Seventy-Two Virgins (33 page)

She knew exactly what she looked like as she came back into his presence. She had dried herself and was wearing only a short silk thing with straps. She was looking — this may sound crude, but it is no less than the truth — like a lingerie model only cleverer and, if anything, with bigger breasts.

He had turned, and picked her up, and carried her on to the bed. Now, in the small hours, she remembered that just before then he had started shoving something he was reading into his bag, and zipped it up.

She brooded on this detail. There had definitely been a touch of furtiveness in his manner.

‘Oh boy,’ she breathed to herself in the dark, as the obvious answer struck her. He was married. He not only had a wife in Surbiton, he had a brace of kids. Make that a gaggle. And she had caught him reading their school reports. With a grim and mounting certainty, she peeled back the coverlet and placed her high-arched feet on the carpet. He was still breathing steadily.

Tiptoe, tiptoe,
she went across the carpet. She bent down. Had Professor Adam Swallow woken at that moment, he would have seen a sight to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. But he did not wake up, and as Cameron stealthily unzipped the bag, she prepared for the shock, and she constructed the necessary mental defences and excuses. She would find a moment to bring it up with him in a gentle, roundabout way, and she would try to draw him out. Maybe she would make some kind of little confession herself, as a way of getting the conversation going.

But as she reached into the bag, and prepared to extract the document, she could feel the pain preparing to course through her system. Perhaps his admiration for Islam had encouraged him to enlist a small assortment of wives. She held up a cardboard folder in the tangerine light from the street.

‘SACEUR,’ it said at the top, in capitals and then, ‘US Military:

Restricted,’ and it gave that year’s date. With a ludicrous sense of jubilation, she put it back and slipped into bed.

It was just some boring address book, she thought; and, believe it or not, Cameron made no connection as she eventually drifted off between its presence in Adam’s bag and their earlier visit to NATO.

The anomalies had popped up only now, as a corpse will surface only some time after a drowning, and she wanted an explanation.

‘OK,’ said Adam. ‘All right.’ He spoke in dead tones, unable to meet her eyes. ‘You’re perfectly right. I’ll explain.’

It takes huge upper body strength to climb upwards and backwards on the inside of a roof with nowhere for your hands and feet to go but the joists. And the joists offered no proper purchase, nothing about which he could curve his fingers. Insofar as he was able to grip the wood at all, it was by means of the sheer pressure he was able to exert with his fingers and thumbs.

But Pickel was remarkably strong; his hands were like those of a farmer or a manual labourer, pumped up by squeezing squash balls to double normal human size. He was also maddened with frustration, furious with himself for missing in the yard and then losing his gun, disgusted at the drivel rising like pollution from the debate below.

As soon as he had whacked the guy who was holding the President, thought Pickel, he might quietly drill a couple of holes in that hinky chef dude, the one who didn’t like sausages.

He didn’t know what was wrong with the world: a bunch of towelhead sickos, threatening to kill the President of the USA and some faggot Limey stands up and makes a speech attacking hamburgers.

Rage impelled him up the inside of the roof, and all he needed, he told himself, was speed and a clear run and absolute concentration. So it was unfortunate, as he looked up to check that he was aiming for the hatch, that he should receive a surprise. There was a face silhouetted in the hatch and the face was saying something to him.

‘Hey Pickel,’ whispered the person and removed his gun from the latch. One of Pickel’s hands slipped off the joist, his foot came off the joist two below. For an instant Pickel hung above the audience, eyes bugging, joints popping, on the point of descending so violently on to the orating Chester de Peverill that he would surely have turned him into the hamburger the chef so deplored.

With a grunting convulsion, Pickel managed to regain control. He shot back down the ladder of joists as fast as he could, to take the strain off his arms, and he reached for the beam again.

He jammed his toe into the corner, just to wedge himself like a human piton. His toecap connected with the ancient tennis ball. After almost 500 years of seclusion, the ball rolled six inches off the beam and began the long drop back into play.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

1052 HRS

The President was among the first to see it: one of the advantages of having your eyes close set together, like Bjorn Borg, the tennis champion, is you can focus on balls a long way away. He thought it was a grenade, perhaps tear gas, the opening gambit of some desperate rescue plan. His first thought was that he was going to die.

