Siege: A Thriller

by Simon Kernick

  “Is your fiancé here?” he asked her suddenly.

  She wondered if he was going to let her go, and felt a surge of hope mixed with guilt. She knew it would be wrong to leave the guests and staff here alone with these animals, but she also knew that, given the choice, she still would. “No,” she said, moving key in hand to the next door. “He doesn’t work in the hotel.”

  “That’s one piece of good news. For you, anyway.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If you do exactly as you’re told, you’ll be back with him by the end of the night.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked, angry suddenly. “You talk about being part of some Army of God, but what exactly do you hope to achieve?”

  “Keep locking those doors,” he snapped back. “The less you know about any of us, the better it’ll be for you, I promise.”

  Elena did as she was told, annoyed with herself for losing her temper.

  Behind her, Fox was speaking again, his tone conversational. “Politicians will always tell you that violence solves nothing. You watch them on the TV; that’s what they say every time. That violence is counterproductive and that if you want something you have to act within the law.” He laughed harshly. “Let me tell you something: that’s bullshit. Violence gets your voice heard. It makes people listen to you. It makes them react. It brings them to the negotiating table. It makes them fear you. In the end, it always gets you what you want.”

  Elena put her key in the last door and twisted it. There was no prospect of escape for anyone now. “So how much more violence are you intending to commit?”

  “That depends on the government.”

  “They won’t negotiate. They never do. Even I know that.”

  “They negotiate a lot more than you think.”

  Elena looked down at the body at her feet. The man was about thirty, with thinning hair and glasses that were now broken. Just an ordinary person, like the rest of them. “They won’t let you get away with murder,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Well, you’d better hope they do,” said Fox, taking her by the arm and leading her away from the door. “Otherwise none of us are getting out of here.”

  21

  17:05

  Ten floors above Fox and Elena, the man called Scope watched as police cars stopped on either side of the hotel, acting in unison as they blocked the traffic in both directions, creating a car-free zone right in front of the main entrance.

  They were out of their vehicles in seconds, moving very fast for cops, who in Scope’s experience tended to amble everywhere unless they were slap bang in the middle of an emergency. These men were gesticulating and shouting orders, moving people away from the hotel, while at the same time putting out traffic cones and scene-of-crime tape. Another police car pulled up slightly behind the others, and three guys got out. They went around the back of the car and opened the trunk, pulling out what looked like MP5 submachine guns. Proper firepower.

  Something big was going on, and for a moment Scope thought it might have something to do with what he’d done here, except he was sure it couldn’t be. He’d worked efficiently and there’d been no noise. Mr. Miller’s corner suite only backed onto one other room, and when he’d put his ear to the wall all he could hear was the sound of loud dance music.

  No, whatever this was, it was way bigger than him. Already he could see more police cars, along with a fire engine and two ambulances, driving into Hyde Park and taking up position a hundred yards distant like some kind of wagon train, while in the sky overhead a helicopter with search beam made tight circles.

  He wondered what the hell was happening. Up here on the top floor of the Stanhope you were above everything and insulated by silence. It was the perfect spot for his work. But the problem was, he had to get out, and soon. And with all these police around it wasn’t going to be easy.

  He briefly inspected the wound on his left forearm, the result of a mistake that could have ended in disaster. He’d dressed it using the first aid kit from the bathroom, and added antiseptic, but the teeth marks were deep, and the blood was still staining the dressing a deep red. It might be even more serious if it turned out the guy responsible for it was HIV-positive, but right then he was more concerned about his blood leaving potentially incriminating DNA traces behind.

  Turning away from the window, Scope returned to the bathroom and applied a roll of fresh dressing over the top of the first. There was a cut about an inch long just above his left eye, and although the plaster he’d covered it with was still sticking, the area around the edges was beginning to darken and swell. It looked conspicuous, and that was bad, but there was nothing he could do about that.

  He took a deep breath, buttoned up his jacket so that it covered the telltale red flecks on his shirt, then walked back through the suite’s lounge, stepping around the bodies. Finally he removed the manager’s badge and left the room, slipping off his gloves as he started down the corridor.

  22

  Martin Dalston took another long sip from his glass of Pinot Noir and placed it on the bedside table next to the three bottles of pills neatly arranged in a row, and the two envelopes containing the letters to his ex-wife and his son. He then lit his second cigarette of the afternoon. His second cigarette, in fact, of the last twenty-two years. It didn’t taste too good, and it was making him cough, but to be honest, he no longer cared.

  He looked at the rope with noose attached that he’d hung from the large picture hook on the opposite wall. In hindsight, he wished he hadn’t put it there since it was constantly in his field of vision—an annoying reminder of what was coming to him—but there’d been nowhere else suitable, and even so, he still wasn’t sure the hook would take his skinny ten stones.

  Typically for a man who’d always liked to keep his options open, Martin had chosen two different ways to die. Hanging was the quick method, although, thanks to the height of the hook, it would mean him keeping his legs bent and off the floor as the rope either throttled him or broke his neck, something that would require the kind of self-discipline he wasn’t at all sure he possessed. The slow, more painless method was the drugs—a combination of barbiturates, oxazepam, and aspirin that he’d been assured would send him gently to sleep.

