Boris Johnson - Seventy-Two Virgins

‘Stupid little coon,’ he said to himself, as though reciting a passage from the Holy Koran, and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.

‘The train of death is on its way,’ said Jones. ‘Its riders are steadfast. Nothing will stop them or turn them back.’

‘Yeah, all roight then,’ said Dean.

Jones pulled up outside the Red Lion pub. The Muslim wrinkled his nose at the smell of beer. He could see the boom ahead, painted with red and white chevrons, and the car park beyond it, normally used by MPs, from which he proposed to set out on foot.

Adam Swallow rose and walked towards the driver’s window.

‘Are you the guys I am expecting?’ Jones nodded. Adam looked into those eyes and felt a momentary lurch of uncertainty. He hoped to goodness that Benedicte had got this thing right.

He wondered how the hell he was going to pass this gang off as a TV crew. He looked at Habib, now playing again with his rosary; at Haroun with his expression of a camel about to spit; he saw the kid, blocking the gangway to the back.

Adam tried to peer into the darkness.

‘So, which one of you is the victim?’

‘He is behind,’ said Jones, jerking his thumb. ‘He is not very well. Please respect his condition.’

‘I didn’t realize he would still need an ambulance?’

‘Certainly. We have many supporters in the healthcare services.’

‘OK,’ said Adam, and prepared to hand over the car park pass, thinking as he did so that he would ring Benedicte as soon as he could.

Just as Jones’s hand was about to close on Roger’s plastic card, emblazoned with the Portcullis of Parliament, Adam’s hand twitched, and the pass jerked just out of reach. He couldn’t help it. He had to ask.

‘Do you mind telling me what kind of torture it was? Was it in Abu Ghraib?’ he said, naming the notorious jail in Baghdad.

‘The Americans did it,’ said Jones.

‘The American women did it,’ said Haroun. ‘They did it with the long sweeping brush handle and the dog.’ He mimed, and Adam flinched.

Without a word, he handed over the plastic pass, and Jones reignited the engine, and drove towards the boom.

The Yanks would be here any minute.

‘Worra you lot on about?’ wailed Dean, and was hit by Haroun.

The cavalcade now found itself somewhat ahead of schedule as it pulled through Chelsea.

‘Bloody Yanks,’ said one Chelsea pensioner, as he sat champing and bemedalled in Ranelagh Gardens. ‘All the gear and no idea.’ Most of his life, post-war, had been dominated by a single controversy: who was the greater general, Monty or Eisenhower, and why did Monty dither at Caen? On this subject he literally bored for Britain.

POTUS in three minutes, crackled the news in the ears of Joe, Matt and all the other USSS men in Parliament Square.

More like Patton than Eisenhower, the cavalcade moved in its lightning thrust through London, and the upper air was full of American communications.

So huge, in fact, was the US Secret Service men’s requirement for bandwidth that yesterday, at Windsor, they had disabled Her Majesty’s TV aerial, and she had been unable to watch Channel Four racing. Conversation at dinner had been strained.

‘I jes lurve to watch the horses,’ the President said. ‘Most afternoons I take a nap in the Oval Office, and I whack on that TV and watch a race. Don’t you watch the races, ma’am?’

‘Hmmf,’ said the Queen.

This morning her TV was still on the blink, and so she felt no particular obligation to watch the speech that was about to take place, without her, in Westminster Hall.

POTUS in two, came the whisper from the smarties on the lapels of the USSS men.

In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the London police were still analysing the implications of the news from Horseferry Road. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell: ‘How many ambulances are there right now in the Westminster area?’

‘I don’t know. A hundred. Tops.’

‘If all this is true, we’ll find the damn thing in five minutes. Roll the CCTV camera film. Oh, another thing. Your dead traffic warden is meant to have recorded all the details in his Huskie, isn’t he?’

‘Ye ssir.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for? We’ll be able to find out all about it from the Apcoa computers. There can’t have been that many illegally parked ambulances in Tufton Street.’

‘Right, sir. I just wondered, sir, given that the whole thing is about to start in a few minutes, whether we should, you know, tell the Americans?’

‘I’ve got 14,000 officers in Central London. We ought to be able to find one rogue ambulance without involving 950 trigger-happy Americans.’

‘Righty-ho, sir… But hang on, sir, I’ll have to tell Colonel Bluett we’re raising the alert threshold. What if he wants to know why?’

‘Tell Bluett to call me,’ said the ranking British officer. Before they could dial him, Bluett was on the line.

POTUS in one minute said the headsets.

The ambulance lolloped down towards the police booth that guarded the Norman Shaw car park. Roger’s open sesame was waved; the tank trap went down; the metal boom went up.

The fatal machine had penetrated the walls of the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, pregnant with arms. Jones parked it smartly and out of the way, in Bay 20 of the small tarmac yard.

As he walked towards it, using a spare visitor’s pass from Cameron to clear the turnstile, Adam suddenly felt a fierce flush of righteousness. The logic of the ambulance now seemed obvious to him, and as he looked at the tinted side window, he speculated murderously about the condition of the poor man within.

He and Cameron had been together in his Holborn flat when, trawling the antiwar websites, he had come across the archive of horror from Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t so much the cruelty that got her, the hooding and beating and killing. It was the female involvement, and the way the whole thing was conducted with the simpering, grinning crassness of pornoloop America.

‘Now I understand it,’ Cameron had said, when they looked together at one of the unprintable images, of a naked Iraqi corpse, and a rather pretty Virginia girl brainlessly mugging for the camera. ‘Now I understand how you could become a suicide bomber.’

Of course, he couldn’t tell Cameron about the stunt that Benedicte had outlined to him, and in which he was collaborating. He knew that she would be prevented by her obligation to Roger, and her instinctive deference towards the office of the President of the United States of America.

So they had worked out a story about a TV crew; and when the truth emerged, he would of course take the heat, and he knew she would forgive him.

As he walked towards the van, he wondered how exactly they would bring the injured man in, and what his injuries were. Would he need a wheelchair? Would they use a stretcher?

He wouldn’t stay to find out, because his plan was to be there in the hall when they entered. He wanted to see the expression on the face of the President.

No one of importance had resigned, in the wake of the scandal. None of the crack-brained neocons had really been confronted with the full awfulness of their doctrines. Now was the time for a reckoning.

It would be worth it.

From the driver’s window, Jones was gesturing at him to stay back.

‘Everything all right?’ said Adam.

‘Please wait,’ said Jones in a whisper. ‘It is the time of prayer.’ Jones wound up his window again, and Adam nodded, and removed his presence some way.

He wished Cameron would hurry up.

Now the noise was rising from the square, to mark the imminent Presidential arrival, and the crowd was flagellating itself with posters, denouncing everything American from bombs to powdered baby milk, like distraught mullahs at an ayatollah’s funeral.