Seventy-Two Virgins (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

0946 HRS

As soon as she had shot-putted the egg, Sandra melted away as efficiently as a Balkan bomb-thrower. Raimondo had been left watching at the railings as the sphere arced through the air.

‘Yay,’ he shouted, as it detonated on the dome of the Dutchman. ‘Way to go,’ he shouted, as if hailing some improbably brilliant piece of aerial billiards.

So it was not surprising that Matt, standing only an axe-handle away, should decide he was the culprit. As the cry died on his lips, the 2201b former linebacker lunged at Raimondo, not even bothering to draw his weapon, and flattening the crash barrier like an encephalopathic bullock. ‘Sir!’ shouted the White House man with instinctive extraterritoriality, ‘you are under arrest.’

Raimondo had always scorned demonstrators. Nothing he liked more in his younger days than seeing the fuzz break up some lefty protest. He remembered a pro-abortion march he’d seen in London, and his feeling of disgust at these scuzzy rentamob characters screaming for the right to kill the unborn. He remembered the way their voices rose to a studied shriek as soon as the police laid hands on them.

Now he yodelled at Matt in identical tones. ‘Don’t you touch me, you faggot!’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said the people next to him. ‘Get off him!’

‘Tosser!’

‘Bastard!’ they cried. When Matt, who did not like being called a faggot, began to use reasonable force to restrain the perp, the noise grew louder still. And when they saw the blood begin to stream down Raimondo’s face, the crowd began to buck and sway. In no time there were two police helicopters overhead, and cops in Star Wars riot gear were climbing over towards them from the other side of the square. Even Jason Pickel was distracted from his daydream, and pointed his scope vaguely at the noise.

Debbie Gujaratne of the
Daily Mirror
had by now endured two minutes and 39 seconds of heady abuse from Roger Barlow, and the truth was that Roger was almost succeeding. Poor chap, thought Debbie as he ranted on. She could picture it all. The basically happy family life: the trips to the Science Museum, the kids on his shoulders, their sticky fingers in his ears; the long and formless Sunday afternoons of toys and fights and painting on the kitchen table; the cacophonous tea, the whimpering bath-time, the sweet breath of children asleep.

She imagined, because she had known them in her own childhood, all the longueurs of bourgeois domesticity, so boring and yet so desired. She pitied him, although she had no family herself (she was of course sleeping with her married news editor). And yet even as she pitied him, she knew she would have no mercy. It would be more than her job was worth.

Barlow had strayed outside the weird and hypocritical matrix that the tabloid imposed on the conduct of public and semi-public figures. He was a goner. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Barlow, I don’t want to be rude because I’ve reely enjoyed our chat, but I’ve got to go now.’

‘You’ve got to go?’ yipped Roger. ‘You’ve got to go now, have you? Well, I haven’t finished with you yet.’ And he prepared to say what he thought.

‘Oh for the Lord’s sake,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, more to himself than to Bluett or anyone else. ‘This isn’t the Bermuda Triangle. This is Westminster and we’ve got 14,000 men on the job. It must have turned right on to Grosvenor Terrace and gone down the Embankment, but what I don’t get is how we could have missed it.’

‘Wait up,’ said Bluett. He was bent over the map, and Purnell noticed that he was sweating, so that his scalp started to gleam under his thinning buzzcut hair like some denuded alpine forest. ‘What’s that in there? That kind of inlet thing?’

Purnell looked over. ‘Oh that’s Derby Gate. It’s a place where loads of MPs have their offices. But I can assure you, Colonel, that it is crawling with my men, and they would all have been put in the picture by now.’

‘Well, let’s try them again,’ said Bluett.

Purnell had eaten cornflakes for breakfast, and it is one of the world’s great unreported truths that cornflakes give you indigestion. On even the most stress-free mornings, they are apt to send a vicious little acid flooding over your uvula, and today they were backing up something rotten on Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. He prayed — since he was a religious man — that he would not be rude to the American.

‘Colonel — can I call you Stuart?’

‘You certainly can, sir.’

‘Stuart, you know my view that we should in all prudence tell the President and move him to a safe place until we’ve sorted this out. Where is he now, by the way, Grover?’ he said, turning to his aide.

