Good stuff, good stuff, chuckled Adam, who had written his own share of bilge in his time. He folded the paper carefully, and would have dropped it in the bin, had not the bins all been removed for security reasons from this part of Westminster. He checked his watch, stood up, and looked boldly out into the street, his bright brown eyes shining with tension. They should be here any minute, he thought.
Where was Cameron?
Now the drops were chasing each other down Joness pitted temples, and he could hear the chatter of the Black Hawk, coming up the Embankment with the President underneath.
He wondered if there was a sign on the roof, a visible identification code, and then began to feel the ambulance shrieking their crime to the heavens.
As he waited for the last lights to turn, he rubbed his palms together, and made little black worms of dried blood.
He says four of them killed the warden, said the station commander into the phone.
Killed a traffic warden? We all feel like that sometimes.
No, I think hes serious. Can he identify the ambulance?
Sounds like he had to scarper pretty quick.
Wed better get on to the Deputy Assistant Commissioners office.
Oh yeah, said the station commander. Ill do that right away. I dont suppose you know the number, do you?
Ill get back to you in a minute. Youve sent someone round to Tufton Street, have you?
Good thinking, said the station commander. Does he have any idea where this ambulance has gone?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
0909 HRS
Continue for 200 yards, said the satnav in the ambulance, still yearning in its silicon soul for Wolverhampton and home, and then try to make a U-turn.
Oh shut up, in the name of Allah, said Haroun. Cant you work out how to make that thing stop? said Jones.
It is a sharmoota. It is a whore, said Haroun. Its just a machine.
It is an American computer whore.
Habib had been silent, playing with his prayer beads, a chunky collection of sickly lime-green onyx. He had smooth, rubbery, almost Disney-ish features, and crinkly hair which he concealed in all weathers beneath a woven black skullcap. Now he opened his sad brown eyes.
The man from the truck will tell them about us.
What will he say? There are too many ambulances.
He may have seen our number.
Believe me, said Haroun, still fantasizing about what he might have done with that thoracic spike, the heathen dog was too frightened. Its not him Im worried about, its him. He jerked his head towards the back of the van.
Jones took a still bloodied hand off the wheel as they came round into Whitehall. He pointed to a packet of surgical wipes on the dashboard, next to a Unison coffee mug.
Please pass me one, he said to Haroun in Arabic, and then read out the English motto on the side of the box: Clean hands save lives. Indeed.
He could ruin it for everyone, said Haroun in Arabic, passing the wipes like an airline stewardess.
I know.
So what are we going to do?
Have faith, said the man called Jones, sponging the blood off his hands, and dropping the tissues on to the floor. They were talking about Dean.
Haroun and Habib, in slightly different ways, were possessed of animal cruelty. Both men had trained with him in the deserts, at the camps in the Sudan and at Khalden in Afghanistan. Habibs tranquil exterior was deceptive, in that he liked to meditate on violence, and had devised some of the more baroque elements of the plan they were about to execute.
With his slanty eyes and triangular tongue, Haroun was like a priggish wolf. If that porky tow-van operator hadnt beaten it so quickly, Haroun would have done for him with all the dispatch of a halal butcher slicing the throat of a sacrificial kid.
In the view of Habib and Haroun, therefore, it was absurd to have Dean in this operation at all. It was just because he was British. It was just because he was the local talent. It was tokenism. It was political correctness gone mad.
As for his terroristic temperament, he seemed to have absorbed far too much of the risk-aversion of the modern British male.
It had only been a few minutes since the violence outside Church House, but any self-respecting terrorist would surely by now have steeled his nerves. Dean, if anything, seemed to be losing morale by the second. He was sitting in the back, by the exsanguinating form of Eric Onyeama, and he was beginning to keen in a frankly off-putting way.
You guys, he said, sticking his head through the door, are you sure we shouldnt just knock this on the head? He said yow, rather than you, because he was from Wolverhampton.
Why dont we just drive on here, and maybe we could like chill for a couple of days. Why dont we do like the machine says, and go back to Wolvo?
Habib looked at Haroun. Haroun looked at Jones. Dean caught the glances. It would on the whole be better not to end up like the poor traffic warden, yerked beneath the breastbone, with the bright bronchial blood still bubbling about the nose and mouth.
OK OK. Dean sat back down on the plastic banquette. Forget I mentioned it. Jones bore to the right on Whitehall, about 100 yards short of the Cenotaph, and indicated that he wished to cross the traffic.
