BORIS JOHNSON

Seventy-Two Virgins

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Copyright © Boris Johnson 2004

Boris Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007198054

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2016 ISBN: 9780007383504

Version: 2016-04-18

PRAISE FOR SEVENTY-TWO VIRGINS

‘A hectic comedy thriller … refreshingly unpompous and very funny.’

Mail on Sunday

‘Johnson scores in his comic handling of those most sensitive issues… he succeeds in being charming and sincere … a witty page-turner.’

Observer

‘Among the hilarious scenes of events and the wonderful dialogue which keeps the story moving at a cracking pace, Johnson uncovers some home truths … I can give no higher praise to this book than to say that I lapped it up at a single uproarious sitting.’

Irish Examiner

‘As an author, he is in a class of his own: ebullient, exhausting but irresistible.’

Daily Mail

‘Fluent, funny material … the writing is vintage, Wode-housian Boris … it has been assembled with skill and terrific energy and will lift morale in the soul of many.’

Evening Standard

‘At the centre of his first novel is a terrorist plot of frightening ingenuity … the comedy is reminiscent of Tom Sharpe.’

Sunday Times

‘This is a comic novel, but Johnson is never far away from making serious points, which he leads us towards with admirable stealth.’

Daily Telegraph

‘A splendidly accomplished and gripping first novel … Few authors could get away with it, but this one most certainly does. Highly recommended.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘The rollicking pace and continuous outpouring of comic invention make the book … The guardians of our author’s future need not worry. This is a laurel from a new bush, but certainly a prizewinner.’

Spectator

‘Invents a genre all of his own: a post 9/11 farce … a pacy, knockabout political thriller which takes in would-be terrorists careering through Westminster in a stolen ambulance, a visit from the US president, celebrity chefs, snipers, tabloids chasing extra-curricular … as much fun reading it as Johnson had writing it.’

GQ

‘As well as Mr Johnson’s inside knowledge of Parliament and his exuberantly idiosyncratic prose style, Mr Johnson is also brilliant at characterisation – each one of his cast of hundreds leaps to life in a few sentences … and yes, I laughed out loud approximately every 30 minutes.’

Country Life

DEDICATION

Optimis parentibus

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Seventy-Two Virgins

Dedication

Part One: The Trojan Ambulance

Chapter One: 0752 Hrs

Chapter Two: 0824 Hrs

Chapter Three: 0832 Hrs

Chapter Four: 0833 Hrs

Chapter Five: 0835 Hrs

Chapter Six: 0837 Hrs

Chapter Seven: 0839 Hrs

Chapter Eight: 0841 Hrs

Chapter Nine: 0843 Hrs

Chapter Ten: 0844 Hrs

Chapter Eleven: 0845 Hrs

Chapter Twelve: 0851 Hrs

Chapter Thirteen: 0854 Hrs

Chapter Fourteen: 0857 Hrs

Chapter Fifteen: 0900 Hrs

Chapter Sixteen: 0908 Hrs

Chapter Seventeen: 0909 Hrs

Chapter Eighteen: 0911 Hrs

Chapter Nineteen: 0914 Hrs

Chapter Twenty: 0916 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-One: 0919 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Two: 0924 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Three: 0926 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Four: 0935 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Five: 0938 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Six: 0940 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Seven: 0942 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Eight: 0944 Hrs

Chapter Twenty-Nine: 0946 Hrs

Chapter Thirty: 0958 Hrs

Part Two: The Special Relationship

Chapter Thirty-One: 1000 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Two: 1007 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Three: 1010 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Four: 1011 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Five: 1021 Hrs

Part Three: I Come To Bury Caesar

Chapter Thirty-Six: 1024 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Seven: 1027 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Eight: 1028 Hrs

Chapter Thirty-Nine: 1030 Hrs

Chapter Forty: 1033 Hrs

Chapter Forty-One: 1036 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Two: 1037 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Three: 1038 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Four: 1040 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Five: 1043 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Six: 1044 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Seven: 1049 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Eight: 1052 Hrs

Chapter Forty-Nine: 1053 Hrs

Chapter Fifty: 1058 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-One: 1103 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Two: 1105 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Three: 1108 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Four: 1112 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Five: 1114 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Six: 1118 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Seven: 1119 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Eight: 1123 Hrs

Chapter Fifty-Nine: 1125 Hrs

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

THE TROJAN AMBULANCE

CHAPTER ONE

0752 HRS

On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.

The gun was equipped with an orange whale harpoon, and would have been lethal, had it been more than six inches long and made of something other than plastic.

‘Say your prayers, buddy,’ said the four-year-old. Roger’s eyelid quivered.

If Sigmund Freud had been able to catch this kid’s conversation, he would have been thrilled. Seldom had there been so exuberant and uninhibited an Oedipus complex.

One morning they were lying all three of them in bed, and Roger was trying to persuade the kid to go and watch Scooby Doo. The child turned to his mother.

He spoke prettily, in the kind of voice he might use for ordering another fish finger.

‘I am going to kill Daddy, and then I am going to marry you.’

Today, Roger didn’t want to be rude to the four-year-old, and he didn’t want to exacerbate his complex, but he was damned if he was going to be treated in this way. He grunted, and rolled away, gripping his slumbering wife with both arms.

The four-year-old fired the plastic dart carefully into the back of Roger’s neck.

Barlow’s blow went wide. Ceding his place to his rival, he rose. He tended to wear T-shirts in bed, and this one was a relic of a brief but illustrious former Tory leadership under which he had been proud to serve.

‘It’s Time For Hague’, proclaimed the T-shirt, while the back announced: ‘The Common Sense Revolution’. As a piece of nightwear, his wife claimed that it had anti-aphrodisiacal properties of a barely credible order.

‘MMM,’ said his wife.

‘Mmm,’ said Roger. ‘Back in a mo.’

As he went into the bathroom he heard the flap of the letterbox. Cee-rist! he thought, the papers …

He scooted downstairs and scooped them up off the mat. Quickly he went through the brutal tabloid that was most likely to have done him in, and then the ones that pretended to be more responsible.

Nope.

Nothing.

Nope. Nothing.

Phew.

Just the usual flammed-up load of old cobblers, masquerading as news.

There was allegedly a ‘dirty bomb’ threat to London, or so said ‘sources’ in the Home Office, with an eye, no doubt, to stirring up public alarm, and then introducing some fresh repression of liberty. There were acres of predictable drivel about the security arrangements for the celebrations today.

The police had launched some Al-Qaeda raid in Wolverhampton and Finsbury. But then there was one of those every month.

In other words, there was nothing important, and certainly nothing to feed his ludicrous paranoia. But some guilty instinct told him to purge the house of these bullying quires of paper.

So he stretched down the Common Sense Revolution to make it a kind of nightshirt (common sense, innit?) and zipped outside into the summer morning. He stuffed them into the fox-ravaged bin, and then checked that no one had seen him.

Drat. Someone had indeed seen him. It was that funny woman who was always muttering under her breath, and who had once seen him administering physical chastisement – in fact it was about the only occasion he had ever done so – to one of his other children.

He beamed at her, tugging the T-shirt over his hips.

With a shudder his neighbour hurried about her business, and Roger darted back up the steps to see the door shutting in his face.

‘Oi. You. No!’ he said.

He bent down to look through the flap.

‘Please,’ he said.

The child’s sweet face came closer. He was now dressed in a red crusader’s tabard, and brandished a plastic gladius or stabbing sword.

‘You are not necessary,’ he said to Roger through the letterbox. ‘Mummy,’ he called, looking back over his shoulder, ‘do we know this man?’

Five minutes later, and with the help of his wife, Roger Barlow had regained access to his house, dressed, washed, and was thrashing around the kitchen looking for that … that thing.

‘You know,’ he said to his wife, ‘the thing with the thing in it.’

His wife had been around long enough to know what to do in these circumstances. She got on with drinking her coffee. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘that thing.’

Barlow cast a worried glance at his watch. It was that green folder thing, the one all about poor Mrs Betts. They were threatening to close the respite centre she needed for her son, who had such severe learning difficulties that he had no realistic hope of education. And last night, in a fit of alcohol-induced elation, he had been staring at the autistic Betts kid’s drawings, which were pretty good, and thought he had seen the answer. But he had had had HAD to have the file.

He was going to ring Mrs Betts that afternoon, and it was no use if he …

Maybe Cameron still had it. He looked again at his watch and wondered whether to dial his beautiful, omnicompetent American researcher. It was too early.

He searched again in his office, under the bed, under the sofa, under the doormat, in the stuff being put out for recycling. He had a sudden horror that he had accidentally thrown the folder away with the papers, and went back to the bins. And then he saw something under his son’s chair, where the child was eating his second breakfast.

He had no time to ask how it had got there. He had no time to speculate on the industrial-strength adhesive with which it was now covered, and which is created by mixing Weetabix with milk.

He had no time because he had a speech to prepare, a respite centre to save, and he had to get to the Commons before the whole of Westminster was blockaded by the Americans.

The President was due to start speaking at 10 a.m., and Roger had to be in his seat in less than an hour. He pointed the bike south and started to churn his legs.

As for the President’s breakfast, it differed from Roger’s in almost every respect. It was a leisured and ruminative repast, taken at a round table in a vast bay window in the same vaulted apartments that have been given to every visiting head of state for the last fifty years.

Olaf of Norway had slept there. So had King Baudouin of Belgium. So had the Pope, and come to that, President Marcos of the Philippines and sundry other thugs the Foreign Office had once thought fit to foist on Her Majesty, notably President Ceaucescu of Romania in 1978 and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe in 1994.

On the bedside table was a guide to the British Museum, a volume of Tennyson and a Dick Francis hardback that might have been new in 1973, when the room was used by President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

Now the President looked out over Windsor Great Park, at the ancient oaks, trussed and propped with iron, and the deer, and, in the distance, the looming turrets of Legoland; but what fascinated him most was the yellow packet of breakfast cereal, reposing in a specially constructed silver cruet.

‘Say, honey, look at this,’ he said to the First Lady, and read out the awesome royal warrants. ‘By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Weetabix and Co., purveyors of breakfast cereals. And Prince Charles. And the Queen Mum. I thought she passed away.’

‘Gee,’ said the First Lady, who had also been trying to eat the Weetabix. ‘Does that mean they make this stuff specially for the Queen?’

‘I guess she has to sort of approve it.’

‘How much does she have to eat?’ asked the First Lady.

They both stared at their bowls. ‘I dunno,’ said the President. ‘Kind of soaks up the milk, doesn’t it?’

Like Barlow, the President considered the amazing physical properties of a Weetabix/milk solution, and its possible application in the construction industry. The First Lady fleetingly wondered what it would be like to have the Presidential seal on the back of a packet of Froot Loops.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Sir,’ said a US Secret Service man in a blue blazer, ‘Colonel Bluett just called. He wanted to be sure you were aware of the security implications of the arrests last night.’

The President grimaced. He had naturally read the papers, but had been hoping not to bring the subject up in front of his wife.

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘Good job by the Brits.’

‘We should go now, sir, if you’re ready, ma’am.’

‘Too bad they didn’t catch the main guy,’ said the First Lady, who had also read the news.

That wasn’t the only detail troubling Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell, who had been sitting at his desk since 6 a.m. in the New Scotland Yard Ops Room. News had come in of a vehicle theft in Wolverhampton, a crime that appeared to have taken place shortly before the not-quite-successful synchronized raids. It might mean something; it might mean nothing. But it was a very odd thing to steal, and his dilemma, now, was whether or not to share the information with the Americans. After ten days working on this visit with Colonel Bluett of the US Secret Service, he somehow couldn’t face the conversation. ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said his assistant, who was called Grover. ‘Even if it was our friends who took it, where the hell are they going to park it? I bet someone will find it within an hour.’

CHAPTER TWO

0824 HRS

It was going to be a beautiful day, thought William Eric Kinloch Onyeama, as he walked across Lambeth Bridge.

No. Wait.

He stopped, and his delighted eye scanned the landscape, dapply and wavy and branchy. He could do better than that.

He searched for his new favourite word. It was on the tip of his tongue. He had just confirmed its rough area of meaning with his teachers at the Euro language school in Peckham Rye.

He looked at the happy brown river, winking beneath the bituminous scum.

He looked at the gilt flèches and steeples of the Houses of Parliament, which inspired in him a deep and unfashionable reverence. That building was, in his view, heart-stoppingly lovely, but too spiky, surely, to qualify for the adjective he was now struggling to recall.

He took in the roses in Victoria Tower Gardens, and the red, white and blue flags that flew over the heart of Westminster on this day of glorious commemoration; the white ellipse of the London Eye; the leaves on the plane trees, turning up their light undersides in the breeze.

They were all beautiful, beautiful, but they were not exactly b— What was it again?

He looked down at his shoes, which he had polished the night before. They were fat Doc Martens, burnished and blushing like bumps or buns. They were bu— What was it? They were like the black rumps of the taxis, the bashful bums that beetled before him over the bridge. They were b—; they were bu— they were busty – no, they were buck, they were bucks—

That was it.

It was going to be a buxom day.

He grinned, and thought of all the things that might be classified as buxom.

Obviously there was Mrs (Nellie) Naaotwa Onyeama. She was as buxom as all get out. This he had amply confirmed a little while ago, just before he rose from her bed.

And the clouds above him were high and fleecy. How foolish they were to talk of rain, thought Eric; and how typically gloomy of the Apcoa people to make them take their pacamacs.

If you added it all together, thought Eric, if you looked at all the glitter and lustre and promise of the new summer’s day, then you could argue – and he stood to be corrected – that this July morning stood fully in the semantic field of his new best word.