‘He’ll be with the Speaker of the House of Commons,’ said Bluett, who had committed the President’s schedule to memory. ‘I respectfully say that we should spend the next eight minutes trying to find this goddam ambulance of yours.’

‘Right,’ said Purnell. Ever since he had been at primary school he had learned to fend off stress by stroking the underside of a table, where no one could see, and now he was stroking away like crazy. ‘Get me Derby Gate,’ he said.

Where Jones & Co. were trying on their equipment.

The skill of making a suicide bomber jacket is mainly in the sewing, and Jones knew plenty of women in the Finsbury area who were up to the job. One of the tasks facing the police, when they came later to sort out what had happened, was to analyse the ingredients. The results were banal.

The blue portabrace camera jackets, the Sony and the sound booms came from Euromedia in Hammersmith, a shop much used by the BBC. The wooden struts, used to separate the explosive charges, were of uncertain provenance, but seemed to have belonged to a fruit box, possibly one that had been used to contain Florida oranges.

The manager of RitePrice in Wolverhampton attempted to claim the batteries, though later, when his premises were stoned, he said that he had been trying to raise the profile of his store. As he complained to his insurers, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’

It was fairly clear that the ball bearings, in two sizes, came from B&Q.

The nitro-glycerine was easily and quickly traced back to a makeshift lab, which was discovered along with a fair number of toenail clippings under the Finsbury Park bed of Jones the Bomb. DNA tests on the toenails established that they came from more than one person, and rather like relics of the Beaker Folk, had been laid down in that site over a long period.

The Nokias had all come from a carphone warehouse in Wolverhampton, and had been paid for in cash, on a pay-as-you-talk basis, the day before. It was Dean’s job now to turn them on, make sure they were charged up to last at least six hours, and to insert them into the right pocket in the appropriate jacket.

‘Here you are, then,’ he said to Haroun and Habib, opening the back of the ambulance and passing out the jackets.

‘Nah,’ said Habib almost immediately, passing it back to the quartermaster. ‘This one is too tight for me. Give it me this one,’ he said, turning to Haroun and speaking in Arabic.

Habib found that Haroun’s waistcoat was also a bit of a squeeze.

‘You then,’ he said pointing at Dean, and offering a jocular Arab insult, such as an ill-mannered sheikh might bestow upon a slave. ‘Give it me this one, then.’

‘No, mush,’ said Dean, whose cockiness was coming back. ‘We’ve all got to have the right one.’ He looked back into the cab for help from Jones the Bomb, but Jones appeared to be doing something elaborate with his own jacket. His shirt was off and he was sticking things to his chest with masking tape.

Dean stepped back, crushing the fingers of Eric Onyeama. For a second he had the impression that the corpse flinched, but he had no time to worry about that.

Habib looked at him shrewdly, and then gabbled something at Haroun. ‘Why you no give it me him?’ he asked, putting a foot on the rear running board of the ambulance. The two Arabs lunged and winkled Dean from the darkness.

‘What’s the matter you?’ said Haroun, holding him from behind in a full Nelson.

‘This is all wrong,’ said Dean. ‘I’m meant to be in charge of this bit.’

Just as the two policemen reached their black booth, the phone stopped ringing again.

‘They’ll call back,’ said the first policeman.

They turned as one and looked back under the arch of the passerelle, towards the ambulance and the Embankment.

Like teenage sisters about to go to the disco, the enigmatic operatives were apparently squabbling over their attire.

Habib took Dean’s jacket, tried it on, and gave it disgustedly to Haroun. Haroun took Dean’s coat and gave it to Habib. Or was it that Habib mistakenly tried on Haroun’s jacket twice, before settling for the one he first thought of, while Dean and Habib simply swapped over and back again? Jones was getting cross.

‘Inti mafish mukh,’
he spat. You have no brains. He jerked his head in the direction of the police, who were now walking back in their direction.

By the time they had shut and locked the ambulance, and begun the prescribed route through Westminster Hall, Dean’s efforts at pelmanism had failed. They had done a three-card trick with the jackets.

