Siege: A Thriller

by Simon Kernick

  As Wolf took hold of the hotel manager, an attractive blonde in a smart trouser suit, and began barking out orders, Fox grabbed Panther by the collar of his waiter’s uniform. He thrust his face in close to the other man. “No more unauthorized shooting, or you die too. Understand?”

  Panther’s eyes blazed with anger, but Fox was undaunted. The little shit could glare all he wanted. He might be Wolf’s fellow countryman, but he still had to know who was boss.

  “Understand?”

  Panther nodded, and Fox motioned for him and the ex-marine Leopard to follow as he ran through the door that led into the lobby, holding his AK-47 out in front of him. He’d set his stopwatch the second the first shot had been fired, and as he came out into the hotel’s immense lobby it read sixty-two seconds.

  The kitchen was supposedly soundproofed, but as Fox moved into the lobby the first guests were already hurrying toward the main doors, while the door staff, decked out in their ridiculous tasseled uniforms and peaked caps, had come inside to see what the commotion was. As soon as they saw Fox in his balaclava with the AK and the other two coming in behind him they started bolting for the exits.

  “Everyone on the floor!” Fox yelled. “Now!”

  Almost all of them obeyed, but one guy, a businessman in a suit, who’d almost made it to the doors, clearly decided to take the risk and keep going. There was no way Fox could let him go. It would be a show of weakness, and he was too pumped up for that anyway. He’d always found something exhilarating about shooting people—it was the hunter in him—and it was the reason he’d joined the army. He was no indiscriminate killer, he always needed a reason; but give him one and he never hesitated. Flipping the AK to his shoulder, he took aim and, as the man’s hand reached out to push open the glass door, he fired a single burst of automatic weapon fire into his back. The force drove the target into the door with an angry thud. There was the sound of breaking glass, and a second later he collapsed.

  Fox looked around the room. “Anyone else try anything, they die too.”

  No one did. They lay still, faces squashed into the expensive-looking burgundy carpet. There’d be no further resistance here.

  Fox motioned for Panther to stand guard over their new hostages, hoping he wouldn’t decide to start shooting them, and took Leopard through the adjacent corridor and into the main bar and restaurant area, where there was now outright panic. People were running around looking desperately for a way out. Unfortunately for them, although there was a bank of windows looking onto Park Lane and Hyde Park beyond, their only obvious means of exit was through the main lobby of the hotel. It was one of the reasons they’d picked the Stanhope as a target. It was easy to corral their prey.

  At this time of the afternoon there were also exactly the right numbers. Fox estimated that there were about fifty people in all in the restaurant and bar, a manageable mix of afternoon teas, business drinks, and the first of the after-work crowd. An hour later and there’d have been too many; an hour earlier, too few. Like everything else about the op, they’d planned the timing of the assault carefully. Publicity-wise, five P.M. GMT was perfect. Their audience would be eating breakfast in LA, getting ready for lunch in New York, heading home from work in Europe, and sitting down to dinner all across the Arab world. Even in Pakistan, India, and beyond people would be up and tuning in to what was happening on a billion television sets.

  Soon the whole world would know about them. It was an intoxicating thought.

  Once again, Fox yelled at everyone to get down on the floor, putting a burst of fire into the ceiling to encourage them.

  There were a few screams, and everyone hit the deck. They really had little choice.

  When they were done, Fox walked into the room and began his prepared speech, delivered in a nonspecific eastern European accent he’d been working on for the past few months. He spoke loudly, but with a deliberate calmness. “Please do not be alarmed. You’ve been taken hostage by the Pan-Arab Army of God. As long as you cooperate, no harm will come to you, and you will be released when our demands are met.”

  “What are your demands?” came a male voice from somewhere in the middle of the restaurant.

  “Who said that?” demanded Fox, taking a couple of steps forward.

  A balding businessman reluctantly put up an arm.

  “Get up.”

  Slowly the businessman got to his feet, palms outstretched in the universal gesture of nonconfrontation. He was overweight with a florid expression and an air of self-importance. “It’s just I may be able to help. I’m a—”

  Fox shot him in the chest with a three-round burst. He knew that the cardinal rule of hostage-taking was to establish total control over your hostages, and that meant eliminating any challenges to your authority quickly and ruthlessly.

  Screams and terrified gasps immediately filled the room but Fox ignored them and kept on talking. “As I was saying, you will all be released when our demands to the British government are met. In the meantime, you are to do exactly what you are told. Any failure to comply, or any attempt to escape, will result in the same punishment I’ve just meted out to Mr. Loudmouth here. Do you all understand?”

  There was a low and not particularly enthusiastic murmur of agreement.

  “On my command you are all to get to your feet and form two orderly lines. It doesn’t matter which line you’re in, so don’t waste time choosing. You’ll then follow me out of the room, and in silence please. My colleague here will be bringing up the rear. We’re going to go upstairs to the next floor. Anyone trying to stay behind will be shot on sight. If you want to live, you’re going to have to do as we say.”

  The threat of violent death is a highly effective method of concentrating the mind, and within seconds the hostages had got themselves into two long, roughly even lines that snaked across the restaurant floor, including several people who’d come out from where they’d been hiding behind the bar.

