Seventy-Two Virgins Read Online Free PDF Page B

must.
     
     
     

CHAPTER NINE
     
    0843 HRS
     
    Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected. The sun would still, at the appointed date four billion years hence, expand to the girth of a red giant and devour the planet. In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail. The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behaviour of his brief human avatar.
    It wasn’t the sex comedy side of things. It wasn’t the waste of money, the cash that should have gone into Weetabix and plastic guns for shooting him in bed.
    It was the gullibility — that was what worried him.
    Should he wait for the papers to present this appalling Hieronymus Bosch version of his life? Or should he try to give his account first, and thereby win points for frankness?
    Hang on a tick: there was a colleague. Swishing down the pavement, hair cut by Trumpers, suit cut by Savile Row — it was Adrian (Ziggy) Roberts. Bright. Forceful. Decisive. Very far from completely unbearable; in fact, by any standards really rather nice.
    Roger conceived a desire to talk to him, not least because he could see under his arm the early edition of the Evening Standard.
    ‘Ziggy, old man,’ called Roger Barlow, kerb-crawling on his bike.
    ‘Hombre!’ replied Ziggy.
    ‘You going to this Westminster Hall business?’
    ‘God no,’ said Ziggy, who had benefited from the most expensive education England can provide. ‘Can’t be arsed.’
    Roger felt welling up in himself the urge to confide in a friend. A problem shared, he whispered to himself, is a problem halved.
    ‘Can I ask you something, Zigs?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Roger looked at his colleague, his high, clear forehead, his myriad certainties. On second thoughts, no.
    Ziggy counted as a friend, but it was, in the end, your friends who did you in. And quite right, too. That was what friends were for.
    ‘That posh suit,’ said Barlow. ‘Just tell me roughly how much.’ But Ziggy’s answer was lost in the noise of the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter. Blimey, thought Barlow: this was worse than the helicopter paranoia scene in Goodfellas.
     
    ‘Wait a sec,’ said the co-pilot of the chopper, as they bullocked over towards the Embankment. He craned backwards the way they had come, and the City of Westminster — touching in its majesty — was reflected in the black visor of his helmet.
    ‘I just realized . .
    ‘Say again?’ yodelled the pilot into the mike on his chin.
    ‘I think we just flew over it. It was on a tow-truck. I didn’t really take it in…’
    ‘On a tow-truck?’
    ‘Yeah, you know, a council truck.’
    ‘Bollocks,’ said the pilot. ‘No one lifts an ambulance.’
    ‘Go on, it’ll take thirty seconds. Just back there in that little street near Marsham Street.’
    The pilot sighed and turned the joystick. ‘Well,’ he said a little later. ‘There’s your tow-truck, but I don’t see any ambulance.’
    The co-pilot stared. It may have been unusual for an ambulance to be hoisted, but it was positively unheard of for a vehicle of any kind to escape the clutches of a tow-truck operator.
    ‘Where’s the driver, anyway?’ he asked himself.
     
    Here, thought Dragan Panic. Down here! Look this way!
    For a couple of seconds he jumped up and down, waving and staring at the police helicopter until his eyeballs began to ache from the glare.
    No use. They couldn’t see him.
    Dragan had a pretty good idea what he had witnessed: the shambolic beginning of something that might end with eternal loss and heartache for thousands of families. He had read about the idiotic punch-up outside Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9111 itself, when the Islamic headcases left their maps and their Koran and their flight manuals in