As Roger Barlow ran back across the passerelle, he looked down again at the ambulance. It appeared to be deserted. Then he thought he saw a lupine figure, slinking through towards the Commons kitchens. Within a few seconds he had reached the Pass Office, still invigilated by the man from Stogumber. ‘Those passes,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘can you deactivate them?’

Conscious that the two policemen were only a matter of fifty yards behind, Jones led them fast along the ordained route. First they crossed the threshold into Norman Shaw North, scampering over a yellow sign painted on the tarmac saying ‘No pedestrians beyond this point’.

He then jinked confidently left and led them down past the post office sorting room, then past the kitchens, and then to the first secure door, where a pass was needed. Fixed to the wall, on the right, was the little plastic swipe card socket familiar to anyone who has tried to get into a modern hotel room. The conspirators bunched in the corridor, a little spinney of sound booms and microphones and camcorders.

There was a hush, as Jones inserted the pass.

The door gave a click, and shifted open a fraction. A green light came on. Jones smiled. Dean froze. The lead terrorist pushed open the gleaming brushed steel door and Dean knew in his writhing intestines that whatever happened, he would not go through it. He understood that if he went through that door, and round that corner, he would die. Even if he failed to die by his own hand, Haroun and Habib would do for him, sure as eggs were eggs.

These two now followed Jones through the door; and as Dean was standing there mute, the door shut behind them. At the click of it, Jones turned round and came back to look through the porthole.

‘Sorry,’ said Dean, ‘got held up.’ He held up the sound boom and mimed the act of snagging it on something.

‘Quickly,’ hissed the mission leader, his voice muffled by the door. ‘Stop being an old woman and use your card.’ Dean looked at the oscillating brown irises of the man called Jones.

Trembling, he put the plastic pass into the pocket. He tried it one way. He tried it the other way. As Jones began to curse him, he genuinely tried to get it right, jiggling the card so as to produce a better contact between the magnetic strip and the electronic reader.

At the very moment when it should have done the trick, his card ceased to function at all. Now Dean was on one side of the barrier and his collaborators were on the other. Haroun and Habib joined Jones at the porthole, banging their noses like sharks at an aquarium. They started all three of them to say terrible things.

Bizzaz immak ala amood.
Your mother’s tits are on a pole.

Ma fish kahraba,
said Habib, slapping the side of his head. There is no electricity.

Dean didn’t speak their language, but he took them to be proposing, roughly speaking, to gouge out his eyes and piss on his brains. ‘Oh I do wish yow would be quiet,’ he said, ‘it’s not my fault.’ Haroun started thumping the door, while Habib looked for a handle.

Had they spent perhaps another twenty seconds, they might have found the metal button, recessed in the tiles, that opens the door from the Commons side.

‘There you go,’ said a breathy voice. A figure appeared behind the three Arabs. It was a blazered and bouffant-haired junior foreign minister.

As he pressed the button he took a distinct pleasure in helping out these struggling journalists from a minority group. ‘After you,’ he said, holding open the door on the assumption that the trio wanted to go out.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Jones, indicating with a sweep that it was rather Dean who should come this way.

And Dean was unlocking his haunches to move, when a voice behind him said, ‘I am sorry, sir, would you mind just staying there while I check your pass.’ It was the first policeman, the other a few paces behind. He had observed Dean’s difficulties with the swipe card.

‘It’s all right, officer,’ oozed the young minister, passing through and holding the door open. ‘I’m letting him through.’

‘That’s right, sir, but I can’t let anyone through who doesn’t have a valid pass.’

‘I’ve got a valid pass. That’s the whole point.’ He nodded brightly at Dean. Dean stayed still.

The minister directed a quick but irrefutable wink at the terrorist conscript. Dean was rooted to the spot.

‘Frankly, sir, I hope you won’t mind my saying this, but I think it would be more appropriate from every point of view if we played this by the book. I am sure the young man won’t mind coming to the office with me to revalidate his pass.’

The minister turned to the policeman. His smile burst out like the sun over a meadow of alpine flowers. ‘Look, I know you are only doing your job, and if I may say so doing it very well. But we have here a distinguished foreign news crew, and I think we should treat everyone the same, without the slightest suggestion of discrimination.’

Invisibly, behind the door, Haroun began to detach the still virgin thorax draining kit from its place of concealment in his sock.