  The disadvantage of an overdose was that it would give him time to think about what he was doing, therefore opening up the possibility of a change of mind. At least if it was quick he’d have no choice in the matter. His preference would have been a gun, but this was England, so that was impossible. So, after much thinking, he’d come up with a simple plan: take the pills, lie back on the bed, and keep the rope in sight as he drifted off, so that he’d always know how painful the alternative was.

  His coughing subsided, and he took another deep drag on the cigarette, trying hard to enjoy it. Strangely, he’d been looking forward to this afternoon. He’d always been prone to melancholy. Dreaming of happier days, and viewing them through the inevitable rose-tinted glasses. So to have the opportunity to relive blow-by-beautiful-blow the happiest two weeks of his life, and to savor all the things that could have happened if he’d followed his dreams and made a life with Carrie Wilson, rather than taking the sensible option and marrying Sue, was a guilty pleasure indeed.

  But so far his reminiscing had been disturbed by the constant noise of sirens going past the window in both directions. A few minutes earlier there’d been a lot of shouting inside the hotel; he even thought he’d heard some shots, although he wasn’t entirely sure. As he lay back on the bed the sound of the sirens grew louder, and they now seemed to be stopping directly outside the hotel.

  He thought about getting up to see what all the fuss was about, but quickly dismissed the idea. The world outside the door to room 315 was no longer relevant, especially when he had a date with a young, gorgeous Carrie Wilson, with the gap-toothed smile he’d missed so much.

  He picked up the wine glass and took another long sip of the Pinot Noir. Soon it would be time to start taki
ng the first of the pills.

  23

  17:11

  Room 1600, the Operations Control Center on the sixteenth floor of the New Scotland Yard building, was bedlam. Of the twenty or so officers and staff crowded inside, many of them talking on phones, DAC Arley Dale was the most senior, and she had the Herculean task of coordinating the evacuation of the entire London transportation system, as well as all major public buildings, in response to the bombs at Westfield and Paddington Station. No one knew where the next bomb would strike, or how far to extend the evacuation, and now matters had been further complicated by multiple reports of an attack on the Stanhope Hotel in Park Lane.

  Arley knew she had to clear some of the people out of the room if she was to impose a semblance of order on the situation. She remembered all too well the criticism leveled at the Met following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Huge mistakes had been made in this very control room because there were too many people inside, many of whom didn’t seem to know what the others were doing. But the scale of this operation, coupled with the volume of information being sent through to them from the Central Control Room at Hendon, where all phone traffic relating to the attacks had been directed, was making things next to impossible. They’d already had a reported sixty claims of responsibility for the bombs as well as separate bomb threats for a total of thirty-seven locations within London, including four in the City of London financial district, and right then Arley was wrestling with the decision of whether or not to extend the evacuations to all prominent buildings within the Square Mile.

  A bank of TV screens showing real-time CCTV footage of central London took up the whole of the wall, and they recorded vividly the problems the police faced. All the major roads, including the A40 and Marylebone Road, both of which were needed by the emergency services, were gridlocked. On a screen somewhere in the middle, a thick pall of smoke could be seen above Paddington Station. The latest reliable report said that there were already thirteen dead and as many as sixty injured at Paddington, while the number of injured had risen to nine at Westfield, although thankfully there were still no fatalities there. But for Arley, what it all meant was that there was no point taking risks with public safety.

  “We need to make a decision on the Gherkin, ma’am,” said a young male officer manning one of the phones. “We’ve just had a second bomb threat against it.”

  “Evacuate it,” she answered, raising her voice above the noise. “In fact, evacuate every building we get a threat against.” Arley wasn’t at all sure she had the authority to make this decision, but there was no time to worry about that now. The important thing, she knew, was to keep making decisions. “And let’s clear this bloody place out. Anyone who does not have to be in here, get out. Now.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve got the head of Westminster Council on the line,” said someone else. “He wants to speak to you urgently.”

  “Find out what he wants and I’ll call him back.” The last thing she wanted to do was waste time talking to someone from the council.

  A female officer stood up at the end of the room, a phone cradled in her shoulder. “I’ve got Brian Walton of London Transport on the line. He wants to know if they can keep a bus service running from zones three through six.”

  “Have we had any specific threats against buses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If there haven’t been any, he can. If there have, he can’t. Find out and let him know.” She had to delegate as many tasks as she could to keep her head above water amid the chaos that was all around her. “And can we try to get some cameras on the scene at the Stanhope Hotel? I want to see what’s going on there.”

  “Ma’am?” Her secretary, Ann, was tapping her on the shoulder. “You’re wanted in the commissioner’s office. DCS Stevens is going to take over in here.”

  Arley snapped out a few more orders, repeated her demand that anyone who shouldn’t be in the room must leave, then went out into the corridor. Like most police officers, she craved the excitement of a crisis, and she had a cool enough head to cope with one, which was the main reason she’d traveled as far as she had in the Met. More than one colleague had hinted that it might also be down to the fact that she was a woman, but her bosses knew better than that.

