Seventy-Two Virgins (15 page)

Roger Barlow drifted on through the Members’ cloakroom, where the coat racks are hung with red ribbons intended for MPs to hang their swords. He contemplated polishing his shoes, but some chap was already there. As he wandered on towards the stairs, he passed the double doors into Westminster Hall, and peeped in. Of all the chambers in the Palace of Westminster, this was by far his favourite. With its floor that seemed to have been laid with the sarsens of Stonehenge, with its perennial dungeon gloom and aimlessly colossal vaulted hammerbeam ceiling, Westminster Hall thrilled him as much as it sometimes left tourists cold.

It spoke of an age before the prinking pomposities of Puginism. The lifeblood of democracy might flow now through other chambers, but Westminster Hall waited, like some great underused ventricle, for those moments when it played its part at the heart of the nation. Kings and queens had lain in state here, and so had Winston Churchill. A king had been put on trial here, and condemned to death. When Parliament wished to honour some figure of global importance, he or she was allowed to speak in Westminster Hall, and the Lords and the Commons were assembled to perch on these same little gilt chairs, drawn up unevenly over the flags; and here, in less than half an hour, would speak the President of the United States. TV lights were already bisecting the gloom, and TV cables coiled over the floor like the roots of a banyan tree.

He shut the door and went on up through the Lobby to the Members’ library. He quickly chose a computer terminal overlooked by no one else. He logged on to Google and searched for all entries under Roger Barlow.

Nope.

Nothing.

Nope. Nothing. Phew.

In a twinkling he checked his Hotmail account. Something from his wife at her office address. ‘Call me.’ Uh-oh.

He quit the email, and the machine was still attempting to execute this order when he became aware of footfalls behind him. He hit the little cross in the top right, and for some reason found himself in the list of the ten most recent Google searches conducted by the machine.

He clicked again in irritation, and a square popped up on his screen. He saw, too late, that it was headlined ‘Put your nipple in my HOT mouth.’ Soon he found that he was in a place called Boobtropolis, or Titty City, not, frankly, that he really cared.

‘Ah, Roger.’ His nape crawled. 4t was the pairing whip. ‘Conducting some invaluable research, I see. I am so glad you are able to help us out this afternoon on the Water Bill. Stick to fluoridation, I would. That’s the hot topic.’

‘Right oh. Is there a line to take on fluoridation?’

‘I don’t care what line you take. As far as I am concerned, you can call for the nation’s children to drink neat potassium cyanide, provided your speech lasts for more than ten minutes. We’ve got to avoid reaching clause twenty-four before the guillotine, so that it can go back to the Lords unamended.’ Roger was about to indulge in some mordant (and probably uncalled-for) reflections on the health of parliamentary democracy, and what a shame it was that so many speeches were generated by the whips, purely to satisfy some timetabling requirement, when his pager went.

‘Hmmm,’ he said. Whips liked to see you fumbling with your pager. ‘That’s odd.’

The message said: PLEASE CALL JOHN WINZER PASS OFFICE X3621.

He excused himself and went to the phone in the corridor, where he first made contact with his wife.

‘Hello, darling, everything all right?’

It seemed he was under suspicion. The four-year-old had watched him from the window, and seen him dispose furtively of the newspapers. The four-year-old had immediately dobbed him in.

His wife said: ‘Is everything all right with you, darling?’ She sounded more amused than anything else.

‘Oh yes, it’s fine. Just complete chaos, what with this state visit.’

‘Oh yes. Are you going to listen to him?’

‘I expect so. Look, gotta go, darling. Someone’s trying to get me on my pager.

‘I am sorry to disturb you, Mr Barlow,’ said the man from Stogumber. ‘It’s probably nothing, but your researcher has just been in, ever such a nice girl.’

‘Oh yes, you mean Cameron.’

‘That’s right, sir, lovely girl. Well, I wouldn’t trouble you with it, sir, but she said you had signed four passes for some foreign gentlemen.’

‘Hang on. We are talking about the same person, aren’t we? The girl I call Cameron is an exceptionally good-looking researcher of about twenty-three with good teeth and blonde hair.’

