Seventy-Two Virgins (32 page)

Sir Charles de Spenser sinks to his knees, deciding that he had better make the most of it. The King’s shot, he declares, was glorious, it was passing glorious. ‘Odd’s bodkins,’ he says, the world has seen nothing so awesomely ballistic since Tamburlaine the Great pelted Samarkand with his trebuchet of skulls. The King decides he likes this man’s style and if Sir Charles fails to earn himself an earldom, he is at least spared execution; and if he loses graciously again, he might achieve a baronetcy.

And as for the ball, it lies alone, unseen and untouched, wedged on the upside of one of the beams, in a little dark coign, for almost half a millennium. Blacker and blacker it grows, as it is covered with the fumes of successive technologies: coal fires, gas fires, petrol engines. Empires wax and wane around it.

Britain is supplanted by America, whose very existence has only been revealed to Europeans forty years before the ball is whacked aloft.

So in principle the ball might stay there forever, lost in mid-rally, frozen in a perpetual present tense all of its own, except that it is now only inches away from Jason Pickel’s scrambling foot, and about to rejoin the narrative of history.

He could make his way back up to the gun, he reckoned, if he somehow hauled himself up the joists, which were about two feet apart. It would mean crawling upwards and backwards, hanging on like Spiderman. It would need amazing prehensile strength in his hands, but Jason had confidence in his physical strength; and he needed that rifle. Mind you, if he fell, it would be almost eighty-five feet and he felt a twinge for whomsoever he might land upon.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

1044 HRS

‘My love.’ Cameron had decided to try tact, and she turned to Adam with what she hoped was a tender look.

‘Yes,’ said Adam, distantly.

‘When we went to NATO …’ Cameron hated to ask him this. She couldn’t bear to destroy him in her own eyes as, in one way or another, she had destroyed all her previous boyfriends; but details, recollections, oddities were now crowding in upon her memory and innocent acts of the loved one now seemed pregnant with suspiciousness.

‘Yes,’ repeated Adam. ‘When we went to NATO.’

Over their heads Chester de Peverill was ranting about GM crops and Frankenstein foods, while Haroun, Habib, Benedicte and her two accomplices played the muzzles of their Schmidts over the crowd, as if pretending to hose them with bullets.

‘You know when we went inside the main building to see Brady Cunningham.’

‘Of course. Brady Cunningham.’ He pronounced it the American way, as though describing a particularly wily piece of pork.

‘Did you know he was a friend of my father’s?’

‘Yes, of course I did. You told me he was.’

‘I mean before we went to NATO, before all the trouble, did you know we might meet him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably, ‘I don’t know what I mean.

What happened was this. Yesterday morning, before their drunken lunch at the Ogenblick, they had been out to NATO to protest against the President, who was making a speech to what is called the North Atlantic Council, comprising the nineteen NATO Ambassadors. As the reader will know by now, Cameron had mixed feelings about this, but went along with it because it was kind of amusing.

The dirty don and his wife were full of teenage insurrection. ‘You know in 1986 I think I went to demonstrate against the Greenham Women,’ he said.

‘We both did,’ said his wife.

‘Good Lord, how plastered we must have been. Anyway look at us now,’ he said, and the Mercedes shook with laughter. When they arrived at NATO HQ in Evere, on the Brussels ring road, they found themselves outside the perimeter fortifications of a building that looked like — and, indeed, had been constructed as — a suburban maternity hospital. As a quartet they did not really fit in with the rest of the crowd, who lacked their urbanity and air of mild derision. The mob was a smaller, more dedicated version of the one outside Westminster Hall today, with a higher proportion of nose rings and Socialist Worker Party badges and Yasser Arafat headscarves; and more angry brown faces.

So Cameron didn’t participate in the stuck pig squealing as the cavalcade arrived, nor did they make
oink oink oink
noises in honour of the police. Nor did they try to rush the steel fence, as the hard cases did at 11 a.m., just as the President was slated to speak. But when the dirty don accidentally dropped a half-empty champagne bottle, from which they had all been swigging, a group of three riot cops converged.