Haroun didn’t see it. He couldn’t really concentrate on anything much at the moment except the build-up of molten lava in his lower abdomen. He was damned if he was going to urinate in front of all these shameless foreign women, like some incontinent child. It would be a haram, a disgrace; and so he was staring at the wall to avoid their eyes and hoping to distract himself from the urging of his medulla oblongata by counting every one of the big grey stones that made up the right-hand wall.

Barlow did see it, because he happened to be staring up again, praying that a thunderbolt would descend and destroy Chester de Peverill, leaving nothing but a pile of ash smoking in his Timberland loafers. He saw a small object detach itself from the area of blinding white below the TV lights. He saw the thing grow bigger in the 2.1 seconds it took to fall, and though he flinched, he knew with a sudden unarticulated joy — because he had a good eye for a ball — that there was a reasonable chance it would fall on the head of the prating prat beside him. Which it did.

Ponk
went the ball on the head of the TV chef. De Peverill bellowed.

Women screamed in the rows around him. Men screamed, too, and shouted and swore. ‘What was that?’ shouted Jones as the Arab gunmen and woman whipped round and the ball rolled under the chairs. Everyone looked at the space in the rafters from which the ball had come. They blinked. They squinted. They listened to the noise of the helicopter, which now seemed to be directly overhead.

They couldn’t be sure whether they could see something up there, or whether it was the green and purple blotches left on the retina by the scalding TV lights. Jones thought it important to assert his command of the situation.

‘Die, infidel son of a whore,’ he said and loosed off a round from his Browning in the general direction of Pickel. The American sniper was gone. With a single fluid lunge he had travelled up and back, wrenching his trapezius muscles but successfully gaining the hatch that led back to the flèche.

The combination of the gunshot and the little leather bomblet had frazzled the President’s nerves. He had given up alcohol many years ago but seldom had he felt more in need of a stiff one, or a cigarette. ‘Say buddy,’ he said to Jones, ‘would you have a piece of gum?’

‘Hssst,’
said Jones, as the tennis ball was recovered from under the chair of a hostage, and brought by one of the Arabs for his inspection. What in the name of the prophet? He held the sphere between finger and thumb, momentarily resting his gun on the lectern. It looked like a coprolite. He hadn’t a clue what it was, but it spelled mischief.

‘Come on,’ he yelled at the President, putting the ball on the lectern, picking up his gun and yanking on the handcuffs. It was time to activate plan B. Jones had worked out long ago that he would need a fallback position. The British and the Americans were bound to come up with a response, and the longer he and the President stood on the dais, the more vulnerable he would be.

‘Dean, follow me,’ he ordered, and gave instructions to Haroun, Habib and the rest of the Arabs to keep charge of the crowd. Dragging the President in his wake and waving the automatic, he marched down the aisle. To Cameron’s horror, he was staring at her as he advanced. She stared back, entranced by those wobbly brown irises in those bloodshot eyes.

‘Professor Swallow,’ he shouted. ‘Adam,’ he said, and Cameron found herself feeling no longer sick, but kind of spacey, detached in a personal bubble of horror. Oh my gosh, she thought, it’s true, it’s all true, and it’s all a goddamn lie.

Adam said something to Jones the Bomb in Arabic.

He said: ‘You’ll pay for this, you moron.’ But Cameron didn’t know Arabic, and looked at him with wild suspicion.

‘Come on, my love,’ said Adam, ‘we’ve got to go with them or they’ll kill us.’

‘They’ll kill us anyway.’

‘No they won’t. Maybe. I don’t know.’

The air immediately above the hall was now being churned so violently by the Black Hawk rotors that a tile was dislodged, and skittered ominously down the Himalayan shoulders of the building.

‘Hurry!’ shouted Jones to Adam and Cameron, and waved his Browning. Bobbing behind in the cuffs, the President hoped that the cameras could not see his expression as Jones and his party made for the exit.

