raids on the Islamist cells. That was why she had furtively telephoned Colonel Bluett and begged him to take extra precautions.
Bluett had been frankly amazed, but also pleased to be made her confidant.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Never mind what the Brits say: that place is gonna be full of my people. I mean some of our top men.’
As the cavalcade began to crawl the last nine miles of its journey, a hatch was opening on the roof of the east wing of the Palace of Westminster, in the cool shadow of Big Ben. Out scrambled the sizeable figure of Lieutenant Jason Pickel.
He stood for a moment on the duckboards, 120 feet above New Palace Yard, listening to the honking of horns down the Embankment, the protesters bleating to each other, like ewes in some distant fold. He held out his hand and squinted at it.
‘Man oh man,’ he said to himself. He stopped the tremor by gripping his sniper’s rifle, and walked on down the duckboard until he found a point of vantage.
‘Are you all right, Jason?’ asked Sergeant Indira Nath, who had followed him up. Indira had been specifically deputed to stay with Pickel, on the orders of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell.
Not that the British cops had any reason to think of Pickel as a risk. It was just that if they were going to have a Yank sharpshooter on the east wing roof – and Bluett was very keen – then there was damn well going to be a Brit to accompany him.
Indira was from the SO 19 Firearms Unit. She had huge eyes, rosy lips, and tiny, delicate hands, in which she now toted an Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, built by Accuracy International of Portsmouth, capable in the hands of an average marksman of bunching bullets within a couple of inches at more than 600 yards. In the hands of Indira, the gun could shoot the horns off a snail.
‘You OK?’ she repeated.
‘It’s just that something gave me goosebumps here. I guess you could call it Dad flashbacks.’
Dad flashbacks? wondered Indira. It sounded like something worrying from Sheila Kitzinger’s Baby and Child Care. She looked at her neighbour on the roof. He was big and blond, with a proud nose and heavy brow, and hands that made his rifle-barrel look like a pencil. He was dressed in olive drab fatigues, and had the name Pickel sewn in black capitals on his chest, as well as the American flag. She hoped he wasn’t going to blab about some deathbed reconciliation with the father who never loved him.
‘Yeah, honey, it’s like a Nam flashback, ’cept it’s about Baghdad.’
‘Tell me about it, Jason,’ said Indira as they settled down together. ‘Were you scared?’
‘Scared? Did you say scared? Jeez, I was—What the hell was that?’
The American went rigid as percussive waves filled the air. He instinctively eased off the safety catch and now BONG the second explosion assailed his eardrums.
The whole roof vibrated as Big Ben sounded the opening carillon of a quarter to nine.
The great clock struck, and Jones cursed (something about a dog, again). The longer they stayed in this traffic jam, the higher their chances of being spotted. Surely the tow-truck man would by now have raised the alarm?
‘But why did he clamp us, sir?’ asked Dean.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Isn’t that why we got an ambulance, so this couldn’t happen?’
‘Have faith, Dean. Has not Allah looked after us? Think of the prophet in his youth, how he became a warrior for God.’
An electronic voice interrupted them. It was female, and spoke in an American accent.
‘Turn left now,’ she said. Haroun cursed. It was the satnav, determined to take the vehicle back to Wolverhampton. Much to the irritation of Jones and his team, they could find no way of silencing her.
‘Soon we will be in the belly of the beast,’ said Jones.
‘Make a U-turn,’ said the satnav, ‘and then turn right in 100 yards.’
The voice of the bossy little robot carried through the driver’s window, and might have reached the ears of Roger Barlow, who was now only a matter of a few feet away; except that he was turned away and bent over.
He was trying to lock up his bike against the railings of St Margaret’s, just until they sorted out this business with the pass.
‘Not there, sir,’ said an American.
‘Where?’
‘Not there, either, sir. I am afraid you will have to take it with you.’
‘But I can’t get into the Commons without a pass, can I?’ The USSS man shrugged.
Barlow stood on the pavement with his bike, like some washed-up crab, as the tide of traffic lapped through the gap and continued around Parliament Square. As he approached his fifty-second year, Roger was conscious that his temper was decreasingly frenetic. He had long since ceased to rave at airport check-ins. If his train was delayed for two hours, it no longer occurred to him to sob and squeal into his mobile. But there was something about being told what to do by this gigantic gone-to-seed quarterback that got, frankly, on his tits.
The Yank was wearing those clodhopping American lace-ups with Cornish pasty welts, a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a large blue blazer. He had the Kevin Costner-ish Germanic looks that you see in so many members of the American military.
‘Well, can I borrow your mobile? I need to get this blasted pass from my assistant.’
‘That’s not allowed, sir.’
Barlow was fed up with the moronic anti-American protesters who were fringing the square and bawling their questions about oil and how many kids Nestlé had killed that day. But he was also fed up with being treated like a terrorist, when he was a bleeding Parliamentarian, and the people of Cirencester had sent him to this place, and it was frankly frigging outrageous that he should be denied access by this Yank. Not that he wanted to be anti-American, of course.
‘They’ll vouch for me,’ he said, pointing to a trio of shirt-sleeved, flak-jacketed Heckler and Koch MP5-toting members of the Met.
No they wouldn’t.
‘Sorry, Mr Barlow, sir,’ said one of them, ‘I am afraid you’ve got to have a pink form today. It’s all been agreed with the White House.’
‘Well, can I use your phone, then?’
‘They’ll have my guts for garters, sir, but there you go.’
Cameron had just reached the office, and was tackling the mail. ‘I’ll come now,’ she said, when he explained the problem.
Roger handed back the phone to the Metropolitan