Their leader was a burly Fleming with a scraggly black beard over his pockmarked cheeks. He appeared to be shaking with anger. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the dirty don, hoofing the pieces together with his foot and putting them in a plastic bag. The cop, blue suited, black booted, demanded their passports. His hairy hand crawled over the shiny leather holster at his hip.

‘It just sort of slipped,’ said the academic.

‘Ayez lagentillesse,’
screamed the policeman, looking up from his methodical leafing, the veins standing out in his neck,
‘de parler un des deux langues de mon pays.’
Speak in one of the two languages of my country. Cameron wanted to tell him that they were on his side.

She and Adam agreed: they didn’t see why the whole world should speak English, just because the Americans spoke English. The don, who spoke fourteen languages fluently, and who could read the script of many more, came to her help. He tried to soothe the cop, he addressed him in good Flemish and then French and then German, since German is one of Belgium’s three official languages, with substantial German minorities in the eastern towns of Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith. But when faced with an outraged Flemish policeman, you have only limited options.

You can run, but he will have no hesitation in shooting you in the back. You can try to bribe him, an option which can be surprisingly successful, but which does not yet automatically occur to British people. You can weep and slobber over his boots, which is what he probably wants. What you must not do is patronize him and Stefan Van de Kerkhove, luitnant in the Belgian riot police, felt patronized by the erudition of the don.

They were all under arrest, he told them, in English. They were being taken to a nasty-looking Belgian police van, white with blue stripes, when Cameron had an idea. She took out her mobile and rang her father in North Carolina. Even at 6 a.m. eastern seaboard time, he was awake.

Her father rang Brady Cunningham, his old friend from West Point, who was now General Brady Cunningham and sitting in his office in the southern wing of NATO, not 100 feet from where they were standing. Within five minutes General Cunningham had sprung them from the clutches of the Flemish riot police and the four demonstrators were being offered coffee in the heart of the US delegation to NATO.

Cameron remembered the great tact with which Adam had handled the square-headed Costner clones of the American military. ‘Oh no, sir,’ he told the General, ‘we weren’t there as demonstrators, we were there as observers.’

In the New Scotland Yard Ops Room, they had given up trying to raise Pickel on his radio. ‘OK,’ said Bluett, ‘here’s what we do. Ricasoli says he went into the hall through a hatch in the roof, right?’

‘That’s correct, sir. That’s what he thinks.’

‘Get me a shot of the roof, an external shot.’

‘You mean a picture? You want a picture of the hall.’

‘We must have a camera somewhere.’ In a matter of seconds the requisite camera shot was found — from the top of the Treasury — and patched through to the Ops Room screens.

‘Ricasoli,’ said Bluett, dialling him up, ‘I want you to get someone on that roof and give some stuff to Lieutenant Pickel. I want you to land right here in the square in oh one minutes and pick it up. Have you got that?’

‘Yessir,’ said Ricasoli, who was just thinking that if it was all the same to Bluett he would rather not be the man to land on the roof.

‘If necessary, do it yourself,’ said Bluett.

‘I’m only asking this because I feel obliged to ask,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘but are you sure Pickel is the right man? You know we’ve got a very good shot, Indira Natu, who could be deployed very quickly.’

‘Pickel,’ said Bluett, ‘Pickel could shoot the moustache off a gnat at 1,000 paces. The guy’s a phenomenon. He may be a freak, but you want a rhino dart in that man’s neck, Pickel’s the boy to put it there for you.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Course, they do say he’s a bit funny sometimes, after what happened in Baghdad.’

‘I was going to mention that. In fact, the word was passed along from S019 that he’d been acting up a bit on the roof, seemed in a bit of a state, Nam flashbacks and all that sort of thing.’

‘Someone reported on Pickel?’

‘Yes, that’s it, the police sniper I mentioned. Of course, I should have asked you, but time was tight.’

‘You should have asked me what?’

‘Whether it was right to give orders to detain him.’

‘And you …

‘Er, yes.’

Bluett glared, secretly delighted that his opposite number had committed such a faux pas. Was it time for Bluett to blow it? he wondered. But as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner said, time was not on their side.

