Seventy-Two Virgins

by Boris Johnson

  Slumped in his seat near the front, the French Ambassador saw it. He shook his Beethoven hairdo. Confounded and depressed though he was, the énarque in him admired anything cruel and brilliant, and the terrorist plan was both. ‘C’est géniale, ça,’ he said and decided that his chances of surviving today were about 5 per cent.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cameron, gripping his arm.

  ‘Hem?’ said the French Ambassador, as though surprised to find he was in the presence of other human beings.

  ‘You said something just now. Do you mean that you think this guy’s a genius?’

  ‘Not a genius, of course not, but the plan is certainly brilliant.’

  ‘But do you think he is, like, cool?’

  ‘It is certainly cool,’ wheezed the French diplomat, ‘to carry out an operation such as this.’ Cameron tried to compute it all. She tried to make sense of the Frenchman’s actions, but mainly of her own actions and the actions of the man on her right.

  She turned to the love object, who was now sitting in the chair vacated by Benedicte, but facing her. She took him in slowly with the anguish of one beholding a much-loved relative on the mortuary slab. She looked first at his long tapering fingers which now held her own with the gentle and winning insistence she had felt so often. She looked at the leather patches on his tweed jacket that he wore even in the heat of London in July and which heaven knows, he wore in Baghdad during the bombing.

  She looked at his strong chin with its hint of bristle and then at the humorous and intelligent crinkles around his eyes and she looked into the eyes themselves. They were still Adam Swallow’s eyes: soulful, thoughtful, humane. Surely this was still a profoundly decent man.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

  ‘But why did you …’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘But you made me get those passes.’

  ‘I know, but I swear …’

  ‘I signed for them,’ said Cameron. As is the case, alas, with all of us, Cameron’s sense of guilt was greatly exacerbated by the certain knowledge that she would be exposed. Everyone would know that she had been instrumental in importing these maniacs to the Palace of Westminster and, oh lordy, her father would know. As soon as she thought of that man whose hot-dang, straight-up and magnificently unnuanced world view had until recently served as the template for her own, she felt so bad again that she toyed with the notion of weeping. And then Cameron thought, stuff it, I’m not going to cry, I’m going to find out what’s really been going on here.

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you promise that you will tell me the absolute truth?’ Her voice was high, as though she had some sort of pressure on the base of her windpipe, but it was firm.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam, and his brown eyes were unblinking, ‘I swear it.’

  ‘And that,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘is more or less all I have to say. It goes without saying that there must be no attempt to tamper with the television coverage of this event. For every channel that shuts off this fascinating broadcast for political reasons I will execute, shall we say, one hostage. Maybe we will start with that one over there. He seems to have survived.’

  He waggled his automatic at the Dutchman, ear now swaddled like Van Gogh, and Hermanus Van Cornelijus looked back with loathing. ‘Of course it is always possible that America will behave with unthinking violence, so let me say for, what, the third time, that if they kill me they will also’ — he tapped his padded breast — ‘kill the 43rd President. He will not be the first civilian to die from what Americans and their allies call friendly fire, but he would certainly be the first President. As to my own death and the death of my colleagues, let me quote the Holy Koran: “the nip of an ant hurts a martyr more than the thrust of a weapon, for these are more welcome to him than sweet cold water on a hot summer day”.’

  Recessed into the lectern was a glass carafe from which Jones the Bomb refreshed himself greedily, letting the drops trickle down his throat. He wiped his mouth and looked at the erstwhile most powerful man in the world as if to say, ‘Not for you, sonny.’ The President pursed his lips.

  In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the male egos were spooling madly in all directions. They were not thinking what they were doing; they were thinking how they would be held to have done when this business was over. One mind, a young female mind, was sitting in a corner and considering logically the problem that Jones had posed. ‘Hey,’ she said to herself, looking up from her notes, ‘hey, I know what!’ she yelled. No one was listening.

