So he was on geranium patrol, a week after Jerry Kuchma died, and it was meant to be extra-tight security because of some pow-wow or shindig inside. A lot sheikhs and mullahs and fat Iraqi businessmen were trying to sort out some blindingly obvious problem, that should have occurred to the Administration before it invaded the country, such as who was going to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of Iraq, and who was going to set monetary policy, and who was going to be in charge of the Iraqi army, now that it had been routed, and who was going to be Foreign Minister, now that Tariq Aziz was being held out at the airport, or how they were going to get the air con back, that kind of thing.
Then this guy walks down the street towards him, a white guy, wearing one of those special Giraldo Rivera war-zone waistcoats, with the pouches. Except that he had nothing in the pouches, and he was wearing stained chinos and trainers.
Thing Jason really noticed about him was his hair. His hair was like an Old Testament prophet, all silvery and swept back. But the detail that mattered, the thing Jason fixed his eye on with almost romantic excitement, was what was clamped to his ear.
‘Yuh, yuh,’ the man was saying, ‘OK, I’ll file 400 words about the scene of the American torture orgies. OK I understand. Listen, if you’re tight for space, I’ll just do 300.’
The reporter hung up, and then directed a look at Jason that was grave and charming. Jason knew he was going to be corrupted.
‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ began the reporter.
‘No trouble at all,’ said Jason.
‘My name is Barry White, and I am a reporter for the Daily Mirror of London, and I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me.’
‘I’ll surely do what I can,’ said Jason.
‘I’m trying to track down General Axelrod – hang on,’ – he pretended to consult his notes – ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Axelrod Zimmerman.’
‘I am afraid I don’t know Lieutenant Zimmerman,’ said Pickel. ‘You’ll have to consult with the media department if you want to arrange an interview. You need to go back to the football stadium.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said the Moses-like reporter. ‘I’ve just come from the media department and they said that Lieutenant Zimmerman would be expecting me here.’
‘Sir, I am afraid I can’t let anyone in here.’
‘This is Uday’s palace, isn’t it, the one they call the love-nest?’
‘It surely is, Mr White sir, but like I say, if you want to see that stuff, you’ve got to get clearance. Haven’t you all done that torture story, anyhow?’
‘Well, there’s just a detail I’d like to check, and I was told that Lieutenant Zimmerman … Tell you what, I’ll ring them up now, and you can talk to them …’
Jason Pickel felt his mouth go dry. He knew he was in the presence of a pusher. It was six days since he had talked to Wanda. Anyway, he needed to know about the soccer matches his kid was playing in, that kind of thing.
The Brit was dialling the number, and then he was offering the phone to him. Jason could see the screen lit up, the plump rectangles indicating a full battery, a clear signal. It was a Thuraya, a satphone. Jesus, he ached for a quick conversation.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but my regulations state that I may not talk in public on a civilian telephone. One of our guys was killed doing that.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ said Barry White, with the look of a headmaster uncovering a case of fourth form bullying. ‘Why don’t we just nip in there and you can use the phone in private?’
That was when the disaster happened, said Jason to Indira, as they sat on the duckboards, on the roof of the House of Commons, surrounded by pigeonshit.
What disaster? asked Indira. But Jason looked brooding, and in her imagination she supplied the answer.
It was the usual thing. Soldier rings home unexpectedly. Crack of dawn. Wife picks up. Sleepy male voice in background.
Before this conversation could go any further, there was another noise, said Jason, outside the gatehouse he was supposed to be guarding. It was like someone quickly popping bubble wrap next to your ear. It was the shooting, and cheering.
And then there was someone else yelling, almost screaming, in English, that unless someone else stopped now, and got out of the car, he was going to open fire.
By this time Barry White was running back outside, and Jason Pickel was following. When his ex-wife was later to sue the US Department of Defense for traumatic stress, it was on the grounds that he had failed to terminate the conversation, and she heard the whole thing.
But now there was a new noise in Parliament Square. The first BMW 750 motorbike had arrived at the traffic lights by St Margaret’s, the forerunner of the precursors of the harbingers of the outriders of the cavalcade. A blue light flashed weakly in the sun. The cop waved a gauntleted arm.
Indira was glad of the interruption.
And now that he could actually hear the police sirens, Dragan Panic began to wonder whether he had chosen the right place for succour.
The Serb tow-truck operative looked at the men standing around him on the building site. They observed his face, pasty, sweaty, the moles like fleshy Rice Krispies that were the legacy of the air pollution that had been part of childhood in communist Eastern Europe.
As soon as he had gasped ‘Where is police?’ he saw their burning eyes, hook noses and hairy black eyebrows that joined in the middle. He knew who they were.
They were Skiptars. They were Muslims, almost certainly from Pristina. And they knew who he was.
He was a Serb.
‘Here is not police,’ said the leading asylum-seeking brickie, whose family farm had been torched in a place called Suva Reka.
They pressed round him, breathing silently, as a bunch of bullocks will press round a terrified picnicker, and drove him backwards.
Handsomely rewarded under the terms of the Private Finance Initiative, the gang of Skiptars had efficiently driven in the piles of the new ministry. They had sunk huge corrugated sheets of steel into the grey loam of London, and now they were pouring lagoons of concrete between the sheets. Towards one of these pits of gravelly slurry they now herded their enemy.
‘What do you want, Serb?’
Dragan saw it all. In fifty years’ time this building would be torn down for reconstruction by the next lot of asylum-seekers, from China, or Pluto, or wherever, and they would break up these concrete blocks to find his whitened bones.
He dodged and ran. Then he tripped, and fell face first in the mud, and then he was up and running again, back down Horseferry Road towards the sirens and the chugging of another helicopter.
Of course he wouldn’t admit it, not even to Grover, but Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was deeply cheesed off by the arrival of the Black Hawk.
It was his airspace. He had sovereignty. But the Black Hawk had somehow bullied away his Twin Squirrel, in a humiliating vindication of their brand names.
‘Are we going to tell them about it?’ asked Grover. He was thinking of the ambulance.
‘Let’s just concentrate on finding the thing.’
Stuck in the gummy shade of London’s plane trees, the ambulance was waiting at yet another traffic light, this one at the back of Parliament Square by a statue of Napier. It was getting hotter in