Seventy-Two Virgins (35 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

1103 HRS

There was something amiss with Haroun, thought Benedicte. She knew the man craved martyrdom, but he was red-faced with impatience. He walked towards her with tiny steps, as though trying to keep a walnut between his knees.

‘Quickly,’ he said.

‘What is thees queeckly?’ she whispered. ‘It is time to blast these sons of goats and monkeys.’ ‘We must wait for Monsieur Jones to come back.’ ‘No! If I wait any more, something will happen.’ ‘What ees something?’

‘Something bad. To me.’

The Palestinian girl looked closely at Haroun.
‘Mais tu veux faire pi-pi, chéri?’

Haroun didn’t like Benedicte. Her chic white T-shirt unambiguously revealed the location of her nipples. She was not attired like a black-eyed one.

He jerked his chin.

‘But go on then,’ she chuckled, waving the muzzle of the Uzi at the swing doors. ‘We can manage.’

And if anybody laughs at me now, thought Haroun as he minced out, I will shoot them in the bladder.

‘Tootle pip,’ called Lady Hovell to his smouldering back, ‘you clear off, and take Ulrika Meinhof here while you are at it.’

The acting terrorist leader walked towards her down the aisle, noiseless in her Nike Airs.

‘I think I should warn you that you don’t scare me, young lady.’

‘Then you are brave but you are not smart.’

‘In fact, there is only one thing that really frightens me.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I am frightened of the disapproval of God.’

‘Ferme la gueule.
How do you say it in English?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Shut you the fat gob.’

‘My advice is to follow that young man, find the nearest policeman, and hand over that gun.’

As the two women stood next to each other, the rain outside deepened in tone. The drops swelled and thickened to the size of currants, or even gulls’ eggs, and a great drumming came from the roof. A cloud of Turneresque blackness rolled across the London sky, and as the light died in the windows, strange shadows formed on the women’s faces.

‘Go home, dear,’ said the Baroness.

Benedicte stuck her snout right next to the ancient map.

‘Now is the time for the beeg silence.’ She raised the Uzi to her ear. ‘Or else the silence will be the long one.’

‘What you need, if you ask my opinion, is a nice husband.’

‘Shut your face,
vieille putain!’

‘I’m no—’

Benedicte pulled the trigger. Even as far back as Barlow and de Peverill, the shots buffeted their eustachian tubes, as though someone was ripping calico just by their ears.

Lady Hovell clapped her hand to her heart. She sat down. Her eyes fell away from Benedicte, and at once she looked like anyone’s old grandma, just told a piece of bad news by the docs.

A noise went up from the audience, a small but unanimous exhalation. They knew that they had sustained a defeat.

Was Lady Hovell’s chin wobbling? Was that a crinkle on the jaw that had never trembled in forty years of sneering from men who weren’t fit to lick her boots? It was hard to tell. But as Silver Stick gazed at her from afar, tears formed in his ducts, of love and fright.

Frig me spastic, thought Jason Pickel, as the bullets ate into the main collar beam, just ten feet below him. That could have been a serious inguinal injury.

He squinted below, to check whether the mad A-rab bitch might fire again. Then slowly he looped the nylon rope round the crown post, tied it tight, and then began to slide it through two carabiners at his belt.

When he had finished, he crouched once again over the gathering, his big shoulders hunched, rifle ready, like an eagle as it waits for its moment.

Adam was still saying nothing, and Cameron was looking at the TV, trying not to hurt.

The BBC had a ‘Russian expert’, who was casting doubt on the oddly pro-American numbers from Russian TV.

She had to know about his theft. ‘So how did you take it?’

‘I am afraid I just put my newspapers and stuff on top of it, and then scooped it all up when we all left.’

‘So what are you, a spy?’

He groaned. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. But it’s got nothing to do with this business.’

‘And who are you supposed to be spying for?’

Dean watched their conversation. In particular, he watched Cameron, and noticed more detail: the tilt of her nose, the bangle on her wrist, the little white scar on her slender left arm. He shivered, and listened to the rattle of the rain. Not only had the temperature fallen, but the adrenalin was turning sour in his veins, leaving a hangover of fear.