  The Ops Room had become an ops floor, with every computer terminal the object of discreet and overt competition between the operatives of Britain and America. Colonel Bluett of the USSS seemed slowly to be gaining the upper hand. By sheer weight of men and materiel at his eventual disposal, he was becoming the Eisenhower of the equation and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was being thrust into the role of Montgomery.

  ‘Not there, you dummkopf, there!’ yelled Bluett. He was now pacing around, a limp cigar hanging from his mouth in blatant imitation of Colonel Kilgore. At any moment you expected him to puff out his barrel chest and announce that Charlie don’t surf or that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.

  Without looking, he took a mobile phone from an aide and yelled into it: ‘Bluett! Not there, there!’ He pointed at a scale model of Westminster Hall, which was hastily being bodged together with the help of a guidebook on top of one of the tables.

  ‘Yes sir,’ he said, for it was Washington on the line, in this case the Secretary of State. ‘We’ve identified six of them, including the girl who came in with the French Ambassador. That’s right, sir. The only guy we can’t get a fix on is the young one. Seems to be some British kid, petty criminal, misfit, something like that. Yessir, yessir, we’re working on that right now. What’s that you say?’

  He lunged at the model and picked up two green toy soldiers. Cradling the mobile, he grabbed a magic marker and labelled one of them POTUS, before putting them back, facing in a slightly different direction.

  ‘Do any of them have a history of suicide bombing? Gee, sir, I don’t think you can have a history of suicide bombing. I think he might have a history of attempted suicide bombing, but—’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ This time the female detective, whose name was Camilla, secured the attention of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, who was desperate to shut out the noise of Bluett.

  ‘You know what, darling,’ he said, smiting his forehead when it was explained to him, ‘you’re flaming well right.’

  ‘Chaps,’ he said, in such a way as to indicate that by chaps’ he meant chaps as opposed to guys. ‘Here is what we are going to do.’ It took Bluett only seconds to realize that his British counterpart had found the solution.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  1037 HRS

  As his eyes soaked up the room, he could see the excitement. Some of his own men were now clustering around Purnell and making animated gestures. For all his swaggering, Bluett was essentially a bureaucrat and every bureaucrat knows what to do when your rival has a brainwave.

  You go along with it. You extol it; and then you secretly find a way of sabotaging it, while making sure that you have distanced yourself from it in good time.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Bluett, when the wheeze was explained to him. ‘There’s only one problem I see here, and that’s how do we get the guy into the hall. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but if this maniac sees someone pointing a gun at him loaded with a rhino tranquillizer then he is going to pull the ripcord — no question. And anyhow, what if it doesn’t knock him out?’

  ‘It will knock him out in a trice,’ said Camilla, the detective who had thought up the idea. ‘Hit him in the neck and he’ll be away with the fairies.’

  ‘That’s swell, that’s swell,’ said Bluett, pacing over to his mock-up and thinking the Brits could not be serious. What did they think this was? Daktari?

  ‘
Show me how we get him in. There are at least six entrances to Westminster Hall, but they are all obvious, and they’ve got men with machine guns everyplace.’ With his magic marker he indicated the main access points, St Stephen’s Entrance, the entrance from New Palace Yard, the passageway entrance by which Jones & Co. had come in and then two sets of entrances on the left-hand side as the President looked at it, through doors that led to a series of debating chambers and meeting rooms.

  ‘Of course we could take them all out just like that’ — he flipped over a figurine violently, ‘but then we’d run the risk of disaster. I love this idea. I love it to death. My only question is how do we get a man in there without being seen. That’s why I want to hear from Pickel.’

  The sharpshooter was at that moment invisible, shielded from view by the glare of the TV lights. He was filthy from soot and trying to think of a way of persuading his gun to slip off its hook and fall into his arms. He stood up to his full six foot two, and stretched his leg-like arms. The gun was still several feet too high.