So he went on down Horseferry Road, past the obelisks with their odd pineapple finials, past the bearded stone Victorians who had conquered the continent from which he came, and he, the colonial, began to hunt in the former imperial metropolis.

He checked the Resparks. He checked the tax. If someone had stuck a ticket in the window, he noted the time of expiry and plotted his return.

All the while he was savouring this language which ruled the world, and over which he was acquiring mastery …

And there in Maunsel Street was his first prey of the morning, buxom in the curvature of its forequarters, a gleaming black four by four which had flouted the Respark and was therefore in defiance of Code 04 and a thoroughly ticketable vehicle.

He reached down for his Sanderson Huskie computer, the wizard device that has given the parkie the whip hand over the motorist. Eric started to record the time, place, and exact dereliction of a Pajero station wagon, licence plate L8 AG41N.

But now a woman was running back down the pavement towards him. She had a kid in tow, with a satchel and a blazer, and she wore an expression of tragic supplication.

‘Oh please,’ she wailed.

She was dressed with terrific chic. She had long blonde hair, dark eyebrows, a tight black T-shirt over a willowy figure and a belt made out of copper plates. It was hard to believe she could be the mother of a ten-year-old.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said and continued to tap.

‘I’ll be literally THREE minutes.’

‘It is not for me to say. It is de rule.’ Eric had caught a glimpse of himself in the smoked Pajero pane, and he knew what she was looking at: six foot two of anthracite handsomeness and power, as richly accoutred with high technology as an American infantryman. He had a smart peaked cap with the cap-badge of the council; he had metallic silver numbers on his epaulettes. He carried a TDS Huskie minicomputer. He had a two-way T8 288 Motorola radio. He had a Radix FP40 printer, ready to discharge his literary efforts, and he was about to print the ticket now.

‘Oh please,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to drop him off at school, and he’s got an exam.’

Eric smiled. ‘What kind of exam?’

‘It’s a maths exam, isn’t it, darling? Oh please, he’s going to be late.’

‘I don’t care,’ said the child.

‘Oh darling.’

Eric approved of maths exams. A cadet branch of Eric’s family had made a great deal of money by scamming arithmetically untalented Europeans, and he was generally in favour of encouraging our children to better themselves.

‘Just one minute,’ wheedled the woman.

The parkie considered. Many traffic wardens are traumatized by the verbals, as they are called, COON, NIGGER, MONKEY, APE.

Those were some of the names Eric had been called, shorn of their participial expletives.

IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF POWER? WHY DON’T YOU GET A BETTER JOB? These were some of the questions he was asked.

Faced with such disgusting behaviour, some traffic wardens respond with a merciless taciturnity. The louder the rant of the traffic offenders, the more acute are the wardens’ feelings of pleasure that they, the stakeless, the outcasts, the niggers, are a valued part of the empire of law, and in a position to chastise the arrogance and selfishness of the indigenous people.

Eric was unusual in that he liked sometimes – every once in a while – to show mercy, as befitted his kingly lineage. The scars on his cheeks denoted that he was a prince of the royal blood in the Hausa tribe, and it was only the evil of primogeniture that debarred him from substantial estates outside Lagos.

Sometimes he would exercise clemency, if he were offered a really rococo excuse, as a bored tutor will indulge a crapulous undergraduate if his reason for missing a class is truly bizarre and degenerate. Sometimes, as today, he could be moved by the appeal of a damn good-looking woman. But today he had a peculiar reason of his own for not wanting to prolong the conversation.

The night before Mrs Onyeama had been very good to him. She had made him his favourite meal, a chicken Kiev with a kind of special West African garlic called kulu, rather like the North American ramps, and he had slept well on it. But he knew from experience that Mrs Onyeama’s chicken Kievs had an amazing effect on the digestive system. There was nothing normally detectable, but from time to time the kraken would wake, and then a globule of air would force itself up the oesophagus and press on the palate … until he was obliged to let it go.

It had happened to him at a wedding party recently. He had been telling a joke, and he came to the punchline, and everyone was crowded around him, like maternity unit staff, waiting for the birth of the joke, and he had suddenly felt – whup – this thing come out of him, involuntarily, rather like the thing in Alien coming out of John Hurt. His audience had reacted in much the same way as the characters in the movie.

So he beamed at her, without a word.

‘Mmm-hmmm,’ he murmured, and put down the Huskie.

‘Really?’ She couldn’t believe it.

‘Mmmmbmm.’

She gushed her thanks and was gone. And it was therefore with a faint sense of a hunter-gatherer who has missed one easy kill that he turned into Tufton Street, for the second time that morning.

He could hardly believe his eyes. It was still there.

It was the big one, el gordo. This was the white whale, and he was Ahab.

It had been there, to his certain knowledge, for half an hour, and probably far longer. The ambulance was on a single yellow. That was a Code 01 offence, and it was on the footway – that was Code 62. But what made it a légitimate target, in Eric’s view, was that it was blocking the thoroughfare, in the sense that two cars could certainly not pass abreast.

It was not true – as the tabloids hinted – that he received a bounty for every car he successfully caused to be plucked from the streets. But it certainly was true that he received bonuses for ‘productivity’, and productivity was measured – well, how else could it be measured?

Eric and Naaotwa Onyeama were ambitious for their children, and on the televised urgings of Carol Vorderman they were currently investing in a series of expensive ‘Kumon’ maths text books. Since Eric Onyeama only made £340 per week, working from 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., this was not an opportunity he could responsibly pass up.

He reached for his Motorola and summoned the clampers. Then, since there could be no question of the vehicle staying where it was, he rang the tow-truck company.

Hee hee hee, chortled Eric, and he laughed at the multiple pleasures of the morning.

He knew all the tow-truck men, and Dragan Panic, the Serb, was the hungriest of the lot. Unless the mysterious crew of this ambulance returned within five minutes, the vehicle was a goner.

In the Tivoli café on the corner of Great Peter Street and Marsham Street three men and a kid of about nineteen were coming to the end of breakfast. The restaurant was non-posh to the point of affectation. Up the nostrils of its diners rose the tang of vinegar, mothering in its bottle, mingling with the ammoniacal vapours that hummed from the cloth that was used to wipe the Formica.

But the four dark customers had done well. They had eaten a meal of Henrician proportions: eggs, beans, chips, chops, schnitzels, steaks. The proprietor was amazed, especially considering it was not yet nine in the morning.

They had swallowed draughts of milkless tea, turned into a kind of sugary quicksand, and then they had eaten the Danish pastry and the doughnuts, ancient thickly iced things that had been in the display so long he had feared he would have to reduce the price.

They had eaten, in fact, as if there were no tomorrow; but today their mortal frames required relief. Owing to their eccentric bivouac they had been unable to pass water all night.

‘Quickly,’ said the one called Jones, coming back from the toilets. ‘The traffic wardens will be here.’ There was certainly something lilting and eastern about his accent; but if you shut your eyes and ignored his brown skin, there were tonic effects – birdlike variations in pitch – that were positively Welsh.

‘I must go too,’ said one of his colleagues, who had a moustache.

‘Well, hurry, God help us.’

Haroun scowled. It was obviously inequitable for their leader so to privilege his own requirements, but no doubt he was under pressure.

‘Sir, please can I go?’

It was the kid. ‘Quickly, Dean,’ said the man called Jones.

There was only one toilet, identified by a pictogram on the door, of a Regency buck and a crinolined dame, to show it was for the use of both sexes, and by an unspoken agreement Dean went in first.

Full though his bladder was after a night of appalling discomfort on a stretcher in that airless vehicle, he found he was trembling too much.

‘What is going on?’ hissed the man called Jones.

‘What are you doing in there?’ Haroun banged on the door and Dean felt that any hope of micturition was gone. He respected Jones, but he was seriously frightened of Haroun, who had the pale blue eyes and tiny black pupils of a staring seagull.

Jones saw a traffic warden pass the window. Their researches had already established that the wardens around here were sticklers, and he had a sense of impending disaster.

He ran out and round the corner. He stood still. He shut his eyes. He clenched his fists.

‘Nooo,’ he called. ‘Stop it, you!’

Already a clamp had appeared on the right-hand front wheel of the ambulance, a green clamp, moronic, infernal. He swore in Arabic.

Hmar. Jackass.

Yebnen kelp. Son of a bitch.

Hee hee hee, chortled Eric Onyeama.

Jones ran back into the Tivoli and rounded up his men. By now only Haroun had failed to make use of the facilities.

‘Come,’ said Jones.

‘I must just go …’ said Haroun, but such was the power of Jones, and so contemptuous was the expression in his eyes that Haroun followed him like a lamb and Jones ran back into the sunlight.

And now he couldn’t believe it … He couldn’t flipping well believe it. Surely he had been gone only seconds, and now the clamp had gone but the ambulance was being hoisted up into a kind of hammock by a hydraulic lift, and the parkie was standing there, still scribing zealously away into his Huskie computer.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ recited Eric, ‘but once all four wheels are off the ground, you have lost control of the vehicle. It is now the responsibility of Westminster City Council.’

Jones waved the keys. ‘But it is ours. Put it down.’

‘All the craps are on,’ said Eric.

‘The craps?’

‘Yessir, these are the craps. The metal craps.’

‘You mean the crabs.’

‘That is right, sir, they are the craps.’

Jones gave up. ‘Did you say all four wheels?’

‘Yes, that is correct, sir. Now that all four wheels are off the ground, it is the law that you no longer have any control over this vehicle.’

This was a big ambulance. Fully laden it weighed not far short of three and a half tonnes, with a 3.5 litre Rover V8 engine and bulky aluminium chassis, so that it was already astonishing that the tow-truck had been able to hoist it.

At that moment Jones had an inspiration. It was technically true that the wheels were off the ground. But the front pair were only a few inches up.

‘What about now?’ asked Jones. He and Haroun jumped on the bonnet of the Leyland Daf vehicle, painted with a blue star and caduceus, and it sunk its nose until the front offside wheel brushed the ground.

‘See!’ shouted Jones. ‘Now it is ours again!’

CHAPTER THREE

0832 HRS

‘Whose ambulance did you say it was?’ asked Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, who was, today, in charge of anti-terrorist and security operations throughout the Metropolis.

Grover entered the room with an air of satisfaction. ‘What did I tell you? We’ve got it. An ambulance from the Bilston and Willenhall NHS Trust was seen at the Travelodge in Dunstable at one a.m.’

‘Good. And it’s still there, is it?’

‘Er, no. It left.’

‘Aha.’

‘We’re on the case.’

A second later, he was back again. ‘I’ve got Bluett on the line.’

The two London policemen looked at each other. They knew – or strongly suspected – that the Americans were tuning in to their frequencies.

‘Put him through,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

He listened with half-closed eyes to the American’s demands.

‘You want a sniper on the roof of the Commons? What did you say his name was?’ On a piece of headed notepaper Purnell printed ‘PICKLE’. Then he crossed it out and wrote ‘PICKEL’.

‘I see, yes,’ he said, ‘I see, yes.’

He listened some more, and then said: ‘Well, I can understand if the First Lady is a bit anxious but … Right you are. Colonel … Okeycokey, chum. Yep. See you later, I expect … No, no, everything else is, um, fine. We have no evidence of anything, you know, untoward.’

He disconnected with a groan.

‘They want a sniper on the roof of the Commons, above New Palace Yard. I’ve said we’ll oblige. Someone answering to this name will be presenting himself in a few minutes. Whatever happens, I am not having him sitting up there alone.’

He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘And I want the choppers to start scanning Westminster for this flaming ambulance.’

High above Soho a Metropolitan Police Twin Squirrel Eurocopter AS 355N banked and turned down Shaftesbury Avenue.

It passed directly over the head of Roger Barlow, who looked up and felt vaguely resentful. Why did they hover in that threatening way over innocent streets? It was like some dreary lefty movie about Thatcher’s Britain.

Then he continued to thread his way through the cars. That’s what he loved about bicycles: the autonomy, the ability to put your wheel wherever you chose. As you looked over the handlebars you could see your front tyre as a snub-nosed cylinder, nosing at will down the open streets of London. He passed an Evening Standard hoarding, announcing full coverage of the state visit.

Uh-oh. The Standard. He had forgotten about the Standard. How would he stop his wife seeing that one?

The traffic was getting heavier. Now he understood. It was the exclusion zone. The American security people had insisted on a total ban on traffic in the area to be honoured by their presence, and the result was that a freeborn Englishman could not even move down the Queen’s highway.

‘Strewth,’ he cursed, and used a disabled ramp to mount the pavement. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but there you go. In any case, his political career might be over by tomorrow morning.

Then he was back on the road again, watching the shimmer starting to rise from the hot bonnets of the backed-up traffic, and thugga thugga whok whok the helicopter was ceasing to impinge on his consciousness.

CHAPTER FOUR

0833 HRS

In the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter the two sun-goggled officers peered into the hot canyons and smoking wadis of the city. ‘So who’s meant to be driving this ambulance?’ said the pilot, as they passed over Trafalgar Square and made for the river. ‘He’s called Jones,’ said Grover from New Scotland Yard.

‘Jones? What’s he look like?’

‘Kind of Arab-type thing.’

Hundreds of miles away, at Fylingdales in Yorkshire, the word Arab triggered an automatic alert in the huge golfball-shaped American listening post, and within seconds the conversation was being monitored in Langley, Virginia.

The pilot continued: ‘That’s all we know: that he’s a kind of Arab called Jones?’

