Seventy-Two Virgins

by Boris Johnson

  ‘SEVEN! I MEAN IT!’

  Dean was staring at Cameron and thinking she was one of the tastiest birds he had ever seen. Here he was, barely nineteen and about to splatter his guts over the walls. He would never know this girl, never talk to her. He might even be responsible for her death. He became aware that she was returning his look. His Sierra Leonean child-guerrilla smile became a guilty smirk, and he turned his face away.

  ‘EIGHT!!’

  Verdommt Brits, thought the Dutch Ambassador and prepared to stand up himself, on the assumption that the terror chief could hardly shoot him for carrying out his orders.

  Tiens, thought the French Ambassador, also girding himself for action. Perhaps he would be the first foreign diplomat in history to address a major parliamentary occasion.

  They need not have worried, because at that moment, like the digits of a child’s cash register, about fifteen suits sprang up across the hall and now more were rising all the time as buttock after buttock unclove itself from the little gilt chairs.

  ‘Now that is more like it,’ said Jones the Bomb, ‘but I don’t know whom to choose.’ He turned to the President, and the President noticed how the fellow was sweating under the TV lights and how a drop had run down his brow, irrigated the cyclopean zit depression and then trickling away into the long furry undivided caterpillar of his brow.

  ‘You choose the speaker,’ said Jones the Bomb. ‘Which of these people do you think will speak best for you?’

  ‘You know what?’ said the President, with a good approximation of geniality. ‘It’s not really my place, but I had the honour earlier today of meeting a gentleman who is in fact the Speaker of the House of Commons.’ He indicated the Speaker standing glumly with Black Rod and the rest of the worthies. ‘You should really ask him to take charge.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Jones, ‘and I say rubbish to the snob traditions of this so-called democracy. You pick the speaker, I mean the person to speak, and you do it now.’

  The President gave his squint, which was intended faintly to recall Clint Eastwood at the point of spitting out his cheroot and firing at Lee Van Cleef, but which his opponents had likened to a half-witted buzzard. ‘OK, buddy,’ said the President, ‘let’s all keep calm here.’

  He shielded his eyes and looked for a conservative-seeming fellow, someone with moderate opinions who would come over well before a global audience.

  Far away to the back and to the right, rocking on the balls of his heels and with his thumbs on the seam of his trousers, Roger Barlow stiffened as he saw the presidential finger pointed straight at his breastbone with the inescapable challenge of Uncle Sam.

  ‘Oh brother,’ he murmured, and had begun to say ‘Ladies and g—’ when ‘LADEES and GENTLEMEN’, screamed the man on his right.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  1038 HRS

  It was Chester de Peverill who had risen a millisecond after him, and whose desire to star in the world’s biggest televised balloon debate was now a hormonal imperative. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Roger, ‘I thought he—’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said Chester, placing his hand on Roger’s shoulder and applying no uncertain pressure. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued, puffing his chest and seeking out the cameras as though he was about to explain the secret of a really good lamb casserole. ‘My name is Chester and I’ — he paused — ‘am a humble cook.’ He waited again, as though this assertion might provoke cries of ‘no, no, no’ or applause.

  The President stared uneasily at him. So did Jones the Bomb. Roger sat back, folded his arms and gave way to the blackness of ungovernable shame.

  ‘I am not a politician. I’m not a world statesman. All I really know about is eating and drinking and that gives me what you might call a gut instinct for things. What’s the problem we’ve got here, folks? We’ve got a global phenomenon which is called anti-Americanism. It’s people everywhere hating America, innit? That’s the trouble and before we sort it out we’ve got to understand why people hate America and from my perspective, from where I sit, there’s a lot of factors that have to be taken into account.’

  ‘Shut up!’ shrieked Jones. ‘What are you trying to say? Are you an imbecile?’

  Chester de Peverill looked stunned. ‘I thought you wanted someone to speak, you know for or against America.’

  ‘You must speak to the motion,’ said Jones, who had studied Erskine May on parliamentary procedure, along with everything else, at Llangollen.

  ‘The motion?’

  ‘Yes: that this house calls for the immediate repatriation of the Guantanamo prisoners.’

  ‘For trial,’ said the President.

  ‘Silence,’ said Jones, who had the air of a rattled bus conductor about to turn vicious with a bilker. ‘Do you believe the American illegally held prisoners should be sent back for trial in the place of their alleged crimes?’

  Chester de Peverill went white. Like all the folksiest and most whimsical TV characters, he tended to duck hard political questions and it struck him that the stakes here were probably quite high. If only he had known. In the seventeen minutes since Jones the Bomb had first handcuffed the President, the TV audience had been growing like bacteria in a Petri dish. There were two cameras in the hall for the live coverage, going out on Sky and BBC News 24. One was trained on the President, and one on the crowd, and their terrified cameramen were feeding pictures across the world. Millions were ringing up other millions and telling them to get to a box and watch the most sensational daytime chat show ever produced anywhere. With every minute that passed the millions were turning into hundreds of millions. Within twenty minutes it is estimated that a billion people were aware by means of some electronic transmission — radio, TV or the internet — of the events in Westminster Hall. Only a small proportion had grasped Jones’s idea in all its sophistication, but that small proportion was numerically huge.