  He gave a little jump, and landed back heavily, missing the platform and resting on a high crossbeam. The beam held up well, but Pickel wobbled as he landed. ‘No,’ he thought. He was a brave man, but not a funambulist. ‘That’s enough jumping.’

  Slowly on his hands and knees, he grovelled his way to the eaves in search of a way up, and listened, as he went, to the further ravings of Jones.

  ‘So,’ said the lead terrorist, ‘is there no one here in this birthplace of Parliamentary debate who has the courage to speak? Here is the building of Pitt, Fox, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill and the great George Galloway. Is no one prepared to say anything on the issue of the hour? Are you all cowards?’ he shrieked suddenly.

  ‘Easy, boy,’ said the President. ‘Last time a person tried to speak you shot him in the ear.’

  ‘Good point, my friend,’ said Jones nastily. ‘This time I have a different policy. If no one speaks by the time I count to ten, I will fire at a hostage. Yes, you again, why not, you miserable creature.’ He once more indicated the wounded Dutchman, who opened his eyes and regarded his tormentor with herpetic inscrutability.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, infidel dogs, the motion before the house is that America should release her illegal prisoners from their Cuban torture chambers. The world is watching, the world is voting. Who will have the courage to speak before the bald guy gets it?’

  ‘ONE!’

  Dean looked at the faces of the politicians nearest him. Even with his limited knowledge of current affairs, he could tell that there were some quite famous people here. Wasn’t that guy the Home Secretary, inventor of FreshStart, to whose munificence with public funds he supposedly owed thanks and praise? Surely to goodness one of them would have the guts to stand up and say something snappy. Wasn’t that what they were trained for?

  Their faces were pale with shock, but each was inwardly engaged in that art he had made into a profession: maximizing the chance of his own survival. In the breast of each one was the traditional competition between the fear of appearing an idiot and the lust to star on television.

  ‘TWO!’

  Ziggy Roberts, best and brightest of the new intake, felt his mouth go dry. He could make his name for evermore. How many times had his speeches mentioned the concept of a golden opportunity’ which it was necessary to ‘seize with both hands’ with a view to going ‘forward into the future’?

  ‘This is it, Ziggy, old man,’ he told himself. ‘This is the big one.’

  ‘THREE!’

  Sir Perry Grainger toyed for a heartbeat with the notion that speaking in this debate would count as dancing to the terrorist tune and be therefore unacceptable. Insofar as he had a natural human desire to be inconspicuous after the demented terrorist leader had tried to shoot him, he justified it on that ground.

  ‘You shouldn’t play their games, Perry,’ one part of his brain told the other half; and the other half retorted vigorously: ‘Don’t be a wimp, Grainger, you fool. Did the people of South Oxfordshire send you to this place that you should keep silent on the greatest international crisis of our epoch, when hundreds of us, including the leader of Britain’s oldest and most important ally, are in mortal peril? You must speak, Grainger, you great dingbat, and speak for England.’

  ‘FOUR!’

  Christ on a bike, thought Roger. I really had better get up and do the business. It was no use trying to order his thoughts, he decided. It was like one of those moments when the whips come and haul you from the tearoom, and they say you’ve got to speak for fifteen minutes on the Fur Trappers Compensation Bill. And you say ‘awfully sorry’ but (a) you’re trying to finish a particularly dense and dry rock cake and (b) fascinating though the subject sounds, you don’t really feel you’ve got quite enough to say about it in the High Court of Parliament, at which the whips look threatening, smoothly mention recent infractions and leave you with no option.

  Barlow got ready to stand and knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to be as vicious and as scathing as he dared towards these terrorists without provoking them to shoot him. He was damn well going to speak up for America and for what he believed in. Apart from anything else, he had worked out one thing. Whatever happened to the President of the United States, he wasn’t getting out of here alive. He had thought it through from the point of view of Jones the Bomb, and it was perfectly obvious that the loonies would have far more impact — a permanent global trauma — if they went ahead and blew the place up than if they became snared up in some double-crossing hostage deal with the Americans.

