Thats our guys, said Bluett, as they watched the ambulance being stopped by Joe and Matt the USSS men. What are they frigging playing at?
Its no ones fault, said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
That, said Bluett, may or may not turn out to be the verdict of history.
So now it goes up Whitehall, and then I am afraid we lose it.
We lose it? said Bluett.
Well, it seems one of the cameras has been vandalized.
Sheee-it, said Bluett.
Theres a lot of ill-feeling against the congestion charge, you know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
0926 HRS
The last Jason Pickel had seen of the ambulance was when it turned right, out of his field of vision, into Norman Shaw North. He had keen enough eyes to see that it had three Mediterranean or Middle Eastern types in the front seat, and though he knew he shouldnt be prejudiced, he was getting those Dad flashbacks again.
Go on, said Indira the friendly sniper, as he croaked to a halt, and once again checked his hand for tremor. What happened then?
Jason got a grip and continued. You British have a great poet, Wystan Hugh Auden.
Mmm. Indira couldnt remember much about Ordon.
In his poem Icarus he makes a good point about any human disaster. Something terrible may be happening in one place, but just down the road people are getting on with their lives. In one corner of the canvas a tragedy is happening, a boy failing into the sea. But the ploughman gets on with his ploughing. The boat sails on.
Yeah, said Indira, thinking he was a nice chap, the big depressed Yank, but hoping very much he wasnt about to recite poetry or maybe he already was?
When he ran out into the street, and after the sunlight went off like a firework through his shades, what he mainly noticed, said Jason, was this incredibly peaceful scene. There were kids fishing in the Tigris, right by the American cantonment. In an instant, even while he could hear the screams of warning from the road, he took in their feet splayed in the mud, the way they cast their lines beyond the biblical rushes and the wavelets glittering. Then he saw the car coming down the road. The sweat was already coursing over his eyebrows and stinging his corneas, but he couldnt brush it away because he was carrying an Ml 6 and a mobile, and anyway, there was no time.
Stop or I fire! yelled Sergeant Kennedy.
Stop! shouted GI Kovac.
Stop! shouted Jason. What part of stop dont you understand?
The car rolling slowly towards them was a Chevrolet GMC, a big white shiny machine of a kind that could be seen all over Baghdad. Like every other example, the car had the letters TV extravagantly striped all over it in masking tape. It meant nothing. There were more TV cars currently cruising Baghdad than there were TV stations on the planet. The Chevrolet GMC was the favoured vehicle of every Baathist kingpin turned looting gangster. Plenty of well-attested sightings had put Saddam himself behind the wheel of a GMC. The orders of Jason and the rest of the detail were clear. If the vehicle failed to stop within a reasonable delay, they were at liberty no, they had a duty to protect human life, Iraqi or American, from possible terrorist attack.
Jesus Christ, screamed Barry White the Limey journalist. What are you fucking well doing? Hes not fucking stopping, is he?
Please keep calm, sir, said Jason Pickel, and dropping the satphone still connected to his stunned and possibly faithless wife, he raised the carbine to his shoulder and shouted clearly, Driver, unless you halt I will open fire on the count of three. One.
By some instinct the little fishermen of the Tigris flung themselves face-first into the reeds.
Two.
It does not take much to rob a British tabloid reporter or indeed a broadsheet reporter of his dignity, even if he has a hairstyle like Michelangelos Moses. Were all going to fucking die, shrieked Barry White as he hurled himself into the ditch, knocking over the last geranium as he went.
Three.
Because he had no choice, Jason Pickel opened fire, first at the windscreen and then at the bonnet.
Its all right, Jason, said Indira, touching his hand and noticing the vibration for the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought, if she and Jason actually had to DO something today.
Oh come on Cameron, darling girl, thought Adam Swallow. He looked at the ambulance and strained his ears for the sound of Islamic prayer. On no account must she see the mutilated man, or even see the men coming out of the ambulance.
He looked at his watch and yearned for the sight of her; partly because he was anxious, and partly because his feeling for her was turning day by day into the most heart-squeezing, throat-choking crush he had ever had on a woman.
In the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons there was a flap. The doorman at St Stephens Entrance had just rung to say the President was on his way, and by their calculations he was almost ten minutes early.
The telephone rang again. Its the French Ambassador, said Sir Edward Luce, the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms, a spare, kindly man. He says its about his partner, and he wants to speak to you personally.
His partner? What am I supposed to be doing with the French Ambassadors floozy?