‘That, and he’s on the CIA’s most wanted list. His father was a gynaecologist in Karachi who was struck off for some reason. He knows a lot about explosives and is a serious wacko. That’s what we know about Jones …’

Who at that moment was sliding with Haroun off the bonnet of the ambulance and on to Tufton Street, as the vehicle was jerked up into the air.

Dragan Panic was standing by his Renault 150 authorized removal unit, twiddling the vertical line of six hydraulic knobs, and grinning. It was always fun when they went doolally.

One chap had leapt aboard his Porsche Cayenne, manacled to the truck, and put it into reverse.

He took it up to about 7,000 revs, smoke pouring everywhere, as the Bavarian beast struggled to escape the gin. There had been a bang and a fresh convexity appeared in the gleaming black bonnet, like a rat in a rubbish sack. That HAD been gratifying.

Jones decided to take a different tack with the traffic warden. He made the obvious point.

‘But we are ambulance men.’

The parkie looked at him.

That was just it. He had watched the vehicle like a tethered goat. He had seen the men get out, leaving it parked in a disgracefully dangerous position.

He had seen them shamble into the Tivoli for breakfast. He didn’t believe for one minute that they were ambulance men. They were the first ambulance men he had ever seen in scruffy old T-shirts and jeans, and he didn’t see why they should be in possession of an ambulance belonging to the Bilston and Willenhall NHS Trust.

‘Please, let us pay now.’

‘No, you must come to the pound.’

‘Why?’

‘You must establish that the vehicle is yours.’

‘But I have lost the papers.’

‘Then you must come to the pound.’

The man called Jones went to the cabin of the ambulance and rootled in the glove box. He came back with a brick of cash, like the wodge the winner has at the end of a game of Monopoly, or what you get for a fiver in Zimbabwean dollars. Eric frowned and pretended to study his Huskie.

‘Please do not force me to beg,’ said Jones.

‘I ain’t forcing you to beg, sir.’

‘My sister is pregnant.’

With every second that passed, Eric was surer that he had done the right thing. Now if they had said that they were taking the Duke of Edinburgh on a secret assignation with a nurse from St Thomas’s hospital, that would have been one thing.

If they had said that they had a freshly excised human liver on board, and that it needed to be transferred in ten minutes to a terminally alcoholic football player, or if they had claimed to be part of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorist unit, they would have appealed to his imagination.

But to say that his sister was pregnant – that was sorry stuff. He looked at the four of them. He noticed that the youngest one was staring at him in a funny way, as if terrified.

Am I really so frightening? wondered Eric Onyeama, king of the kerb. He continued to tap into the Huskie.

‘L64896P’, ‘Tufton Street’, ‘02, 62’ … The details were soon pinged into space, and stored in irrefutable perpetuity in the Apcoa computers. Somewhere in cyberspace the electronic data began to team up with other groups of electrons; in less than half a second they were having a vast symposium of sub-atomic particles, and among the preliminary conclusions would be that the vehicle was from Wolverhampton.

He looked up again, and saw the kindlier-looking one, Habib, who was cleaning his teeth with a carved juniper twig. But where was the other one?

Haroun had vanished.

He had stolen inside the machine and he was searching for something.

He knocked aside a cervical collar-set. He brushed a mouth-to-mouth ventilator to the floor. Ha, he thought to himself. This would unquestionably do the job, he decided. He extracted the prong of a pericardial puncture kit, and tested its needle point on his finger.

CHAPTER FIVE

0835 HRS

‘Looks like a killer,’ said Purnell. He gave a small shudder as he looked at the file on Haroun Abu Zahra, a slim docket. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘Not a lot,’ said Grover, ‘but the Yanks are pretty keen on talking to him as well. There is one thing, though.’ He paused, as all subordinates will when they are keen to emphasize some tiny advance.

‘Our lads were talking to the Travelodge, and they said there was something most peculiar about their room.’

‘After they’d left?’

‘Yeah. There’s a picture by some posh artist on the wall, of a naked girl, you know, a print.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Tits out, very tasteful and all.’

‘Go on.’

‘And they had turned it to the wall. Twenty minutes later they checked out.’

‘Wackos.’

The phone went in the outer room. They both knew it was Bluett.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell looked at the clock on the wall.

‘They’ll be on their way, won’t they?’

‘No way of stopping them now,’ said Grover.

No fewer than fifteen BMW 750 police motorcycles were engaged in sheepdogging the traffic out of the way of the slowly oncoming cavalcade.

Now they were approaching Junction 4 for West Drayton and Heathrow, and seeing the signs the President looked over to his right.

He tried to spot the two Boeing 747-700s, painted in the eggshell blue livery of the President of the United States; but no sign. Perhaps they had been tactfully concealed in a hangar.

After the airport the wailing host of outriders and motorbike voortrekkers took the red route that runs from Heathrow to London. They shovelled the taxis aside and cowed the cursing commuters.

One woman tried to see into the tint-windowed limos and crashed her Nissan Micra into the back of an expensive but vulnerable Alfa 164. The ensuing delay added an average of fifteen minutes to the journeys of more than 1,000 motorists.

As the traffic thickened down the Charing Cross Road, it occurred to Roger that this security business would be no joke. What if he couldn’t even get into his office?

Cameron. That was the answer.

Cameron would have all the passes necessary.

He reached into his breast pocket for his mobile, since he was all in favour of using his bike as his office.

Damn. Oh yes. He’d thrown it away the other day when it rang at the wrong moment. Straight out of the car window, as it happened, on the M25, landing safely in some buddleias in the central reservation.

He negotiated the Palio of Trafalgar Square and howled round into Whitehall. And here it was.

A fence. Ribbons of aluminium fences, and policemen in fluorescent yellow, sprouting like dandelions in the grey of the stone and the tarmac, and the whok-whok-whok of a helicopter in the distance.

‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to dismount.’

‘But I’m a Member of Parliament.’

The policeman looked at him with open disgust.

‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Sheba, sir.’

And so it went on as Roger was shunted in a ludicrous arc westwards of the place to which his electors had sent him. Every time he attempted to penetrate the cordon of fencing he was sent off again in search of some mythical entry point.

‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t take your bike through here.’

At one point, to his shame, he snapped at the men in blue.

‘What’s wrong with my bike?’

‘It’s a lethal weapon, sir.’

‘You can say that again. It’s almost killed me several times.’

‘Now don’t try to be funny, sir. I’ve seen these things packed with explosives. I’ve seen what they can do. Look, I know it’s annoying, sir,’ said the copper, seeing his expression, ‘but please try to bear with us. We’re all doing our best, but the whole caboodle has been agreed with the Americans.’

And so Roger Barlow tacked ever round and west, until he found himself in Pimlico and puffing up Tufton Street.

Where he saw Dragan Panic standing by the tiplift of his Renault 150, heaving some large white vehicle aboard.

‘Come on, droogie moi, come on, my friend,’ said Dragan to himself in Serbo-Croat.

In theory the Renault could lift 4,450 kilos, but the hydraulics were puffing a bit and the stabilizing rods were biting into the tarmac the way a heart attack victim clutches his chest.

Dragan wanted to take this bleeding ambulance, and then he wanted to scarper. Personally, he thought Eric the parkie was mad.

OK, so it was dangerously parked. But you didn’t lift an ambulance. Nah, not an ambulance. Since fleeing Pristina in 1999 Dragan had slotted in nicely in the East End. His knuckles were richly scabbed and crusted with doubloons, and he dressed in trackie bums. At Christmas he sold Christmas trees on the street corner, thumping his mittened hands together. He did a bit of gamekeeping for some toffs out in Essex, place called Rayleigh, and he did like a high bird.

But lifting an ambulance – well, it was like shooting a white pheasant, wasn’t it? He wasn’t on for that. And above all he didn’t like being in the company of Muslims. That wasn’t just because he was a Serb killer from Pristina, and a former member of Arkan’s Tigers.

It was also because he was as big a coward as ever set fire to a Muslim hayrick in the dark, and experience had taught him that you had to keep an eye on the sneaky bastards. Speaking of which …

A couple of them seemed to have vanished. Now there was just the young kid and the spooky-looking fellow, and the parkie taking his time.

CHAPTER SIX

0837 HRS

Eric Onyeama was struggling with the urge not to burp.

This man was rude, and Eric had to maintain his poise and dignity. It was impossible to do this while burping.

‘Please … Oh you bastard,’ said the man called Jones. ‘Just do what I say or I’ll …’

‘I must warn you that it is the policy of our company to take legal action against anybody who uses the verbal or physical ab—’

As when scuba divers find a pocket of stale air in a sunken submarine, and the bubble rises to the surface in a distended globule, so the garlic vapours were released from Eric’s stomach.

‘Abuu—’

They passed in a gaseous bolus through his oesophagus, and slid out invisibly through the barrier of his teeth.

‘Abuse,’ he said, and a look of mystification, and then horror passed over the face of the man called Jones. He staggered back.

Ah yes, thought Roger Barlow, a classic scene of our modern vibrant multicultural society, a group of asylum seekers in dispute with a Nigerian traffic warden.

Poor bleeders, he thought. What were they? Albanians, Kosovars, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Martians? Now their day was wrecked. They would have to find the thick end of £200 just to spring their motor. How many windscreens would they have to wash to earn that back?

He composed a sorrowful speech in his head, to the effect that the law was cruel, but that its essence was impartiality. Hang about, he said to himself as he drew nearer. That’s bonkers. They can’t take an ambulance.

Barlow rescues ambulance, he said to himself reflexively. Have-a-go hero MP in mercy dash. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Mr Barlow last night. The Mail asks: Has the world gone mad? He was thinking Newsroom Southeast, he was thinking Littlejohn. He was thinking Big Stuff. Well, this was a story, all right. That should get that awful Debbie woman off his back.

He saw the traffic warden say something to the olive-skinned man, and the olive-skinned man reeled; and no wonder he reeled, poor dutiful fellow. He could imagine that they were already late for a mission.

Across London, the mere act of getting up was taking a terrible toll. People were braining themselves in the shower, slicing their nostrils with Bic razors, brushing their teeth with their children’s poisonous Quinoderm acne cream, sustaining cardiac infarcts at finding themselves misreported in the paper – and where was the ambulance?

It was outrageous! Roger braked and spoke in the mellow bedside tones of the MP’s surgery.

CHAPTER SEVEN

0839 HRS

‘Excuse me. I wonder if I can help.’

The traffic warden smiled bashfully. ‘It’s OK, sir, we do not need any help here. De law is de law.’

‘I know it’s none of my business, but are you seriously going to remove that ambulance?’

‘Please, sir, do not get involved. I cannot make de rules. I can only enfoooo – oo excuse me, I can only enforce them.’

Barlow blinked as he was engulfed. ‘But this is absurd,’ he said, turning to the victims. ‘I know this shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said superbly, ‘but I am an MP.’

For the first time the olive-skinned man faced the MP. His passport said his name was Jones, and that he had been born in Mold, Clwyd. Though it was true that he was currently a student at an institution implausibly called Llangollen University, these biographical details seemed unlikely.

Roger Barlow noticed something about his eyes. They had a kind of wobble. It was as though he was watching a very close-up game of ping-pong.

‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘Piss off and die.’

‘Eh?’ Barlow gasped.

‘Not necessarily in that order,’ said Jones.

Barlow looked for guidance to the warden. There was something badly out of whack here. When all was said and done, were they not, he and the warden, part of the same team?

He made the law, the warden enforced it. They were like two china dogs, bracketing the sacred texts of statute.

‘I’m sorry … ?’ he said, pathetically.

Tee hee hee, sniggered Eric Onyeama, and shook his head at the busybody. He felt sure he had seen dis man before, maybe in church, or at a meeting of parents and teachers. But if Roger was looking for an ally now, he was out of luck.

‘De man is right,’ he said. ‘You must go away.’ And Roger did. For once he felt he could have made a difference. He could have improved things here. He cycled on. Was it getting hotter, or was that the sweat of embarrassment?

That man told me to piss off, he told himself. And die, too. He wondered whether anyone had seen his humiliation.

Had Barlow not been so mortified, he might have seen Haroun issue from the side of the van and pass something to Jones. The leader of the gang of four now looked at his watch and decided it was time to bring matters to a close.

‘Please be so kind as to put the ambulance down now, and stop this damnfoolery.’

Hey dere, said Eric to himself. The Huskie was chirruping back to him.

I knew it, he thought. The ambulance had been reported stolen last night, from Dymock Street, Wolverhampton.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Jones’s voice had an evil snit to it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Eric, thinking fast, ‘but you must come with me to the pound.’

‘I’m going to ask you one last time: give us back our vehicle.’

‘You have broken de law.’

‘No,’ sneered Jones: ‘you broke de fucking law. You lifted the thing off the ground while we were here.’

‘I am sorry, but that is wrong.’

‘You IDIOT! Tell him to put the ambulance down. Tell him to do it now.’

In defence of its parking attendants, men and women who must put up with some of the worst abuse known to this coarsened, selfish and irresponsible age, Westminster Council gives them cameras.

These are used not just to record the offence, but also to deter the protesting traffic offender just as he is about to bust a blood vessel or commit a common assault. Now Eric took out his Sony DSU-30 digital camera, and left the Huskie hanging by his neck. As he was doing this Haroun was creeping unseen up the side of the tow-truck.

In his hand he held a nasty-looking piece of medical equipment which was, did he but know it, a thorax draining kit. The man called Jones began to swear – never a good sign for those who had dealings with this horrid person.

‘Omak zanya fee erd.’ Your mother committed adultery with a donkey.

‘I am sorry?’ beamed Eric, who had decided to call the police.

