She remembered the fire engines and the ambulances nosing surreptitiously on to the tarmac (Busters reputation as a prangmeister was still green). She remembered the pride in her fathers voice as he said, Hang on, babe, and took off vertically, shooting up into the bright blue American sky like a firework. There was the awful pressure on her groin and legs from the G-suit, and then there was the joy, the ethereal unrepeatable joy, of being allowed by her father to co-pilot the plane. She simply held the joystick hard to the right, and the plane corkscrewed over and down magically at supersonic speed in an aileron roll towards the indigo sea. It was like a dream of death, or the animal exhilaration of some huge marine bird as it falls like a stone on some fish below; and so they might indeed have ganneted into the deep, had Buster not said to his daughter, OK, babe, Ill take back the plane, now, and they flew back in contented silence as the afternoon sun gave its dying benediction on rural America, the little red barns, the cylindrical grain silos, the churches and the schoolhouses. Whatever man Cameron settled on, that was the intensity of experience he would have to replicate. Which was why she was so stunned by Adam.
Now she was making faster time than her new boyfriend as they both marched towards Westminster Hall, mainly because she knew the route, and he was momentarily lost in the ground-floor corridors of Norman Shaw South.
You dont mind if I use the phone, said Colonel Bluett to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
Purnell indicated, again, that the entire Ops Room was at the Colonels disposal.
Im jes gonna tell Ricasoli about this here ambulance, said the Colonel.
Ricasoli? said Purnell.
Captain Ricasoli, up there in the Black Hawk.
Purnell looked at Grover, and Grover looked wordlessly back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
0938 HRS
In the police booth that governs the entrance to Norman Shaw North car park, they were having an argument about multicultural Britain.
Its all part of the diversity regulations, innit. Youve got to treat all religions the same.
I dont know, mate, said the other policeman. Ive never heard of that one.
Course you do. Youve got to have a Koran in every ambulance these days, in case you have to administer the last rites to a Muslim.
And youre sure it said it was the Koran?
Course Im sure. It was right there on the dashboard, with a load of used tissues. Al Quran. That means the Koran in Arabian.
The two coppers considered the implications.
Its a different world, mate.
You can say that again.
The second policemans attention was briefly diverted to the Sun newspaper, which carried a big picture of Jordans breasts. After a moments thought he said: So every ambulance has to carry the Bible, too?
I spect so.
What if its a Hindu accident victim? Do they have to carry the Bhagavad-Gita?
I shouldnt wonder.
What about the Book of Mormon?
The two coppers brooded again. Tell you what, said the first policeman, I reckon we just go and have a squint at that ambulance.
Right you are.
They shut the door of the booth behind them and wandered slowly over; with the result that they just missed the all points alert phone call, inviting them to keep an eye out for a stolen Wolverhampton ambulance, licence plate L64896P.
Inside that fatal machine Jones allowed himself to reflect, for one second, that so far they had been incredibly lucky. It could only be the will of Allah, blessings be upon his name, that they had not yet been detected.
Much of their plotting was amateurish. He thought with a shudder of the scene in the motel last night. But there was one detail which was both brilliant and revolutionary, and which would be copied by other terrorist cells. It was due entirely to him, the man whose passport said he was called Jones.
He was not called Jones, of course, but that was the name in which he enrolled at Llangollen, and which his fellow-students smirkingly accepted.
High above that North Welsh town, not far from the ruins of Dinas Bran and looking out over the foaming ale-coloured River Dee, are the delightful premises of a former mental home. Under the Learning and Skills Council it had been turned into a teacher training centre, where Welsh was dinned into the skulls of graduates, with a view to passing on this weird creole to the listless children of Denbighshire. The institution was then promoted into an Adult Education Centre, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Wales. Finally, in the great Stalinist push to expand the numbers in tertiary education, the place was rebaptized Llangollen University.
Here Jones had arrived two years ago, and spurned the useless courses that occupied most of the students. He did not do Media Studies or Gender Awareness in Film. He did that proper old-fashioned twenty-first-century British university course. He majored in hairdressing, and was known to his sniggering fellow-students as Jones the Hair.
But his main interest seemed to be in the thick, sweet, colourless, odourless liquid which is applied to hair in pomades and unguents. ft is called glycerin, C3H5(OH)3, and when treated with nitric acid (HNO3) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4) it produces something very remarkable.
One night there was a noise from Joness room. Some drunken Media Studies louts had been out at the Wild Pheasant, and they burst into the toejam and cigarette infested quarters of Jones the Hair. He was lying stunned and blackened on the floor, and was known ever after as Jones the Bomb.
A few weeks later, he secretly propounded an advance in bomb-making techniques, which looks simple, like so many good ideas, but it had never been done before. It is true that a mobile phone has already been used as a bomb: in January 1996 Israels internal security agency Shabak used an exploding phone to assassinate Palestinian bomb mastermind Yahya Ayash, known as the Engineer. He blew his mind out on a call, as the Beatles sang. But until Jones hit upon the wheeze, no one had used a series of Nokias in suicide jackets.
Each jacket contained about six kilos of explosive and a small detonator. Sewn into a little pouch next to the detonator was the mobile. When the phone rang, a current was passed along a small wire, which in turn caused a bridge wire to heat-function, as physicists say: to get hot. This in turn ignited a match element, which set off the primary explosive of the detonator. This set off the secondary explosive of the detonator. This in turn detonated the nitro-glycerine, which means that this substance was resolved, with incredible speed and violence, into nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide and oxygen. At this point, traditionally, the suicide bombers head would fly off as though drop-kicked by Jonny Wilkinson, and in a confined space the ball bearings in the jacket would cause carnage and havoc. That was the idea.
Jones had all their numbers preset on his speed-dial. He couldnt dial all four at once: that would not be necessary; but he could ring them up one after the other, and get them on the blower, so to speak.
But there was one obvious point that had been oppressing Dean ever since their rehearsal.
Its not fair, sir, he said to Jones in what he hoped sounded a casual voice. You can dial us but we cant dial you.
It is fair, Dean. It is what we agreed.
Yeah, but how does your bomber jacket go off? You cant dial yourself, can you?
That is secret, Dean.
Well, I think we should be all in this together. Nervous terror now propelled Deans tongue. Whats the difference? Its the four musketeers, innit.
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 couldnt 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.
Lets 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 wasnt there.