Seventy-Two Virgins (37 page)

But by now his job was done. It is a feature of human nature to believe in that which is evidently strongly believed in; and there were millions in France who were deeply impressed by the passion of their distinguished representative. Many had picked up their mobiles to express one point of view, and were suddenly overcome with a sense of the frivolity of anti-Americanism, and voted the other way.

In the diners and lounges of America there was shock at this sign of gratitude from an unexpected quarter. There was amazement. There were fits of piteous blubbing.

‘Yay!’ whooped Cameron. She was blushing, and there were tears in her eyes of innocent joy. ‘See,’ she said, turning to Adam, ‘see what Yves really thinks.’

‘Of course he thinks that, and that’s exactly what I think, too.’

Jones stared at the Frenchman on the screen. His nostrils were as white and rigid as porcelain.

‘Shut up the pair of you,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘We will see what happens when the votes come in.’

The BBC announced that there had been some very heavy polling in India, where intercommunal riots had broken out in Mumbai and Delhi, so ferocious was the disagreement between Muslims and Hindus. The percentage in favour of release of the Guantanamo prisoners was back up to 55.

Jones’s eyes went to the door, whence he could hear Dean’s retreating footsteps.

Oh sweet Prophet, praise and honour to your name and may a thousand blessings be upon you, thought Haroun as he struggled with his fly. As he did so he noticed the horrible graffiti: ‘Vote Labour!’ ‘Death to the middle class.’ ‘Applications to be next Tory leader,’ someone had written on the bog roll dispenser. ‘Please take one.’ Was there no end to the degeneracy of these people and their politics?

His gun had been left in the sink, and the door, marked Gentlemen Members Only, was unlocked. But what did he care? In an instant he would attain relief.

Now the fly was open, and — what in the name of Allah? He had forgotten about the prophylactic towel. He swore, and with a lung-bursting, drowning desperation he tore at his trousers and sought out the safety pin he had used to fasten the towel to his loins.

His imam had given him a tip, you see: that he would need his genitals intact, in order to enjoy the seventy-two heavenly benefits of martyrdom. Now he couldn’t undo the beastly towel. He jabbed his finger on the pin. He bled on the sacred nappy.

He yanked and pulled on the towel, formerly the property — for some reason — of the Creech Castle Hotel, Taunton, and now the O-ring seal of his urethra began to expand. He couldn’t stop it. Shame was coming down the tracks like a derailed Cannonball Express.

America has an astonishing 99.3 televisions per 100 households, a density exceeded only by Taiwan. Almost the entire population of the East Coast was now watching the debate in Westminster Hall, and they were voting with a patriotism that stunned the data collators of the BBC.

‘It can’t be true,’ said one polo neck to the Director of Political Editorial. ‘There’s something on the wires saying that 127 million Americans have voted to keep the prisoners in Cuba. How many people live in America anyway?’

‘Sounds dead dodgy to me,’ said the BBC hierarch.

‘We can’t suppress it, can we?’

‘Nah, put it out,’ said the executive with a vanishingly tiny smile. ‘But if you can think of a health warning, so much the better.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

1118 HRS

‘It is lies, all lies!’ railed Jones. ‘It is the Fox TV. It is propaganda and bullshit.’ But Jones could not stop the earth turning, and as dawn continued to break over America, and as the alarm clocks went off and the TVs went on, Americans voted in huge numbers to vindicate their right to bang up the towelhead nutters. In Iowa, Wanda Pickel and Jason Jr voted solidly for the President, and so did Mom’s new friend Howie, a realtor whom she had met on the set of a daytime TV show.

Now Jones could feel his majority slipping away; he was like one of those candidates who thinks he has won, on the night of the election, because they count the votes from the liberal urban areas first. Only as the votes start to come in from the shires, from the boneheaded conservative villages where they know right from wrong, does it dawn on the candidate that the race may be closer than he thought.

Dean, he noted, was now out of the door; and Jones began to count his protégé’s footfalls down the corridor. Another couple of seconds, he thought, and stroked the Nokia.

