Seventy-Two Virgins (30 page)

‘This is it, Ziggy, old man,’ he told himself. ‘This is the big one.’

‘THREE!’

Sir Perry Grainger toyed for a heartbeat with the notion that speaking in this debate would count as dancing to the terrorist tune and be therefore unacceptable. Insofar as he had a natural human desire to be inconspicuous after the demented terrorist leader had tried to shoot him, he justified it on that ground.

‘You shouldn’t play their games, Perry,’ one part of his brain told the other half; and the other half retorted vigorously: ‘Don’t be a wimp, Grainger, you fool. Did the people of South Oxfordshire send you to this place that you should keep silent on the greatest international crisis of our epoch, when hundreds of us, including the leader of Britain’s oldest and most important ally, are in mortal peril? You must speak, Grainger, you great dingbat, and speak for England.’

‘FOUR!’

Christ on a bike, thought Roger. I really had better get up and do the business. It was no use trying to order his thoughts, he decided. It was like one of those moments when the whips come and haul you from the tearoom, and they say you’ve got to speak for fifteen minutes on the Fur Trappers Compensation Bill. And you say ‘awfully sorry’ but (a) you’re trying to finish a particularly dense and dry rock cake and (b) fascinating though the subject sounds, you don’t really feel you’ve got quite enough to say about it in the High Court of Parliament, at which the whips look threatening, smoothly mention recent infractions and leave you with no option.

Barlow got ready to stand and knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to be as vicious and as scathing as he dared towards these terrorists without provoking them to shoot him. He was damn well going to speak up for America and for what he believed in. Apart from anything else, he had worked out one thing. Whatever happened to the President of the United States, he wasn’t getting out of here alive. He had thought it through from the point of view of Jones the Bomb, and it was perfectly obvious that the loonies would have far more impact — a permanent global trauma — if they went ahead and blew the place up than if they became snared up in some double-crossing hostage deal with the Americans.

‘FIVE!’

Haroun looked at his boss, histrionically waving his automatic, and felt a twinge of annoyance. He didn’t hold with all this speechifying; he didn’t like this silly debating-society approach that Jones had introduced. He smouldered at the crowd and spat with a
splatch
on the flagstone occupied by the front row. This was not some stupid and degenerate Western reality TV show, some kind of
Pop Idol
votathon. This wasn’t
I’m the President, Get Me Out of Here.
This was a war and he, Habib and Jones and Dean and their Arab brothers and their — ahem — sister were fedayeen; they were ready to sacrifice their lives for a cause. That’s what fedayeen meant. Indeed it was doctrinally vital that this action of theirs should be construed as a military action. When they all died, as they surely would, sometime in the next few hours, Haroun believed that he would die as a soldier, a man engaged in Jihad; and this was theologically essential to Haroun because it is well known that the Holy Koran forbids suicide.

‘Whoever kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in hell,’ says the Koran, and it was part of the deal Haroun had made with himself that he would not be going to hell. On the contrary, he was going to a place more lovely and more perfect than you and I can possibly imagine.

Somewhere a blissful tent had been pitched for him in the clouds, piled with silken cushions, cooled by the perpetual trickle of holy water from a turquoise fountain of vaguely Mudejar design; and he would have some peace there, thought Haroun, peace after the miserable American-induced stress of this earthly existence.

He would lie back on the pillows and in one hand he would manipulate the celestial narghileh, bubbling away with hashish a thousand times more delicious than anything that could be found in the valleys of Afghanistan, and his other arm would be gently looped around the exposed stomach of the first of his statutory 72 almond-eyed virgins; and slowly he would ease off her filmy pyjama bottoms and prepare to enjoy her in a way that his imam had assured him was both decently spiritual and infinitely carnal. She would bend over him, bringing her breasts ever closer to his face, laughing low and praising him and dissolving all the onanistic wretchedness of his previous life and— Oh-oh, he thought. In the name of Allah, Haroun told himself, I had better be careful.