Please make a U-turn now, said the satnav, as soon as she understood what he was trying to do.
Haroun said something truly awful to the computer about what he would do to her mothers rib cage.
Then he struck her on the fascia with a seat belt cutter. The machine started to squeak and gibber, like Robert De Niros lalloglossia when he is hit repeatedly on the head at the end of Cape Fear.
Then she fell silent. The trouble was, thought Dean, she was right. Of all the great terrorist outrages of history, could any boast such screwed-up and hopeless beginnings? Dean tried to think himself into the mind of one who was about to fill the citadels of the West with death and despair, and to send a message to every dutiful Muslim of encouragement, gladness and strength. He sighed and blinked.
Jones turned and looked back at Dean as they waited to cross the traffic.
Remember what it says in the Holy Koran, my young friend.
Slay the unbelievers wherever you can find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush for them everywhere.
Yeah, said Dean miserably. Right.
We will perform the jihad against the Kuffar, the unbelievers.
Yeah.
Remember that Allah is our ally, and they have no ally. We are the lions, Dean, we are the lions ready to set out. We will assault with speed, with the heart of a volcano, with the bombardment of thunders.
The ambulance moved across Whitehall to the right, and Dean felt his mood lift.
Think of the hur, the black-eyed virgins of Paradise, Dean. Would you like seventy-two black-eyed virgins, whose chastity has been violated neither by man nor djinn? Would you like that, Dean?
The ambulance slowed as it approached a red and white boom that controlled access to their intended car park. Habib smiled, and so did Haroun.
Yeah, said Dean, he guessed he would like that, really.
It was no coincidence that Dean was born in March 1988, nine months after Margaret Thatchers last election victory. His father was the manager of a previously union-ridden Black Country autoparts factory, and believed he had much to celebrate that night.
Already he relied on immigrant labour, many of them Muslim women, and it made his blood freeze to think of a return to the closed shop. Dean never knew his name or occupation, and for the time being all we need to know is that towards 3 a.m. on the morning of Friday 9 June a Midlands businessman called Sammy, of Viper Wipers, was cruising the Bilston Road in search, as he put it, of a bit of black.
There is no need here to rehearse the details of that melancholy transaction: the slow prowling of the Ford Granada Ghia 2.1 down the sooty sodium streets, over bridges and culverts that had been here since the age of Telford and Macadam. We must take it that Deans biological father cruised on, his eyes like an unblinking snake, past pairs of white girls in white socks, shivering on corners, until he found what he wanted. Neither party would remember exactly where or how Dean had been conceived. Was it beneath this spindly smokestack which 200 years ago had been a symbol of Englands industrial dominance?
Was it beneath this hideously echoing arch, dripping with slime? And how did life begin? Was it a burst condom, that triumph of nature over artifice, or did Deans father pay some trifling bonus for unprotected sex?
And yet when the feature writers came to look back at Deans childhood and adolescence, they had to admit that England had done him proud. His mother had almost immediately given him up for adoption, and since he was only the faintest coffee colour, he was fostered with a white family who appeared on the face of things to express all that was most honourable about bourgeois Britain.
Dennis and Vera (or Vie) Faulkner were in their late forties when Dean came into their lives. They were considered by the system to be towards the upper limit of the age range, but there was some sympathy for Vie in the chilly hearts of the adoptocrats. She had been one of the would-be mothers who participated in Robert Winston and John Steptoes first attempts to create a test-tube baby. It had worked for the others. It had worked for Louise Brown. It hadnt worked for Vie.
She loved little Dean. She boiled eggs for him every day (in fact, his first act of rebellion was to announce, No more eggs!) and Dennis, a fanatical monarchist whose family roots were in Northern Ireland, would puff around the garden, teaching him football and cricket. He went to a Montessori school, and learned to glue bits of spaghetti on paper, the discipline now known as Key Stage One. He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School, and though academically undistinguished he showed some talent for water polo.
You simply could not pretend that he was unhappy in that quiet house in Wednesbury. He went on holiday with Dennis and Vie, and learned to put up with the curious glances. When people at school made the mistake of asking where he was really from he learned to blank them and to say that he was really from Wolverhampton. From time to time about once every three years he would receive small sums of money in badly hand-addressed envelopes, and Dennis would hand them over with a grimace.