Jones the Bomb spoke. ‘The door is open, Dean, my young friend.’

Dean looked at the door. On the contrary, it was shut.

‘But if you go through that door now, remember that you will lose all chance of bliss. You have a chance now’ — he stared with his mongoose intensity — ‘to obtain the stone that is more precious than the world and anything that is in it. Remember, my dear Dean, that when the first drop of blood is spilled, the shahid does not feel the pain of his wounds, and all his sins are forgiven. He sees his seat in Paradise, and he is saved from the torment of the grave—’

‘Mr Jones, sir, I just don’t believe in paradise.’

The President looked keenly at him. No one ever got elected President of the United States without believing in paradise.

Jones made a sad face: ‘I know it is difficult, and I know it is frightening, and I know we all have moments when we feel we have lost our faith . .

‘You bet your sweet ass,’ said the President.

‘But I hope you still have faith in me, Dean. Do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Have faith in the person who has liberated you from the false values of Western decadence?’

Dean rose. He moved towards the door. ‘Mr Jones, I. No. Yes. I … No.’

That’s it, thought Roger Barlow, when Benedicte fired at the roof-beams. Get me out of this thing, dear Lord, and I promise I’ll be good. I’m fed up with being bad.

Here are all the good things I am going to do. I’m going to pick up my towels from the bathroom floor. I’m going to start listening properly when she talks to me. I’m going to communicate. I’m going to stay awake after lights out, because it’s always worth it in the end. I’m going to understand that the important thing is not to solve problems, but to discuss them. After fifteen years, I’m going to get the point that marriage is not a final act; it’s like a meeting of the European agricultural ministers, an endless negotiation of insolubles.

I won’t pick the corner of my toenails with a Bic biro lid. Ditto ears, or at least not at dinner parties.

I won’t open tins of tuna and then leave them under the bed. I won’t go to the fridge, take out a Waitrose raspberry trifle, eat it all, and then put back the licked-out plastic container.

I won’t lose my temper when we get lost, and then refuse to ask the way. I’ll stop farting under the duvet .

His eyes met the twitchy glare of Habib, who was walking down the aisle, swinging his gun like a sadistic maths master invigilating an exam.

It occurred to Roger that if he wanted divine intervention, he had better make some real concessions.

The noise from Benedicte’s gun carried out into New Palace Yard. It penetrated the ambulance, and entered the ears of William Eric Kinloch Onyeama. One lung was half-full of blood.

The pericardial puncture unit had made a neat hole in his chest. His thoracic diaphragm had been punctured, his pencardial membrane was in a bad way and his sternum was severely scraped.

But Eric Onyeama was alive, and he owed his life to the Huskie.

It was the tough little computer which had served as his breastplate, and which had borne the brunt of Haroun’s attack.

He had lost about four pints of blood; but the haemorrhage had slowed, and now he was coming out of his faint. He flapped an arm, and knocked a non-glass urine bottle to the floor.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

1105 HRS

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said one of the Swat team that surrounded the ambulance. ‘There’s someone moving in there.’

‘Somebody open the doors.’

‘Cover me.’

With infinite care, and strictly according to the manuals, the Swat team inched towards the handle. Slowly, slowly, in the hope of not setting off some Vietcong-style booby trap, both the rear doors were swung wide. The Swat team stared within, their expressions full of the semi-sacred awe with which a man will look at the bottom of a woman’s handbag.

‘Strewth,’ said one. ‘It looks like a flaming abattoir in there.’

Eric the parkie was almost invisible in the tangle of medical equipment. His lower body was covered in a long spinal board, complete with head immobilizer and securing straps. His upper half was buried in a midden of oximeters, stethoscopes, thermometers, resuscitation masks, vomiting bags, gastric tubes, sterile surgical gloves and defibrillators. The whole assemblage was richly spattered with gore.

‘I think there’s someone there.’

‘Sweet Mary mother of God.’

‘Or part of someone, anyway. That’s definitely a foot.’

