Siege: A Thriller

by Simon Kernick

  And then the sickness had started: the intense bouts of abdominal pain; the chronic tiredness; the nausea; and, finally, the steadily accelerating weight loss. Martin knew he was fading. Given his views on treatment, he had only two alternatives. One: let the cancer take him at its own pace, with Robert there by his side helplessly watching him as he deteriorated. Or two: end matters himself.

  Martin had never been a particularly brave man. He’d always avoided confrontation and, if truth be told, he’d avoided hard decisions too. But perhaps, he thought as he walked into the lobby of the Stanhope Hotel that afternoon, there was an inner steel in him after all. Because today was going to be the last day of his life and he felt remarkably calm about it.

  He’d booked room 315 four days earlier. At first the receptionist had told him that the hotel couldn’t guarantee a particular room, but then he’d explained that he wanted it because he and his wife had stayed there on the night of their wedding, and wanted to stay in it again for their twentieth anniversary.

  Sadly, none of this was true. Martin had never stayed in the Stanhope with Sue. But even after all these years room 315 held hugely important memories, and it was ironic that the thing he was most worried about as he approached the desk was that the hotel had accidentally given it to someone else.

  But they hadn’t, and because it was after two P.M., it was ready for him.

  The pretty young receptionist smiled and in lightly accented English wished him a pleasant stay, and he thanked her with a smile of his own, and said it would be, before heading for the elevators, hoping she wouldn’t notice the fact that he’d brought very little luggage.

  For the first time, he felt guilty about doing what he was about to do in a public place like a hotel room, where his body would inevitably be discovered by an unfortunate member of the staff. He could, he supposed, have done it in the poky little flat he called home, but somehow that seemed far too much like a lonely end. There was, he had to admit, something comforting about having other people near him when he went, even if they were strangers.

  When he got to the door to 315, he stopped as the memories came flooding back. Memories of the only time he’d truly been in love—indeed, truly happy—and he felt an intense wave of emotion wash over him. This had been their place. Thousands of people had stayed in the room in the twenty-two years since, but it would always be their place. He thought of her now, all those thousands of miles away, and wondered if she was even still alive. In the past few weeks he’d seriously considered making contact to let her know what had happened to him, but in the end he’d held back. There was too much scope for disappointment. Carrie Wilson was the past, and it was far better simply to have her as a lingering, beautiful memory.

  He opened the door and stepped inside, ready to relive it all again for the very last time.

  5

  The rendezvous was an empty warehouse on the sprawling Park Royal industrial estate just north of the A40 that had been hired on a three-month lease by an untraceable offshore company registered in the United Arab Emirates.

  Fox was the first to arrive, at 15:40. It took him the best part of five minutes to get through the complex set of locks they’d added to maximize security. Once he was inside and had disabled the state-of-the-art, supposedly tamper-proof burglar alarm system, he relocked the doors and did a quick sweep of the main loading bay area with a bug finder. He was pretty sure that no one would have been able to get in without them knowing about it, and even surer that there’d been no leak in the cell, but he was also the kind of man who left nothing to chance. It was why he’d survived as long as he had.

  Once he was satisfied that the place was clean, he put a call in to Bull using one of the three mobiles he was carrying. He’d left Bull with the kids at a rented house three miles away that morning.

  Bull answered with a simple “yeah” on the second ring, and Fox was pleased that he was keeping the phone so close to hand, and that he was answering it in the way he’d been instructed, giving nothing away. Bull wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, and Fox had had to spend a lot of time prepping him about his role today, which was one of the most important of all of them.

  “It’s me,” said Fox, pacing the warehouse floor. “Everything all right?”

  “All good. I just checked up on them now.”

  He sounded alert enough, and Fox was sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done when the time came. But he wanted to make sure Bull remembered the timings. The timings were everything today.

  “You remember what time you’ve got to be at the final rendezvous, don’t you?”

  “ ’Course I do. We’ve been through it enough times. Twenty-three hundred.”

  “Not a minute later. Give yourself plenty of time, but don’t leave before you get final confirmation.”

  Bull said he understood. He didn’t sound the least bit annoyed at being asked the same question by Fox for the hundredth time in the past three days. He sounded keen and eager to please. This was the biggest day in his whole life and he knew it.

  Fox ended the call and switched off the phone.

  There was an office at the end of a narrow corridor leading from the loading bay, and he unlocked the door and went inside, switching on the lights. At the far end of the room, hidden behind a pile of boxes, was a large padlocked crate. As he did every time he came here, Fox checked the contents, making sure that nothing had been tampered with.

  The weaponry for the operation originated from the former Yugoslav republic of Kosovo. It consisted of eight AK-47 assault rifles, six Glock 17 pistols with suppressors, grenades, body armor, and 25 kilos of C4 explosive, along with detonators and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It had been bought from a group of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in a deal arranged by the client, before being smuggled into the EU in the hidden compartment of a truck usually reserved for illegal immigrants.