‘Yen ‘aal deen ommak!’ barked Jones. Damn your mother’s rooster – a deadlier insult than you might think, if only to an Arab.

‘What for do you need an ambulance anyway?’ asked Eric, and he took a couple of quick shots of Jones: billhook nose, grubby neck, short grey-flecked hair and peculiar eyes.

‘It is for the disabled,’ said Jones.

‘Who are the disabled?’

Haroun tiptoed round the front of the Renault and prepared to lunge at Dragan Panic.

‘I don’t see a disabled person anywhere,’ repeated Eric. ‘Show me the disabled person.’

‘Here is the disabled person,’ said Jones.

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

The last noise Eric heard before he fainted with shock was the ripping of his own pericardium as it was punctured by the pericardial puncture unit. Then there was a scraping noise as the spike hit something hard that might have been bone.

‘Help me,’ shouted Jones to Dean, the nineteen-year-old, as he caught the falling warden.

Dean watched, mouth agape, as his boss buckled under the weight; and then leapt forward to help him arrange the traffic warden in the gutter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

0841 HRS

Dragan the Serb had been weaned on tales of heroic assassination and glorious betrayal. From the Battle of Kosovo Pole onwards, Serbs have learned to glory in a sense of victimhood. But today he decided to give the national myth a miss.

He pushed away Haroun and his spike, and thudded off, weaving and shoulders hunched, as though with every yard he expected a bullet in his back from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He sprinted from the Muslim extremists, down Tufton Street, past the (former) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, and turned on to Great Peter Street. He weaved one way, he ducked the other.

Haroun watched him go.

‘Leave him,’ called Jones. ‘We have no time.’

Dean already felt he had good reason to be admiring of Jones, but he was amazed at the self-possession with which his boss now began to unload the ambulance from the tow-truck.

‘Whoa,’ he called, as the telescopic arm of the crane jerked into life, and the vehicle was thrust out into the street.

The arm was powered by three separate hydraulic lifts, the first capable of carrying 2,500 kilos, the second 1,700 kilos and the third 1,300 kilos; and in theory they were well capable of lifting a three-and-a-half-tonne ambulance.

But Jones was in such a hurry that he neglected the basic laws of physics.

‘Hey!’ said Dean, as the white machine was swung out over the street, like some mad mediaeval siege engine.

Haroun gave a curse – something nasty about a dog. Dean guessed – and even Habib broke off from flossing with his juniper twig.

‘Yow need to come back a bit,’ shouted Dean over the roar of the Renault engine.

The front wheels of the tow-truck were now on the verge of leaving the ground; black smoke was coming from the exhaust; the whole thing was about to keel over, and Dean instinctively ran to drag the body of Eric the warden out of the way.

‘It is fine, it is fine,’ shouted Jones, and flipped the next toggle, so that their stolen machine crashed back towards them and bust a taillight on the bed of the tow-truck.

‘Do it like this,’ called Habib quietly in Arabic. Habib was also called Freddie, and came from a good Lebanese family. He was a Takfiri, a man who masked the ferocity of his faith with a sympathetic worldliness; and he had spent enough time in gambling houses to understand the principles of the grabby machines you use to pick up a watch or a fluffy toy.

Together, and with what Dean thought was remarkable coolness, he and Jones worked out how to ease in the last extender arm and, in hydraulic pants, the van was lowered to the ground.

With the speed of Formula One pitstopmen they now undid the metal crabs and hessian straps, bunged them on the back of the tow-truck, and loaded poor Eric in the back of the ambulance.

Haroun paused only to read the sign on the side of the Renault.

‘How ees my driving?’ he said, and laughed, a horrible carking yelp.

It says something for the tranquillity that has descended on the Church of England that no one else observed these events outside Church House.

No one took any notice of them as they drove in full conformity with the laws of the road – apart from the taillight – in the direction of the Palace of Westminster.

They began thereby to catch up with Roger Barlow, who was waiting with his bike at a red traffic light, as all good lawmakers must.

CHAPTER NINE

0843 HRS

Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected. The sun would still, at the appointed date four billion years hence, expand to the girth of a red giant and devour the planet. In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail. The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behaviour of his brief human avatar.

It wasn’t the sex comedy side of things. It wasn’t the waste of money, the cash that should have gone into Weetabix and plastic guns for shooting him in bed.

It was the gullibility – that was what worried him.

Should he wait for the papers to present this appalling Hieronymus Bosch version of his life? Or should he try to give his account first, and thereby win points for frankness?

Hang on a tick: there was a colleague. Swishing down the pavement, hair cut by Trumpers, suit cut by Savile Row – it was Adrian (Ziggy) Roberts. Bright. Forceful. Decisive. Very far from completely unbearable; in fact, by any standards really rather nice.

Roger conceived a desire to talk to him, not least because he could see under his arm the early edition of the Evening Standard.

‘Ziggy, old man,’ called Roger Barlow, kerb-crawling on his bike.

‘Hombre!’ replied Ziggy.

‘You going to this Westminster Hall business?’

‘God no,’ said Ziggy, who had benefited from the most expensive education England can provide. ‘Can’t be arsed.’

Roger felt welling up in himself the urge to confide in a friend. A problem shared, he whispered to himself, is a problem halved.

‘Can I ask you something, Zigs?’

‘Of course.’

Roger looked at his colleague, his high, clear forehead, his myriad certainties. On second thoughts, no.

Ziggy counted as a friend, but it was, in the end, your friends who did you in. And quite right, too. That was what friends were for.

‘That posh suit,’ said Barlow. ‘Just tell me roughly how much.’ But Ziggy’s answer was lost in the noise of the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter. Blimey, thought Barlow: this was worse than the helicopter paranoia scene in Goodfellas.

‘Wait a sec,’ said the co-pilot of the chopper, as they bullocked over towards the Embankment. He craned backwards the way they had come, and the City of Westminster – touching in its majesty – was reflected in the black visor of his helmet.

‘I just realized …’

‘Say again?’ yodelled the pilot into the mike on his chin.

‘I think we just flew over it. It was on a tow-truck. I didn’t really take it in …’

‘On a tow-truck?’

‘Yeah, you know, a council truck.’

‘Bollocks,’ said the pilot. ‘No one lifts an ambulance.’

‘Go on, it’ll take thirty seconds. Just back there in that little street near Marsham Street.’

The pilot sighed and turned the joystick. ‘Well,’ he said a little later. ‘There’s your tow-truck, but I don’t see any ambulance.’

The co-pilot stared. It may have been unusual for an ambulance to be hoisted, but it was positively unheard of for a vehicle of any kind to escape the clutches of a tow-truck operator.

‘Where’s the driver, anyway?’ he asked himself.

Here, thought Dragan Panic. Down here! Look this way!

For a couple of seconds he jumped up and down, waving and staring at the police helicopter until his eyeballs began to ache from the glare.

No use. They couldn’t see him.

Dragan had a pretty good idea what he had witnessed: the shambolic beginning of something that might end with eternal loss and heartache for thousands of families. He had read about the idiotic punch-up outside Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11 itself, when the Islamic headcases left their maps and their Koran and their flight manuals in the stolen hire car. But mere incompetence was no guarantee of failure, as he knew from his own soldiering.

Dragan looked down towards Marsham Street. He saw a building site; he saw men in yellow hats and muddy boots. Tough men, who could help.

He was older and fatter than he had been as a purple-pyjamaed Serb MUP man, and he was soaked with sweat; and though he had absolutely no reason to love the United States, not after what they had done to Serbia, he stamped and grunted as fast as his Reeboks would carry him.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Help, please!’

Dark faces looked up.

Dragan put his hands on his knees in exhaustion, and began to explain to the immigrant builders that there was a plot against America.

CHAPTER TEN

0844 HRS

‘I’m starting to think we should warn the Yanks,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

‘You mean about the ambulance?’ said Grover. ‘What makes you think they don’t know already?’

But when Purnell came to dial Bluett he once again found himself changing his mind. Why raise the temperature?

He cleared his throat when Bluett picked up, and was on the point of improvising some excuse when the American cut in.

‘Mr Deputy Commissioner, we have a problem.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Purnell, ‘I know. I mean, what problem?’

‘We got reports of helicopter activity right over the cavalcade route, and the Black Hawk needs to go that way.’

‘…’ said Purnell.

‘We need that Black Hawk in the aerial vicinity at all times, and neither of us wants a mid-air collision.’

Purnell found his eyes closing, and he listened some more.

‘Unbelievable,’ he told Grover, when the conversation was over. ‘We’ve got just over an hour till the President starts speaking, and the Americans are fussing about the French Ambassador’s girlfriend. They say they don’t want her in the hall.

‘And tell the boys in the chopper to clear out of the way, would you?’

The trouble with today, thought Purnell, was that if something did go wrong, no one could say they hadn’t been warned.

BOMB SCARE HITS LONDON read Roger Barlow, continuing to steal shifty looks at Ziggy’s Standard; and then page after page about the state visit.

Of course there was nothing about him. He felt like laughing at his own egocentricity.

There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction, just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed. Maybe he wasn’t a genuine akratic. Maybe it would be more accurate to say he had a thanatos urge. By this time next week, he thought, there would be nothing left for him to do but go on daytime TV shows. Perhaps in ten years’ time he might be sufficiently rehabilitated to be offered the part of Widow Twanky at the Salvation Army hall in Horsham.

‘Catch you round, then,’ said Barlow to Ziggy.

‘Ciao-ciao,’ called Ziggy, the man of efficiency and ambition. He flashed his pink ‘P’ form, and was admitted to the security bubble.

For the eighth time that morning, Barlow presented his bike for inspection by the authorities.

Roadblock was too modest a word for the Atlantic wall of concrete that the anti-terrorist mob had put in Parliament Square. Each lithon of black-painted aggregate was packed with steel and designed to withstand 83 newtons of force, or a suicide ram-raid with a Chieftain tank.

There was a gap through which cars were being admitted in drips, but all cycles were being stopped.

‘Whoa there, sir,’ said a sixteen-and-a-half-stone American man with a kind of transparent plastic Curly-Wurly coming out of his ear and disappearing into his collar. ‘How are we today?’

‘We’re fine,’ said Barlow shortly.

‘I can’t let you through without a pink pass with the letter P.’ Barlow had grown up in the Cold War, and when at school he had read Thucydides. It had been obvious to him that America was the modern Athens – energetic, pluralistic, the guarantor of democracy and freedom; and therefore infinitely to be preferred to the Soviet Union, closed, nasty, militaristic, the modern Sparta. But now, on being intercepted by an enormous Kansan, just feet away from the statue of Winston Churchill, he felt his gorge rise. His eyes prickled with irritation. ‘I am a Member of Parliament.

‘Oh, damn it all,’ he added; though as luck would have it his curse was lost in the noise of the Metropolitan Police Twin Squirrel swinging high and away towards Victoria.

Had he looked 200 feet behind him, he would have seen the ambulance come to a halt in the queue for the very same traffic lights-cum-checkpoint.

Sitting at the wheel, Jones swore. Any minute now the cavalcade would be upon them. He looked at the Americans, checking each vehicle with glacial deliberation, and checked his watch.

‘Aire fe Mabda’ak,’ he said, which means ‘My cock in your principles’.

The cavalcade was now approximately twenty-seven minutes away from Parliament Square. Apart from the outriders, it consisted of thirty black vehicles, a mobile operating theatre complete with the appropriate blood supplies and a specially adapted Black Hawk helicopter in a continuous hover, intended to snatch the principals in the event of an ambush. The two ‘permanent protectees’, as they were known to the 950 American agents in London, were in a Cadillac De Ville so fortified it was a wonder it could move. The armour plating was five inches thick and designed to withstand direct fire from a bazooka or a mine placed beneath it. There was a tea-cosy of armour around the battery, the radiator and the engine block, to minimize the risk of the fuel catching fire. The glass was three inches of polycarbonate laminate and instead of allowing the driver simply to look through the windshield, an infra-red camera scanned the heat signature of all the objects in the path of the car, and projected an image on the inside of the windscreen. But move the Cadillac did, though at something less than the US speed limit.

Permanent Protectee number one shuffled the papers of his speech and touched the hand of Permanent Protectee number two. It was an insane way to travel, but kind of fun. The cavalcade mounted the ramparted expressway at the end of the M4, and West London was spread out beneath them in the morning sun, like a beautiful woman surprised in bed without her make-up.

‘Gee,’ said the second Permanent Protectee, ‘ain’t that something?’

She smiled at her husband, but secretly she was worried. She had been reading the papers; she knew about the abortive raids on the Islamist cells. That was why she had furtively telephoned Colonel Bluett and begged him to take extra precautions.

Bluett had been frankly amazed, but also pleased to be made her confidant.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Never mind what the Brits say: that place is gonna be full of my people. I mean some of our top men.’

As the cavalcade began to crawl the last nine miles of its journey, a hatch was opening on the roof of the east wing of the Palace of Westminster, in the cool shadow of Big Ben. Out scrambled the sizeable figure of Lieutenant Jason Pickel.

He stood for a moment on the duckboards, 120 feet above New Palace Yard, listening to the honking of horns down the Embankment, the protesters bleating to each other, like ewes in some distant fold. He held out his hand and squinted at it.

‘Man oh man,’ he said to himself. He stopped the tremor by gripping his sniper’s rifle, and walked on down the duckboard until he found a point of vantage.

‘Are you all right, Jason?’ asked Sergeant Indira Nath, who had followed him up. Indira had been specifically deputed to stay with Pickel, on the orders of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell.

Not that the British cops had any reason to think of Pickel as a risk. It was just that if they were going to have a Yank sharpshooter on the east wing roof – and Bluett was very keen – then there was damn well going to be a Brit to accompany him.

