Seventy-Two Virgins (12 page)

‘To all those who opposed and oppose our allied action in Iraq, there is one overwhelming and unanswerable rejoinder: that whatever our intentions, the result was the freedom of a civilized people from a particularly miserable servitude, and of that I believe we can be very proud.’

There was quite a lot of hear-hearing on both sides of the House, and for the first time in a while, Cameron felt sensations of enthusiasm for her employer. So she was amazed, when the assenting groans had died away, to hear the Inca prince say Bollocks again, so loudly that he was heard by someone on the green benches.

This time Big Daddy in tails descended a few steps towards him, and if he had not risen of his own accord, it seemed quite likely that he would have been manhandled out.

That, however, was three months ago. To say that her feelings had changed would do scant justice to the endocrinal choir of happiness within. According to a reductionist account — probably from the pages of
Marie Claire
— it was all about phenylethylamine, which was in turn stimulating the production of norepinephrine and adrenalin, suppressing her appetite for food and filling her with a sense of excitement.

Her hypothalamus was producing serotonin, giving her a broad benignity, and out of the substantia nigra of her brain came the really good thing, the boy from the black stuff, the most powerful and addictive of all the drugs in her personal self-generated pharmacopoeia.

It was the dopamine that gave her the sense of invulnerability, the hormone that lets a boxer take his punches and helps a rugby player to get knocked down and get up again. It was the dopamine, the clinching intoxicant of sexual love, which now propelled her through the concourse of Portcullis House, approving glances pinging off her from all sides. Without that drug it is doubtful she would have gone, as she did now, to the Pass Office.

CHAPTER TWENTY

0916 HRS

Bluett was in a considerable taking. The various US listening posts had put together enough snatches of conversation to conclude that something was awry.

‘I’m coming right over,’ he told Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, though in reality he was already on his way.

‘Tremendous,’ said Purnell. He waved at Grover, who was just coming in to tell him that the stolen ambulance had been located both on the CCTV and on the Apcoa computers.

‘The Ops Room is all yours. Can I ask why?’

‘I want you to explain why the alert status is now red plus.’

‘Tiff — I’ll see you in a short while, Colonel.’

‘No, I mean I want you to explain now.’

‘I think we may have an incident involving an ambulance.’

‘An ambulance, huh?’ said Bluett, as if he didn’t know.

Like big black birds of prey alighting one after the other on a telegraph wire, the cars of the cavalcade came to a halt in line. Exactly abreast of the red carpet that spilled from the steps of St Stephen’s Entrance drew up the decoy Cadillac De Ville, and the crowd experienced a kind of orgasm of hatred.

‘Incoming!’ said the USSS men to each other, as the eggs volleyed over the road and the railings, and as soon as they splatted on the crimson cloth, the mess was cleared up by men in black tights with J-cloths. Then the second decoy Cadillac swooped in to land, and drew some more of the protesters’ ammo. Then the first two Cadillacs shifted forward, and the real De Ville slid into its berth, right slap next to the candy-striped marquee they had erected in front of St Stephen’s Entrance.

Inside were the battery of sensors and G-men that Jones had hoped to avoid by choosing his subterranean route. Permanent Protectees One and Two got out.

Almost unseen by the mob they slipped into the shelter of the marquee and went up the steps, hand in hand, for their first engagement, an audience with the Speaker of the House of Commons. Pressing up against the barricades, and the statue of Jan Christiaan Smuts, the crowd disgraced itself with its commentary.

When she entered the Pass Office Cameron found she was momentarily tongue-tied. Every yell and honk outside was turning into a beat of warning in her lovely head, that this was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Everyone knew the risks, and surely Adam could see that there was something weird about what he was asking her to do. Why was he rushing her? Why was she being given no real time to think?

Whatever you thought about the President, he was her leader, her head of state. If only in virtue of his office, he deserved her most devoted and assiduous protection.

She calmed herself down. Adam could not possibly have got this wrong. It was only a TV crew.

‘Yes, m’dear,’ said the man in the peaked cap, a cheerful father of three from Stogumber in Somerset, who would never forgive himself for what he was about to do. He knew Cameron’s face and liked it.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve come to pick up four press passes in the name of Roger Barlow.’

