Seventy-Two Virgins

by Boris Johnson

  ‘As you know,’ the President went on, ‘it has become a cliché to say that the terrorist is like a mosquito. He’s difficult to spot, he causes an awful lot of bad feeling, a paranoia wherever he goes, and his bite is lethal. That’s why it’s no use just standing in the dark and slapping ourselves. That’s why we decided to drain that swamp. We did it together in Afghanistan, we did it in Iraq. And I believe, in the words of Winston Churchill, that our liberation of those countries will go down as one of the most unsordid acts in history.’

  The French Ambassador stuck out his tongue, placed his right index finger upon it and made a retching noise.

  ‘Whatever people now say, we know that Iraqi regime had developed weapons of mass destruction, and had Saddam remained in power, we can be certain that he would either have used them or shipped them to other rogue states around the world.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said a satirical English voice, loud enough to be heard by ten rows forward and back. ‘Like America.’

  It was Barry White, who had slipped efficiently into a seat near the back. It would normally have been unthinkable even for a tosser like Barry to heckle the President, never mind that he was leader of the free world, whatever that meant these days.

  He was a guest of the country and it was just rude to talk during his speech. But there was something funny in the air, a pre-menstrual irrationality, the panting swollen-veined tension that precedes a downpour in July.

  The President didn’t catch the remark but he saw its effect ripple out as a gust might catch a particular patch of corn as it passes over a prairie, turning up the dark undersides of the ears. ‘And we all know that there are people mad and sick enough to use those weapons.

  ‘Yeah, like you,’ said Barry White, and the crowd swayed around him again, some indicating that he should put a sock in it.

  ‘Upon innocent people.’

  ‘You said it, pal,’ said the heckler.

  ‘And to all those who blamed my country for overreacting to the threat, I say to them that the terrorist is no respecter of frontiers or nationalities. There were 67 Britons who died in the World Trade Center. There were 23 Japanese, 16 Jamaicans, 17 Colombians, 15 Filipinos, and …’

  ‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ said Barry White, to the disgust of those around him.

  ‘…a total of 32 other nations lost lives. It was an attack upon the world, and I believe that it has been the world’s fight that we in America have been fighting.’ The President had feared that this was the most controversial part of his speech. It had echoes of that line — those who are not with us are against us — which had particularly cheesed off the cheese eaters. He feared with one lobe of his brain that the British Labor guys would all stand up now, and whip off their jackets and reveal ‘Not In My Name’ T-shirts, or perhaps that this would be the moment for the walk-out. But no, he appeared to have got away with it. He had a feeling that someone was heckling him, but the guy was too British or too cowardly to do it properly. What he noticed again as he flickered his gaze around the mediaeval hall, was the odd progress of that film crew.

  You know how you spot a gecko on a wall and one moment it is in spot A and the next moment, when you glance again, it has somehow moved undetected to spot B. So the four characters were moving up towards him, hugging the grey cliff of stone, waggling their cameras at him. Had he looked harder, the President might have noticed that they had changed the order of march, so that the mixed-race-looking guy was being chivvied along by one of the darker-skinned fellows.

  The President was more interested in finishing the text on his lectern. ‘And never forget that among those who died on 9/11 were 58 entirely innocent Muslims. It cannot be repeated too often that this war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. We do not have any quarrel with any people in the Muslim world, and I want to say on a personal level as a Christian, how much I admire and respect their great religion.’ There was some uncertain clapping at this point. People could see that there was much to respect in Islamic culture. It was not obvious why this should be particularly moving to a Christian unless the President was somehow asserting his approval of mutually antagonistic and fundamentalist creeds of all kinds.

  ‘It is not Islam which drives young men and women brutally to take their lives and the lives of others.’

  ‘No,’ said Barry White in his irritating voice, much like Muttley, the dog that accompanies Dick Dastardly in the Wacky Races. ‘It’s the Israeli Defence Force.’