‘So I say in conclusion,’ perorated the Frenchman, ‘that to hate America is in a way to hate ourselves. It is a fact of human psychology that all our most vehement opinions, all our most passionate prejudices, are but the result of some internal argument, some unresolved tension in our own souls. If I may borrow the words of a great Anglo-Saxon writer, the rage of those who despise America is the rage of Caliban, staring at his face in the glass. It may seem odd to some of my countrymen that I should end my speech with the same slogan that you might hear from the lips of the President, if he were still with us. But I say these words with the utmost sincerity and respect. God Bless America, ladies and gentlemen,
messieurs, mesdames,
and I say it again—’

As Haroun finally disentangled himself from the towel, he was filled with that infantile ballistic joy that comes in the last second before the weapon is discharged. I am a missile, a sidewinder, a tank, he thought. I will shoot them all, he thought as he aimed at the sign saying ‘Shanks’. I will tear their bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.

‘God…’

High over the Atlantic warm Gulf winds were pushing the Stealth bombers faster than they had ever flown before.

Parliament Square was now a parade ground of crack troops: the Paras, the SAS. Men with blackened faces were running on rubber soles to take up positions all over Pugin and Barry’s palace. They scoped the gryphons in their sights. They primed the stun grenades. They checked the rope ladders.

In the Ops Room of Scotland Yard the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolis was twitching like a palsied ant. These lunatics could blow themselves up any moment, and yet Bluett the Yank seemed paralysed.

‘I really think we should give the command, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Of course the odds are not particularly bright, but we’ve got to give it a go.’

Colonel Bluett was staring at the cornflake-packet and Lego model of Westminster Hall. He could see the conflagration in his mind’s eye, the flesh charred and shrivelled like something left on a barbecue.

‘Waco,’ he said. ‘Waco had nothing on this.’

‘…bless …’

And I tell you what, thought Roger Barlow, as he cast around for other undertakings he could offer the Almighty, I really promise that I’ll put a lot more into my marriage, ‘cos I know that you only get out what you put in. Tell you what, God old bean, I’ll clean up the puddles on the bathroom floor, and I’ll even remember to put the sodding electric toothbrush on the charger … And oh all right (he winced), I’ll make stuff to eat, fish pie and whatnot, and perhaps I’ll roll up my sleeves and wear some gay pinafore like little Chester here.

‘…America!’

‘Goodbye, Dean, my child,’ said Jones. He pressed the button marked Yes on the Nokia. The number came up in the blue square on the screen. DIALLING, said the machine, and began to count the seconds.

‘No, I certainly wasn’t in on it,’ said Adam to Cameron, and for the first time in their relationship, it seemed, she noticed the odd little lentil-shaped convexity, the relic of a trapped follicle, perhaps, on his cheek. Was her love dying? She couldn’t believe it could; and perhaps, indeed, it was not. ‘Don’t be angry. The only thing I can assume is that Benedicte took us all for a ride.’

CONNECTING, said the machine. Somewhere in the ether one gang of chirruping electrons was introduced to another gang. They snuffled round each other; they started to speak each other’s language. They seriously clicked and began electronic intercourse. The corresponding mobile phone vibrated once.

The explosion could be heard all over the Palace, and in the square outside. It wasn’t a car backfiring, or a firework, or someone inadvertently putting a match to the intestinal vapours of a cow. It was an aggressive, percussive noise, the rattling of demons on the gates of Hell.

‘You morons!’ screamed Raimondo Charles, who was being made to kneel on the ground in Whitehall, not far from the Cenotaph, with his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘You hear that? Now they’re sending in the freaking Swat guys like this is
Raid on Entebbe.
Frigging idiotic cowboy shit-for-brains!’

‘Hey, knock it off, man,’ said a British captive.

‘Yeah,’ said another captive, a gloomy-looking pony-tailed fellow with a Motorhead T-shirt. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

Adam threw his arm around Cameron, but she hunched her shoulders and pulled away from him. ‘No,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Don’t.’

The President hurled himself to the floor; not out of any particular cowardice, but simply in deference to the many lessons he had been given in protecting POTUS in the event of a bomb. It is a measure of the violence with which he hurled himself that Jones the Bomb, still handcuffed to his captive, came too.