On the left of Westminster Hall, as you face it from the north door, there is a curious stone balustrade with a low flight of steps leading up on either side. The banisters are decorated by carved stone heraldic beasts, chip-eared lions, a crack-horned unicorn and a stag missing part of his antler. Underneath the balustrade are steps leading to a set of swing doors which give access to a series of small meeting rooms called W1, W2, W3, W4, W5 and W6, where MPs encounter their constituents.

Here Jones hastened, having decided that room W6 was the most easily defended, being along a corridor, virtually subterranean, and only accessible by the one door from Westminster Hall. He stood on the steps and turned to ensure that his party was in order: the President, Cameron and Adam as hostages, and Dean, his skin now having an eerie Venusian tinge, bringing up the rear. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ yelled Jones the Bomb at the crowd. ‘If anyone tries to follow us he will die, or she.’

He was on the point of descending the steps when a voice from the crowd objected. It was Chester de Peverill, who had recovered from the shock of the ball on his head.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What about my speech: do you want me to carry on?’

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

1053 HRS

‘My dear fellow,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘there is nothing that would give me greater pleasure. I will not be able to watch you in person, but I believe there may be a television down here. Carry on.’ And he was gone.

‘Actually,’ said Chester, ‘now I come to think of it, I think I’ve almost finished my speech. I might as well sit down.’

‘So soon?’ said Barlow. ‘Are you sure?’

There was a silence, and a kind of power vacuum. Despite his instructions, it was not clear which of the Arabs Jones had left in charge of the debate. Habib and Haroun disapproved, and in any case Haroun was now afflicted by a Chernobyl in his underpants.

He was starting to jig up and down, as children do, waggling his hand as though playing an imaginary guitar. Nothing could mask the incontrovertible and overwhelming pressure on his urethra. Several people in the audience noticed his demeanour. I don’t like the look of that one, they thought. Chap’s on crack cocaine.

The two other Arabs were chauffeurs from the Kuwaiti Embassy, and they hadn’t got the hang of Jones’s debate at all, so it was left to Benedicte.

She marched to the vacant lectern and yelped into the mike, ‘Come on, ladies and gentlemen,
mesdames, messieurs,
who wants to be the next?’

Once again the forest of would-be speakers sprang up. Roger Barlow, Ziggy Roberts, Sir Perry Grainger, and a score of others. Benedicte’s eye fell on her lover, the French Ambassador. He was standing turkey-breasted, glaring haughtily at his girlfriend.

‘Un instant, chéri,’
said Benedicte. ‘Ladies first.’

Not far from the Ambassador, on the other side of the aisle, a lady had risen. Her age was unclear but she was certainly no younger than seventy. Her silvery hair was cut short, and her attire was grey and white, and of almost nun-like severity. She was a peer of the realm, a former Home Office minister, a grandmother of twenty children.

She was Elspeth, Baroness Hovell, the scourge of the gay lobby, the abominator of abortion, the defender of corporal punishment (lovingly administered), and the only politician of any party to have the guts to question whether it was the business of the Treasury to use endless fiscal incentives to drive women out to work. In short, she was one of the few people there whose views and manifesto approximated to those of an Islamic fundamentalist, which was why she was known to her enemies — the right-on columnists, the stand-up comedians — as Old Ironpants, or the Mullah.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, ‘I hope it will not be thought too much of an insult to everyone here present, if I say that I believe our conduct, our collective conduct, is pretty pathetic. Like quite a few of us in this room I am old enough to remember the war, and I must say that this is not how we won it. We are being held to ransom by a bunch of terrorist louts, just a handful of them, and we sit here, and do nothing about it. I say …’

‘Please, madam, please,’ said Benedicte, interrupting as politely as she could. ‘You are not on the good path at all. You should be speaking of American abuse of human rights.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Lady Hovell, as though a ticket inspector had just sworn at her on the number 19 bus. ‘Did you say American abuse of human rights?’

‘That’s right, you must say whether the prisoners should be released.’

‘Well, I must say that strikes me as a bit hypocritical. What about your abuse of our human rights? Are you or are you not depriving us of our liberty?’