He found himself staring irresistibly at Cameron, just ten feet or so away in her low-cut top. He felt the surge of fundamentalist rage that inspires the pathetic Islamofascistic male. How much longer would Jones keep them among these harlots and jezebels? He stared with that perverted Wahhabi mixture of lust, terror and disgust at this portrait of sexually emancipated Western woman. He glared at her thighs and her unambiguously exuberant bosom and yearned to punish her, punish her entire society, punish America for her criminal role in pioneering feminism. He wanted to punish her for the inadequacies she made him feel, because he knew in his heart that she was more unattainable to him than the doe-eyed virgins of heaven; and there was a part of him, a secret half-acknowledged corner of his soul, that yearned for her on precisely those grounds.

It was above all that part of himself, that part that had been tempted, the part that collaborated with America and her values, that he wished to destroy. Oh, but he would purge himself, he would cleanse himself of the Western taint. With sweating fingers he touched the stitched pouch in which the one-way Nokia was stored, and waited for the moment when he could wash his soul in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire. ‘Come on, Jones,’ he thought.

‘SIX!’

But what would he say? wondered Cameron. It was a measure of her devotion to Adam, and indeed her awful inescapable feminine deference, that as Jones began to count, she had simply assumed the love-object would take charge. He was always haranguing meetings with brilliant and mordant paradoxes. Surely he would leap to his feet, shod in lovingly polished oxblood brogues, and somehow set things straight?

But Adam Swallow just stared back. She looked into his implacable eyes, and tried to read him. Was that the glare of a proud but innocent man? Or was he a cynical abettor of terrorists? And she remembered that he knew these people anyway, or at least she assumed he knew these people, because he had suborned her into securing their access to the premises. She felt her soul-sickness deepen and she turned to the front and saw Dean with his afro hair and his proud, pale, almost Nilotic features. He looked so young and so scared.

‘SEVEN! I MEAN IT!’

Dean was staring at Cameron and thinking she was one of the tastiest birds he had ever seen. Here he was, barely nineteen and about to splatter his guts over the walls. He would never know this girl, never talk to her. He might even be responsible for her death. He became aware that she was returning his look. His Sierra Leonean child-guerrilla smile became a guilty smirk, and he turned his face away.

‘EIGHT!!’

Verdommt Brits, thought the Dutch Ambassador and prepared to stand up himself, on the assumption that the terror chief could hardly shoot him for carrying out his orders.

Tiens,
thought the French Ambassador, also girding himself for action. Perhaps he would be the first foreign diplomat in history to address a major parliamentary occasion.

They need not have worried, because at that moment, like the digits of a child’s cash register, about fifteen suits sprang up across the hall and now more were rising all the time as buttock after buttock unclove itself from the little gilt chairs.

‘Now that is more like it,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘but I don’t know whom to choose.’ He turned to the President, and the President noticed how the fellow was sweating under the TV lights and how a drop had run down his brow, irrigated the cyclopean zit depression and then trickling away into the long furry undivided caterpillar of his brow.

‘You choose the speaker,’ said Jones the Bomb. ‘Which of these people do you think will speak best for you?’

‘You know what?’ said the President, with a good approximation of geniality. ‘It’s not really my place, but I had the honour earlier today of meeting a gentleman who is in fact the Speaker of the House of Commons.’ He indicated the Speaker standing glumly with Black Rod and the rest of the worthies. ‘You should really ask him to take charge.’

‘I think not,’ said Jones, ‘and I say rubbish to the snob traditions of this so-called democracy. You pick the speaker, I mean the person to speak, and you do it now.’

The President gave his squint, which was intended faintly to recall Clint Eastwood at the point of spitting out his cheroot and firing at Lee Van Cleef, but which his opponents had likened to a half-witted buzzard. ‘OK, buddy,’ said the President, ‘let’s all keep calm here.’

He shielded his eyes and looked for a conservative-seeming fellow, someone with moderate opinions who would come over well before a global audience.

