Siege: A Thriller

by Simon Kernick

  Grabbing a hand towel from the bathroom, he tied it around her leg to soak up the blood and restrict its flow, careful not to make the knot too tight. As he did so, he took in her appearance for the first time. She was in her late thirties, good-looking but rail-thin, with well-coiffed, shoulder-length black hair, dark oval eyes, and skin that should have looked tanned but was now an anemic gray thanks to the shock of her ordeal.

  Scope knew he had to get this woman and her son out of the hotel fast, but he also knew that, once outside, they’d tell the authorities what he’d done, which would attract a lot of unwelcome attention. He didn’t want anyone linking him with what had happened in the suite upstairs.

  He looked at the boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven years old, and who was staring at Scope curiously. He had the same coloring as his mother, and the same dark oval eyes, but his face was rounder and he had a dimple on his chin that somehow made him look even more vulnerable than he was.

  Scope turned to the woman. “We’ve got to go.” His fight with the gunmen had made a hell of a lot of noise and it wouldn’t be long before more of them turned up to investigate.

  “It hurts,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

  “The wound’s not as bad as it looks. I promise you. Now, stay awake for me, OK?”

  She nodded weakly.

  “She’s been shot,” said the boy, his voice high and panicked. “People who get shot always die, don’t they?”

  “No, most survive,” Scope told him firmly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “Is Grandpa dead?”

  Scope didn’t have to look at the body of the old man. He’d seen enough dead people in his time to be certain of the answer. “I’m afraid he is. I’m sorry.”

  “The bad man killed him. He was trying to protect us.”

  Scope spoke slowly, his tone reassuring. “That’s because he loved you, but the bad man’s dead too. He won’t be able to hurt anyone again, ever.”

  The boy’s dark eyes burned angrily. “I’m glad you killed him.”

  “How did the bad man get in here?”

  “He had a key.”

  So they had key cards to the rooms. Masters probably. It showed a level of planning that was worrying.

  Scope got up and took the pistol from the man in the waiter’s uniform. It was a Glock 17. He ejected the magazine and checked the number of bullets. Three. He gave the guy a quick pat-down but he wasn’t carrying any spare ammo, and the 7.62 x 39mm bullets his friend was using in the AK wouldn’t be any use. He took both their key cards and went back to where the woman was lying.

  Her eyes were closing as Scope picked her up in his arms as gently as he could. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Abby.”

  “We’re going to get help, Abby. I want you to stay with us, OK?”

  “OK,” she groaned in response.

  “And what’s your name, son?”

  “Ethan,” said the boy.

  “I want you to follow me and your mum, Ethan, and try to make as little noise as possible. Like you’re trying to sneak up on someone. You think you can do that?”

  The boy nodded. “But what about Grandpa? I don’t want to leave him here.”

  “We’ve got to for the moment, but the police’ll be coming back in for him very soon.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise. Now don’t say another word, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Conscious of the fact that if they were ambushed he wouldn’t have a chance of fighting back, Scope carried Abby out of the room, Ethan following. It was completely silent in the corridor as he made his way over to the emergency staircase, trying not to think too much about what he was doing. That had always been his credo in the military. Never think too much. If you do, you’re likely to get scared. And when you’re scared, you’re ineffective.

  He took a brief look through the door’s frosted glass, saw nothing on the other side, and led Ethan into the stairwell.

  They’d just started down when Scope heard someone hurrying down the stairs a few floors above them. It might just have been a frightened guest, but there was also a good chance it was another of the gunmen, especially as the pace of the steps suggested confidence rather than panic.

  Gesturing for Ethan to follow, he hurried down the steps to the second floor, opened the exit door, and turned right down the corridor, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the emergency staircase.

  As soon as they’d turned the corner, Scope stopped outside the nearest room and carefully placed Abby on the floor, propping her up against the wall, while he fished in his pocket for one of the hotel key cards. Her face was contorted in pain but at least she was staying quiet.

  He inserted the key card, and while Ethan held the door open, Scope lifted his mother up again and took her inside.

  The room was empty, and in the semi-darkness Scope saw that the bed hadn’t been slept in. As he placed Abby on it, he noticed that the blood from her wound had seeped through the towel.

  Clearly now in shock, she asked him where they were.

  “In one of the other rooms. We should be safe here for now.”

  “But we need to get outside.”

  “I know. But right now, it’s too dangerous.”

  He moved away from the bed, switched on the lights, and pushed a chair across the door, positioning it so that the back was just beneath the handle, then got another towel from the bathroom to replace the first. As he wrapped the towel around Abby’s leg, applying gentle pressure on the wound, and placed a cushion under her leg to elevate it, he noticed her staring up at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked him. “The way you dealt with those men back there . . . ”

  Scope returned her stare. “I’m the man who’s keeping you alive,” he answered.