Indira was from the SO 19 Firearms Unit. She had huge eyes, rosy lips, and tiny, delicate hands, in which she now toted an Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, built by Accuracy International of Portsmouth, capable in the hands of an average marksman of bunching bullets within a couple of inches at more than 600 yards. In the hands of Indira, the gun could shoot the horns off a snail.

‘You OK?’ she repeated.

‘It’s just that something gave me goosebumps here. I guess you could call it Dad flashbacks.’

Dad flashbacks? wondered Indira. It sounded like something worrying from Sheila Kitzinger’s Baby and Child Care. She looked at her neighbour on the roof. He was big and blond, with a proud nose and heavy brow, and hands that made his rifle-barrel look like a pencil. He was dressed in olive drab fatigues, and had the name Pickel sewn in black capitals on his chest, as well as the American flag. She hoped he wasn’t going to blab about some deathbed reconciliation with the father who never loved him.

‘Yeah, honey, it’s like a Nam flashback, ’cept it’s about Baghdad.’

‘Tell me about it, Jason,’ said Indira as they settled down together. ‘Were you scared?’

‘Scared? Did you say scared? Jeez, I was—What the hell was that?’

The American went rigid as percussive waves filled the air. He instinctively eased off the safety catch and now BONG the second explosion assailed his eardrums.

The whole roof vibrated as Big Ben sounded the opening carillon of a quarter to nine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

0845 HRS

The great clock struck, and Jones cursed (something about a dog, again). The longer they stayed in this traffic jam, the higher their chances of being spotted. Surely the tow-truck man would by now have raised the alarm?

‘But why did he clamp us, sir?’ asked Dean.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Isn’t that why we got an ambulance, so this couldn’t happen?’

‘Have faith, Dean. Has not Allah looked after us? Think of the prophet in his youth, how he became a warrior for God.’

An electronic voice interrupted them. It was female, and spoke in an American accent.

‘Turn left now,’ she said. Haroun cursed. It was the satnav, determined to take the vehicle back to Wolverhampton. Much to the irritation of Jones and his team, they could find no way of silencing her.

‘Soon we will be in the belly of the beast,’ said Jones.

‘Make a U-turn,’ said the satnav, ‘and then turn right in 100 yards.’

The voice of the bossy little robot carried through the driver’s window, and might have reached the ears of Roger Barlow, who was now only a matter of a few feet away; except that he was turned away and bent over.

He was trying to lock up his bike against the railings of St Margaret’s, just until they sorted out this business with the pass.

‘Not there, sir,’ said an American.

‘Where?’

‘Not there, either, sir. I am afraid you will have to take it with you.’

‘But I can’t get into the Commons without a pass, can I?’ The USSS man shrugged.

Barlow stood on the pavement with his bike, like some washed-up crab, as the tide of traffic lapped through the gap and continued around Parliament Square. As he approached his fifty-second year, Roger was conscious that his temper was decreasingly frenetic. He had long since ceased to rave at airport check-ins. If his train was delayed for two hours, it no longer occurred to him to sob and squeal into his mobile. But there was something about being told what to do by this gigantic gone-to-seed quarterback that got, frankly, on his tits.

The Yank was wearing those clodhopping American lace-ups with Cornish pasty welts, a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a large blue blazer. He had the Kevin Costner-ish Germanic looks that you see in so many members of the American military.

‘Well, can I borrow your mobile? I need to get this blasted pass from my assistant.’

‘That’s not allowed, sir.’

Barlow was fed up with the moronic anti-American protesters who were fringing the square and bawling their questions about oil and how many kids Nestlé had killed that day. But he was also fed up with being treated like a terrorist, when he was a bleeding Parliamentarian, and the people of Cirencester had sent him to this place, and it was frankly frigging outrageous that he should be denied access by this Yank. Not that he wanted to be anti-American, of course.

‘They’ll vouch for me,’ he said, pointing to a trio of shirt-sleeved, flak-jacketed Heckler and Koch MP5-toting members of the Met.

No they wouldn’t.

‘Sorry, Mr Barlow, sir,’ said one of them, ‘I am afraid you’ve got to have a pink form today. It’s all been agreed with the White House.’

‘Well, can I use your phone, then?’

‘They’ll have my guts for garters, sir, but there you go.’

Cameron had just reached the office, and was tackling the mail. ‘I’ll come now,’ she said, when he explained the problem.

Roger handed back the phone to the Metropolitan Policeman, and stared again at the American.

‘Is it true that there are a thousand American Secret Service men here?’

‘That’s what I read, sir.’

Barlow couldn’t help himself. He went back to Joe of the USSS.

‘Excuse me. I think you really ought to let me through, because I was elected to serve in this building, and you have absolutely no jurisdiction here.’

‘I know, sir,’ said the human refrigerator, and he touched the Curly-Wurly tube in his ear and mumbled into the Smartie on his lapel. ‘I’m not disagreeing with you, sir, not at all. I have no doubt that you are who you say you are, and I really apologize for this procedure. But my orders say clearly that I don’t let anyone through today without a pink P form, and if anyone gets through today who shouldn’t get through today, then my ass is grass. I’m not history, I’m not biology, I’m physics. Wait, Joe, who are those guys?’

Everything without a pass was being sent up Victoria Street, but now an ambulance had drawn up at the checkpoint. The linebacker was staring at it, but Roger wanted his attention.

‘May I see your ID?’ he said. He knew he was being a pompous twit, but honestly, this was London …

With great courtesy, considering what a nuisance the Brit MP was being, the American Secret Service man opened his wallet and produced a badge. It had a blue and red shield within a five-pointed gold star, and on the roundel was inscribed ‘United States Secret Service’.

‘There you go, sir. Is that OK?’

Roger couldn’t help it. These credentials should mean nothing to him, not on the streets of London. But he felt a childish sense of reverence.

‘Er, yes, that is … OK.’

‘Just wait here, sir,’ said the American, and he strolled towards the ambulance driven by the man whose passport said he was called Jones.

‘How are you guys today?’ he enquired, removing his shades, the ones with the little nick in the corner, and holding out his hand for their papers.

‘At the next junction, turn left,’ said the female Dalek of the ambulance satnav.

‘What’s that?’ said Matt the USSS man.

‘She is a machine,’ said Jones. ‘She is stupid. She is nothing.’

As Roger Barlow saw the Levantine-featured fellow hand over a pink P form, a thought penetrated his mental fog of guilt, depression and self-obsession.

‘Oi,’ he said to the American, but so feebly that he could scarcely be heard above the chanting. ‘Hang on a mo,’ he said, almost to himself.

‘Joe,’ called the vast American to one of his colleagues, ‘would you mind checking in the back of the van here? You don’t mind, sir,’ he said to Jones, ‘if we check in the back of your ambulance?’

‘It’s an ambulance, Matt,’ said Joe.

‘I know, but we gotta check.’

The queue behind set up a parping, and down the Embankment the noise of the protesters reached an aero engine howl.

All the Americans were now touching their trembling ears, and the men from the Met were listening on their walkie-talkies.

‘Joe,’ called Matt, as his colleague approached the rear of the ambulance, ‘we gotta clear this stretch of road more quickly. We got the cavalcade in around twenty minutes. We’ve got POTUS coming through.’

‘POTUS coming through,’ said Joe, and slapped the flank of the ambulance as if it were a steer. ‘You boys better git out of the way.’

‘Hang on a tick,’ said Roger Barlow, a little more assertively. ‘You know it really isn’t possible,’ he murmured, as the ambulance went slowly round the back of the green and came to a halt at the traffic lights. ‘I saw those guys a few moments ago.’ Another thought half-formed in his depleted brain.

Jones stowed the forged pink P form on the dashboard and touched the accelerator.

CHAPTER TWELVE

0851 HRS

Six miles away the cavalcade circled the Hogarth roundabout, and the first Permanent Protectee shifted in the bulletproof undershirt he had been forced to wear. He looked out of the window and was startled to see a trio of English children, aged no more than eleven or twelve, leering in at him from the side of the road. They were ‘thugged up’ in their grey tracksuit hoods. They were spotty. They were giving him an enthusiastic two-fingered salute.

‘I guess those guys would rather Saddam was still in power,’ said the second Permanent Protectee indignantly, and took her husband’s hand.

And now Bluett’s top man, the sharpest sharpshooter in the US Army, was looking out from his eyrie across Parliament Square and trying to wish the bad feeling away.

Here and there across the crowd, the bleats were turning into an anti-American chorus; and it took Jason Pickel back to the rhythms of the cretinous song the Iraqis sang, the song of adulation of a man who had tortured and killed thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, of his own people.

‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia Saddam!’

After that statue had been pulled down, on the day of the ‘liberation’, they had briefly and obligingly changed the lyric.

‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia – Bush!’ they sang, ingratiatingly. But it didn’t have the same swing. It didn’t last.

The trouble with Baghdad was that the fear never let up. You couldn’t sleep at night because it was so hot, and they couldn’t fix the air con in the Al-Mansouria Palace, one of Uday’s little pied-à-terres, a hideous place constructed of marble, crystal and medium-density fibreboard. And even if they had been able to fix the air con, they wouldn’t have gotten no electricity, because no one seemed able to get the generators to work; and even if the generators had worked, the juice wouldn’t have made it across town, seeing as people kept ripping up the copper cables, and barbecuing off the plastic, and melting down the metal. And then the self-same looters, or their relatives, came and screamed outside your compound, and cursed America.

And when you had to go on patrol, in your Humvee, the crowds of protesters would part sullenly, and the sweat would run so badly down your legs that you would get nappy rash, even if you never got off the Humvee, and no one, to be honest, was very keen to get off the Humvee.

‘We’re going into the Garden of Eden, boys,’ his commanding officer had told them as they flew over Turkey in the C-130s. ‘It’s the cradle of mankind, so I want you to treat the place with respect, and remember that these are an ancient people, and they want our help.’

Garden of Eden? thought Jason after he had been there for three weeks. Call it hell on earth.

The economy was shot to hell, the Baathist police wouldn’t turn up for work; and almost the worst thing of all was the food. Wasn’t this meant to be the Fertile Crescent? Surely this was a place so rich in alluvial salts that it had first occurred to mankind to scratch a bone in the earth and plant seeds.

And all they could get to eat was shoarma and chips, chicken and chips, shoarma and chips, chicken and chips. And you know what the Iraqis really loved, their number one smash hit recipe? They called it Khantooqi Fried. It was funny: back home, people complained about the imposition of American values on an ancient civilization.

Well, there was one delicacy that every Iraqi short-order chef could produce, and that was the brown-grey salty batter in which they caked the corpses of their poor, scraggy, underfed roosters. Long before General Tommy Franks, there was one American military figure who had conquered Iraq, and that was Colonel Sanders.

After a while McDonald’s did arrive in the barracks. They installed Coke machines. The troops’ skin began to suffer. All the guys were getting seriously homesick, and they were only allowed five minutes per week on the phone.

All of it might have been tolerable, however, had it not been for the streets. He hated the streets, walking among these skinny and malnourished people as though you were from an alien planet. You felt like Judge Dredd, with your big padded helmet, your flak jacket, your chest a kind of mobile drugstore: watch, radio, aspirin, scissors.

Always there was the heart-thud of anxiety when the cars cruised towards your station. Everyone was afraid of the guys with the mad eyes, who ran in from the crowds and pop pop pop they fired or ka-boom they blew their killer waistcoats. No damn good a flak jacket was going to do you, not against a man who really wanted to whack you.

Pickel had been standing on the mound outside the Al-Mansouria Palace, watering his geraniums. Actually, he wasn’t watering them, he was Diet Coke-ing them, since some clerk’s error in the Pentagon meant they were supplied with more Diet Coke than bottled water. The geraniums liked Diet Coke, even if it was bad for people, and Jason just loved the way they grew, the way they responded to him. He loved their geranium smell when he broke their stalks, to make them grow better. He stroked their pinks and reds and whites that mimicked his sunburnt Germanic skin. He marvelled at their long woody stalks, and thought how much bigger they were than the geraniums at home.

Thing was, he was worried about how things were at home. He hadn’t talked to his wife for more than twenty minutes in the last month, and he missed her.

Anyhow, he was Diet Coke-ing the blooms, when the Humvee with Jerry Kuchma rolled up. They were already yelling for help as soon as they came in sight, and when they braked poor Jerry Kuchma’s helmet rolled out into the yellow dust of the street. There was a big nametape stitched to the brim, as if he were at school, saying that it belonged to Kuchma, blood type A neg. But Jerry wasn’t going to be needing a transfusion now. You only had to look at the exit wound in his back, when they rolled him over, to see that the blood wouldn’t stay inside him.

Pickel was so horrified that he just stood there, and the only thing he managed to say was ‘Hey’. He said ‘hey’ because at one point he was worried that the stretcher guys were going to damage his blooms.

But the worst bit was when the English journalist came.

Why the hell he had been picked to come to London he did not know. He’d told his superiors.

He’d explained how it left him with a rancorous feeling of resentment towards anyone with one of those smooth-talking freaking British accents. If Jason Pickel had been asked to do a word association test, and you had said the word ‘British’, he would have said ‘rat’ or ‘fink’ or ‘shithead’.

So he was on geranium patrol, a week after Jerry Kuchma died, and it was meant to be extra-tight security because of some pow-wow or shindig inside. A lot sheikhs and mullahs and fat Iraqi businessmen were trying to sort out some blindingly obvious problem, that should have occurred to the Administration before it invaded the country, such as who was going to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of Iraq, and who was going to set monetary policy, and who was going to be in charge of the Iraqi army, now that it had been routed, and who was going to be Foreign Minister, now that Tariq Aziz was being held out at the airport, or how they were going to get the air con back, that kind of thing.