Benedicte spun round to see where the explosion had come from. So did Habib, and 1,600 eyes bugged from their sockets as the audience prepared to surrender to a full-blown Gadarene hysteria, kicking over the little gilt chairs and thinking, at last, of making a break for it.

Silver Stick dropped his silver stick, and then caught it again, like a conjurer, before raising it in the en garde position.

Dean jumped out of his skin, but only metaphorically. His skin remained attached to his body. He turned round, and rushed back down the corridor to room W6.

Pickel barely moved. Frig me dead, he thought.

And it was Haroun, of course, who Jackson Pollocked the walls and ceiling of the Gentlemen Members’ conveniences with his blood and brains. Perhaps it was because his circumstances were so confined, but the 5-kilo bomb did remarkably little damage to anything else. A light bulb was lost to his levitating brain-pan, and his teeth chipped the tiles. Various parts of him were trapped in the U-bend of the lavatory, but they presented no real problems to the forensic plumbers.

Did he attain Paradise, beyond that final orgastic delivery of urine? Was he transported on wings of angels to the soft bowers that await the martyrs in the islands of the blessed?

Does Haroun now live in a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and rubies, a sunny pleasure-dome as wide as the distance between al-Jabiyyah, a suburb of Damascus, and the Yemeni capital of Sana’a? Is he attended by 80,000 servants?

Does he eat of honeydew and drink the milk of Paradise? And finally, is this menu brought to him by seventy-two black-eyed virgins, so decorous and submissive as to assuage all the sexual indignities of this earth?

Or has he by now eaten his pitiful ration of raisins?

My friends, I have not the faintest idea. There, as they say in German, I am over-questioned. No narrator, whatever omniscience he may claim, can give you the answer to that one.

But I have my suspicions.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

1119 HRS

Barry White had seen enough war zones to know when it was time to be gone. ‘Let’s make like hockey players,’ he said to Chester de Peverill, ‘and get the puck out of here.’ They rose to their feet. Across the hall, people were doing the same.

Their faces were pale and their ears were singing; but tongues that had cloven to the roofs of mouths were suddenly able to speak. It briefly occurred to those members of the British cabinet, who had sat for more than an hour in tapioca-like terror, that this was it: this was the moment for self-preservation.

Behind the black-painted rail at the top of the hall, Silver Stick and Black Rod and the Earl Marshal exchanged meaningful glances, like an escape committee at Colditz. They knew that the authority of the terrorists had been momentarily dissipated; and that if the whole crowd went amok together, they might yet prevail.

As soon as Habib heard the bomb, he whirled and stared at the door that led into the hall. He knew what had happened, and in spite of his religious training, which had taught him to feel nothing but gladness for the death of his brother, the tears ran down his cheeks.

He stood still, and closed his eyes. ‘Call out in joy, O my mother; distribute sweets, O my father and brother. A wedding with the black-eyed virgins awaits your sons in Paradise. Go with God, Haroun,’ he said, and for a second he listened with brimming eyelashes to the pagan mutterings of the crowd, growing in strength like pigs who have found their way out of the sty.

He heard them milling from their seats, knocking over the chairs, and he felt a sudden contempt. They were a different species. They were unclean. They were dogs and the sons of dogs. They had no right to be reckoned in the same category as Haroun, the pure, the martyr, the shahid.

He opened his eyes. He looked at the sweaty old peeresses, the New Labour MPs with their cruel and unfeeling promotion of liberal values, and the perpetually compromised Tories.

How could they rival the moral depth of a man who gave his life for a cause? He felt overcome by the hot hate of righteousness, and waved his Schmidt.

‘Sit down,’ he shouted, ‘or I shoot you.’

‘Sit down, everybody, or it will be the shooting time!’ yelled Benedicte, and she invisibly painted the crowd with her bullets.

The moment of opportunity passed. There is something very particular about the sensation of watching the black O of a loaded gun barrel moving across your abdomen, and several members of the crowd felt it now. In many cases, it loosens the alimentary system, and causes the pulse to rise and a green moment to happen to the cheeks. People sat down again. Resignation descended.