Guy Fawkes Day

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 48: Central Lobby, Houses of Parliament, 10:32 p.m.

  Al-Ajnabi looked round to see what was causing the commotion inside the Chamber and saw Smedley sprinting towards him, an excited smile bursting across his broad face.

  ‘Omar, Omar, come and look at this! Come and look at the bloody TV. It's started! It's only bloody well started!’ he shouted, gripping Al-Ajnabi in a bear hug.

  Al-Ajnabi followed his friend into the Chamber and found Amy Weatherington staring at the television screen in front of her, tears streaming down her face. It didn't take him long to work out why. The television reporter's voice was awestruck, but it was the pictures that really did the talking, the panoramic aerial camera shots revealing the true enormity of the event.

  Seoul was alive, seething, cacophonic, united, sombre. An enormous mass of humanity was filing down every major street and highway in the city, keeping to a purpose and direction of its own choosing.

  Al-Ajnabi felt the blood surge to his cheeks as he saw his photo toted on every other placard; the banners all proclaimed their support in big, blotchy English letters.

  The reporter's voice was reverential.

  ‘This is undoubtedly one of, if not the largest peaceful demonstration the world has ever witnessed. Millions are filing past through the streets of Seoul. And I mean millions. It is an awesome spectacle, and not one that the British government will appreciate seeing. No one in Seoul seems to be working. Nearly all of the city's shops, offices and factories are either closed or empty. There is not a vehicle on the roads—there's simply not room for any. Riot police and troops are starting to line the major roads, but not even the ultra-experienced South Korean riot police will be of any use if the demonstration turns violent; they are hopelessly outnumbered.’

  The BBC switched back to the London studio and the national newsreader carried on.

  ‘As if the unfolding events in South Korea are not enough, we are beginning to get pictures of similar massive, if smaller, demonstrations breaking out in Manila, Jakarta, Calcutta and New Delhi. And there are clear signs that these demonstrations must have been cleverly coordinated by an invisible hand sympathetic to the terrorists currently holding the Houses of Parliament. But the sheer scale of the protests is beyond anything anybody could have dreamt of, and what's more, there is every possibility that similar mass protests will continue to break out across many cities of the world as different time zones wake up to this third day of siege.’

  Al-Ajnabi put his arms around Amy and Neil's shoulders and the three of them stood that way for a few moments releasing some of the tension from the long siege before Al-Ajnabi broke off.

  Upstairs in the Public Gallery, the news from the television had brought Maria Vasquez back to life. She was beaming and brandishing her MP5K above her head in celebration. Magdalena Ortiz was next to burst in from her position monitoring the approaches to Speaker's Court. She shouted up to Khalid Chentouf in the Press Gallery.

  ‘Viva la revolucion mondiale!’

  Khalid Chentouf broke out into a burst of Algerian song, but Al-Ajnabi sensed it was time to interrupt the celebrations.

  ‘OK, everyone. Things may be turning in our favour but that only means that we will have to be even more careful. If the government was looking for an excuse to flush us out before, they've got it now. We have set the whole world on fire and they will act to put it out quickly. We had better get back to our positions immediately. Don't you agree, Colonel?’ Al-Ajnabi taunted, shouting triumphantly at the government backbenches.

  McPherson stuck his head above the parapet for the first time in many hours.

  ‘Go ahead, enjoy your moment of glory, Bailey, but it will be short-lived. You've only been right about one thing so far: that the SAS will be in here soon to put an end to your little fantasy world. You'd better shoot me now while you still can.’

  ‘No need, my dear Colonel,’ Al-Ajnabi replied phlegmatically. ‘Amy here will do that for me the moment the SAS fire the first shot, won't you, Amy?’

  Amy Weatherington nodded as he patted her shoulder, but by the tenseness in her shoulder muscles, he could tell it was a duty she would not relish.

  He patted Amy's shoulder again and Hasan's voice came across the radio.