Then this guy walks down the street towards him, a white guy, wearing one of those special Giraldo Rivera war-zone waistcoats, with the pouches. Except that he had nothing in the pouches, and he was wearing stained chinos and trainers.

Thing Jason really noticed about him was his hair. His hair was like an Old Testament prophet, all silvery and swept back. But the detail that mattered, the thing Jason fixed his eye on with almost romantic excitement, was what was clamped to his ear.

‘Yuh, yuh,’ the man was saying, ‘OK, I’ll file 400 words about the scene of the American torture orgies. OK I understand. Listen, if you’re tight for space, I’ll just do 300.’

The reporter hung up, and then directed a look at Jason that was grave and charming. Jason knew he was going to be corrupted.

‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ began the reporter.

‘No trouble at all,’ said Jason.

‘My name is Barry White, and I am a reporter for the Daily Mirror of London, and I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me.’

‘I’ll surely do what I can,’ said Jason.

‘I’m trying to track down General Axelrod – hang on,’ – he pretended to consult his notes – ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Axelrod Zimmerman.’

‘I am afraid I don’t know Lieutenant Zimmerman,’ said Pickel. ‘You’ll have to consult with the media department if you want to arrange an interview. You need to go back to the football stadium.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ said the Moses-like reporter. ‘I’ve just come from the media department and they said that Lieutenant Zimmerman would be expecting me here.’

‘Sir, I am afraid I can’t let anyone in here.’

‘This is Uday’s palace, isn’t it, the one they call the love-nest?’

‘It surely is, Mr White sir, but like I say, if you want to see that stuff, you’ve got to get clearance. Haven’t you all done that torture story, anyhow?’

‘Well, there’s just a detail I’d like to check, and I was told that Lieutenant Zimmerman … Tell you what, I’ll ring them up now, and you can talk to them …’

Jason Pickel felt his mouth go dry. He knew he was in the presence of a pusher. It was six days since he had talked to Wanda. Anyway, he needed to know about the soccer matches his kid was playing in, that kind of thing.

The Brit was dialling the number, and then he was offering the phone to him. Jason could see the screen lit up, the plump rectangles indicating a full battery, a clear signal. It was a Thuraya, a satphone. Jesus, he ached for a quick conversation.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but my regulations state that I may not talk in public on a civilian telephone. One of our guys was killed doing that.’

‘But that’s absurd,’ said Barry White, with the look of a headmaster uncovering a case of fourth form bullying. ‘Why don’t we just nip in there and you can use the phone in private?’

That was when the disaster happened, said Jason to Indira, as they sat on the duckboards, on the roof of the House of Commons, surrounded by pigeonshit.

What disaster? asked Indira. But Jason looked brooding, and in her imagination she supplied the answer.

It was the usual thing. Soldier rings home unexpectedly. Crack of dawn. Wife picks up. Sleepy male voice in background.

Before this conversation could go any further, there was another noise, said Jason, outside the gatehouse he was supposed to be guarding. It was like someone quickly popping bubble wrap next to your ear. It was the shooting, and cheering.

And then there was someone else yelling, almost screaming, in English, that unless someone else stopped now, and got out of the car, he was going to open fire.

By this time Barry White was running back outside, and Jason Pickel was following. When his ex-wife was later to sue the US Department of Defense for traumatic stress, it was on the grounds that he had failed to terminate the conversation, and she heard the whole thing.

But now there was a new noise in Parliament Square. The first BMW 750 motorbike had arrived at the traffic lights by St Margaret’s, the forerunner of the precursors of the harbingers of the outriders of the cavalcade. A blue light flashed weakly in the sun. The cop waved a gauntleted arm.

Indira was glad of the interruption.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

0854 HRS

And now that he could actually hear the police sirens, Dragan Panic began to wonder whether he had chosen the right place for succour.

The Serb tow-truck operative looked at the men standing around him on the building site. They observed his face, pasty, sweaty, the moles like fleshy Rice Krispies that were the legacy of the air pollution that had been part of childhood in communist Eastern Europe.

As soon as he had gasped ‘Where is police?’ he saw their burning eyes, hook noses and hairy black eyebrows that joined in the middle. He knew who they were.

They were Skiptars. They were Muslims, almost certainly from Pristina. And they knew who he was.

He was a Serb.

‘Here is not police,’ said the leading asylum-seeking brickie, whose family farm had been torched in a place called Suva Reka.

They pressed round him, breathing silently, as a bunch of bullocks will press round a terrified picnicker, and drove him backwards.

Handsomely rewarded under the terms of the Private Finance Initiative, the gang of Skiptars had efficiently driven in the piles of the new ministry. They had sunk huge corrugated sheets of steel into the grey loam of London, and now they were pouring lagoons of concrete between the sheets. Towards one of these pits of gravelly slurry they now herded their enemy.

‘What do you want, Serb?’

Dragan saw it all. In fifty years’ time this building would be torn down for reconstruction by the next lot of asylum-seekers, from China, or Pluto, or wherever, and they would break up these concrete blocks to find his whitened bones.

He dodged and ran. Then he tripped, and fell face first in the mud, and then he was up and running again, back down Horseferry Road towards the sirens and the chugging of another helicopter.

Of course he wouldn’t admit it, not even to Grover, but Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was deeply cheesed off by the arrival of the Black Hawk.

It was his airspace. He had sovereignty. But the Black Hawk had somehow bullied away his Twin Squirrel, in a humiliating vindication of their brand names.

‘Are we going to tell them about it?’ asked Grover. He was thinking of the ambulance.

‘Let’s just concentrate on finding the thing.’

Stuck in the gummy shade of London’s plane trees, the ambulance was waiting at yet another traffic light, this one at the back of Parliament Square by a statue of Napier. It was getting hotter in the cabin; the rusty metallic smell of freshly spilt blood rose from the back, and Jones was conscious of a sense of mounting disorder.

Despite their enormous breakfast, Habib was now eating a tub of hummus, spooning it down with a tongue depressor he had found in the glove compartment.

‘Why do you eat it now?’ asked Haroun.

‘Show me where it is written a man may not eat on the eve of battle.’

‘But we are all about to die.’

‘We’ll be lucky,’ said Jones bitterly.

He tried to concentrate on all the things he had to get right in the next five minutes.

On leaving Parliament Square, the plan was to turn left up Whitehall, and then, just before the Cenotaph, to turn right at the Red Lion pub. There Dr Adam would supply them with a parking permit.

It was very important, when they saw Dr Adam, that they acted their parts convincingly. The man called Adam knew something, but he did not know everything.

The only person who knew everything was Jones.

Then the lights changed and in defiance of the satnav they trickled forward to the last set, and came once again in full view of Roger Barlow – had he chanced to look that way.

Not that anyone in his right mind would look at an ambulance, when he could behold the face of Cameron Maclean.

He watched her come towards him across the road, and the crowd parted around her like a zip. She looked like a character in a hairspray ad, with glossy evangelical skin and lustrous eyes. She was twenty-four, full of energy and optimism, and she had the dubious honour of being Roger’s research assistant.

Not for the first time, Barlow was seriously impressed by her efficiency. If his memory served him right – and he kept a vague eye on her romantic career – she had been off in Brussels last night, and here she was in less than five minutes.

He beamed. He knew that Cameron had long ago lost any reverence she may have had for him or his office, but what the hell.

‘Your wife left a message on my mobile. It must have been while I was on the Tube.’

‘My wife?’ Barlow felt a prickling in the roots of his hair.

‘Yeah. She sounded kind of pissed.’

‘Pissed?’ Roger’s mind boggled. It was less than an hour since he had left home.

‘I guess you guys would say pissed off.’

They sorted out the pink pass, and Barlow entered the security bubble.

‘Did she say what about?’ he asked, thinking as he did so what a foolish thing it was to ask.

‘No, Roger.’ He scrutinized her. Was that contempt? Was that pity? Who could tell?

Roger was indebted – England was indebted – to Cameron’s former political science tutor. This was a languid Nozickian with whom she had been in love and who had baffled her, candidly, by his refusal to sleep with her. At the end of her last winter term she had come to see him in his study. The snow was falling outside.

‘What shall I do, Franklin?’ she had asked him, stretching her long legs on his zebra-skin rug. ‘Where shall I go?’

‘Go work in Yurp,’ he said, meaning Europe. ‘Go to London. Why don’t you go work for one of those British Tories? They’re in a whole lot of trouble right now.’

So she’d written to about ten MPs whose websites proclaimed them to be interested in North America. Barlow was the only one to answer, with a laconic scrawl, inviting her to appear for work in December. Eight months later, Cameron was finding that her political convictions were somehow wilting under prolonged exposure to Roger Herbert Barlow MP.

Her first job had been to sign all his Christmas cards. These were late.

‘Uh, Roger,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what style you want me to use. Do I say Mr and Mrs or do I say Justin and Nell? Or what do I say?’

‘Tremendous, tremendous,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll catch you later.’

‘But what do you want me to say? Best wishes Roger, or Love Roger, or Happy Christmas from Roger and Diana?’

‘Yup yup yup yup,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’

Since this was among her first meetings with Roger, she hardly dared say what she felt: that it was grossly rude to treat friends and constituents in this way.

So she knuckled under, and signed 500 cards ‘Mr Roger Barlow Esquire MP’ in that flagrantly American piggy-knitting handwriting, with the r like a Russian ya sign. It would have been more believable if she had written ‘David Beckham’.

When, inevitably, there was a revolt in his constituency about this breach of etiquette, he was so low as to seek, somehow, to blame her.

‘Oh Gaaad,’ he said, groaning and running his hands through his hair, to the point where she felt like kicking him.

Just what kind of a Conservative was this guy, anyhow? It was soooo disappointing. She’d been with him at a meeting in a church hall in Cirencester, and someone had stood up and said, ‘Mr Barlow, do you agree with me that there is far too much gratuitous and offensive sex on TV? And will you’ – the man’s hands were shaking as he read out his question – ‘take steps to ensure that Ofcom protects children from the current tide of filth?’ Barlow had given an intelligent answer, about the difficulties of censorship, and the watershed, and that kind of thing, and then thrown it all away with some flip aside.

‘Of course, I tend to rely on my children to tell me what it’s safe to watch, ha ha ha …’

Cameron felt her stomach contract with irritation. Didn’t he understand that these guys cared about this question? He was their servant, paid with their tax dollars, to represent their views in Parliament.

A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.

At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.

In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.

Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.

By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.

She coped with all that, and she endured his jelly-like answers about censorship and abortion; so she was thrilled when he seemed to take some sort of stand on gay marriage. His answer was indistinct, no doubt deliberately so, but she heard him say something to the effect that gay marriage was ‘a bit rum when you consider that marriage is normally thought of as taking place between a man and a woman’. Whoopee!

At once it was as though she had chanced upon a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views. He was actually AGAINST something, she thought, almost hugging herself with excitement. He was against a cause espoused by people who might actually VOTE for him. And then, of course, came the disappointment.

She was charged with drafting an answer to a letter from a constituent, who sought the joys of matrimony with his same-sex ‘partner’. She wrote a rather fierce letter, if not exactly consigning the man, an IT consultant, to the licking tongues of hellfire, then at least making it pretty clear what she, or Roger Barlow, whose name and superscription appeared on the letter, thought of the whole project. To her amazement he had crossed it out and written, ‘Good on yer, matey, go right ahead. Frankly I don’t see why the state should object to a union between three men and a dog. Yours sincerely.’

‘But excuse me,’ she said, and her lips grew tight and her eyes larger and more beautiful than ever, ‘I thought you were against it. That’s what you said in the church.’

‘Oh did I?’ said Roger. His own eyes were merry and dark. ‘No, I think what I said, in the interests of total accuracy, was that it was a bit rum, and to say something is a bit rum is a long day’s march from saying that you are against it. A long day’s march.’

‘Right,’ said Cameron.

There were still ways she admired him. He worked prodigiously hard. He got things done. By dint of 5 a.m. vigils, and by writing innumerable letters, he undoubtedly lifted the odd pebble from the mountain of suffering that oppressed the losers of Cirencester. He cared a lot about some of his projects, and yet sometimes she couldn’t help wondering about his IDEALS. His VALUES. His CORE BELIEFS.

Sometimes, it occurred to her, when she listened to Roger waffling about pornography or abortion, the mullahs had a point. No wonder the Christian churches seemed in permanent confusion and decline, and no wonder Islam was the fastest-growing religion in this country.

As they walked through the checkpoint and over the zebra crossing, the noise of the protesters became overpowering. They had whistles and rattles and bongos and steel drums. There was one man so covered in badges denouncing America that he looked like a pearly queen.

Seeing Barlow, he picked up his megaphone and bawled, ‘There’s that tosser, whatsisname! It’s that jerk thingummy! It’s old whodjamaflip, the complete prat. Sorry I can’t remember your name, my old china, but I hope you accept that my sentiments are sincere. Come on everybody, let’s have a chorus.’ And he began to warble raggedly, jabbing a finger in the direction of Barlow and Cameron as they scuttled past. ‘You’re shit, and you know you are, you’re shit and you know you are …’(repeat to fade).

Cameron scowled at the man, piqued in her basic sense of loyalty. She tried accelerating her gait, in the hope that Roger would walk faster.

Much earlier that morning she and Adam, her boyfriend, had been brushing their teeth in the Amigo hotel, Brussels. She had been nuzzling him, unable to speak for foam and love, when he spat out his own mouthful of Colgate and made a peculiar request.