  For some reason this sally was loud enough to reach a much larger section of the audience, and the President’s own ears caught the word Israel.

  He scowled. He didn’t like it at all. He began to wonder whether indeed he would get to the end without some audience reaction so unacceptable that the US networks would be obliged to report it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  1021 HRS

  ‘It is not Islam that turns these sad and impressionable young men and women to terror. It is those who knowingly pervert the teachings of that great value system, and who corrupt these young people, and who lead them into the path of evil.’ He looked up again and holy mackerel, the four Arab geckos had scooted a long way up the wall, they were there just off to his right, there where the skirt of grey stone steps began to rise from the floor to the dais from which he was speaking.

  The President momentarily caught the eye of the leader. He was glancing up from his camera viewfinder and there was something in his manner that was, yes, reptilian.

  ‘Our struggle and our fight is with those who would turn a religion of peace into a utensil of torture and killing . .

  The word ‘torture’ produced a predictable heckle.

  ‘… And I tell you all now, and I tell all those who may now be following this speech across the world, that as long as I am Commander in Chief, the United States will pay any price, we will bear any burden, we will travel any distance to track down those who would kill or harm our citizens or other innocents of the earths. My Lords, Ladies, Members of the House of Commons, Honourable and Esteemed Friends and Members of the British Cabinet …’

  ‘Hey!’ exclaimed Roger, quite loudly this time, as he saw Jones the Bomb begin his final scuttle towards the sweep of steps. ‘Sscht,’ said everyone. Chester de Peverill squeezed his arm in the most patronizing way, put his finger to his lips and winked. Roger gave up. He sat down and kept silent out of fear of embarrassment, the fear that prevents the Englishman from ever being as truly entrepreneurial as the American, the fear that causes him to be exceptionally prone to prostate cancer.

  From his vantage point leaning against the far wall, Adam Swallow looked with amazement at the group. But where was the cripple? Where was the man from Abu Ghraib? He wheeled around to find Benedicte, and she refused to meet his eyes.

  In the Ops Room, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was filled with sudden and evanescent satisfaction. ‘Quiet!’ he yelled at Bluett and the rest of the room. ‘I’m getting something about fatalities in New Palace Yard. What’s that? A dark-skinned man has been shot, in the ambulance .

  What’s that? A traffic warden? Oh Jesus, we know about him. What about the others?. . . The others, for Christ’s sake. No, not the man on the roof. The man on the roof is on our side, you idiots. What happened to the four TV crew? What do you mean you thought they were just TV crew? You mean they aren’t dead? Then where the hell are they? Oh sweet Mary mother of God, don’t tell me you just let them in the frigging hall.’

  ‘Where,’ said Bluett, ‘in the name of God is Pickel?’

  The President glanced down at a group of the most senior British politicians from the Government and the Opposition who were sitting in the first three ranks. To his very slight surprise he saw that between him and the higher echelons of British politics, crawling towards him up the steps, was that Arab film crew. It seemed that the game of gecko grandmother’s footsteps was about to come to an end.

  The President had no time to pause, no time to think, but he thrust out h
is chin and filled his lungs.

  ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of all the people of my country for your steadfastness, your courage and the clarity with which you have seen the risk we all face and the readiness with which you have responded and I believe that future generations will look back on this alliance of ours and ponder the marvel that once again we too, Britain and America, stood firm against evil. Because I am certain that no matter how bitter the struggle may be, no matter how irksome the security precautions we must take, the time will surely come when we will overcome the — what the hell?’

  Whatever abstract noun was fated, in the view of the President, to be overcome by the Atlantic Alliance, that audience would never know.

  PART THREE

  I COME TO BURY CAESAR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  1024 HRS

  Across the hall, behind pillars, behind doors, at strategic points in the audience, in helicopters overhead and wherever the speech was being monitored on television, American security men gasped or swore or howled and pulled out their weapons, just as the news was breaking in their Curly-Wurlies.

