Seventy-Two Virgins (25 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the hell was Chester doing here, anyhow?

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

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

‘You see that lot there.’

‘Which lot, Roger, mon ami?’

‘The chaps with the cameras and what not.’

‘The film crew?’

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

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

‘But I think they could be Arab terrorists.’

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

‘But it’s my fault they’re in here.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Upon innocent people.’

‘You said it, pal,’ said the heckler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

1021 HRS

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

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

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

The word ‘torture’ produced a predictable heckle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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