  ‘Hadratak, there are two people walking towards the entrance. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Keep watching them, Hasan, I'm on my way.’

  By the time Al-Ajnabi reached the Central Lobby the mobile in his pocket was ringing and he guessed he now knew who at least one of the visitors would be.

  ‘Bugger off, Max,’ he swore into the mobile. ‘No point in seeing you again now. Piss off back to the Guildhall before I get Hasan to empty a clip into your smug, smiling face.’

  ‘Temper, Robbie!’ Clayton mocked. ‘Maybe you don't want to see me. Fine. But there's someone else here who's determined to come and talk to you, invited or not.’

  ‘They are here, Hadratak,’ Hasan's voice cut in across the radio.

  Al-Ajnabi jogged the rest of the way past the murals and bright lights of St Stephen's porch.

  Hasan was leaning against the metal detector by the security desk. Al-Ajnabi followed the direction of the barrel of Hasan's Skorpion 61 and together they listened to the approaching footsteps.

  Al-Ajnabi swallowed back the tension. He knew who and what was coming towards him, but the absolute certainty of his intuition brought no solutions, only profound confusion. It was only a month since their first meeting back in Oxford; now he wished he had never followed that line.

  ‘Sophie!’ he murmured out loud the moment he saw her face, standing next to her father at the top of the first flight of steps. Clayton stayed motionless while Sophie trotted up the next flight towards him.

  Al-Ajnabi turned to Hasan.

  ‘Leave us,’ he said in Arabic. ‘Go and take up your position by the Library.’

  ‘Bit rotten of me playing your ace of trumps right back at you, Robbie, but I thought she might make you change your mind,’ Clayton shouted out, his voice echoing around the stonework of the hallway. ‘I'll wait here. You two have got five minutes alone.’

  Sophie smiled when she reached him but there was awkwardness in her too. She was dressed casually in jeans, jumper and boots, but the lack of pretension only served to accentuate her looks.

  When he tried to catch her eye, she flicked a strand of chestnut hair away from her face and looked askance.

  ‘It's ironic, isn't it,’ she laughed nervously. ‘I should have been in here from the start with Max pleading with the authorities not to attack you and risk jeopardizing the life of the daughter he never knew he had. Now it's all the other way around!’

  ‘Yes, but this time you're not staying; even five minutes is too long for you to be in here. They're coming soon, Sophie. I can feel it. I wouldn't put it past your father to be using you as a decoy.’

  He slipped an arm around her shoulder and escorted her half way down the length of St Stephen's Hall, where they sat on one of the wooden benches the tourists used before their guided tours, looking across the hallway at a mural depicting one of King Edward's bloodier escapades.

  Sophie seemed to relax with the intimacy of contact and she looked up into his eyes for the first time.

  ‘I haven't come to ask you to give in, Omar. I know that won't interest you now.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So why have you come, Sophie?’

  ‘I had to know the truth about us, Omar. At what point in our relationship did you stop using me to get even with my mother? I mean, when did it become me and you, not you and her?’

  He sighed and shook his head.

  ‘My God, that's a hard one, Sophie. I think right from that first day in Oxford I realized that twenty years is too long to hold a grudge against someone you've been waiting for all your life.’

  She reached for his hand and clasped it tight.

  ‘And what was the other thing?’ he asked gently.

  ‘That
you let Marcus go. He's done nothing wrong; nothing to harm you. You were big enough to release me from your plans, Omar. Now please do the same for Marcus.’

  Al-Ajnabi got up from the bench, leaving his gun next to her. He walked across the hallway, staring up at the high, vaulted ceiling and resting a boot against the base of a statue of Pitt.

  He thought for a second then chuckled softly.

  ‘Ah, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie! All your mother's qualities! Beautiful, generous, and practical-minded. Also that ability to infuse the men who love you with that constant tinge of jealousy! Fine, you can have Marcus. Max's lot have probably only got him rigged up with kit anyway; I'm sure we're better off without him. Just send your father down here and we'll arrange the transfer.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she cried, jumping off the bench towards him in delight. He clasped her tight but avoided the lingering kiss she was looking for, slipping his head instead against the side of her neck and running his fingers through that thick, lustrous hair, just as he had last done that night under the stars at Tarangire.