  They were too late. ‘That will do, Mr President,’ said Jones the Bomb, clicking the handcuff over the President’s limp wrist. Then he held their hands up together, as the umpire raises the hand of a boxer to show that their fates are now conjoined.

  That was it, thought Jones. He had done it. Whatever happened now, he would join the ranks of the immortals for this action. In Mecca, in Medina, in all the holy places of Islam, babes unborn would lisp the name of Jones. He was also aware that he was very likely to be shot dead in the next ten seconds, unless he could explain to the shooters that this was a bad idea.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, taking the microphone, ‘it will be simplest if I do the talking from now on. I should like to begin by pointing out to anyone who is thinking of shooting me that the bomb I am wearing is connected by electronic sensors to my heart and will detonate as soon as it senses that there is no pulse.

  ‘If that happens, America will lose a president, Britain will lose much of its government and the rest of you will be in a very bad way. So here, as they say in the movies, are my demands.’

  Cameron had already worked out what Benedicte and the two other Arabs, the ones sitting in front of her, would do next. The insight had been granted to another part of her brain, just as she watched Jones clicking on the handcuff. She was more interested in the behaviour of the French Ambassador. With what seemed now to be utter predictability, the man in the djelabah reached down under his seat in the movement she had seen him rehearse. He flipped off the brass plaque. It clacked backwards on to her toes, chipping the varnish.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cameron, and then regretted the incongruous pettiness of her complaint.

  Here, the plaque reminded her, was the spot where Thomas More, patron saint of politicians, had been condemned to death. There was a point there somewhere, thought Cameron as she looked at the wrenched-off memorial, screws awry. The man’s hairy wrist shot down into the darkness to produce a plastic bag marked ‘RitePrice’ out of which he removed two Schmidt MP rapid fire submachine guns, and gave one to his neighbour, and then produced another bag.

  ‘Mais Bénédicte,’ said the French Ambassador, turning to his girlfriend. The girl looked at the older man. She was beautiful, thought Cameron, with full red lips and skin that was startlingly pale for a Palestinian Arab.

  ‘Et alors?’

  ‘Mais non,’ he shouted, and flung out an arm to restrain the two men as they rose. Benedicte al-Walibi kept her eyes fixed on the Ambassador but with one hand she tapped her Arab colleague on the arm, borrowed a Schmidt and shoved the muzzle hard into the soft fold under her lover’s ribs.

  ‘Tais-toi, chéri,’ she said.

  Out of the corner of her eye Cameron became suddenly aware that the Dutch Ambassador was on the verge of heroism. His father had fought the Nazis. His uncle had been present as one of the negotiators when South Moluccan terrorists had hijacked a Dutch train and started to massacre the passengers. He knew that violence sometimes had to be matched with violence for the salvation of society; and anyway he was full of the battle adrenalin and suppressed fury of one who has been freshly bombed by an ostrich egg.

  He made a nostril noise like a kettle coming to the boil, and was on the point of hurling himself upon Benedicte when she whipped round and poked him in the chest with her gun. ‘You shut up too, bald man,’ she said. He slumped back.

  When Cameron looked at him, with his morning dress streaked with the embryo of a flightless bird, with his expression of a stunned mullet, she felt instantly overcome. It was the shocking inversion of feminine aggression, it was the sight of the President, her President, handcuffed and humiliated. It was the gross impropriety of the submachine guns in this place to which even Parliamentarians were not allowed to bring their swords.

  Along the bottom of her lashes brimmed tears as big as planets. She blinked. They splashed to the floor, on the plaque and on her feet. She looked up through the blur and saw someone walking through the rows towards her, unchecked by the gunmen.

  He was someone she wanted to see, the man who would explain everything or at least provide her with a theory. ‘Oh Adam,’ she said, ‘thank God.’