  Fox motioned to Leopard to go to the end of the lines and bring up the rear. They’d trained for this on many occasions and everyone knew exactly what to do. He gestured for the two people at the front of the lines to follow him, then backed slowly out of the room, keeping his gun trained steadily on them.

  Wolf and the others were already in the lobby and in the process of taking the remainder of the hostages, including the traumatized kitchen staff, up the marble staircase that led to the next floor and the hotel’s ballroom.

  As Fox backed up the staircase with the two lines of hostages following, he saw a handful of people standing a few yards beyond the main glass doors. Most of them were talking into their mobiles, or staring at the shattered glass with the smear of blood across it and the body of the man he’d shot a few minutes earlier, which was still lying just inside the entrance to the hotel. A few of the sick bastards were even using their phones to film the scene. It seemed to Fox that everyone was a voyeur these days, preferring either to film or watch events rather than help shape them. It was one of the key differences between them and him.

  He knew it wouldn’t be long before the first police arrived on the scene. Fortunately, they were unlikely to be armed, since less than 7 percent of officers in the Met were authorized to carry guns, and even if one of the mobile armed response vehicles did turn up, they were trained to act with extreme caution and wouldn’t attempt to penetrate the building at this stage.

  Still, the ground floor was going to need securing quickly.

  The ballroom was the perfect location for holding the hostages. It was a cavernous place with no windows or natural light, and like the main restaurant and bar area, there was only one way in or out, making escape impossible and severely limiting the scope of an assault by the security services to free them. Once again, it was why they’d chosen the Stanhope—and proof, thought Fox, of the effectiveness of good surveillance.

  The hostages themselves were largely calm and quiet as they were shepherded over to the far end of the room and made to sit down. There were abo
ut eighty altogether, and all adults, which made things a little easier. After the earlier shootings, no one was asking any questions or trying to engage in amateur negotiation. A couple of the kitchen staff had minor injuries, but none was seriously wounded. All the seriously wounded were still in the kitchen, and they were going to have to be finished off since there were neither the resources nor, to be frank, the desire to do anything to save them.

  When everyone was sitting down and four of the men had formed a guard around them, Wolf approached the group, still holding the blond hotel manager by the collar of her jacket. He forced her to her knees in front of him and stood legs apart, chest puffed out, looking every inch the man in charge, as he delivered his own speech to the assembled hostages, which was pretty much a rehash of Fox’s but with an added harangue about the crimes of the West, and the UK in particular, against the Muslim world. He finished by ordering everyone to turn off their mobile phones and put them on the floor where they could be seen.

  There was a flurry of activity as the hostages complied, after which they sat staring intently at the floor as Wolf moved his AK in a lazy arc from one hostage to another.

  The first part of the operation was complete. The hotel was under their control and the hostages subdued.

  Fox looked at his watch. The time was 16:55.

  20

  Elena gasped as the man holding her, who she assumed was the leader, pulled her to her feet.

  His grip hurt, but she was getting used to it now. In fact she’d calmed down a great deal, even though it gutted her to have to leave behind her mobile phone on the floor. She’d always been a practical sort of girl, one who preferred to get on with things, and right now she knew she had to deal with the current situation and do her best to stay alive. And that meant cooperating. These men might be animals—to kill Rav, Faisal, Aidan, and the others in cold blood like they’d done, they had to be—but for the moment at least they’d stopped shooting.

  The man the leader had addressed earlier as Fox took the rucksack from his back and placed it in the middle of the hostages. He opened it up, fiddled about inside for a few seconds, then removed what looked like a roll of cable, which he trailed across the floor over to one of the other gunmen. She saw that there was a press-down lever attached to the roll, which the other gunman put his foot on. She’d seen something similar once on a TV program about the Beslan siege, and her heart lurched as she realized that it was a detonation device and that the rucksack contained a bomb that would probably kill them all if it exploded.

  Elena didn’t resist as the leader marched her across the ballroom floor and into the satellite kitchen. They were followed by Fox, who’d collected rucksacks from two of the other gunmen.

  As soon as they were inside, the leader told her to face the wall, with her hands in the air.

  She felt a spasm of pure terror. Were they going to shoot her?

  But then the two men started peppering her with questions. Where were the master key cards to the rooms kept? What was the password for the hotel’s electronic guest register? Where was the CCTV camera control room?

  Elena answered each question honestly, but when the leader asked her how to disable the hotel’s sprinkler system, she hesitated. There could be only one reason they’d want to know this: so that if it came to it they could set the place on fire. Her mind went back to the Mumbai sieges of 2008, the flames and thick black smoke billowing out from the upper windows of the grand old buildings. She’d felt so sorry for all the people involved in those horrifying events but never for one moment had she expected to find herself in the middle of something similar. It just didn’t happen somewhere like London.

  “Answer me,” demanded the leader, “or I’ll shoot you through the kneecap.”

  “There’s a box on the wall in the storage room on the ground floor,” she said quickly, too scared to lie with a gun pointed at her. “There’s a lever inside that you pull down to disconnect it manually.”

  “And is the box locked?”