  Because of the levels of security at British ports, and the use of sniffer dogs to detect explosives, it had been considered safest to avoid bringing the consignment into the country using the truck. Instead, the crate had been dropped at a safe house in Antwerp. A contact of the handler there knew a Belgian fishing boat captain who occasionally did hashish runs into the UK. For a fee, the captain had agreed to transport the weapons and land them using a rigid inflatable boat on an isolated stretch of beach north of Peterhead in Scotland. From there, the crate had been collected by Fox and several other members of the team, and driven to London.

  Because the C4 had still been in powder form, Fox had delivered it separately to a warehouse in Forest Gate, along with the detonators, where it had been collected by the people whose job it was to turn it into bombs. Fox had no idea of their identities, he’d simply dropped off the tub containing the C4. Then, two weeks later, he’d received an anonymous text telling him to go back to the warehouse, where six identical black North Face backpacks and a small trolley suitcase were waiting for him, all of them now converted into deadly weapons.

  Fox didn’t bother re-padlocking the crate since they’d be needing the contents soon enough. Instead, he pulled out one of the Kevlar vests, grabbed a set of stained navy blue decorator’s overalls from a built-in cupboard next to the door, and got changed, packing the civilian clothes he’d come here in, and which he’d be needing later, into a backpack. Although he wore gloves throughout the process, he wasn’t too worried about leaving any DNA behind. A local cleaning company had been hired to come in the following day and give the whole place a full industrial steam clean, which would remove all traces of his presence here.

  Fox could feel the excitement building in him now. This was it. The culmination of months of planning. Success, and the whole world was his. Failure, and it would be his last day on earth.

  Death or glory. The choice was that stark. It reminded him of his time in the army, in those all too rare moments when he’d seen action. It was that feeling of being totally and utterly alive. He loved the thrill of vi
olence, always had. And today, for the first time in far too long, he was going to get the chance to experience that thrill on a grand scale.

  Down the corridor, he heard the sound of the rear loading doors opening, and he smiled.

  The others were beginning to arrive.

  6

  Cat Manolis paced the hotel room, wondering if it was work or the interminably heavy London traffic that was delaying her lover.

  Their affair had started innocently enough. The occasional shared smile as they passed each other in the corridor at work, or in the gym beneath the building, where they both worked out; the first conversation on the treadmill at 7:30 one morning; the knowing look he’d given her. Even then it had been weeks before he’d asked her out for a coffee. Everything had had to be so secret. It was the same old thing. He was trapped in a loveless marriage, a handsome, charismatic man in need of female attention, possessed of the kind of power that was always such an aphrodisiac, even to a woman barely half his age.

  They’d met for coffee one Saturday morning in a pretty little café on the South Bank. He’d made an excuse to his wife, telling her he had to come into town, and they’d spent a snatched couple of hours together. They’d walked along the banks of the Thames, and Cat had put her arm through his as they talked. She’d told him about her upbringing in Nice, how she’d been the only child of a father who was long gone by the time she was born, and a mother who’d never forgiven her for it, as if she was somehow to blame for his fecklessness. How she’d gone off the rails (although she refused to give him too many details about how low she’d fallen) before pulling herself together and marrying a man who was the love of her life, only to lose him a week before her twenty-fourth birthday. It was grief, then, that had brought her to London five years earlier.

  He’d seemed genuinely touched by her story and had told her his own more familiar one: how he’d been with the same woman since university, how they’d once been in love, and how, over the thirty years and three children since, their love had faded to nothing more than a hollow husk, leaving him desperate to be free of the marriage.

  “I care for you very much,” he’d said gently when it was time for them to part. He’d looked into her eyes as he spoke so she’d know his words were heartfelt.

  They’d kissed passionately. It had been something that was always going to happen, and it seemed to last for a long, long time.

  When they’d finally broken apart, they’d promised to meet again as soon as circumstances allowed.

  Since then they’d had three separate trysts—all involving coffee, followed by a walk, though never in the same place—and all the time they’d been moving toward this day. When they would finally sleep together for the first time. Michael had wanted to consummate their relationship at Cat’s apartment, but she’d explained that it would be impractical given that she shared her place with three other women, so they’d settled for the far more romantic destination of the Stanhope on Park Lane.

  Cat was dressed seductively in a simple sleeveless black dress that finished just above the knee, sheer black hold-up stockings, and black court shoes with four-inch heels. Usually she dressed far more modestly and, as she stopped and looked at herself in the room’s full-length mirror, she felt a frisson of excitement. She looked good. There was no doubt about it. Michael would melt when he saw her.

  If, of course, he turned up.

  She looked at her watch. It was five to four. He was almost half an hour late. And he hadn’t even called. She couldn’t call him either. She was under strict instructions never to call him. Too easy to get found out, he’d said, and then that’ll be it for both of us.

  Trying to hide her concern, she poured a glass of Evian from the mini-bar and took a long sip, contemplating breaking the law and annoying Michael at the same time by lighting a cigarette.

  If she had to wait, then she might as well make the most of it.

  7

  16:00

  “If we want to survive, then we have to operate like a well-oiled machine. That means obeying orders when they’re given.