The man looked confused. ‘In the name of Roger Barlow? But he’s a Member.’

‘Yes, no, I mean they are one-day press passes and Roger Barlow has signed for them.

‘Okey dokey,’ said the guard, and after rustling in a drawer he produced four laminated badges. ‘Coo-er,’ he said, ‘I see Mr Barlow’s got some interesting friends. The Al-Khadija network, eh? Cameraman, soundman, producer and reporter. Very good. There you are, m’dear,’ and he handed them over, as a man might hand over four freshly microwaved Cornish pasties.

Cameron took them, and she was about to leave the Pass Office in search of Adam, when she felt faint.

She had been up since five a.m. — or four a.m., UK time — to catch the early flight back from Brussels. But that wasn’t it. She felt suddenly queasy, looking at these four photographs, which Adam had given her, and which he said had come from Benedicte.

There was a bench just outside the office, and here she sat, with her head forward to promote blood supply.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

0919 HRS

Inside the ambulance, Jones was giving instructions to Haroun and Habib.

‘We’ve got about thirty minutes until the beginning of the speeches. That means we’ve got fifteen minutes to get into Westminster Hall, which isn’t very long. As soon as the good doctor gives us the passes, we go.

‘Everything OK now, Dean, my child?’ he added, turning to look into the rank, blood-spattered shambles. ‘Or am I going to have to shoot you now?’

Dean looked out of the dirty side window. He could see a lowered security boom and Metropolitan Policemen in shirt-sleeve order and carrying machine guns, and, some way off, Adam waiting.

Now Jones knew from his briefings that they would be required to negotiate a series of tunnels to attain Westminster Hall.

As soon as Adam had gone to take his place in the hall, they would emerge, and go through the basement of Norman Shaw South, the Scottish Baronial building behind them. They had worked out a route past the kitchens and the post room. Then they would come up the stairs and tack diagonally across the ground floor of Portcullis House, and then under the road and down the escalator to the colonnade of New Palace Yard. It was a bit complicated, but could be accomplished in a shade over five minutes.

‘I’m coming, sir,’ said Dean. There was a small clonk, and Dean froze. Slowly he rotated his eyes to the floor. Was it his imagination, or had one of those parking ticket gizmos slipped off the warden’s chest? Surely he— No, thought Dean; no one could survive the loss of so much blood.

He squelched in search of the equipment.

Life had been tough for Dean since that dreadful night in Wednesbury. The magistrates had grasped pretty clearly what had happened, and in some ways they were even sympathetic. But he was still convicted, in a juvenile court, of arson. Price launched an action with more than twenty separate complaints, including destruction of intellectual property. He claimed that he had produced a new kind of hard cheese, dense, nutty and as fissile as Parmesan.

It was going to be unmistakable, he said, and he had already ordered the British racing green wax in which it was to be coated. He painted a picture of a revolution in taste, and not just in Britain. His green spheres would pop up in delicatessens across the planet.

‘And what were you going to call this cheese?’ asked the magistrate.

‘It was going to be Old Wednesbury,’ said Price, with tears in his eyes.

The magistrate had a holiday house in Normandy. He understood the backwardness of the British in the matter of cheese. He was enough of a patriot to resent the loss of Old Wednesbury.

‘Four hundred hours’ community service,’ he said.

Shock and disappointment had now crowded in so fast on Dennis and Vie that Dennis had a kind of blip, a small cranial embolism that noticeably slowed him down, and Vie, poor Vie who had loved Dean, contracted ovarian cancer, cruel irony of fate. She faded to bones and was gone.

Dean left school. He felt, and sometimes claimed, that he had been vice-captain of the school’s water polo team, even though that office was not recognized in the school’s constitution. Otherwise his record was unblemished by achievement.

He fell in with a bad crowd while performing his community service. It was a soft job, scraping graffiti off gravestones, and his fellow-convicts, Wayne and Paulie, had no desire to move on to the next task, trying to move the gum which clung like huge pale lichen to Wolverhampton’s desolate piazzas, testament to the frustrated oral desires of office workers prevented from smoking. Wayne and Paulie told Dean about the horrors of this Sisyphean task, how even if the gum came off the flag, it adhered so grimly to the scraper that it seemed nothing would shift it but a tactical nuclear weapon. So every night, when the cemetery was locked, Wayne, Dean and Paulie would shin over the gate, have some drugs, and then, like Penelope with her loom, they would busily undo the work of the day.