He calls her his petite arnie. You remember Miss Benedicte al-Walibi. We had that trouble with the American Embassy.
Nnnggh, the Speaker groaned. It was a low Scottish groan, an act of self-psyching-up, accepted within the Presbyterian sect to which he belonged as an expression of direct communication with the Almighty. Just such a noise had he produced in his youth, in the 1970s, when as an adroit convenor of the TGWU he had prepared to broker a deal between his lads and a once-great Coventry car firm. The deal might be inflation-busting; it might be unaffordable; it might accelerate the bringing of the hallowed marque to its knees. But with his broken prize-fighters weariness he usually persuaded all sides that no better bargain could be struck. Tell him Ill call him right back, said the Speaker. Weve got the President coming in now.
There was a silence in the Speakers glorious apartments. The clock ticked a beat or two. Out of his nostrils came the soft, stertorous noise of a man digesting the traditional sheet-metal workers breakfast of chitterlings and black pudding. But the Speakers mind whirred with great precision as he worked on the problem of the French Ambassadors mistress.
Outside the Thames ran softly in the sun; inside the velvet brocaded wallpaper soared in plum and bottle green, like the luxurious trousers of some nineteenth-century clown, until it met the demented whorls and volutes of the Pugin entablature. Ranged at the back of the room was a glass-fronted case containing the gifts which successive Speakers had received from visiting dignitaries: a silver spittoon from the Speaker of the Chinese Peoples Assembly; a whip, its handle inlaid with topaz and jacinth, from the Majlis of Free Afghanistan; a drum from Uganda; a model ship from Moscow, and so on.
There was a rapping on the oak without. The Speaker stood.He clenched his buttocks. He stitched on his broadest smile.
But it was not the President who entered. It was Sir Perry Grainger, an MP for more than a quarter of a century, Chairman of the All-Party Foreign Affairs Committee, and a man of almost stratospheric pomposity.
I am so sorry to raise this now, but the matter has only just come to my attention. Sir Perry advanced to the middle of the carpet and beamed. It was an amphibian Roy Jenkinsesque beam of frightening intensity and insincerity.
Someone has this morning informed me of the nature of the token which you will present on behalf of the House of Commons to the President. Is, ah, that it?
Sir Perrys eye fell on the frankly unmissable object that stood on the Speakers desk.
Sir Perry, said the Speaker, as patiently as he was able. You may not like it, but the President is going to be here any second.
My views are in a sense immaterial, but I think that there are many people, on both sides of the Atlantic, who might describe it as vulgar tat.
But I chose it myself, said the Speaker, didnt I, Sir Edward?
You did, sir. You went to some considerable trouble.
I think its just the job, said the Speaker.
Its certainly rather jolly, said Sir Edward.
The Americans are nuts about Churchill, explained the Speaker. Hes a hero to them. They canna get enough of him.
Sir Perry looked at the enormous Toby jug of the wartime leader: mauve-cheeked, gooseberry-eyed and waving a V sign. But the gesture is obscene.
Not in America, said the Speaker. In America, he demonstrated for Sir Perrys benefit they use only one finger. I tell you what, he continued, with the arm-round-the shoulder voice he used for when the fix was coming, I believe that many colleagues on all sides of the House would think it right if you, Sir Perry, were to present him with this sign of transatlantic good wishes.
Well, I am not sure, Mr Speaker Vanity began to struggle with good taste in Sir Perrys mind, a short, one-sided conflict.
The President is on his way now, sir, said a man in tights, sticking his head round the door.
And furthermore, said the Speaker, as he reached into a humidor and produced a gorillas fistful of nine-inch cigars, we will stuff it with Sir Winstons personal smokes.
But surely those arent Winstons cigars?
They are now. Wah. I have spoken, said the Speaker.
But do you?
I have spoken. Thats what Im paid to do, and he raised his palm like a chief.
Sir Edward, please ring the French Ambassador with my compliments, and tell him that he and his Palestinian doxy are fully expected in Westminster Hall. Their seats will be in the diplomatic section. This is the House of Commons, and no one tells us what to do, and certainly no foreign government.
Mr President, sir, it is an honour.
And still Cameron sat on the bench in the corridor outside the Pass Office, not twenty yards from where Adam waited. She stared at the photos, of Jones with his livid mask, the slightly fatter one in the skullcap, the one with the killer eyes, and a young, good-looking boy. Was this really a TV crew?
Then she began to persuade herself that it must be, mainly because she had never known Adam to be wrong about anything.