  30

  17:50

  A cold wind blew over Park Lane and, with impeccable timing, an icy drizzle began to fall as DAC Arley Dale stood at the police rendezvous point—a marked Land Rover Freelander 2 from Traffic parked in the middle of the road twenty yards west of the hotel. Two mobile incident rooms were en route from different locations but both were stuck in traffic. With her was Chief Inspector Chris Matthews of Paddington Green Station, who’d been coordinating the initial response to the crisis.

  Matthews was bald and underweight and looked like he ran marathons every day. He had the kind of severe face that scares criminals, children, and probably a lot of other people too, but Arley had the feeling that if you pressed the right buttons you’d see a much softer side. He was highly competent too, and right then, that was by far the most important thing.

  “I’ve got the inner cordon in place all around the hotel,” Matthews explained, “but I’m short of CO19 officers.”

  “They’ll be here soon. We’ve got them coming from all over. But I also want a central and an outer cordon set up, so we can get civilians and camera crews as far back as possible. Ideally, I don’t want any of them within a four-hundred-yard radius of the hotel, not when there are gunmen inside.”

  “I haven’t got the manpower at the moment, ma’am. All my spare resources are carrying out an evacuation of the surrounding buildings.”

  Arley nodded, squinting against the drizzle, as she looked around. More officers were arriving all the time, some of them milling around, not quite sure what they were meant to be doing. This was always a problem in a fast-moving incident like this one. Everyone knew what had to be done: secure the area, move the public away, and establish control. Organizing it, however, when the whole of central London was gridlocked was a different story altogether, and though Matthews was trying hard, he was up against it.

  “Evening all,” came a voice behind them. “DCI John Cheney, Counter Terrorism Command.”

  Arley and Matthews both turned around and were confronted with a tall, good-looking man in his mid-forties with broad shoulders and a full
head of natural blond hair that had been flattened by the rain. He was dressed in a suit and long raincoat, and looked every inch a copper, even down to the sardonic, knowing smile.

  “I’ve been sent here to give what assistance I can,” said Cheney, as he and Matthews shook hands. “My specialty’s foreign terror groups.”

  He turned to Arley and she gave him a thin smile. “Hello, John.”

  “You two know each other?” asked Matthews.

  “From a long time back,” said Arley, shaking hands formally.

  And it had been a long time. Getting close to twenty years. She’d still been a uniformed constable and he’d been a handsome young DC at the same station. Arley was engaged to someone else at the time, but even so, for a few short weeks she and John Cheney had embarked on a passionate affair that had lasted right up till the point she found out that he was sleeping with at least two other women. At the time, Arley had been truly gutted. She’d been infatuated, prepared to break off her engagement to be with Cheney, but, having had her fingers burned, she’d turned her back on him, and in the years since they’d seen each other only a handful of times at official functions.

  Seeing him now, she felt nothing. It had all been too long ago. Getting straight down to business, Arley gave him a brief rundown of events so far.

  “Have we had any claims of responsibility?” he asked in the familiar gravelly voice she’d always been sure he put on.

  “We think they may be from an organization called the Pan-Arab Army of God. Have you come across them before?”

  Cheney shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

  Arley rolled her eyes. “That’s useful.”

  “It’s also no great surprise. These terrorist groups chop and change their names and personnel all the time. New ones are always appearing. Have they made any demands yet?”

  “Other than the phone call to the Standard, we haven’t heard a word from them.”

  “We’re still getting the occasional bursts of gunfire coming from inside,” put in Matthews. “But not enough to suggest they’re killing hostages indiscriminately.”

  “Well, that’s one thing I suppose. Do we even know if they want to negotiate?”

  Arley looked up toward the hotel. “They’ve been in there an hour, and they’re making no move to get out or to blow the place up, and they said something in the call to the Standard about being prepared to negotiate, so I’m guessing they must want to talk at some point. But to be brutally honest, we haven’t got a clue what they’re up to in there.”

  “We need to listen in on them,” Cheney said. “I’ve got contacts over at GCHQ. I can get on to them and see if they can set something up remotely.”

  “That’d be a help,” said Arley, who’d been so caught up in the immediacy of events that it hadn’t yet occurred to her to use the technology of GCHQ, the government’s central listening station, to gather information on the terrorists.

  At that moment, Chris Matthews’s mobile rang, and as he took the call Arley thought that the sooner they had a secure phone service at the scene, the better. Mobiles were far too easy to hack into, and the last thing they needed was some journalist, or worse still one of the terrorists, listening to them rather than the other way around.

  “The first of the incident rooms is here,” Matthews told her, shouting above the shrieking of a police siren as a riot van pulled into the top of Park Lane.

  Not any too soon, thought Arley, as the rain began to come down even harder.