‘We’ve got to get him out.’

The Swat team leader looked at the ambulance man. ‘You’d better lead the way.’

‘Whoa,’ said the ambulance man. ‘This is an armed response situation. The rules clearly state that in armed response situations, it’s down to you boys.’

‘Hey, we don’t want to kill him.’

‘Yeah, and we don’t want him to kill us.’

‘Oh come off it.’

‘You come off it.’

So Britain’s emergency services began the now traditional act of worship before the altar of Phobia, the many-headed multiple-bosomed goddess of health and safety. With every pump of Eric Onyeama’s good and loyal heart the puddle of blood beneath him grew, and with every pump the beat grew fainter.

‘Help me you idiots,’ he said. But only his lips moved.

Adam took Cameron’s hand and led her away from the blare of the TV, to the back of room W6. As she felt those long, dark-haired pianist’s fingers, she tried to remember that this was a hand she thrilled to touch.

‘I’ll tell you who I’m spying for,’ he said, ‘of course I will. I’ll tell you in a minute. But I want you to believe me about something. I am not a terrorist.’

‘Then why did you make me do this?’

She still loved the intensity of his intellect; she loved his broad shoulders and thick curly black hair. Despite her depression, for an instant she persuaded herself she might also love the fact that he was a spy.

‘I thought — look you’re not going to believe me.’

‘Did you know they weren’t a TV crew?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re mad. You’re an active collaborator.’

‘No,’ said Adam with soft desperation.

‘Say, who is this fellow, anyway?’ The President watched as the man with the flowing grey hair was at last given the floor. ‘What’s that he said?’

The President reached for the zapper to turn it up.

Jones the Bomb snatched the gizmo away. ‘That is His Excellency Yves Charpentier, Ambassador of the Republic of France.’

‘Know him, do you?’

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

1108 HRS

Haroun’s hasty footsteps echoed on the stone stairs. He was alone, save for the busts of dead white men and their scary dead white eyes.

He tried one door, then another. The fool English: did they expect a man to piss against the wall of their godless palaces? Well, he would have to, if this went on much longer. He turned a corner, and came face to face with a woman.

She was dressed in black from head to toe. She wore a helmet and her upper body was swaddled in Kevlar with a label saying Metropolitan Police.

She swung her gun on him. He turned his on her. By mutual consent they each slipped back around the corner and trotted in the opposite direction.

Oh, perhaps I should have asked her, thought Haroun, because things were starting to go critical in his lower abdomen. One by one the graphite rods of restraint were popping out of the radioactive pile, and meltdown was approaching.

Ah! But it was haram, a disgrace, to discuss such things with a woman.

He came to a door, of old rich oak and bossed with bronze. Praise be to the prophet, thought Haroun: it said GENTS.

Locked. Through his tears, he read a notice Sellotaped to the wood, in the name of the Clerk of Works, informing him that the convenience would be out of order, pending conversion to allow for disabled access.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,
messieurs, mesdames,’
said the French Ambassador. ‘Since I believe that there is a strong possibility that this will be our last day on earth, I will speak briefly, and I will speak from the heart.’

Boy, thought the President, Yves here was one hell of a snappy dresser. The Frenchman was wearing an indigo suit of the most formal possible cut, but his shirt was patterned with blue horizontal stripes of varying tones and thicknesses. The whole thing was set off by a taramasalata-coloured tie, strobing under the TV lights and — yes — giving the impression of a pulsing from-the-heart sincerity.

‘I stand before you as the representative of a friendly nation, that bears nothing but amity and goodwill towards this country, which has been my home for the last three years, and also towards the United States.

‘For the avoidance of doubt, I wish to join the noble lady who has just spoken, in recording my contempt for the terrorists who are holding us hostage, and who threaten murder. When these events are investigated, and the criminals punished — as they surely will be — it will be discovered that some of our captors gained access to this hall through the invitation of myself and of my former associate.’

He stuck his chin at Benedicte. ‘I mean the lady with the gun. All I will say now is that I have been the slave to Aphrodite and that the goddess has ensorcelled my wits.’