  ‘Omar, do you think…?’

  ‘Sh,’ he interrupted pushing a finger against her lips. ‘You must go now, Sophie. There's no time for any more.’

  He walked away from her, slumping back down on the wooden bench. She made to join him then seemed to think better of it, stopping just in front to lay a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't calculate how long she held it there, and through her fingertips he drank in all the turmoil of her emotions, which he reciprocated on the same secret wavelength.

  It was mutually understood that she would leave then and there, but he could not bring himself to follow the sound of her footsteps back down the hallway with his eyes.

  Of all the pain in his life so far, this seemed the bitterest, yet it contained that bittersweet flipside that he wouldn't have swapped for any other outcome, no matter how much more pleasant. And he realized why: in the intensity of excruciating passion, fulfilled and unfulfilled desires met at the edges: there was no difference between having or not having, success or failure.

  Every footstep she took sent a random selection of alternate bitter and sweet memories flickering across his mind: his first moment of real intimacy with Alison in his college room all those years back; the sight of the dead bodies strewn across the Falls Road when he had scooped himself off the pavement after Goss's headbutt. The nights spent sleeping under the stars in Angola all merged into one amorphous glob of good memory, a time when he had taken every day as it came and learned to appreciate the simple things in life. Then there was the day after the attempted coup in Ramliyya and the strange sensation that had suddenly struck deep inside when it finally sank home to him that he had the funds at his disposal to make every fantasy and desire he could ever conceive an actual reality.

  Then there had been that fantastic five months after the liberation of Asmara, when he had left his friends and former comrades-in-arms in the fledgling Eritrean government and taken an unplanned motorbike trip across Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Somewhere along that vast stretch of red road the seed crystal of this present action had been born. He could not remember exactly when and where it had first occurred to him just how close the world was coming to trading in a natural heritage of unimaginable beauty constructed over aeons of riotous evolution for a future of urban scrawl, pollution and horrific wars that would be fought over what was left to scrape out of the bottom of the empty bowl.

  ‘Good God, to think I could have nabbed the most wanted man in the world single-handed! You look lost, Robbie. Completely lost.’

  Al-Ajnabi sprang out of his reverie and looked up to where Max was standing. His MP5K lay abandoned on the bench between them. He looked up at Max wondering if Clayton would make a dash for the gun. But he didn't. Instead Max sighed, pushed the gun his way and sat down where it had rested on the bench.

  ‘I suppose out of all us I've got out off pretty lightly so far,’ Clayton mused. ‘In fact, even if you had followed your original plan and Sophie were holed up there inside with you, with me just discovering the identity of the daughter I never knew I had, it was good of you to have credited me with a conscience big enough to care about any of that. I mean, if I really were the enormous shit you always thought me to be after the episode with Alison, completely devoid of moral scruples, then surely I wouldn't have given a damn even if you had told me at this stage that an SAS raid would jeopardize the life of my daughter? Wouldn't you say there was some inconsistency in your logic, Robbie?’

  The sound of Max's voice was just the catalyst Al-Ajnabi needed. He snapped out of his trance and leapt purposefully off the bench, taking the gun with him.

  ‘Shut up and fuck off, won't you, Max? I haven't got time to talk might-have-been's with you. I'm going to give you back Marcus Easterby. After that, there's no more talking for us, Max.’

  ‘Then it won't do any good for me to ask you one last time, for my daughter's sake, to give in?’

  Al-Ajnabi turned towards the Central Lobby and started to walk away.

  ‘No it won't. But I've got an alternative suggestion, Max. When the SAS do come in, why don't you join them? I'm sure you can wangle that if you haven't already. That way we can finally sort things out between us. If you're big enough to accept the invitation, I'll be looking out for you.’