Far away to the back and to the right, rocking on the balls of his heels and with his thumbs on the seam of his trousers, Roger Barlow stiffened as he saw the presidential finger pointed straight at his breastbone with the inescapable challenge of Uncle Sam.

‘Oh brother,’ he murmured, and had begun to say ‘Ladies and g—’ when ‘LADEES and GENTLEMEN’, screamed the man on his right.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

1038 HRS

It was Chester de Peverill who had risen a millisecond after him, and whose desire to star in the world’s biggest televised balloon debate was now a hormonal imperative. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Roger, ‘I thought he—’

‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said Chester, placing his hand on Roger’s shoulder and applying no uncertain pressure. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued, puffing his chest and seeking out the cameras as though he was about to explain the secret of a really good lamb casserole. ‘My name is Chester and I’ — he paused — ‘am a humble cook.’ He waited again, as though this assertion might provoke cries of ‘no, no, no’ or applause.

The President stared uneasily at him. So did Jones the Bomb. Roger sat back, folded his arms and gave way to the blackness of ungovernable shame.

‘I am not a politician. I’m not a world statesman. All I really know about is eating and drinking and that gives me what you might call a gut instinct for things. What’s the problem we’ve got here, folks? We’ve got a global phenomenon which is called anti-Americanism. It’s people everywhere hating America, innit? That’s the trouble and before we sort it out we’ve got to understand why people hate America and from my perspective, from where I sit, there’s a lot of factors that have to be taken into account.’

‘Shut up!’ shrieked Jones. ‘What are you trying to say? Are you an imbecile?’

Chester de Peverill looked stunned. ‘I thought you wanted someone to speak, you know for or against America.’

‘You must speak to the motion,’ said Jones, who had studied Erskine May on parliamentary procedure, along with everything else, at Llangollen.

‘The motion?’

‘Yes: that this house calls for the immediate repatriation of the Guantanamo prisoners.’

‘For trial,’ said the President.

‘Silence,’ said Jones, who had the air of a rattled bus conductor about to turn vicious with a bilker. ‘Do you believe the American illegally held prisoners should be sent back for trial in the place of their alleged crimes?’

Chester de Peverill went white. Like all the folksiest and most whimsical TV characters, he tended to duck hard political questions and it struck him that the stakes here were probably quite high. If only he had known. In the seventeen minutes since Jones the Bomb had first handcuffed the President, the TV audience had been growing like bacteria in a Petri dish. There were two cameras in the hall for the live coverage, going out on Sky and BBC News 24. One was trained on the President, and one on the crowd, and their terrified cameramen were feeding pictures across the world. Millions were ringing up other millions and telling them to get to a box and watch the most sensational daytime chat show ever produced anywhere. With every minute that passed the millions were turning into hundreds of millions. Within twenty minutes it is estimated that a billion people were aware by means of some electronic transmission — radio, TV or the internet — of the events in Westminster Hall. Only a small proportion had grasped Jones’s idea in all its sophistication, but that small proportion was numerically huge.

They understood the concept of interactive TV and that they were in some sense the jury. From Berlin to Baghdad, from Manchester to Manila, from Sidcup to Sydney, there were already myriads who had no principled objection to the wheeze. Of course, they were in many cases sickened and horrified by what was going on. Good people across the planet were full of loathing for Jones and his barbarous treatment of the President, and his shooting of the Dutch Ambassador; but there was also a large number of people, good people, who thought America had a case to answer, not just on the narrow question of Guantanamo Bay, but more generally.

As they prepared to ring their TV stations and record their votes, they were fascinated by this strange, long-haired, rubbery-lipped Englishman who said he was a cook. Much as their consciences warned them not to gratify the terrorists, there were millions who were also yearning to give the Americans a lesson and in the sheep-like way of all human beings, they wanted to see which way this cook would go.

Chester de Peverill goggled. Across the planet, audiences in sports bars went silent and trembling fingers turned up the volume on the zapper.

‘Right,’ said Chester.

‘Yes or no?’ said Jones.

‘What? You mean, yes they should be sent back?’

‘Of course that is the question: what do you think?’