  They understood the concept of interactive TV and that they were in some sense the jury. From Berlin to Baghdad, from Manchester to Manila, from Sidcup to Sydney, there were already myriads who had no principled objection to the wheeze. Of course, they were in many cases sickened and horrified by what was going on. Good people across the planet were full of loathing for Jones and his barbarous treatment of the President, and his shooting of the Dutch Ambassador; but there was also a large number of people, good people, who thought America had a case to answer, not just on the narrow question of Guantanamo Bay, but more generally.

  As they prepared to ring their TV stations and record their votes, they were fascinated by this strange, long-haired, rubbery-lipped Englishman who said he was a cook. Much as their consciences warned them not to gratify the terrorists, there were millions who were also yearning to give the Americans a lesson and in the sheep-like way of all human beings, they wanted to see which way this cook would go.

  Chester de Peverill goggled. Across the planet, audiences in sports bars went silent and trembling fingers turned up the volume on the zapper.

  ‘Right,’ said Chester.

  ‘Yes or no?’ said Jones.

  ‘What? You mean, yes they should be sent back?’

  ‘Of course that is the question: what do you think?’

  ‘Or no they should stay in Guantanamo Bay?’

  ‘Idiot!’ barked Jones. ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to answer the question.’ The TV chef stared hopelessly around the chamber, as out of his depth as a soup-soaked crouton. Like all despairing examination candidates, he tried to get some extra purchase on the phrasing of the question.

  ‘Should the ILLEGALLY HELD prisoners go back FOR TRIAL?’ He stopped histrionically, hoping that he would give the impression that he was a man who knew exactly what he was about to say.

  ‘Spit it out, pal,’ said the President.

  ‘Well,’ said Chester, ‘if you want my honest opinion . .

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jones, flashing his teeth.
‘That’s the one we want. The honest one.’

  ‘My honest opinion is, er, yes. Yes, of course the prisoners should go back and I say that without having an anti-American bone in my body. In fact some of my best friends are Americans.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  1040 HRS

  It was the tipping point. Chester’s moronic answer, arrived at with all the ratiocination of a donkey hesitating between two equal piles of hay, was colossally influential. Across the word this mere cook, this faux-naïve student of onions and gravy, had given cover and legitimation to the millions who wanted to vote to give America a bloody nose.

  As the calls poured in, TV bosses started opportunistically whacking up the cost per minute and even though the higher prices were flashed on the screen, the viewers kept on calling.

  In the upper reaches of the BBC, the hierarchs were in semi-continuous delirium of self-importance as they wondered what to do with the data. Could they responsibly publish the news? Could they not?

  ‘Basically this is a devil and the deep blue sea job,’ said the Political Director (Editorial) to the Director of Political Editorial. ‘I mean, we’re stuffed if we do and stuffed if we don’t. If we suppress what’s coming in, everyone will say we’ve been leant on by the government, and if we just go ahead and publish the news, everyone will start screaming about anti-American bias of the BBC.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the Director of Political Editorial with a look of joy. He knew, they all knew, everyone who cared to look up the internet political wonk sites knew that the news was bad for America. China had recently seen a prodigious growth in the number of TVs and telephones of all kinds, not that the Chinese saw any particular need to thank America for the benefits of capitalism.

  ‘Yes,’ cried liberated young Chinese girls in pencil skirts as they dialled the TV stations. ‘Yes,’ said Chinese Human Rights activists into their snazzy new Sony Ericssons. Never mind all that American think tanks had done to campaign against the Laogai, the Chinese gulags.

  Yes, now was the time to hold America to account. They wanted those guys sent back from Cuba. Slowly, like some storm being incubated in the armpit of Africa before it starts swirling round and round, gaining speed as it moves over the Atlantic, drenching Bermuda, then breaking out with hurricane force over the coast of North Carolina, the unthinkable was starting to become the politically correct. A global conviction was being born, that it was forgivable, this once, to comply with a terrorist stunt.

  ‘But just because I love America,’ said Chester de Peverill, ‘that does not mean I support American foreign policy or American farm policy. They fill their beef with hormones and then they dump it on the markets of developing countries and destroy the livelihood of those farmers. Do you know what happened to the Vietnamese catfish industry?’ he demanded.

  The audience in the hall coughed and fidgeted. The audience at large watched him with fascination. Even the Vietnamese catfish fishermen watching from their pool tables wondered quite how this was relevant.

  ‘The Americans wanted to encourage their own catfish producers, so they slapped such prohibitive duties on Vietnamese catfish that, you know, they had a very tough time of it.’ Chester was conscious that this was perhaps not the most powerful point he could make, given that the anti-globalization movement, to which he was in theory affiliated, was also in favour of tariffs and protection, but he ploughed on, amid general expressions of disbelief.

  ‘Do you know how many Americans have food poisoning every day? Two hundred thousand, and it’s no wonder when you consider the kind of gloop they eat. Have you ever eaten American cheese?’

  ‘Listen, Chester,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘why don’t you just put a sock in it for the time being?’