  “Innocent people are going to die. There’s no getting around that. But that’s not our problem. They’re collateral damage in a war. Nothing more, nothing less. At no point can you forget that, or suddenly develop an attack of conscience, because if you hesitate about pulling the trigger, or refuse, then the penalty’s immediate death. No exceptions. We can’t afford for the machine to break down. If it does, we’re all dead, or worse still, in the hands of the enemy, which means the rest of our natural lives in prison. And I’m not going to let that happen. Are we clear on that?”

  Fox looked in turn at each of the four men facing him, watching for any signs of doubt in their eyes, but none of them gave anything away. All of them had worked for him in the recent past, and they had three things in common. One: extensive military experience in a combat role. Two: no spouses or dependents. And three, and most important of all: they were all disaffected individuals who harbored a rage against the many perceived injustices in the world—a rage that had manifested itself in the heady mix of violent extremism. There were other motives at play too which explained why they’d chosen to become involved—money, boredom, a desire to once again see real action—but it was the rage that was the most important, because it would be this that drove them to do what was needed today.

  There were two he considered totally reliable. One was Dragon, the ex-sapper he’d picked to drive the van bomb to the Westfield. He was currently on the run from prison, where he was being held on remand on a number of explosives charges. He’d run down and killed a ten-year-old boy in a hijacked car during the course of his escape, as well as seriously injuring a prison officer, and he was facing the rest of his life inside if he was recaptured. The other was Leopard, a short, wiry former marine who’d once been top of his group in the SAS selection trials, only to be turned down because apparently he didn’t have the right mental attitude. Leopard had ended up being court-martialed in Afghanistan for breaking the British Army’s ultra-strict rules of engagement by carrying out an unauthorized kill on two members of a Taliban mortar team. He’d served more than two years inside on manslaughter charges—just, in his mind, for doing his job—and the burning anger he felt at his treatment was authentic.

  Tiger, a typically Aryan Dane who’d received extensive shrapnel injuries while serving in Afghanistan and walked with an aggressive limp, also had plenty of ruthlessness, but Fox was a lot less sure of his reliability. A onetime member of a neo-Nazi group, Tiger had grown up with an almost psychotic hatred of Jews, and after his experience in Afghanistan had added Muslims to his list of sworn enemies, along with politicians and, as far as Fox could tell, pretty much everyone else who didn’t agree with him. He was also a violent sadist and bully who’d stripped and tied up his ex-girlfriend the previous year and burned her repeatedly with cigarette butts. He’d only avoided jail because she’d dropped the charges against him after threats to her life. The other men didn’t know about this, or they probably wouldn’t have agreed to work with him.

  And then there was Bear, the “man with the face.” Of all the men involved in the operation, Fox trusted Bear the least. And yet he owed him the most. Bear had once saved his life when they were serving together in Al-Amarah back in 2005 by spotting an IED half-buried in an irrigation ditch just as the platoon was passing by on patrol. Fox had been closest to it and would have taken the brunt of the blast, but Bear had shouted a warning and jumped on his back, sending them both sprawling into the dirt just as it was detonated by the insurgents. Fox had been temporarily deafened by the blast but was otherwise unhurt. Bear had been less lucky. A jagged, burning piece of shrapnel the size of a baseball had struck him on the side of the face. Alerted by his screams, and the sizzling, Fox had managed to pull it free, burning his fingers through his gloves in the process. Although the heat had cauterized the wound, the shrapnel had burned away most of the flesh just beneath the eye to the jaw line, leaving
him permanently disfigured, and bitterly resentful of the politicians he’d always blamed for it.

  Bear had worked with Fox since those army days, and Fox knew that he was a proven killer, but he was still concerned that, when it came down to it, Bear wouldn’t be able to murder an innocent person in cold blood.

  They caught each other’s eyes, and Bear gave him a long, hard look to demonstrate that he knew what was expected of him.

  Fox acknowledged it with a nod before turning to the sixth man in the room, standing next to him. “Now, I’m going to hand you over to Wolf, who you’ve all met before. I just want to reiterate that he’s the client’s representative, and in overall command of the operation on the ground, while I’m acting as his second in command. You refer to him, as you refer to me, and each other, by code name rather than rank, and never, at any point, use real names. Understood?”

  The men nodded, and Wolf took a step forward. He was a short, squat man, well into his forties, with dark skin and a pockmarked face which, combined with his lacquered, dyed-black hair, gave him more than a passing resemblance to the former Panamanian dictator, General Noriega. He cleared his throat loudly and let the cigarette he’d been smoking fall to the warehouse floor.

  “In the next fifteen minutes, you are all going to be half a million dollars richer,” he announced in a clear, strong Arabic accent.

  Fox saw all eyes light up at this. After all, whatever their political affiliations, this was what they were really here for.

  “As soon as I give the word, the money will be sent to your nominated bank accounts. The remainder, one and a half million dollars, will be paid at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, on successful completion of the job. Before I give the word for the first installment, however, I need proof that we are all committed.”