Here was the mossy tomb of Hannah, beloved wife of Tobias Horton, departed this world in the year of grace 1869. ‘SCMU’, wrote Dean. He meant to write scum, but was so stoned that dyslexia was added to his list of troubles.

Here were the higgledy-piggledy headstones of the Arbuthnot family, sticking out of the earth like carious teeth. ‘Fuck off, wogs,’ wrote Dean on the Arbuthnots. In view of his complexes, well known to his social workers, he thought this act unlikely to be blamed on him.

Shorn of Vie’s mediation, his life at home had become almost satirically bad, he and Dennis timing their routines so as not even to meet in the kitchen. After a year of drifting, and rejecting every solution that Dennis could offer, Dean was, as the politicians like to put it, on the conveyor belt to crime. Twice on the urgings of Wayne and Paulie he had been involved in attempted joy riding. Once he had been caught. Once he had served as a look-out while Wayne and Paulie burgled a house in Willenhall, a bosky street with quiet villas set well back from the lamps, the residence, did he but know it, of his natural father, whose wiper business had been wiped out by Tory interest rates and who made a tidy living offering consultancy to fellow-victims on how to go bust in the most profitable possible way.

You could not really say that the state had failed young Dean, not for lack of resources.

If a heartless politician were to engage in gratuitous political point-scoring, he might note that Dean was cared for by a Substance Abuse Outreach Worker (£25,000 pa), a Crime Prevention Detached Youth Project Worker (£31,000), a Burglary Reduction Worker (£23,000), a Probation Officer (£26,000), a Vehicle Theft Reduction Worker (£28,000 plus cars) and a representative of DYSPEL, a state-funded body that sees to the needs of dyslexic young offenders (£36,000).

No single person really took an intelligent interest in him until one day some liberal genius in the Home Office came up with the FreshStart scheme. In a move evoking the excesses of 1970s Sweden, or the penal policies of Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, the Home Secretary decided that there was only one way of getting Dean and his kind off their conveyor belt before they became fully assembled, galvanized and rust-proofed criminals.

The idea was that they should all be given a £10,000 FreshStart fund, at the expense of the taxpayer. Wayne, Paulie and Dean could hardly believe their luck. They immediately rented a large house, where they lived in scenes of unremitting squalor. They relieved the sudden tedium of affluence with drink and drugs. They bought an orange Vauxhall Astra, which they ineffectively souped up and rammed through the window of RitePrice in Bilston. Wayne sustained such serious injuries that he spent much of the next few years shuttling, at indescribable public expense, between Stoke Mandeville and assorted respite centres.

Dean and Paulie were still more or less in one piece; and the bulk of their FreshStart funds was used to compensate RitePrice. It was furthermore decided by the parole officers and social workers that in so far as Dean and Paulie still had a debt to RitePrice, they should repay it by working there, free, as part of a Youth Training Scheme called Passport2Jobs. Under Passport2Jobs some of the least employable young people in Britain were allowed to sit picking their noses and reading
Fiesta
in the stock rooms of firms willing to accept the subsidies attached.

Dean was in some ways a gifted shelf-stacker. He devised a way of booby-trapping the Pampers nappies, so that a shopper couldn’t pull out one of the plastic breeze blocks of Maxi-Pluses without the rest of them raining down on her, or, more gratifyingly still, on the head of the little brute in the buggy.

He was wholly absorbed, as though back at his Montessori school, in creating pyramids of oranges and nectarines. One week, to his shivering pleasure, a photocopied form was stuck on the board announcing that he was RitePrice’s most useful employee of the month of June.

‘Well done, Dean,’ said curly-haired Vanessa at the checkout, and Dean shot a glance at her.

She was beaming at him, showing loads of pretty white teeth. There seemed no question about her sincerity. ‘Thanks,’ he said. It wasn’t obvious, as he stomped over to the so-called Delicatessen section, but he was walking on air.