LITMIR.BIZ

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two London policemen looked at each other. They knew – or strongly suspected – that the Americans were tuning in to their frequencies.

      ‘Put him through,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

      He listened with half-closed eyes to the American’s demands.

      ‘You want a sniper on the roof of the Commons? What did you say his name was?’ On a piece of headed notepaper Purnell printed ‘PICKLE’. Then he crossed it out and wrote ‘PICKEL’.

      ‘I see, yes,’ he said, ‘I see, yes.’

      He listened some more, and then said: ‘Well, I can understand if the First Lady is a bit anxious but … Right you are. Colonel … Okeycokey, chum. Yep. See you later, I expect … No, no, everything else is, um, fine. We have no evidence of anything, you know, untoward.’

      He disconnected with a groan.

      ‘They want a sniper on the roof of the Commons, above New Palace Yard. I’ve said we’ll oblige. Someone answering to this name will be presenting himself in a few minutes. Whatever happens, I am not having him sitting up there alone.’

      He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘And I want the choppers to start scanning Westminster for this flaming ambulance.’

      High above Soho a Metropolitan Police Twin Squirrel Eurocopter AS 355N banked and turned down Shaftesbury Avenue.

      It passed directly over the head of Roger Barlow, who looked up and felt vaguely resentful. Why did they hover in that threatening way over innocent streets? It was like some dreary lefty movie about Thatcher’s Britain.

      Then he continued to thread his way through the cars. That’s what he loved about bicycles: the autonomy, the ability to put your wheel wherever you chose. As you looked over the handlebars you could see your front tyre as a snub-nosed cylinder, nosing at will down the open streets of London. He passed an Evening Standard hoarding, announcing full coverage of the state visit.

      Uh-oh. The Standard. He had forgotten about the Standard. How would he stop his wife seeing that one?

      The traffic was getting heavier. Now he understood. It was the exclusion zone. The American security people had insisted on a total ban on traffic in the area to be honoured by their presence, and the result was that a freeborn Englishman could not even move down the Queen’s highway.

      ‘Strewth,’ he cursed, and used a disabled ramp to mount the pavement. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but there you go. In any case, his political career might be over by tomorrow morning.

      Then he was back on the road again, watching the shimmer starting to rise from the hot bonnets of the backed-up traffic, and thugga thugga whok whok the helicopter was ceasing to impinge on his consciousness.

CHAPTER FOUR

       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

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