‘Just reassure me about one thing: this dart — you sure it’s going to knock him out in time?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the bright young officer who had thought up the idea. ‘It’s thyapentine sodium. It takes three seconds to put a rhino to sleep.’

‘And it won’t actually kill him or set off the bomb?’

‘Oh no. I mean, no, not at all.’

‘History is going to judge us, Mr Commissioner,’ said Bluett to Purnell, ‘history is going to judge us.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

1049 HRS

‘And do you know how they make a cocktail sausage?’ Chester de Peverill asked. ‘They get all the fat they can’t sell in other cuts of meat, and then they add something called drind, which is dried pig rind which expands when you add water, and then they add mechanically recovered meat. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, do you know what mechanically recovered meat is? It’s what you get when you turn a fire hose on the carcass of the animal, a jet of unimaginable power, and you squirt off every scrap of fibre and gristle and tissue and you create a great slurry of unidentifiable swill, which you sieve into a pulp and then you add …’

Haroun walked with deliberate tread down the aisle, three paces per slab. He approached Habib, and their eyes met. Each knew what the other was thinking. Why did Jones insist on this foolery? Why were they listening to this disgusting infidel chef and his preposterous recipes for unclean food? The sooner they consummated their operation the better. Time was passing and the Americans were resourceful.

‘Why don’t we just kill him?’ hissed Haroun to Habib as they passed.

‘Soon, brother,’ replied Habib, keeping his eyes travelling around the crowd. ‘Soon, may it please Allah.’

Haroun listened to the change in the note of the helicopter that had been hovering above them, and then saw a shadow pass over the south window as the Black Hawk descended.

‘And then do you know what Big Food puts in your cocktail sausage, Mr President? Even in the ones you serve in the White House? They put tons of sugar and salt and a load of bread crusts to make it hold water. It’s disgusting, it’s evil, it’s’ — Haroun hawked violently, as though preparing to discharge a great custard gob of phlegm. He hoped to put Chester off his stride. He did not succeed.

Haroun discovered another reason why he was starting to feel uncomfortable: his bladder was still full after a night in the ambulance, and the coffee he had drunk in the Tivoli was now bursting to be liberated from his body.

Cameron sieved her memory, but still couldn’t think how Adam had done what she now suspected. They must have been in that office for all of fifteen minutes. They sat on oatmeal-coloured sofas, they chin-wagged absently with the General; and then they were escorted off the NATO premises with great friendliness, much to the surprise of the rest of the mob, who were still waiting for the President to reappear.

They got in a taxi; they went to the Ogenblick. How had he done it? She had to find the courage to ask him. ‘Adam,’ she said, still holding him by the hand, ‘did you take anything from Brady Cunningham’s office?’

Adam shut his eyes, feeling a weight of despair at his own folly. ‘Take something?’

‘That’s right. This feels real dumb, but I found something.’

‘You found something?’ He was frowning again. ‘Where did you find something?’

‘Well I’m ashamed to say this, but I have to get it off my chest. I found it in your bag.’

Adam took his hand away from hers.

‘My bag? You mean in the hotel? What were you doing looking in my bag?’

It must have been two in the morning. Cameron was lying awake, in a state of post-coital rapture. Outside, Brussels was subsiding into silence. The restaurants had taken in their great seafood still-lives; they had removed the huge tableaux of lobsters and langoustines and oysters and mussels, arrayed on beds of ice in whorls and fans, like mad Flemish genre paintings, trundled them inside the dining rooms and left them to drip in the dark. There was no noise save the odd police siren, the bray of some lost stag night reveller and the resistless metronomic breathing of the man she now thought she loved. As he lay there she studied the big square structure of his chest, with one muscular arm flung wide, and the hairs slowly rising and falling as he breathed. One part of her wanted him to wake up, and do that wonderful thing to her again; and as she studied him she started to feel a crushing sense of anxiety. What if he was in some way misleading her? What if he had no real feeling for her?

And in her paranoia, she remembered something earlier. Adam had been doing something with his bag when she came out of the shower.