  Chief Commissioner Derek Phillips was one of the good guys, a copper’s copper with the best interests of the people beneath him at heart, but Arley sometimes wondered if he had the necessary decisiveness to deal with a major incident. It wasn’t just that he looked more like a comfortably off accountant than a police officer; his stewardship of the recent student protests in London, when the students had been allowed to go on the rampage virtually unhindered, had seen him become a hostage to events rather than the person in control of them.

  He was standing behind his immense glass desk when Arley walked in, the backdrop of a murky London skyline stretched out behind him. “Thanks for coming so promptly,” he said, without gesturing for her to take a seat. “How are things in 1600?”

  “We’re feeling the heat, sir. Do you have any more information on the Stanhope attack?”

  “Apparently a group of gunmen have broken into the building and are taking hostages. There are unconfirmed reports of casualties, and we do know that shots were fired from inside the hotel at the first officers on the scene. That was about twenty minutes ago. But so far the picture of what’s actually going on is very patchy. Chris Matthews, the chief inspector down at Paddington Green, is on the scene. He’s put a cordon in place and set up a rendezvous point in Hyde Park, but he’s being hampered by all the gridlock around there. It looks like everyone’s trying to leave the city at once.”

  “I can’t say I blame them. We’re getting a lot of claims of responsibility for what’s happening, but nothing’s confirmed. Whoever it is, is clearly well organized.”

  “I’ve just been onto Hendon. They say one call stands out. It was made to the Evening Standard at 4:34 P.M., just after the Paddington bombs had gone off. It came from a mobile in the western Hyde Park area, which is a good three-quarters of a mile from the scene.”

  “So there’s no way the caller could have known about the bombs unless he was responsible for them?”

  “Exactly. It was too quick and too assured to have been a hoax. The caller claimed to be from an organization called the Pan-Arab Army of God. They’re not on our list of proscribed organizations and no one at Counter Terrorism Command seems to have heard of them, so we’re guessing they’re new boys. It’s possible they’re being sponsored by an unfriendly Arab government because the caller said something about the attacks being in retaliation for British and NATO interference in Arab and other Muslim countries. He also claimed that there were bombs at a number of London’s other mainline railway stations. Have you had any other reports of bombs going off?”

  Arley shook her head. “Plenty of scares, but nothing else.”

  “Thank God for that. We’re stretched enough as it is.”

  The commissioner looked shaken by the afternoon’s events, which wasn’t good. Arley was shaken too, but she knew how to keep a lid on her emotions, and she was hoping that Commissioner Phillips did too. Trying to remain as businesslike as possible, she filled him in on the evacuation plans she was putting in place.

  “You’re doing a good job,” he told her, sounding like he meant it. “But I need you out in the field. It looks like it’s turning into a siege situation at the Stanhope. The PM’s been informed and he’s convening a meeting of COBRA for six P.M. In the meantime, we have to respond fast. We’re using the usual structure. I’m Gold Commander. Assistant Commissioner Jacobs is Silver. We’ll both be based here. I want you as Bronze, running things on site at the Stanhope. I’ve asked Paddington Green to requisition a suitable building you can use as an HQ, and we’re sending over a mobile incident room as well, but in the meantime you’re just going to have to make do with whatever’s available at the scene.”

  Arley was pleased to be Bronze Commander,
though a little awed by the size of the task ahead. “I’ll get down there as soon as I can but you know what the traffic’s like. It may take me some time.”

  “We haven’t got time. There’s a helicopter waiting on the roof. It’ll take you there now.”

  The phone on Commissioner Phillips’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver, listened, then replaced it. His expression was grim. “That was Hendon. They’ve just had a call from a wounded kitchen worker inside the building. He told them that there are at least half a dozen masked gunmen in the building, and that there are three people dead. And that’s just in the kitchen. They were still talking to him when there was the sound of gunfire and he was cut off. It sounded like he was shot.”

  Arley nodded slowly. This was a situation that already appeared to be running out of control. “If we’ve got gunmen firing indiscriminately, it sounds as though it’s going to have to be handed over to the military sooner rather than later.”

  “That’s why I want you on the scene. Get going, and good luck.”

  Arley took a deep breath. She was going to need it.

  24

  Fox stood over the body of the kitchen worker, his AK-47 still smoking, and shook his head angrily. He hadn’t wanted to kill him but the guy had been on the phone to the emergency services, doubtless giving them important information as to the number of gunmen, as well as letting them know there were multiple casualties.

  Beside him, Dragon, the man who’d left the bomb at the Westfield, sighed. A former sapper, he was the explosives expert, and Fox had brought him with him to help secure the rear of the hotel, having taken the pretty hotel manager back to the ballroom and the other hostages.

  “What did that prick think he was doing going on a shooting fest like that?” said Dragon in his deep Welsh accent. He was referring to the actions of Panther, the inside man at the hotel, and his words matched Fox’s own thoughts. “It’s stuff like that that brings on an early assault.”