Seventy-Two Virgins (26 page)

PART THREE

I COME TO BURY CAESAR

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.’