‘I couldn’t rightly zay about her teeth, zir, but the rest zounds right.’ Winzer’s accent was thickening with excitement.

‘And who are these people I’ve asked to be given passes?’

‘That’s what worried me, zir. She said they wuz for four TV people from the Al-Khadija network. It’s all above board and all that, but I thought I had better be safe than sorry. I mean they could be anybody, couldn’t they, and what with everything happening here today, I just thought I’d give you a ring and anyway.

‘Well done, John,’ said Barlow, whose dim, alcohol-drenched cerebral synapses were starting to see a pattern in the events of the day.

‘Don’t move from there, John,’ he said, ‘I am just on my way.

‘I am not moving anywhere,’ said John Winzer. ‘I am not allowed to.’

Cameron blinked as she came back out of the Pass Office and into the sunshine, and at first she couldn’t spot Adam. Then he popped up from somewhere and kissed her on the cheek. She was pleased.

‘I’ve got them,’ she said, and handed them over.

‘You’re wonderful,’ said Adam.

‘Where are the men?’ she asked. Her eye blanked the ambulance, searching instead the Rovers and Mercs.

‘Oh they’ll be along in a moment, but I’m worried that they won’t have anywhere to sit down. Do you think you could possibly do me a huge favour and take these’ — he produced four letrasetted signs saying ‘reserved’ — ‘and put them on the chairs in Westminster Hall. They should be pretty close to the North Door.’

Cameron immediately saw how difficult this would be. All the good seats would be taken, and she didn’t know what she would say if she were challenged, or whose authority she would cite.

She turned to go, but some instinct made her look back at him. ‘But where are the people?’

‘Oh, they are around. They’ll be along in a minute.’

Cameron departed, out via the Embankment and Portcullis House. Adam was in some way fobbing her off. It was not a feeling she liked, and she had an idea. She stopped on the steps of Portcullis House.

She waited a beat, then doubled back, devising some question she might ask her beloved. As she looked round the corner into the car park, this is what she saw.

Adam Swallow walked quickly over to the ambulance and tapped on the window. After a bit a wiry fellow emerged, took the passes and disappeared back into the cabin, shutting the door.

At which point Adam turned on his heel and left, as if to go to Westminster Hall via the ground floor of Norman Shaw South.

Cameron made an involuntary noise and then beat it round the corner like a rabbit. An ambulance?

All her sense of panic and suspicion came flooding back, and with an effort she controlled it. She had to believe in Adam.

For God’s sake, didn’t she want someone unpredictable, who finally took charge? Wasn’t that the whole point? In those long, wretched months of going to plays with dorks, the plays she called
les liaisons misérables
— she had done some pop psychology on herself.

Obviously she needed an alpha male. She needed an authority figure to supplant her father. But she had concluded — with the prosaic exactitude of a feature in
Honey
or
Bella
— that she needed someone who was both the same as and opposite to her father. She needed an alpha/gamma male, and Professor Adam Swallow surely fitted the bill.

He had a bust of Dante. He read a philosopher called Adorno. He collected 1920s Suprematist teacups. He went travelling to unexpected places, and in an elegant hand he recorded his thoughts — together with little doodles — on the pages of leather-bound notebooks.

He was furious about the treatment of the Palestinians, and resented America for her crass attempt to reconfigure, with bombs and dollars, the Muslim mentality, and to impose ‘democracy’ on societies that neither wanted nor understood the concept. Her father would have been scandalized by these attitudes. But maybe, for Cameron, that was part of the attraction.

Henry ‘Hank’ or ‘Buster’ MacLean was an alpha male so alpha that he would have been awarded a congratulatory first by the examiners in Advanced Virility. He commanded the Seymour Johnson US Air Force Base in North Carolina, and he believed firmly in the American imperium. He loathed the Democrats and he loathed the media, in particular their grotesque misreporting of the Tet offensive, which led to America’s unnecessary withdrawal from Vietnam, and which he identified with current accounts of Iraq.

