Boris Johnson - Seventy-Two Virgins

‘We all know the figures: the increment in US defence spending, the amount by which the Pentagon decided to increase defence spending last year, is greater than the combined defence budgets of Britain, France and Germany. It is surely right to call America in some sense an empire. But is she an evil empire?’

‘Of course she is evil, you conceited French stupidity!’ Jones the Bomb leapt up, trailing the President, and almost rubbed noses with the TV screen. ‘Benedicte, you must make him shut up and sit down.’

But the French Ambassador was coming to the point.

‘So you expect me to believe that?’ said Cameron to Adam. ‘You thought they were going to wheel in some torture victim, just to embarrass the President?’

She paused, and scanned the face of her loved one, and was amazed by how much she wanted to believe him.

‘I know it sounds crazy now, but it’s all I’ve got to say,’ said Adam. ‘Now let’s just concentrate on getting out of here alive.’

Over the scuffed green carpet of room W6 Dean slithered in his trainers. He was now only a couple of yards from the handle. He turned and mouthed at Cameron. ‘Come with me.’

Cameron looked at him, and then looked quickly back at Adam.

‘Dean, my fine young friend.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dean instinctively. Jones the Bomb was still watching the TV, but he had good peripheral vision.

‘I will not stand in your way. I will always remember you fondly.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ He edged a foot closer to the door.

‘Your mother will be filled with joy over your heavenly wedding,’ said Jones.

‘My mother, sir?’

‘The same.’

‘Sir, what wedding?’

Jones smiled and slid his gunhand into the suicide jacket, and checked the Nokia.

Now Haroun was lost. He was sure he had been here before. Surely it was the same marble staircase, the one where he had met the policewoman. But if he had been here before, would he not have remembered that giant painting? It depicted the infidel Queen Elizabeth, her orange hair and pasty face, all lit up as she plotted some new act of aggression. Haroun spat and swore, and tottered on. He looked into the office of someone called the Rt Hon. John Prescott MP, and thought of urinating in the waste paper basket, but there was the risk of being interrupted by the woman. Heaven help me, he begged. Come down, O Power Divine, and give me the blessing of release. In the nuclear reactor in his loins the last carbon rod had blown out of the pile; the last drop of coolant had evaporated, and the corrupt and incompetent director had leapt into his jalopy and begun to drive for the coast.

Far above the Atlantic the boomerang of Stealth bombers was making good time, as Rome might once have sent her quinquiremes to crush a rebellion.

Jupiter Pluvius continued his percussion on the roof, and now the beat turned up again, as though the rain god were moving to some symphonic finale. Immediately beneath the tiles, Jason Pickel stared down at the sweating domes, the hats, the comb-overs and shilling-sized bald patches of the audience, ninety feet below. He looked through the sights for the umpteenth time and lined up the cross-hairs on two prominent objects, first Benedicte’s left nipple, then her right nipple. ‘Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?’ he hummed, ‘Or thorns compose so rich a crown?’ He couldn’t miss, he told himself. Well, he could, but he couldn’t.

Away at the back, Roger Barlow was partly hoping to speak, and partly hoping that he would be spared the ordeal, not least since the Frenchman was being so colossally sound. Yves Charpentier had a slightly irritating way of pushing out his lips and making an udder-milking gesture with his hands, but what he had to say was good.

‘Way to go, Froggie!’ he thought.

Barlow was also wondering what the hell was going on with Cameron. To judge by the way the Arabs had treated her and that fogeyish boyfriend of hers, there seemed to be some element of complicity. Oh dear, oh dear.

And she had seemed such a nice girl. Belief, idealism, fanaticism, mania: in Barlow’s mind they were all part of the same ghastly continuum. Would they blame him? Would they investigate the lackadaisical way in which he had hired her and supervised her?

Probably: once they’d finished ripping him to shreds about Eulalie. What should he do? Fire her?

Probably.

‘All right,’ said Cameron. She decided she would make up her mind about Adam later. ‘So whose spy are you? The Russians? The Chinese?’

Adam gave a rueful smile. He pointed to something on his lapel.

‘See that?’

‘What is it? A microphone?’

‘No, no. What does it look like?’

She shrugged. It looked like something from a game, a little red token of some kind. Maybe part of an army from Risk.

‘It is a florette of the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur.’

Cameron noticed the rather too professional way he said it, with plenty of rolling of the rs.

‘So you are spying for the Froggies.’

‘C’est ça.’

‘Bien je jamais.’

‘And one last thing, Dean,’ said Jones as the teenager turned the handle of the door. ‘I hope you will enjoy the attentions of the black-eyed ones, and remember that the black of their eyes is blacker than black, and the white of their eyes is whiter than white; and I hope that you will find them comely and submissive.’ Dean shivered. He looked at Cameron and opened the door.

‘Hey, Dean, wait up,’ said the President.

Dean halted in amazement.

The President turned to Jones the Bomb. ‘Hey, this black-eyed one stuff. Is that the black-eyed virgins, the seventy-two virgins in Paradise that you guys talk about?’

‘Such is the reward of the shahid,’ said Jones, stiffly.

“Cos I read something interesting ‘bout that,’ said the President.

‘Silence,’ said Jones. ‘You know nothing of this.’

‘Wait, wait. This might be useful for Dean to know. I read that there was a scholarly controversy about this black-eyed phrase, a real big fight.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jones.

‘It seems, from what I read, that black-eyed ones might not mean seventy-two virgin girls. They looked at the old Arabic there, and they now think it’s a mistranslation, and it really means .

‘What?’ said Dean.

‘Idiot,’ said Jones the Bomb.

‘… raisins.’

‘Raisins?’ said Dean.

‘Isn’t that something?’ said the President. ‘You blow yourself up thinking you’re going to get seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and instead you get seventy-two raisins. Kind of makes a difference, I’d have thought.’

‘Fool,’ said Jones, and raised the Browning as if to whack him again.

‘And another thing,’ said the President bravely, ‘is why is it so great if they’re virgins? Most folks would say that a little experience is… you might want to think about that, Dean.’

‘Enough,’ said Jones the Bomb.

‘Non, concitoyens de France, I do not think America is an evil empire,’ said the French Ambassador. Out of that grey thatch a single drop of perspiration appeared and rolled down that high, pale forehead. He was a good-looking man, but certainly not a young man any more.

‘And franchement, mes amis, I do not think the comparisons with Rome are apt…’

Cameron got up and led Adam towards the television. The President glanced at them incuriously. Jones was muttering to himself; he sounded like a bag lady.

‘Look, Adam, he’s got the same thing as you.’ The cameras had a tight head shot, and the red thread of the Légion d’Honneur — a more discreet version of Adam’s florette — was just visible on the Frenchman’s lapel.