  ‘FIVE!’

  Haroun looked at his boss, histrionically waving his automatic, and felt a twinge of annoyance. He didn’t hold with all this speechifying; he didn’t like this silly debating-society approach that Jones had introduced. He smouldered at the crowd and spat with a splatch on the flagstone occupied by the front row. This was not some stupid and degenerate Western reality TV show, some kind of Pop Idol votathon. This wasn’t I’m the President, Get Me Out of Here. This was a war and he, Habib and Jones and Dean and their Arab brothers and their — ahem — sister were fedayeen; they were ready to sacrifice their lives for a cause. That’s what fedayeen meant. Indeed it was doctrinally vital that this action of theirs should be construed as a military action. When they all died, as they surely would, sometime in the next few hours, Haroun believed that he would die as a soldier, a man engaged in Jihad; and this was theologically essential to Haroun because it is well known that the Holy Koran forbids suicide.

  ‘Whoever kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in hell,’ says the Koran, and it was part of the deal Haroun had made with himself that he would not be going to hell. On the contrary, he was going to a place more lovely and more perfect than you and I can possibly imagine.

  Somewhere a blissful tent had been pitched for him in the clouds, piled with silken cushions, cooled by the perpetual trickle of holy water from a turquoise fountain of vaguely Mudejar design; and he would have some peace there, thought Haroun, peace after the miserable American-induced stress of this earthly existence.

  He would lie back on the pillows and in one hand he would manipulate the celestial narghileh, bubbling away with hashish a thousand times more delicious than anything that could be found in the valleys of Afghanistan, and his other arm would be gently looped around the exposed stomach of the first of his statutory 72 almond-eyed virgins; and slowly he would ease off her filmy pyjama bottoms and prepare to enjoy her in a way that his imam had assured him was both decently spiritual and infinitely carnal. She would bend over him, bringing her breasts ever closer to his face, laughing low and praising him and dissolving all the onanistic wretchedness of his previous life and— Oh-oh, he thought. In the name of Allah, Haroun told himself, I had better be careful.

  He found himself staring irresistibly at Cameron, just ten feet or so away in her low-cut top. He felt the surge of fundamentalist rage that inspires the pathetic Islamofascistic male. How muc
h longer would Jones keep them among these harlots and jezebels? He stared with that perverted Wahhabi mixture of lust, terror and disgust at this portrait of sexually emancipated Western woman. He glared at her thighs and her unambiguously exuberant bosom and yearned to punish her, punish her entire society, punish America for her criminal role in pioneering feminism. He wanted to punish her for the inadequacies she made him feel, because he knew in his heart that she was more unattainable to him than the doe-eyed virgins of heaven; and there was a part of him, a secret half-acknowledged corner of his soul, that yearned for her on precisely those grounds.

  It was above all that part of himself, that part that had been tempted, the part that collaborated with America and her values, that he wished to destroy. Oh, but he would purge himself, he would cleanse himself of the Western taint. With sweating fingers he touched the stitched pouch in which the one-way Nokia was stored, and waited for the moment when he could wash his soul in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire. ‘Come on, Jones,’ he thought.

  ‘SIX!’

  But what would he say? wondered Cameron. It was a measure of her devotion to Adam, and indeed her awful inescapable feminine deference, that as Jones began to count, she had simply assumed the love-object would take charge. He was always haranguing meetings with brilliant and mordant paradoxes. Surely he would leap to his feet, shod in lovingly polished oxblood brogues, and somehow set things straight?

  But Adam Swallow just stared back. She looked into his implacable eyes, and tried to read him. Was that the glare of a proud but innocent man? Or was he a cynical abettor of terrorists? And she remembered that he knew these people anyway, or at least she assumed he knew these people, because he had suborned her into securing their access to the premises. She felt her soul-sickness deepen and she turned to the front and saw Dean with his afro hair and his proud, pale, almost Nilotic features. He looked so young and so scared.