until, out of sheer exhaustion, they had parked up in Tufton Street and sprawled in the back.

Because if Palestine was the cause for sickos like Haroun and Habib, it was only at best the proximate cause. There is one really psychologically satisfying explanation for the suicidal behaviour of young men, and it is something to do with sex, or at least with self-esteem. Somewhere in the background of their general screwed-up-ness was the cultural tectonic grinding between East and West, and the shaming, daring, tempting challenge presented to the Muslim man by the emancipated Western female. Which was why the Abu Ghraib scenes had been so catastrophic, and why the chuckling American servicewomen had been such efficient recruiting-sergeants for terror.

The pictures had so badly affected Haroun, in particular, that he had come to think that he had been himself in Abu Ghraib; naked, mocked, derided by these smoking, drinking Jezebels of the Appalachians. He had given instructions in a sealed letter to his imam in Tipton, that in the event of his death his body parts — should there be any remaining — were not to be touched by any female forensic officer or mortuary technician.

Habib, who wore the mask of a worldly Lebanese, was not as visibly disturbed, though his motives were very similar. These impulses had sent them both to train with the Sheikh, may Allah bring blessings on his head, in the camps in Sudan and at Khalden. But the kid from Wolverhampton was different, and in his wiser moments Jones knew it.

As soon as he found Dean in the Islamic Welfare Centre, Jones knew that he had a significant catch on his hands, and he also knew that it would be difficult to persuade others in the network of this fact. They saw a mixed-up, mixed race youth with only the vaguest knowledge of the Koran. Jones saw the makings of a small political coup. Not only did Dean have a phosphorescent hatred of bourgeois values, and an unconquerable will to undermine the dairy business, supermarkets, and other extensions of what he called the agro-industrial complex. He was also palpably — if anything, excessively — British.

He proved that British society was so corrupt that it engendered the very vipers that now sunk their fangs into its neck. If anyone could persuade the British intelligentsia to a bout of its favourite where-did-we-all-go-wrong-ery, it was surely Dean. Yet there had been times, even before the stressful events of today, when his optimism had been shaken. Last year the small remainder of Dean’s FreshStart endowment had been spent flying him to Lahore, whence it was hoped he would trek to the border with Afghanistan and imbue himself with all that was most inhuman in the terrorist repertory.

Nothing was heard from the trainee operative for weeks. Jones dared to hope. Then he started to receive reverse-charge calls from a plainly dope-brained Dean, who seemed to be in a Peshawar doss-house. He complained vehemently about the Pakistani police who, he said, had impounded his passport. He added that ants were not only coming out of the shower drain but out of his armpits. There was nothing for it. Haroun and Habib were disturbed from their Prussian drill at Khalden. They left the red-rocked tranquillity of their desert camp, slunk down from the mountains, and at times with main force conveyed the tyro to Afghanistan.

It is hard to say which — Dean or the wolf twins — had the lesser affection for their partnership. A bad time was had by all. Haroun and Habib thought first to toughen him up. They yomped all day through vast and trackless systems of unpopulated valleys. Occasionally Dean’s vestigial aesthetic sense allowed him to be penetrated by the beauty of the landscape, the rock turning with the sun from gold to ochre to reddish to purple and then to the blue-black of the night, with the white lamps of the stars shining on their sleeping bags in the very pattern they had shone on Alexander and his army. Mainly, however, he found himself thinking of the anti-smoking videos shown at Wolverhampton Grammar School as he gasped and gagged, through lack of fitness or oxygen, in the wake of the weaving wolves.