She had agreed without thinking; of course she had. But now that she was with Roger, and now that she could hear the square full of the sounds of hate, it seemed a more difficult and dangerous proposition.

She felt uneasy that she had handed over Roger’s car park pass; though Roger the cyclist had long since lost track of it, and probably didn’t even know she had it in her handbag. Now she was dubious about the ethics of the other request that Adam had made.

‘It’s completely outrageous,’ Adam had told her, as he outlined the callous discrimination against the journalists from Al-Khadija. ‘They just want to make a film about parliamentary democracy. Aren’t we supposed to be in favour of that kind of thing?’

She didn’t have to do anything difficult, he said: she just had to pick them up, and obviously he couldn’t do it himself because he didn’t have a researcher’s pass. And, by the way, could she get one for him, too?

So guiltily she tried to force Roger’s pace, and turned her eyes away from the crowd, and didn’t look twice at the white emergency services vehicle chuntering slowly round the corner to her left.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

0857 HRS

‘So one of our chopper boys thinks he saw an ambulance?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘Did he get the roof number?’

The Deputy Assistant Commissioner was thinking that there was a case for passing it on to the pilot of the Black Hawk.

‘No,’ said Grover. ‘He can’t remember it, and anyway he says it was half covered up by a tow-truck crane.’

‘A tow-truck?’

‘S’what he says.’

‘Well, where’s this tow-truck? Christ on a bike.’

Dragan Panic sighed. He was only second in the queue, but he seemed to have been here for some time.

At Horseferry Road police station Duty Officer Louise Botting was dealing with another victim of crime.

She was a woman of about fifty, with grey hair, and perfectly attired for cycling. She had a helmet with a red reflector, fluorescent yellow zig-zags on her torso, and an air of Anglo-Saxon indignation.

‘I feel a bit silly reporting it, but I feel it’s my duty. It’s just so uncivilized.’

‘I know, madam,’ said Louise Botting, and passed her a form.

‘Do you know why they do it?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘Is there ever any chance of catching them, do you think?’

‘Well, there’s always a chance, I s’pose.’

Behind her in the queue, Dragan groaned.

‘What I would like to know,’ said the woman loudly as she left, ‘is what kind of person would steal my bike seat?’

No one in the room felt able to answer, least of all Dragan, who now bent towards the counter, his muscles still trembling with exertion.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ asked Louise Botting.

‘They killed the traffic warden, didn’t they,’ said Dragan.

‘Did they?’ asked Sergeant Botting, and then listened with mounting amazement. At one point she interrupted him. ‘Did you say you were removing an ambulance?’

‘I told him not to. I was going to tell him not to.’

‘And why are you covered in mud?’

Dragan thumped a weary fist on the attack-proof glass, like a drunk in a benefit office. ‘I swear I am telling the truth.’

Louise Botting summoned the station commander, and together they took a full statement.

‘Are you saying you lifted this ambulance? Right. And where is this ambulance now? They drove off, you say, and you are sure they are Muslim terrorists. I see, Mr Panic. Now, what’s your address? No. 10, Eaton Place, SW1. You’re sure about that. I see.’

Then the station commander took a call, and when he explained its contents to Louise Botting, she looked at Dragan Panic with new and wondering eyes.

She filled in an Initial Crime Report, and timed the incident for 9 a.m.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

0900 HRS

BONG Big Ben struck nine, and on the roof of the Commons, Pickel quivered again.

BONG The cavalcade effortfully turned right towards Chelsea, and the leaves of the Embankment waved beneath the passage of the Black Hawk.

BONG The Ambassador of the French Republic, M. Yves Charpentier, told his official driver to follow the Mall down to Parliament Square and make for St Stephen’s Entrance. Then he sat back on the blue velour of the Renault and buried his nose in the hot black scented crown of his mistress, Benedicte al-Walibi.

BONG In a cave in the tribal areas of Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border, the BBC’s coverage of the state visit was being closely monitored on TV.

BONG The British Prime Minister sat in his small office in Downing Street and gave heartfelt thanks, once again, to the protocol ruling which meant he did not have to attend the speech in Westminster Hall; the theory being that he had proposed the President’s health last night at Windsor, and that was enough. John Major, it had been pointed out, was not there for Nelson Mandela. Nor for Bill Clinton, if his memory served him correctly.

BONG Colonel Bluett of the US Secret Service had decided that it was time to take a more active role in the security operation, and was now being driven in a blacked-out Ford from Grosvenor Square to Scotland Yard.

BONG In the White House in Washington, the Presidential red setter had a beautiful dream, in which he sunk his teeth into the neck of the Presidential cat.

BONG Roger Barlow’s four-year-old heir was sitting cross-legged at school, and looking intently at some pictures of king-killing in old Dahomey.

BONG Jones felt the first drop of perspiration emerge from his temple and run down his cheek.

As Roger and Cameron gained the entrance to New Palace Yard, a taxi drew up. The policeman bent down to look through the window, and then let them through. After twenty-five years everyone knew Felix Thomson. Barlow knew him, too, and offered a mock-salute which was returned, though perhaps a little more mockingly than Barlow, in an ideal world, would have liked.

The policeman at the gate once more demanded production of the pink slip, though for some reason they waved Felix Thomson’s taxi on without too much fuss. The vehicle rolled on a few yards down the cobbles to another barricade, a ramp with winking lights that came up and prevented access, just by the spot where Airey Neave had been blown up by the IRA.

‘No, sorry, sir,’ said the policeman. Barlow had made to follow the taxi, because he wanted to have a word with Felix Thomson, and now he was told this was not on. He’d have to go that way, through the turnstiles. Did he have his pass with him? He had his pass.

‘Oh Cameron, by the way, I have a terrible feeling I have to make a speech in the debate this afternoon.’

‘That’s right, Roger. The whips have been on to us twice already. They are expecting it.’

‘Oh lor’, sighed the MP, stopping. ‘Can you remember what it’s all about?’

Why the hell, wondered Cameron, couldn’t he ever concentrate on what she was saying? ‘I sent you a speech. I mean I sent you a draft of the speech. It was in your mail on Friday.’

‘Oh yes, and what’s the Bill about?’

‘It’s the Water Utilities Bill (England and Wales). The whips thought you might be interested in speaking on fluoridation.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Roger, ‘and what line am I taking?’

‘Well, I sort of presumed you would be taking a libertarian line. A lot of people have been writing in, saying how much they dislike fluoridation. They say it’s the nanny state.’

‘Nasty stuff, is it, fluoride?’

‘Well, it can be deadly poisonous, and they’ve done a lot of research on possible side-effects …’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Roger, ‘I know what it does. It causes premature baldness in rhesus monkeys, hypertension in rats, and it changes the sex of cuttlefish.’

‘If you say so, Roger.’ She tried shifting forwards. Adam would be waiting.

‘I mean, what if the whole libertarian argument is utter tosh? What if this stuff is really good for you, protects the nation’s teeth, mmm? I think of my parents’ generation. They never had the stuff and they had terrible trouble. I remember my father taking a great bite of an apple, and crack. Very psychologically damaging, losing your teeth. It’s all in Freud. You know, if you’re an elephant, and you lose your teeth, you’ve had it.’

‘I expert the same goes if you’re a lion.’

‘Good point,’ said Roger. ‘Here, just say aaah. Go on, open wide the pearly gates.’ Cameron had the surreal experience of offering her teeth for inspection to the Member for Cirencester.

‘See,’ said Roger, ‘inside every skull, thirty-two vital differences between the English and the Americans.’ As he was looking his research assistant in the mouth, he became aware of two people craning their necks to watch him from 120 feet up. It was Jason Pickel and Indira, their scopes glinting in the sun.

‘Can I stop now?’ asked Cameron.

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Barlow, and they resumed their walk to the wrought-iron porch of the Members’ Entrance.

‘You’re quite happy for me to check your teeth?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Ah,’ said Roger, brightening again. ‘Now that is what we call Barlow’s Law of the Displaced Negative. In principle you are saying that you are happy for me to look at your teeth, but there is a stray negative, the no, which simply needs to be removed from the beginning of that sentence and inserted between subject and predicate, to give the real meaning. You secretly mean, “It’s not fine.” To give another example, men are often asked, “Do I look OK in this dress?” and they answer, “No, no, you look great.” The displaced negative is a clue to their real thoughts. They should say, “Yes, darling, you look great.” The female equivalent is “No, no, darling, you have got masses of hair.”’

Cameron snorted, not altogether fondly. She was damned if she was going to ask Roger if she looked OK, mainly because she had no (real) doubts about the matter.

Finally she left Roger, berthing his bike in the cycle racks at the bottom of New Palace Yard. She felt she had done her best.

He knew about the fluoride speech. He was on top of the Betts case, and the plan to save the respite centre. He was, by his standards, under control.

Now she had to go quickly to find Adam.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

0908 HRS

Even though it was a warm July morning, the man outside the Red Lion pub in Derby Gate was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and faded cords. He had scuffed brown brogues from which emerged cheap towelling socks, one of which was blue, and one of which looked suspiciously like a trophy from the goody bag of Virgin Atlantic. When the authorities would come that evening to examine the contents of his wallet, they would confirm that he was Dr Adam Swallow, thirty-five, and that he had recently been travelling in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to judge by the few decayed and crumpled low-denomination bills he had saved from his trips. He was a reader at the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Oxford, and a plastic badge suggested that he was director of Middle Eastern studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. The innermost fold of his wallet contained a forgotten condom of great antiquity and no contraceptive value whatever.

He was tall and lean and dark, and sitting forward on the beer-splashed bench, and between his thick wrists he held a tabloid paper. He was chuckling.

The centre page feature was a tremendous tub-thumping why oh why piece by Sir Trevor Hutchinson, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Entitled ‘Our Shameful Surrender to Terror’, it dilated on the various erosions of liberty entailed by the current obsession with security. Was it not outrageous, whinnied Sir Trev, that the Queen was being served with plastic cutlery, aboard the royal flight, all these years after 9/11? He gave a vigorous description of the Metropolitan Police Maginot Line around the Palace of Westminster. He railed against the frogmen in the Thames, the boom that had been constructed in the river, to protect the Commons Terrace from a riparian boarding party, the glass barrier in the Chamber, that shielded the electors from their representatives, or vice versa, for the first time in our island story. And then he related his almost insane irritation, when boarding a flight from Heathrow to Inverness to fulfil an important shooting engagement, at being asked to produce his passport. There being 300 words to supply after this opening lungful, Sir Trev went on to deplore the general phobia of risk in today’s namby-pamby society, alighting on such diverse themes as the near cancellation, on insurance grounds, of the climactic firework display at the Henley Regatta, and the use of cup-holders and – splutterissimo – air-bags in the new American tanks which the army, in defiance of his advice, was on the verge of buying.

‘Good stuff, good stuff,’ chuckled Adam, who had written his own share of bilge in his time. He folded the paper carefully, and would have dropped it in the bin, had not the bins all been removed for security reasons from this part of Westminster. He checked his watch, stood up, and looked boldly out into the street, his bright brown eyes shining with tension. They should be here any minute, he thought.

Where was Cameron?

Now the drops were chasing each other down Jones’s pitted temples, and he could hear the chatter of the Black Hawk, coming up the Embankment with the President underneath.

He wondered if there was a sign on the roof, a visible identification code, and then began to feel the ambulance shrieking their crime to the heavens.

As he waited for the last lights to turn, he rubbed his palms together, and made little black worms of dried blood.

‘He says four of them killed the warden,’ said the station commander into the phone.

‘Killed a traffic warden? We all feel like that sometimes.’

‘No, I think he’s serious.’

‘Can he identify the ambulance?’

‘Sounds like he had to scarper pretty quick.’

‘We’d better get on to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner’s office.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said the station commander. ‘I’ll do that right away. I don’t suppose you know the number, do you?’

‘I’ll get back to you in a minute. You’ve sent someone round to Tufton Street, have you?’

‘Good thinking,’ said the station commander.

‘Does he have any idea where this ambulance has gone?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

0909 HRS

‘Continue for 200 yards,’ said the satnav in the ambulance, still yearning in its silicon soul for Wolverhampton and home, ‘and then try to make a U-turn.’

‘Oh shut up, in the name of Allah,’ said Haroun.

‘Can’t you work out how to make that thing stop?’ said Jones.

‘It is a sharmoota. It is a whore,’ said Haroun.

‘It’s just a machine.’

‘It is an American computer whore.’

Habib had been silent, playing with his prayer beads, a chunky collection of sickly lime-green onyx. He had smooth, rubbery, almost Disney-ish features, and crinkly hair which he concealed in all weathers beneath a woven black skullcap. Now he opened his sad brown eyes.

‘The man from the truck will tell them about us.’

‘What will he say? There are too many ambulances.’

‘He may have seen our number.’

‘Believe me,’ said Haroun, still fantasizing about what he might have done with that thoracic spike, ‘the heathen dog was too frightened. It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s him.’ He jerked his head towards the back of the van.

Jones took a still bloodied hand off the wheel as they came round into Whitehall. He pointed to a packet of surgical wipes on the dashboard, next to a Unison coffee mug.

‘Please pass me one,’ he said to Haroun in Arabic, and then read out the English motto on the side of the box: ‘“Clean hands save lives”. Indeed.’

‘He could ruin it for everyone,’ said Haroun in Arabic, passing the wipes like an airline stewardess.

‘I know.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Have faith,’ said the man called Jones, sponging the blood off his hands, and dropping the tissues on to the floor. They were talking about Dean.