  She nodded. “Yes. So’s the storage room. The keys to both are in the safe.”

  “I’ll take her down there with me,” said Fox. “I need to secure the downstairs area.”

  “Make sure she doesn’t escape,” replied the leader. “We need her.”

  “I know that. She won’t try anything.” He looked over at Elena. “Will you?”

  Elena looked back at him and shook her head emphatically.

  Fox took her by the arm, his touch a lot gentler than the leader’s, and led her toward the door.

  As she was ushered out of the room, Elena glanced briefly back toward the store cupboard door. She wondered if Clinton the handyman was still in there, and if he was, whether they’d find him. Armin had obviously told them about the satellite kitchen and its potential as an HQ, but she wasn’t sure he’d know about the secret sleeping spot, since the staff who did know about it tended to keep the knowledge to themselves. She hoped not. She liked Clinton. She wanted him to live.

  Fox didn’t speak as he hurried her down the staircase. He kept the assault rifle down by his side and if she’d been incredibly brave she could have tried to take it from him, but there was a concentrated intensity and confidence about him that scared Elena almost as much as the aggression of the others did, and she knew she’d never succeed.

  As they strode across the lobby, she saw the body of the businessman lying just inside the main doors. It was dark outside now, but there were two figures standing just beyond the doors, and she could tell by their fluorescent jackets that they were police officers. They were both looking at the body, and one was talking into his radio. As soon as they saw Fox they took a step back.

  Fox told her to get down as he raised the assault rifle to his shoulder in an easy, fluid motion, which made her think that perhaps he had a military background.

  She fell to her knees, putting her head in her hands and shutting her eyes, as a heavy burst of automatic weapon fire filled the air. He pulled her up again and, as she opened her eyes, she saw that the bullets had peppered the glass of several of the doors close to where the policemen had been, but that neither of them had been hit. She wondered whether he’d deliberately missed them, and if so, why.

  “OK, let’s go,” he said, hauling Elena to her feet. “I want the front doors locked. Have you got the keys on you?”

  “No, they’re kept in the main safe,” she said, knowing there was no point lying since Armin would have already told them most of what they needed to know about the workings of the Stanhope.

  “And you know the combination.”

  It was a statement rather than a question, and again she told the truth. “Yes.”

  “I want all the master key cards too. The ones that’ll open every room, including the suites.”

  “I can get them.”

  He looked at her closely for a moment, and she saw that beneath the balaclava he had pale blue eyes. This surprised her. Because these people claimed to be representing an organization called the Pan-Arab Army of God she’d assumed they’d all be Arabs. Yet Fox was clearly white. He spoke with a vague eastern European accent, so perhaps he was a Muslim from the south.

  “I got engaged today,” she said quickly, not even knowing why she’d said it. He didn’t answer. Instead, he tightened his grip on her arm and walked across the lobby, stopping beside one of the leather sofas to deposit a rucksack beneath the glass coffee table in front of it, before continuing over to the door that led behind the main reception desk. With Fox following closely behind, Elena walked around the back of the desk and into the CCTV control room where the main safe was kept, relieved that no one was hiding behind the door. She hadn’t seen Walter, the duty security guard, or Katrina, the nineteen-year-old Slovakian receptionist, upstairs in the ballroom and hoped that they’d managed to make a break for the doors in the few short minutes when the lobby had been unguarded. Katrina was such a sweet girl and didn’t deserve to get caught up in something like this. But then,
of course, none of them did.

  While she opened the safe and took out the keys, she watched Fox out of the corner of her eye as he took a package from another of his rucksacks. He leaned down and carefully placed it beside the desk and out of sight before standing back up and reviewing the bank of screens on the wall.

  “Why isn’t this camera working?” he said, pointing to the only blank screen.

  Elena frowned. The hotel’s CCTV system was generally reliable. It had to be in a place like this where people were free to come and go as they pleased. “I don’t know,” she answered. “It must be faulty.”

  “Where is it?”

  She came forward to take a closer look. “Up on the top floor. Where the suites are.”

  He nodded slowly, then took the key cards and told her to turn off all the lights in the front section of the lobby, which she did manually from behind the reception counter. Finally, he ordered her to lock the hotel’s front doors.

  That was the hard part. Being so close to freedom. Being able to see the two police officers she’d seen earlier as they ushered the crowds of onlookers away from the front courtyard; and beyond them people driving past in their cars on Park Lane, utterly oblivious to what was going on in this place. And then the line of trees that bordered Hyde Park, a place where she and Rod loved to walk on summer evenings.

  People looked at her, some pointing, as she went from one door to the other, stepping over the body of the dead man, ignoring the sickly smell of feces as she imprisoned herself, the gunmen, and the hotel guests inside. She paused for a moment and looked at her faint reflection in the glass. The stress had stretched and twisted her face, and the blood splatters on her usually impeccable uniform stood out. Immediately her thoughts turned to escape. The outside was so, so near. All she had to do was fling open one of the doors, run for her life in a zigzag motion, keeping low like they did in the movies, and she’d be free.

  But behind her, in the glass door, she could see the gunman, Fox, and she knew she’d never make it.