‘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 Jones’s 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 he’s serious.’
‘Can he identify the ambulance?’
‘Sounds like he had to scarper pretty quick.’
‘We’d better get on to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner’s office.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said the station commander. ‘I’ll do that right away. I don’t suppose you know the number, do you?’
‘I’ll get back to you in a minute. You’ve sent someone round to Tufton Street, have you?’
‘Good thinking,’ said the station commander.
‘Does he have any idea where this ambulance has gone?’
‘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.
‘Can’t you work out how to make that thing stop?’ said Jones.
‘It is a sharmoota. It is a whore,’ said Haroun.
‘It’s 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. It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s 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. Habib’s 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 hadn’t 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 shouldn’t just knock this on the head?’ He said yow, rather than you, because he was from Wolverhampton.
‘Why don’t we just drive on here, and maybe we could like chill for a couple of days. Why don’t 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 mother’s rib cage.
Then he struck her on the fascia with a seat belt cutter. The machine started to squeak and gibber, sounding like Robert De Niro 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