Haroun and Habib, in slightly different ways, were possessed of animal cruelty. Both men had trained with him in the deserts, at the camps in the Sudan and at Khalden in Afghanistan. Habib’s tranquil exterior was deceptive, in that he liked to meditate on violence, and had devised some of the more baroque elements of the plan they were about to execute.

With his slanty eyes and triangular tongue, Haroun was like a priggish wolf. If that porky tow-van operator hadn’t beaten it so quickly, Haroun would have done for him with all the dispatch of a halal butcher slicing the throat of a sacrificial kid.

In the view of Habib and Haroun, therefore, it was absurd to have Dean in this operation at all. It was just because he was British. It was just because he was the local talent. It was tokenism. It was political correctness gone mad.

As for his terroristic temperament, he seemed to have absorbed far too much of the risk-aversion of the modern British male.

It had only been a few minutes since the violence outside Church House, but any self-respecting terrorist would surely by now have steeled his nerves. Dean, if anything, seemed to be losing morale by the second. He was sitting in the back, by the exsanguinating form of Eric Onyeama, and he was beginning to keen in a frankly off-putting way.

‘You guys,’ he said, sticking his head through the door, ‘are you sure we shouldn’t just knock this on the head?’ He said yow, rather than you, because he was from Wolverhampton.

‘Why don’t we just drive on here, and maybe we could like chill for a couple of days. Why don’t we do like the machine says, and go back to Wolvo?’

Habib looked at Haroun. Haroun looked at Jones. Dean caught the glances. It would on the whole be better not to end up like the poor traffic warden, yerked beneath the breastbone, with the bright bronchial blood still bubbling about the nose and mouth.

‘OK OK.’ Dean sat back down on the plastic banquette. ‘Forget I mentioned it.’ Jones bore to the right on Whitehall, about 100 yards short of the Cenotaph, and indicated that he wished to cross the traffic.

‘Please make a U-turn now,’ said the satnav, as soon as she understood what he was trying to do.

Haroun said something truly awful to the computer about what he would do to her mother’s rib cage.

Then he struck her on the fascia with a seat belt cutter. The machine started to squeak and gibber, sounding like Robert De Niro when he is hit repeatedly on the head at the end of Cape Fear.

Then she fell silent. The trouble was, thought Dean, she was right. Of all the great terrorist outrages of history, could any boast such screwed-up and hopeless beginnings? Dean tried to think himself into the mind of one who was about to fill the citadels of the West with death and despair, and to send a message to every dutiful Muslim of encouragement, gladness and strength. He sighed and blinked.

Jones turned and looked back at Dean as they waited to cross the traffic.

‘Remember what it says in the Holy Koran, my young friend.

“‘Slay the unbelievers wherever you can find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush for them everywhere.’”

‘Yeah,’ said Dean miserably. ‘Right.’

‘We will perform the jihad against the Kuffar, the unbelievers.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Remember that Allah is our ally, and they have no ally. We are the lions. Dean, we are the lions ready to set out. We will assault with speed, with the heart of a volcano, with the bombardment of thunders.’

The ambulance moved across Whitehall to the right, and Dean felt his mood lift.

‘Think of the hur, the black-eyed virgins of Paradise, Dean. Would you like seventy-two black-eyed virgins, whose chastity has been violated neither by man nor djinn? Would you like that, Dean?’

The ambulance slowed as it approached a red and white boom that controlled access to their intended car park. Habib smiled, and so did Haroun.

Yeah, said Dean, he guessed he would like that, really.

It was no coincidence that Dean was born in March 1988, nine months after Margaret Thatcher’s last election victory. His father was the manager of a previously union-ridden Black Country autoparts factory, and believed he had much to celebrate that night.

Already he relied on immigrant labour, many of them Muslim women, and it made his blood freeze to think of a return to the closed shop. Dean never knew his name or occupation, and for the time being all we need to know is that towards 3 a.m. on the morning of Friday 9 June a Midlands businessman called Sammy, of Viper Wipers, was cruising the Bilston Road in search, as he put it, of a ‘bit of black’.

There is no need here to rehearse the details of that melancholy transaction: the slow prowling of the Ford Granada Ghia 2.1 down the sooty sodium streets, over bridges and culverts that had been here since the age of Telford and Macadam. We must take it that Dean’s biological father cruised on, his eyes like an unblinking snake, past pairs of white girls in white socks, shivering on corners, until he found what he wanted. Neither party would remember exactly where or how Dean had been conceived. Was it beneath this spindly smokestack which 200 years ago had been a symbol of England’s industrial dominance?

Was it beneath this hideously echoing arch, dripping with slime? And how did life begin? Was it a burst condom, that triumph of nature over artifice, or did Dean’s father pay some trifling bonus for unprotected sex?

And yet when the feature writers came to look back at Dean’s childhood and adolescence, they had to admit that England had done him proud. His mother had almost immediately given him up for adoption, and since he was only the faintest coffee colour, he was fostered with a white family who appeared on the face of things to express all that was most honourable about bourgeois Britain.

Dennis and Vera (or Vie) Faulkner were in their late forties when Dean came into their lives. They were considered by the system to be towards the upper limit of the age range, but there was some sympathy for Vie in the chilly hearts of the adoptocrats. She had been one of the would-be mothers who participated in Robert Winston and John Steptoe’s first attempts to create a test-tube baby. It had worked for the others. It had worked for Louise Brown. It hadn’t worked for Vie.

She loved little Dean. She boiled eggs for him every day (in fact, his first act of rebellion was to announce, ‘No more eggs!’) and Dennis, a fanatical monarchist whose family roots were in Northern Ireland, would puff around the garden, teaching him football and cricket. He went to a Montessori school, and learned to glue bits of spaghetti on paper, the discipline now known as Key Stage One. He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School, and though academically undistinguished he showed some talent for water polo.

You simply could not pretend that he was unhappy in that quiet house in Wednesbury. He went on holiday with Dennis and Vie, and learned to put up with the curious glances. When people at school made the mistake of asking ‘where he was really from’ he learned to blank them and to say that he was really from Wolverhampton. From time to time – about once every three years – he would receive small sums of money in badly hand-addressed envelopes, and Dennis would hand them over with a grimace.

All children probably fantasize, from time to time, that they are not really the offspring of their parents. Is there any half-sensitive kid who has not speculated that he was in fact discovered in a capsule in the Himalayas, concealed among the eggs of mutant pterodactyls from the planet Krypton? It was different for Dean. From the word go, Dean had unambiguous physical evidence that he was the subject – the victim – of a swap, and all his life he had to cope not with narcissistic fantasies of otherness, but with the secret thought that he wasn’t meant to be here at all.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t love Dennis and Vie. Mostly he did love them. It was just that sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if they loved him as much as they would love a natural child; and then he felt alienated. Matters came to a head shortly after his sixteenth birthday. He was growing tall, with an honest and engaging smile, and his skin, after some early unruliness, was clear and good. He went with Dennis to the golf club, and earned tips for caddying.

He helped Vie in the Sue Ryder shop. Dennis was an executive with Otis elevators, or had been until his retirement, and hoped that Dean might one day join the company. ‘Get with Otis,’ he would tell his adoptive son, ‘get with Otis and go up in the world!’

It all went wrong for Dean when his adoptive parents became involved in a war. It was a war with the neighbours, and it was as full of malevolence as anything that took place in Bosnia. Next door was a man called Mr Price, who was, sociologically speaking, not so very unlike Dennis Faulkner. Instead of working for Otis elevators, Peter Price had been quite big in the Milk Marketing Board. The high moment of his career had come in the 1970s, when he had helped to formulate Lymeswold cheese, the Heatho-Walkerian plan to deal with the Milk Surplus. Alas, Lymeswold never caught on. It was likened fatally by Auberon Waugh, the journalist, to banana toothpaste, and as a piece of import substitution it was no match for the soft blue cheeses of France and Italy, let alone the great wagon wheels of industrially produced cambozola, the German cheese that trundled across the channel with the ruthless housewife appeal of a BMW. Like Dennis Faulkner, Peter Price was pensioned off early. But instead of just watching the television, or doing his roses. Price the Cheese was a man with a dream.

In his garage he had a row of vats and centrifuges and skimmers and strainers. Day in, day out, he would clank and prod, sniffing and pressing and squeezing. From the age of ten or so, Dean would go and see Price the Cheese, and his extraordinary machines.

‘Go on,’ Price would say, ‘try this one.’ Price would cut the coagulum into strips, and Dean would put the latest radioactive isotope on his tongue.

‘Or try this one, my dear sir,’ the caseomaniac would say. ‘I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’

‘Mmmmbmm,’ said Dean.

‘Have you heard of Auberon Waugh?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You wouldn’t say this tasted like banana toothpaste, would you?’

‘No.’

One day. Price told himself, the garage would produce a cheese so startlingly magnificent that the humiliation of Lymeswold would be avenged. Tesco would buy it. Waitrose would certainly buy it. No one, not even a posh git like Auberon Waugh, would dare to brush his teeth with this one. This cheese would be pungent, and that was the problem. Most days, in fact 90 per cent of the time, his garage exuded nothing to trouble the nose. On a very few days, when he hadn’t been perhaps quite liberal enough with the Milton disinfectant, there would be the faintest bouquet of udder, as of two lactating cows standing close to each other in a warm milking parlour. And once in a blue moon, when Price the Cheese hit on something sensationally ripe, he would open the garage door and emit.

On a still, hot summer’s evening, he was capable of producing an odour that was probably bacteriologically identical to the substance generated between the fourth and fifth toes of a squaddie who has marched for twenty-four hours in the desert in rubber-soled boots. One these occasions Mr Faulkner complained, though if the truth be told the objection was not so much to the cheesy aromas. The real protester was Vie, who had once been having a bath in the upstairs bathroom, without drawing the curtains.

She had looked up, and had the sudden thrilling sensation that someone was watching her. From then on, Peter Price was in trouble. Perhaps Vie had conceived some feeling for the old cheese-fancier, some instinct that needed to be suppressed or sublimated into anger. Perhaps there was a subconscious sense in which Vie’s real objection was not so much that he had looked, but that he had jerked his head away.

No matter. Price was a snoop. Together, with the lights out, Dennis and Vie stood and looked up at the neighbouring window. They felt the play of his binoculars over their possessions, their lives: the fitted green carpet in the living room, the coal effect fire, the Daily Mail reader offer carriage clock, the Royal Doulton Ware figurine of the Queen Mother. They felt his mocking beams assess their choice of television programme, and the sad secret reasons for adopting this coffee-coloured son. They seethed, with the first stirrings of feud. When someone trampled the ornamental poppy in the front garden, they had an inkling that it might be him; when Dennis could have sworn that the slug pellets had been moved from one end of the shed to the other, he had a sudden notion; when Royal Doulton Ware sent them a frankly obscene figurine, instead of the requested statuette of Lady Di, they both found it hard to fight the suspicion; and when the cat went missing they had no doubt.

‘I tell you what, honeybunch,’ said Dennis to Vie, ‘I’ve got just the thing for him.’

His answer, of course, was cupressa leylandii, the nuclear weapon of suburban hate. When Dennis planted them, ten in a row, at the bottom of the garden, they were only eight feet tall. In two years they had almost doubled. Upwards, sideways and diagonally groped their spongy, aromatic fronds, dwarfing and in some places crushing the original wooden boundary fence. Twilight descended on the sunny little room where Price would take his breakfast. No longer could he range his little pots of curd on the sill, and watch them turn radioactive in the heat. A sanatorial gloom spread through the entire lower floor, turning all the cheese he made to a green thought in a green shade.

Soon the topmost sprigs were beginning to challenge the upper floor; soon, thought Price, he would need to keep the lights on all day, throughout the house. He began with letters; he invoked the council; he sent them the text of the High Hedges Bill, then making its progress through the Commons. But Dennis knew instinctively that his hedge was untouchable. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and Parliament would surely find it impossible to give one man the right to compel the chopping-down of another man’s trees. Price joined a leylandii victims’ support group. He became party to a class action which intended to test, if necessary before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the proposition that a man had not only the right to life, but the right to light.

It was no use. Sometimes, with much pleading, the council’s hedge officer would persuade Dennis to make a few desultory abbreviations to the very top. But if ever Price pushed or moaned too much, Dennis would threaten to expose him as a ‘peeping Tom’ and cheese freak.

‘I’ll get the health and safety round to that garage,’ he said. ‘We all know what goes on there. It’s disgoosting,’ said Dean’s adoptive father, and Dean felt a twinge of remorse.

And then one September, two and a half years after the deployment of the leylandii, Price exacted his appalling revenge. Dennis and Vie and Dean had been to Alicante, and things had not been easy. Dennis resented the way Dean kept his headphones on all day, and Dean was basically doing his nut. For seven solid days he had endured a beach holiday with his adoptive parents: Dennis with the Factor 15 glooped on top of his head, and every other extremity, Vie with her crispy hair and stunned blue eyes and pointless expensive jewellery; Dennis with his old man’s tits, Vie with her evening lipstick running into the cracks around her mouth.

Dean would stare at the incredible girls, and feel a repeated sense of amazement that people were allowed to appear like this, before him, in public. He would lie on his back and squint at the surf, and observe the curious fact that when a beautiful girl emerged from the sea, you couldn’t always tell how big she was. As she rose, with water running down her terrifying shape, he would assume she was a divinity, a Venus Anadyomene, a mega-titted six-footer. But then as she came closer, so close that sometimes she would drip all over him, he would see that she was really just a little Spanish girl, all in the same proportions, but with her dimensions magnified by the sun.

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