  In the Scotland Yard Ops Room there was a moment of hush. Like all men in such positions, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell and Colonel Bluett of the USSS were contemplating not just the imminence of carnage in Westminster Hall and the assassination of a president. They foresaw clearly the immolation of their own careers.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what are we waiting for? I’ve got twenty-one guns in that hall.’

  Without consulting Purnell, the American flipped open the switch that connected him to the earpieces of the men in the hall.

  ‘Boys, this is Bluett. Who has got a line on these guys?’

  From their vantage points around the hall, the lynx-eyed USSS men started to whisper their options into the Smarties on their lapels.

  ‘Negative, sir: I’ve got a man with an Uzi at my gut.’

  ‘Negative, sir: I’m way back here.’

  ‘I got him, sir. I got that sucker whenever you want.’ It was Lieutenant Alan Cabache.

  High up and recessed into the east wall of Westminster Hall, just under the corbels of the hammerbeams, is a series of huge murky alcoves; hard to make out at any time, and almost invisible now in the overhead glow of the TV lights. In one of these alcoves Lieutenant Cabache had been waiting for an hour, hidden by the ancient friable skirts of Philippa of Hainault. He was covered with soot, and his legs ached from being braced against Philippa’s rump. But it was all about to pay off.

  Now he secretly slid his Glock barrel under Philippa’s left breast and drew a bead on Jones, just fifty feet away, down and to his right.

  ‘I got him, sir,’ he repeated.

  ‘Then whack him!’ said Bluett.

  ‘NO,’ said Purnell. ‘For God’s sake, man, you heard what he said!’

  ‘What’s that, Stephen? Are you countermanding me here?’

  ‘Too damn right, I am. You heard what he said. As soon as he dies, his fucking bomb goes off.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  Across the hall, the USSS men listened in despair. Who the hell was in charge here?

  ‘I do believe it until we somehow find evidence to the contrary.’

  ‘You do believe it.’ A note of doubt had crept into Bluett’s voice.

  ‘Shall I shoot, sir?’ asked Cabache, as quietly as he could.

  ‘NO,’ said Purnell.

  ‘Uh, wait up, Cabache. Well, what do you frigging propose, Mr Commissioner?’

  ‘Sir, I’ve got Downing Street on the line.’ The Prime Minister, the head of MIS, the Cabinet Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the head of Counter-Intelligence and a new minister for Homeland Security were being hustled into Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, or Cobra. Normally, their number would have incl
uded the Home Secretary, but the Home Secretary was in Westminster Hall.

  Now Purnell spoke to the British Prime Minister, on a secure’ mobile, as he was jogged by his own agents towards the electronic nerve centre of Downing Street.

  Like Purnell and Bluett, the Prime Minister had instantly seen that these events could be fatal to his career. So there was one point he stressed in his brief conversation with Purnell, namely that he, the Prime Minister, was taking political responsibility, of course, but no ‘operational’ responsibility. It would be quite wrong, the Prime Minister said, for him to second-guess the split-second decisions of the experts. That was why he, the Prime Minister, was going to leave such decisions to Purnell.

  ‘With full cooperation, of course, with the Americans,’ said the Prime Minister.

  ‘Cooperation, sir?’ said Purnell.

  ‘And consultation.’ Then the line went dead as the British leader was patched through to Washington.

  ‘The first thing we do,’ said Purnell, ‘is find out about this business with the sensors. Is it possible to make a suicide bomb jacket like that?’

  ‘I dunno, sir,’ said Grover.

  ‘Well don’t hang around,’ said Bluett. He didn’t know whether he was entitled to give orders to Grover, but he was damn well going to give orders to someone.

  The President and Jones the Bomb stood at the head of the congregation like a shackled pair of slaves about to be auctioned. As he waited for his yokemate to outline his demands the President looked and was not reassured. He saw a nose so hooked that Jones could easily touch it — and sometimes did, to the horror of anyone sitting opposite him in the Tube — with the tip of his tongue. He saw the bags under his eyes, shiny and dark as plum sauce; and now the eyes with their odd vibration were upon him.