Seventy-Two Virgins (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said Purnell.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

1010 HRS

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, son.’

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

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

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

‘No you don’t, kiddo.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark men.

White van.

Ambulance.

Getting out.

Something funny.

Bulky waistcoats.

Terrorists.

Shoot them.

Dark men.

TV crew.

Could be nothing.

Could be something.

No time.

Dark men.

White van.

Car in Baghdad.

Could be innocent.

Could have been innocent.

No time.

Shoot first.

Wait a second.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every sniper has the same phobia.

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