Seventy-Two Virgins

by Boris Johnson

  After this heretical speech, Dean opened the back door, without permission, and started to move the kit outside. In case this was a mutiny, Haroun and Habib went through the hatch to intercept him, and every time they stepped on poor Eric Onyeama, there was a nasty marshy sound.

  Now Dean had begun to shift the jackets out through the back, and Haroun and Habib were obliged physically to restrain him. This was mad, thought Jones, and began seriously contemplating aborting the operation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  0940 HRS

  Most MPs, even the most self-important, develop a kind of shuffling scamper from their offices to the Division Lobbies, from the Chamber to the TV studios of Millbank. If any of their constituents happened to spot them, they would get the impression of an exceedingly pressed and dedicated crew.

  So no one looked twice at Roger Barlow as he loped across the ground floor of Portcullis House.

  It could be nothing, Roger told himself.

  By far the most likely thing was that Cameron had warned him of some arrangement — probably involving a Unicef delegation of Arab teenage journalists — and he had simply bleeped it out.

  But the first thing to do was to find Cameron, and the most likely place was his office. So he went up the stairs in Norman Shaw South so as to cross by the passerelle that arched over the car park, and that took him almost directly to his office in Norman Shaw North.

  And strike me pink, he thought, as he looked down from the passerelle to the left: there was that flipping ambulance again. It had to be the same one.

  A darkish kid got out, holding some TV equipment, and gesticulating. Then he saw two Arabs hustle the dark young man into the back and close the door behind them.

  ‘Christ on a bike,’ muttered Barlow.

  ‘Everything all right, Roger?’ said Ziggy Roberts, scooting efficiently by, toting a bunch of girly swot papers about pensions, or the mobility component of incapacity benefit.

  ‘You never know,’ he called over his shoulder, in one of those phrases that made Roger want to punch the lights out of whoever said it, ‘it may never happen.’

  ‘But those chaps …’ said Barlow. The ambulance was shut, and gave no hint of its cargo.

  ‘I say, Ziggy, I couldn’t borrow your mobile.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Oh sorry, I must have left it in the office.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Ziggy, look at that.’

  Both men turned to look as the back door slowly opened again, as unobtrusive and sinister as the nocturnal opening of that hatch, thousands of years ago, in the underside of the Greek offering.

  A dark head poked out like a tortoise, and then slowly withdrew. The door shut behind it. ‘Looks like an ambulance to me,’ said Ziggy Roberts.

  ‘Let’s bloody hope so,’ said Barlow, and double-timed across in search of Cameron. He was puffing a little when he opened the door, and found she wasn’t there.

  ‘What’s the matter with yow?’ demanded Dean, in the back of the ambulance. He struggled briefly in the grip of the two zealots, as they waited for their leader to apply discipline.

  Haroun and Habib had worked before with young Dean, and Jones knew their views well.

  Haroun and Habib belonged to the umma, the diaspora of aggrieved Islamic youth, whose hatred of the West was all the stronger because they lived in the West, and they were constantly exposed to its temptations and frustrations. Yes, their cause was officially Palestine, and yes, like so many men of their age, they watched the suicide bomber videos that are broadcast on satellite TV. They whipped themselves up with sentimental music, and sat in their bedsits, smoking, swearing, nostrils flaring as they saw the slow-motion balletic footage of the little kids (how expertly coached by their parents) provoking Israeli tanks to respond with shells to their stones.

  They wept, as they saw the suicide bombers’ home movies, the pukey little speeches of thanks to their parents and above all to Allah, the pornographic lingering of the camera on their dynamite waistcoats. They wept, they coughed, they swore, they spat; and then, quite often, they would go and get some of the other kind of pornography, and behold the self-defilement of the Western woman; provided, of course, that this was accompanied by a proper dose of Muslim self-flagellation.

  The previous night, for instance, they had all originally checked into a Travelodge near Luton. But Haroun had been so outraged, on coming out of the bathroom, to find Habib watching Angels of Lust, the comically bowdlerized British soft porn movie set in the NHS, that he had insisted on moving out.

  ‘It is the House of Sharmoota,’ he said. It is the House of Harlot.

  Habib had been so ashamed, and so admiring of Haroun’s purity, that he had agreed; and Jones had sighed and driven on down the empty sodium-lit Ml until, out of sheer exhaustion, they had parked up in Tufton Street and sprawled in the back.

  Because if Palestine was the cause for sickos like Haroun and Habib, it was only at best the proximate cause. There is one really psychologically satisfying explanation for the suicidal behaviour of young men, and it is something to do with sex, or at least with self-esteem. Somewhere in the background of their general screwed-up-ness was the cultural tectonic grinding between East and West, and the shaming, daring, tempting challenge presented to the Muslim man by the emancipated Western female. Which was why the Abu Ghraib scenes had been so catastrophic, and why the chuckling American servicewomen had been such efficient recruiting-sergeants for terror.

  The pictures had so badly affected Haroun, in particular, that he had come to think that he had been himself in Abu Ghraib; naked, mocked, derided by these smoking, drinking Jezebels of the Appalachians. He had given instructions in a sealed letter to his imam in Tipton, that in the event of his death his body parts — should there be any remaining — were not to be touched by any female forensic officer or mortuary technician.

  Habib, who wore the mask of a worldly Lebanese, was not as visibly disturbed, though his motives were very similar. These impulses had sent them both to train with the Sheikh, may Allah bring blessings on his head, in the camps in Sudan and at Khalden. But the kid from Wolverhampton was different, and in his wiser moments Jones knew it.

  As soon as he found Dean in the Islamic Welfare Centre, Jones knew that he had a significant catch on his hands, and he also knew that it would be difficult to persuade others in the network of this fact. They saw a mixed-up, mixed race youth with only the vaguest knowledge of the Koran. Jones saw the makings of a small political coup. Not only did Dean have a phosphorescent hatred of bourgeois values, and an unconquerable will to undermine the dairy business, supermarkets, and other extensions of what he called the agro-industrial complex. He was also palpably — if anything, excessively — British.

  He proved that British society was so corrupt that it engendered the very vipers that now sunk their fangs into its neck. If anyone could persuade the British intelligentsia to a bout of its favourite where-did-we-all-go-wrong-ery, it was surely Dean. Yet there had been times, even before the stressful events of today, when his optimism had been shaken. Last year the small remainder of Dean’s FreshStart endowment had been spent flying him to Lahore, whence it was hoped he would trek to the border with Afghanistan and imbue himself with all that was most inhuman in the terrorist repertory.

  Nothing was heard from the trainee operative for weeks. Jones dared to hope. Then he started to receive reverse-charge calls from a plainly dope-brained Dean, who seemed to be in a Peshawar doss-house. He complained vehemently about the Pakistani police who, he said, had impounded his passport. He added that ants were not only coming out of the shower drain but out of his armpits. There was nothing for it. Haroun and Habib were disturbed from their Prussian drill at Khalden. They left the red-rocked tranquillity of their desert camp, slunk down from the mountains, and at times with main force conveyed the tyro to Afghanistan.

  It is hard to say which — Dean or the wolf twins — had the lesser affection for their partnership. A bad time was had by all. Haroun
and Habib thought first to toughen him up. They yomped all day through vast and trackless systems of unpopulated valleys. Occasionally Dean’s vestigial aesthetic sense allowed him to be penetrated by the beauty of the landscape, the rock turning with the sun from gold to ochre to reddish to purple and then to the blue-black of the night, with the white lamps of the stars shining on their sleeping bags in the very pattern they had shone on Alexander and his army. Mainly, however, he found himself thinking of the anti-smoking videos shown at Wolverhampton Grammar School as he gasped and gagged, through lack of fitness or oxygen, in the wake of the weaving wolves.

  Soon the blood started to dry between his toes. Protective calluses formed. The soi-disant vice-captain of the school water polo team finally began to show some of the athleticism one might expect. He even started to look quite authentic, in his dish-dash and turban, and somewhat against their better judgement Haroun and Habib decided it was time to mount an operation. Dean would now prove his worth by striking a blow against the Western society he claimed to reject. The blow was to be all the more significant for being simultaneously vicious and pointless.

  It was at a Chaikhana in the Panjshir valley that they came across their target. They were sitting at breakfast, Dean morosely drinking what he took to be fermented asses’ milk, the wolves wolfing their nan, when they heard a voice on the stair. It was a high, camp, Oxonian voice, of a kind Dean had heard most often on TV in the mouths of characters who were meant to be absurd.

  ‘I’ve got to go, darling, because I’ve just got to have breakfast and then go off and look at the Buddhas. Love you too. Big kiss. Mwah mwah.’

  First down the stairs came a pair of sandals so evidently travel-worn that one imagined they must be softer than the inner thigh of the sultan’s favourite houri. Next were the infinitely fashionable baggy Afghan trousers and the Afghan waistcoat and then the long skinny brown arms decorated at the wrist with those epicene string bracelets affected by Prince William; and then six-foot, curly-haired Jamie Davenport emerged and embraced the whitewashed breakfast room with his radiant smile.

  Not since the days of Eric Newby had a professional travel writer been through these parts, and come up with so much that was hilarious, fascinating, warm, witty and wise. At the age of twenty-three Davenport had dazzled London with his tale of escape from a shotgun marriage in the Khyber Pass, entitled ‘A quick poke in the Hindu Bush’. Three years later ‘Alph — the search for Kubla’s Sacred River’ had won just about every gong going. Now he was back on the ancient literary trail, in search of the usual farrago of wily Pathans and almond-eyed beauties with lotus-stud noses and peach-like bottoms and truculent, jezzail-wielding tribesmen who move, in the space of five pages, from desiring to cut your throat to desiring you to marry their sisters.

  Wherever he went, his aerial was tuned for anything usable: snatches of sufi mumbo-jumbo, religious syncretism, gobbets of recondite fact, and if all else failed there were the charming mis-spellings of the menus. When he came down to breakfast, he was ready for anecdote, colour, quotes, personalities. What he found was Haroun, Habib and Dean, all in a pretty foul mood.

  Dean was about to croak a greeting when Haroun kicked him under the table.

  ‘But how,’ asked Dean, when the team had assembled outside, ‘and, you know, why?’

  He stared into the fathomless brown eyes of the Islamofascists.

  ‘He is a foreign pig,’ said Haroun.

  ‘He is part of the infidel desecration of this country,’ said Habib.

  ‘He is a Zionist pig,’ said Haroun. The last was especially unfair, since Jamie Davenport’s sympathies were very much in the opposite direction. Indeed, he had been known to attend parties with a little Arab tea towel at his throat.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Dean. ‘But how am I meant to do it?’ In their hearts, the two Arabs were hoping he might be talked into the suicide option. Go off into the hot white noonday with the other irritating Englishman, take him to some deserted wadi, pull the ripcord and boom.

  However, they doubted his competence, and whatever they said about sherbet and sloe-eyed virgins, they doubted his appetite for the job. So half an hour later Jamie Davenport found himself being driven in a Daewoo pick-up by two effusive Arabs, who swore they knew the whereabouts of a lost Buddha, and a seeming deaf-mute whose ethnic origins were not at all obvious.

  ‘Look, is it much further?’ he asked, after Dean had driven them erratically into the desert for several miles.

  ‘Just five minutes, five minutes,’ said Haroun.

  ‘And did you say that this Buddha had Hellenistic influences?’

  ‘Assuredly it is most Hellenistic.’

  ‘Really? Does it have curly hair?’

  Haroun appeared scandalized by the question. ‘It is as curly as mine. Of course it is curly.’

  Jamie Davenport settled back in his seat for a second. A syncretic Buddha. Good. Might be worth a couple of paragraphs, especially if he could contrive some kind of colourful incident or exchange with his guides.

  ‘And you are sure it is syncretic?’ he said absently.

  ‘It is profoundly syncretic,’ said Habib.

  Dean was rehearsing his lines as he drove. In fact he had decided on only one line, the better to conceal his English voice. At a signal from Haroun and Habib he would stop. While the Englishman got out, he would take the automatic from the glove compartment. They would all four walk a little way. Then, when it was obvious that there was no Buddha, he would pull the automatic out, force the man of letters to his knees, hands behind back, head forward in the traditional position of execution, and he would say, with all due fanaticism, ‘Die, foreign dog!’

  Or should that be ‘pig’? He was trying the words to himself, hunched over the steering wheel and moving his lips, when he saw an obstruction in the road. In fact, there were several obstructions, a row of boulders, each bigger than a melon.

  After that things happened very fast.

  Haroun and Habib screamed at him to reverse. Just as Dean was selecting the gear, a hairy face protruded itself through the driver’s window, with dentition that was poor even by English standards, and an AK 47 was jammed beneath his jaw. Fifteen minutes later the team — Haroun, Habib, Dean — were standing by the side of the road. All three appeared to have been rolled in the dust like gingerbread men rolled in flour. They were minus their wallets, their mobiles, their car, and in Habib’s case a tooth and a small amount of blood. They were also minus their shoes and their intended assassinee.

  At one point during the exchanges, when Habib and Haroun had failed to persuade the badmashes to let them be, Dean had yelled at the robbers: “Ere, mush, what’s the matter with yow? Don’t you know we wuz going to kill him anyway?’

  After that Jamie Davenport the explorer was driven away by his new proprietors, his eyes wide with terror and his wits so scattered that he believed he had made an important discovery. Never mind the lost descendants of Alexander’s hoplites. Here was a tribesman in the Panjshir valley who spoke with a strong Black Country accent. It was his most syncretic adventure for years.

  Which wasn’t exactly the opinion of Haroun and Habib. Never the jolliest pair, their eyes had bored into Dean, lacquered black and glittery with hatred.

  So now, in the gloom of the back of the ambulance, Jones the Bomb did his usual trick. He took Dean’s side. Over the recumbent form of the leaking Eric Onyeama, he put his hand on Dean’s shoulder. He looked at him sympathetically. He gave him a kind of Vulcan nerve pinch.

  ‘Come on, Dean, my son,’ he said. ‘We all need you. By tonight you will be world famous, and your name will be on every TV station and every newspaper on earth. We are all depending on you, and we cannot do it without you.

  ‘O Lions of Islam,’ he continued, addressing them all in a sacerdotal voice, ‘may our appointed time be today and every day in the prayer niches of the exalted one, so that we may align our feet before Allah.’

  We all have in our live
s someone who controls our emotional thermostat. There is always someone whose function is to supply the pipette drops of praise, the intermittent goo’ boy choc drops of external affirmation that get us through the day. The story of our lives is essentially the rotation of that person’s identity: mother, father, teacher, girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse and so on. Dean’s emotional thermostat was controlled by Jones, and had been ever since his arrival at the Islamic Welfare Centre.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ he said now, nodding. ‘Come on then. Let’s do it to it.’

  He began again with the gear.

  Roger Barlow was just about to shut the door of his office, and report the ambulance, when the phone started ringing. He hesitated. He ought to go straight down to the Pass Office, and get the police, but what if it was Felix Thomson? It was.

  He sounded happy. ‘Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve looked at the newslist.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Barlow tried to inject a note of exquisite detachment into his voice, as though discussing the future of NATO.

  ‘And there is a story about you listed at number 23.’

  ‘Number 23?’

  ‘Yes, it means, roughly speaking that there are twenty-two more important stories today, in the view of the news editor, many of them to do with the current festivities.’

  Roger laughed, in what he hoped was a dry, amused chuckle. ‘And, er, what does it say?’

  ‘It just says, 23: Roger Barlow MP shocker.’

  ‘Shocker?’ said Barlow. It sounded like a frivolous media expression, that might be attached to a story of no real importance. ‘Does that mean … .

  ‘Yeah,’ said Felix Thomson. ‘Or it could mean, you know, a shocker.’

  In a transport of shame, Barlow thanked his journalistic contact, and ended the connection. He was about to dial security when the phone rang again.

  It was Debbie from the Daily Mirror.

  The ambulance would have to wait a tick.

  ‘This is doing my head in,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘We’ve got footage of the flaming thing going up Whitehall, and we’ve got two cameras at the top end of Whitehall and they haven’t seen it. This’ll teach us to rely on those blasted CCTV things. It’s just disappeared.’