Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

I reached the first floor and turned right, and saw that the corridor was busier.

Two women were standing half-way down, deep in conversation, and a man on my left was locking, or unlocking, an office door.

I glanced at my watch and started to ease up, feeling in my pockets for something that, maybe, I’d left somewhere, or if not there, somewhere else, but then again, maybe I never had it, but if I had, should I go back and look for it? I stood in the corridor, frowning, and the man on the left had opened the office door and was looking at me, about to ask me if I was lost.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and smiled at him, holding up a key ring.

‘Got it,’ I said, and he gave me a small, uncertain nod as I walked on.

A bell pinged at the end of the corridor and I speeded up a little, jangling the keys in my right hand. The lift doors slid open, and a low trolley started to nose its way out into the corridor.

Francisco and Hugo, in their neat blue overalls, carefully shepherded the trolley out of the lift; Francisco pushing, Hugo resting both his hands on the water barrels. Relax, I wanted to say to him, as I slowed down to let the trolley go ahead of me. It’s only water, for Christ’s sake. You’re following it as if it’s your wife on her way to the delivery room.

Francisco was moving slowly, checking the numbers on the office doors, looking very good indeed, while Hugo kept turning and licking his lips.

I stopped at a notice-board and examined it. I tore down three pieces of paper, two of them being the fire drill, and one, an open invitation to a barbecue at Bob and Tina’s, Sunday atnoon. I stood there, reading them as if they needed to be read, and then looked at my watch.

They were late. Forty-five seconds late.

I couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d agreed, and practised, and sworn about, and practised again, the little fuckers were late.

‘Yes?’ said a voice. Fifty-five seconds.

I looked down the corridor, and saw that Francisco and Hugo had reached the open reception area. A woman sat at a desk, peering at them over big glasses.

Sixty-five fucking seconds.

‘Salem alicoum,’ said Francisco, in a soft voice. ‘ Alicoum salem,’ said the woman.

Seventy.

Hugo banged his hand on the top of the water barrels, then turned and looked at me.

I started to walk forwards, took two steps, and then I heard it.

Heard it and felt it. It was like a bomb.

When you watch cars crashing on television, you’re fed a certain level of sound by the dubbing mixers, and you probably think to yourself that’s it, that’s what a car crash sounds like. You forget, or, with a bit of luck, you never know, how much energy is being released when half-a-ton of metal hits another half-a-ton of metal. Or the side of a building. Vast amounts of energy, capable of shaking your body from head to toe, even though you’re a hundred yards away.

The Land Rover’s horn, jammed down with Cyrus’s knife, cut through the silence like the wail of an animal. And then it quickly faded away, swamped by the sounds of doors opening, chairs being pushed back, bodies scuffling into doorways - looking at each other, looking back down the corridor.

Then they were all talking, and most of them were saying Jesus, and goddamn, and the fuck was that, and suddenly I was watching a dozen backs, scurrying away from us, tripping, skipping, tumbling over each other to get to the stairwell.

‘You think we should see?’ said Francisco to the woman behind the desk.

She looked at him, then squinted down the corridor.

‘I can’t… you know…’ she said, and her hand moved towards the telephone. I don’t know who she thought she was going to call.

Francisco and I looked at each other for about a hundredth of a second.

‘Was that…’ I began, staring nervously at the woman, ‘I mean, did that sound like a bomb?’

She put one hand on the phone and the other out in front, palm towards the window, asking the world to just stop and wait a moment while she got herself together.

There was a scream from somewhere.

Somebody had seen the blood on Benjamin’s shirt, or fallen over, or just felt like screaming, and it got the woman half on to her feet.

‘What could that be?’ said Francisco, as Hugo started to move round the edge of her desk.

This time she didn’t look at him.

‘They’ll tell us,’ she said, peering past me down the corridor. ‘We stay where we are, and they’ll tell us what to do.’

As she said it, there was a metallic click, and the woman instantly knew that it was out of place, was terribly wrong; because there are good clicks and bad clicks, and this was definitely one of the worst.

She swung round to look at Hugo.

‘Lady,’ he said, his eyes shining, ‘you had your chance.’

So here we are.

Sitting pretty, feeling good.

We have had control of the building for thirty-five minutes now and, all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

The Moroccan staff have gone from the ground floor, and Hugo and Cyrus have cleared the second and third floors from end to end, herding men and women down the main staircase and out into the street with a lot of unnecessary shouts of ‘let’s go’ and ‘move it’.

Benjamin and Latifa are installed in the lobby, where they can move quickly from the front of the building to the back if they need to. Although we all know they won’t need to. Not for a while, anyway.

The police have turned up. First in cars, then in jeeps, now by the truckload. They are scattered around outside in tight shirts, yelling and moving vehicles, and they haven’t yet decided whether to walk nonchalantly across the street, or scuttle across with their heads dipped low to avoid sniper fire. They can probably see Bernhard on the roof, but they don’t yet know who he is, or what he’s doing there.

Francisco and I are in the consul’s office.

We have a total of eight prisoners here - five men and three women, bound together with Bernhard’s job-lot of police handcuffs - and we have asked them if they wouldn’t mind sitting on the very impressive Kelim rug. If any of them moves off the rug, we have explained, they do it at the risk of being shot dead by Francisco or myself, with the help of a pair of Steyr AUG sub-machine guns that we cleverly remembered to bring with us.

The only exception we have made is for the consul himself, because we are not animals - we have an awareness of rank and protocol, and we don’t want to make an important man sit cross-legged on the floor - and anyway, he needs to be able to speak on the phone.

Benjamin has been playing with the telephone exchange, and has promised us that any call, to any number in the building, will come through to this office.

So Mr James Beamon, being the duly appointed representative of the United States government in Casablanca, second in command on Moroccan soil only to the ambassador in Rabat, is sitting at his desk now, staring at Francisco with a look of cool appraisal.

Beamon, as we know well from our researches, is a career diplomat. He is not the retired shoe-salesman you might expect to find in such a post - a man who has given fifty million dollars to the President’s election campaign fund, and been rewarded with a big desk and three hundred free lunches a year. Beamon is in his late-fifties, tall and heavily built, and he has a very quick brain. He will handle this situation well and wisely.

Which is exactly what we want.

‘What about the rest-room?’ Beamon says.

‘One person, every half an hour,’ says Francisco. ‘You decide the order among yourselves, you go with one of us, you do not lock the door.’ Francisco moves to the window and looks out into the street. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes.