0833 HRS
In the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter the two sun-goggled officers peered into the hot canyons and smoking wadis of the city. ‘So who’s meant to be driving this ambulance?’ said the pilot, as they passed over Trafalgar Square and made for the river. ‘He’s called Jones,’ said Grover from New Scotland Yard.
‘Jones? What’s he look like?’
‘Kind of Arab-type thing.’
Hundreds of miles away, at Fylingdales in Yorkshire, the word Arab triggered an automatic alert in the huge golfball-shaped American listening post, and within seconds the conversation was being monitored in Langley, Virginia.
The pilot continued: ‘That’s all we know: that he’s a kind of Arab called Jones?’
‘That, and he’s on the CIA’s most wanted list. His father was a gynaecologist in Karachi who was struck off for some reason. He knows a lot about explosives and is a serious wacko. That’s what we know about Jones …’
Who at that moment was sliding with Haroun off the bonnet of the ambulance and on to Tufton Street, as the vehicle was jerked up into the air.
Dragan Panic was standing by his Renault 150 authorized removal unit, twiddling the vertical line of six hydraulic knobs, and grinning. It was always fun when they went doolally.
One chap had leapt aboard his Porsche Cayenne, manacled to the truck, and put it into reverse.
He took it up to about 7,000 revs, smoke pouring everywhere, as the Bavarian beast struggled to escape the gin. There had been a bang and a fresh convexity appeared in the gleaming black bonnet, like a rat in a rubbish sack. That HAD been gratifying.
Jones decided to take a different tack with the traffic warden. He made the obvious point.
‘But we are ambulance men.’
The parkie looked at him.
That was just it. He had watched the vehicle like a tethered goat. He had seen the men get out, leaving it parked in a disgracefully dangerous position.
He had seen them shamble into the Tivoli for breakfast. He didn’t believe for one minute that they were ambulance men. They were the first ambulance men he had ever seen in scruffy old T-shirts and jeans, and he didn’t see why they should be in possession of an ambulance belonging to the Bilston and Willenhall NHS Trust.
‘Please, let us pay now.’
‘No, you must come to the pound.’
‘Why?’
‘You must establish that the vehicle is yours.’
‘But I have lost the papers.’
‘Then you must come to the pound.’
The man called Jones went to the cabin of the ambulance and rootled in the glove box. He came back with a brick of cash, like the wodge the winner has at the end of a game of Monopoly, or what you get for a fiver in Zimbabwean dollars. Eric frowned and pretended to study his Huskie.
‘Please do not force me to beg,’ said Jones.
‘I ain’t forcing you to beg, sir.’
‘My sister is pregnant.’
With every second that passed, Eric was surer that he had done the right thing. Now if they had said that they were taking the Duke of Edinburgh on a secret assignation with a nurse from St Thomas’s hospital, that would have been one thing.
If they had said that they had a freshly excised human liver on board, and that it needed to be transferred in ten minutes to a terminally alcoholic football player, or if they had claimed to be part of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorist unit, they would have appealed to his imagination.
But to say that his sister was pregnant – that was sorry stuff. He looked at the four of them. He noticed that the youngest one was staring at him in a funny way, as if terrified.
Am I really so frightening? wondered Eric Onyeama, king of the kerb. He continued to tap into the Huskie.
‘L64896P’, ‘Tufton Street’, ‘02, 62’ … The details were soon pinged into space, and stored in irrefutable perpetuity in the Apcoa computers. Somewhere in cyberspace the electronic data began to team up with other groups of electrons; in less than half a second they were having a vast symposium of sub-atomic particles, and among the preliminary conclusions would be that the vehicle was from Wolverhampton.
He looked up again, and saw the kindlier-looking one, Habib, who was cleaning his teeth with a carved juniper twig. But where was the other one?
Haroun had vanished.
He had stolen inside the machine and he was searching for something.
He knocked aside a cervical collar-set. He brushed a mouth-to-mouth ventilator to the floor. Ha, he thought to himself. This would unquestionably do the job, he decided. He extracted the prong of a pericardial puncture kit, and tested its needle point on his finger.
‘Looks like a killer,’ said Purnell. He gave a small shudder as he looked at the file on Haroun Abu Zahra, a slim docket. ‘What do we know about him?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Grover, ‘but the Yanks are pretty keen on talking to him as well. There is one thing, though.’ He paused, as all subordinates will when they are keen to emphasize some tiny advance.
‘Our lads were talking to the Travelodge, and they said there was something most peculiar about their room.’
‘After they’d left?’
‘Yeah. There’s a picture by some posh artist on the wall, of a naked girl, you know, a print.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Tits out, very tasteful and all.’
‘Go on.’
‘And they had turned it to the wall. Twenty minutes later they checked out.’
‘Wackos.’
The phone went in the outer room. They both knew it was Bluett.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell looked at the clock on the wall.
‘They’ll be on their way, won’t they?’
‘No way of stopping them now,’ said Grover.
No fewer than fifteen BMW 750 police motorcycles were engaged in sheepdogging the traffic out of the way of the slowly oncoming cavalcade.
Now they were approaching Junction 4 for West Drayton and Heathrow, and seeing the