Not that he was a bigot, or anything like that. As a major employer, he saw the evil waste and stupidity of racism. He didn’t care much about drugs either way. He was just innocently right wing in that he believed in the power of the will, the greatness of America, and the ability of a man to rise on the stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things. When Cameron was a little girl he would take her roaring out in his T-bird, a car on which he doted until one day he forgot to fill her with oil. Every year, on her birthday, he promised he would take her up in one of the Lockheed jets he was commanding in ever greater numbers, and every year she would look at him with shining eyes, secretly wish she could marry him, and yearn for the moment when she could be his co-pilot.

If Buster MacLean were to be portrayed by modern Hollywood, it would be considered theatrically indispensable to expose him, in the final reel, as a cross-dresser, a bra-fetishist, an alcoholic or an abuser of animals. He was none of these things. He simply had the right stuff exploding hormonally from every orifice. In fact his machismo was so intense that he was sometimes considered a danger to himself and the exorbitantly expensive technology he was paid to fly, and every time Cameron’s mom heard him make his promise to her daughter, she would cross her fingers and hope, when the day came, for clear weather.

Nobody blamed Buster when his right-hand jet engine inhaled a turkey buzzard and forced him to eject at 5,000 feet. Nobody thought any the less of him when he was involved in a near miss with a Japanese Air Lines 747 approaching Baltimore Airport, forcing the commercial pilot to take such violent evasive action that upon landing a Matsushita executive was discovered in an overhead locker. But when he contrived to eject both his co-pilot and himself, without a cloud in the sky, leaving $60 million worth of taxpayer-funded fighter-bomber to fly on alone for almost 600 miles until it crashed into a convenience store in Nevada, it was decided there was only one thing to be done with Buster MacLean.

He was promoted to a position of real responsibility. By the time Cameron was twenty-one, and legally allowed to sit in an F1 SE Strike Eagle, capable of flying at twice the speed of sound while posting a bomb through the letterbox of Saddam Hussein, there was nothing and no one who could stop her father from taking her aloft. She remembered the day in delicious, lingering detail. She had just an apple and water for breakfast. There was no point in eating birthday cake if you were going to put your stomach through six Gs.

She remembered the fire engines and the ambulances nosing surreptitiously on to the tarmac (Buster’s reputation as a prangmeister was still green). She remembered the pride in her father’s voice as he said, ‘Hang on, babe’, and took off vertically, shooting up into the bright blue American sky like a firework. There was the awful pressure on her groin and legs from the G-suit, and then there was the joy, the ethereal unrepeatable joy, of being allowed by her father to co-pilot the plane. She simply held the joystick hard to the right, and the plane corkscrewed over and down magically at supersonic speed in an aileron roll towards the indigo sea. It was like a dream of death, or the animal exhilaration of some huge marine bird as it falls like a stone on some fish below; and so they might indeed have ganneted into the deep, had Buster not said to his daughter, ‘OK, babe, I’ll take back the plane, now,’ and they flew back in contented silence as the afternoon sun gave its dying benediction on rural America, the little red barns, the cylindrical grain silos, the churches and the schoolhouses. Whatever man Cameron settled on, that was the intensity of experience he would have to replicate. Which was why she was so stunned by Adam.

Now she was making faster time than her new boyfriend as they both marched towards Westminster Hall, mainly because she knew the route, and he was momentarily lost in the ground-floor corridors of Norman Shaw South.

‘You don’t mind if I use the phone,’ said Colonel Bluett to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

Purnell indicated, again, that the entire Ops Room was at the Colonel’s disposal.

‘I’m jes gonna tell Ricasoli about this here ambulance,’ said the Colonel.

‘Ricasoli?’ said Purnell.

‘Captain Ricasoli, up there in the Black Hawk.’

Purnell looked at Grover, and Grover looked wordlessly back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

0938 HRS

In the police booth that governs the entrance to Norman Shaw North car park, they were having an argument about multicultural Britain.

‘It’s all part of the diversity regulations, innit. You’ve got to treat all religions the same.’

‘I don’t know, mate,’ said the other policeman. ‘I’ve never heard of that one.’

“Course you do. You’ve got to have a Koran in every ambulance these days, in case you have to administer the last rites to a Muslim.’

‘And you’re sure it said it was the Koran?’

“Course I’m sure. It was right there on the dashboard, with a load of used tissues. Al Qur’an. That means the Koran in Arabian.’

The two coppers considered the implications.