  Chester paused. He was being heckled and he knew from the studio audience at Chester Minute that a good heckle can be turned to gold.

  ‘Well, my friends, what do we have here? It’s my old friend Roger. He’s a politician, you know.’

  ‘Do shut up, Chester,’ said Roger. ‘These people are murderers.’

  ‘And my old friend Roger doesn’t want to hear my view of American cheese, which strikes me in a way as being not that surprising, because what you get from politicians like Roger is just like American cheese, processed and heat-treated to the point of macrobiotic extinction; and what you get from me is raw, unpasteurized — and you know, for some people like Rog here, I suppose I may be just a little bit too pungent for his taste.’

  The TV chef looked down almost affectionately at the politician. Chester was quite oblivious to his surroundings, with the Asperger’s syndrome, the quasi-refusal to relate to the feelings of other people, that begins to afflict those who spend their evenings in star dressing rooms and their days absent-mindedly scanning the face of everyone they pass to see if they have been ‘recognized’.

  ‘Its good to see you, Rog. You know, folks, at university he was known as Roger the Artful Todger and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s been up to some kind of beastliness again, whanging the old donger in the kedgeree I have no doubt, no offence, Rog.’

  Roger grabbed de Peverill’s tie and pulled down hard.

  ‘Stop,’ cried Jones, who could hardly believe his good fortune in finding this advocate of his cause. ‘You there, leave him alone and you, yes you, Mr Cook, please continue with your interesting remarks.’

  ‘And do you know,’ said Chester, scowling at Roger with magnificent disdain, ‘that in spite of their pasteurized, homogenized, sterilized, emulsified, genetically modified and hormone-pumped food, the Americans eat so much of it that they are the fattest country on earth. We all know about the evils of the tobacco industry. We all know about the creeps and saddos who defend the right of every American school kid to bear arms, even if it means bearing an AK47 into the maths class and wiping out teach and sixteen pre-pubescent school children. But what, my friends, are we going to do about the real enemy of our values, I mean our European values, that have produced in France a country with 258 cheeses? The real enemy is not big oil, it’s not big tobacco, it is big food.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  1043 HRS

  Across the Far East the debate was going badly for America, or at least for the President. The Chinese were now voting for the return of the gagged and ski-goggled Guantanamo prisoners by 68 per cent to 32 per cent. In Malaysia the Yes vote reached a staggering 98 per cent. Even in South Korea, the country for which many young American soldiers had died, there was a 52 per cent majority of TV viewers in favour of the return of the prisoners and the story was certainly no better in Vietnam, where an apathetic public were scandalized afresh by the American insult to their catfish.

  In Europe the polling was closer, and in some countries, notably Denmark, there was already strong and implacable opposition to anything that sounded like cooperation with a bunch of Islamic nutcases. Britain was proving staunch, at least so far, in that many people understood that a yes vote was a victory for the terrorists. As for America, slowly waking up, it was a different story.

  Americans looked at this lank-haired chef, condescending to them about their diet, and decided they liked him about as much as they liked Osama Bin Laden. Of course, it was still early days, and even in countries like China people were delaying before casting their votes, as families feuded about the meaning of what they were doing. Phone sockets were ripped out of walls, handsets were hidden under cushions while decent people wrangled about the limits of respectable anti-Americanism. One Chinaman told his brother to go and copulate with a pangolin in a lake. He was stabbed with a letter-opener in the duodenum.

  In Pakistan a man was so scandalized by his wife’s refusal to vote against the awful Rumsfeld Stalag in Cuba that he shouted ‘Ju te Marunga!’ which means ‘I hit you with my shoe, woman’, an insult she requited by braining him with an iron. All told, the internet number crunchers calculated that of the world’s TV viewers who had so far expressed an opinion, a staggering 61 per cent were ready t
o rub America’s nose in it, even if it meant going along with the boys from the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques.

  And Chester de Peverill jawed on, protected by Jones. He began on the infamy of America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. He went on to America’s disgusting attempt to patent seeds that were the intellectual property of Third World farmers. Barlow and others had at one point tried to slow handclap him, but Jones was having none of it.

  Jones wanted the debate, and yet he was growing increasingly antsy. For more than twenty minutes now he had held the Western world at his mercy, and he knew it would not be long before the imperialists struck back.

  A man in a muddy tracksuit was being shown into the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard, accompanied by Sergeant Louise Botting of Horseferry Road. It was Dragan Panic, the tow-truck operative. He really didn’t like being surrounded by so many policemen, but he had been told that his cooperation was essential, especially if he wanted Indefinite Leave to Remain in Britain.

  He was plonked in front of a TV, which appeared to be showing some boring parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall. Nobody watched the debates in Westminster Hall, not even the MPs who took part in them.

  ‘Is that them?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

  At that moment the cameras were panning across the hall, to take in Benedicte and the two other Arabs, and so Dragan began to shake his head.

  ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, when the President and Jones the Bomb suddenly filled the frame. ‘I know him anywhere, that creepy man. Bozhe Moi, my God,’ he said, when he identified the man in the other handcuff as the President of the United States.