  31

  17:57

  The Stanhope’s Park View Restaurant was on the ninth floor of the hotel and had floor-to-ceiling windows right across its western side, which looked out onto a spacious roof terrace that was used for dining in summer, and beyond that to the green, tree-lined expanse of Hyde Park.

  Elena usually loved this view, and when she was on night shift she liked to walk out onto the terrace after the restaurant had closed and smoke a cigarette while looking out across the lights and noise of London, enjoying the sense of being a part of something huge yet somehow intimate at the same time.

  Tonight, though, all the blinds were drawn, and tables and chairs had been piled up against the windows by her and the other hostages to create a space in the middle of the floor. They were sitting in that space now, a frightened, confused, largely silent group of about twenty people bolstered in number by a group of guests and staff members who’d been discovered hiding in the adjoining kitchen. In the middle of the group, only a few feet from where Elena sat, was a rucksack bomb similar to the one she’d seen Fox preparing in the hotel lobby. She wondered why they’d been brought up here, a long way from the other hostages in the ballroom.

  There were two gunmen in the restaurant: the man who seemed to be the leader, who she now knew was called Wolf, and his sidekick, the man who’d accompanied her to the lobby earlier, Fox. Both of them were holding assault rifles, and Wolf’s foot was on the pedal connected by wires to the rucksack bomb. They’d even set up a portable TV next to them so they could use the news channels to keep tabs on what was going on outside. At that moment they were conversing in hushed tones, while keeping a close eye on the hostages.

  On the way up, Elena had tried to speak to Fox, to establish some kind of rapport, but he’d told her to shut up, and the tension in his tone had persuaded her that it wasn’t a good idea to carry on talking.

  There were three young children among the hostages, two girls of about six and eight and a boy of about twelve who was dressed in his school uniform and who’d been one of those hiding in the kitchen, along with his parents. Elena guessed they’d come here for an early evening meal, maybe for a special occasion of some sort. Both the boy and one of the little girls were sobbing quietly—a sound that wrenched at Elena’s heart. She loved children and had nieces and nephews of a similar age. It sickened her that these innocents were caught up in this nightmare.

  Before she’d had a chance to think about what she was doing, she stood up.

  Wolf and Fox immediately turned her way, and Wolf raised his gun. “Sit down,” he ordered.

  “Please,” she said, still standing, “let the children and their mothers go. There’ll still be plenty of us left behind.”

  “Sit down.”

  “But they’ve done nothing to you. Please. Have some heart.”

  Wolf took three steps forward and put the rifle to his shoulder.

  For a terrible second, Elena thought he was going to shoot her, even though she’d been banking on the fact that, as the most senior member of the Stanhope’s staff on duty, she was a lot more useful to them alive.

  “I’ll tell you one more time: sit down.”

  Reluctantly, and with anger coursing through her, she did as she was told, noticing that most of the other hostages were staring at her.

  Wolf lowered the gun, and Elena saw him glance at the three young children in turn. “If you all cooperate, and if your government cares enough about you,” he said at last, “then you will all be freed. But in the meantime you will suffer the way so many of the world’s people have suffered at your hands. You will be given no food or water, and you will not be allowed to leave the room. You will only speak when spoken to by one of us. Anyone who speaks out of turn from now on will be shot immediately.” He glared at Elena. “Including you. Do you understand?”

  There were a few nods and murmurs. Elena didn’t say anything. She held Wolf’s gaze, unsure why she was being so brave, or foolish, by constantly drawing attention to herself.

  “Do you understand?” he demanded, enunciating the words slowly and carefully as he stared straight at Elena.

  She nodded, hating him. “Yes.”

  “Good. Are there any guests staying in the suites?”

  For a split second she thought about lying. Mr. Al-Jahabi might have been a pervert but she had no desire to put him through this. In the end, though, it wasn’t worth the risk, either for her or the other guests. “Yes. Two of them are occupied, the Garden
and the Deco.”

  Wolf turned away. Elena looked around at the other hostages, and saw the fear in their faces. She caught the eye of the man next to her. It was one of the guests from the third floor. The man who’d had the rope in his room. He looked thin and pale, and Elena gave him a supportive smile, trying to forget the fact that he’d been planning to commit suicide in her hotel—an act she considered incredibly selfish, given that it would have been one of her staff members who had to deal with the aftermath. He smiled back weakly, and it was clear to her that he knew what she was thinking and was ashamed.

  She turned away, and thought of Rod. He would almost certainly have heard what was happening at the hotel and would be terribly worried. For the first time she wondered whether she’d ever see him again. It made her feel sick to think that this could be it for her—the end.

  She took a deep breath, keeping the panic at bay. She did have a future, she told herself. She was going to go to Australia with Rod, get married, and have a family. But first she was going to have to get out of here, and that meant escaping. But how? She looked around the silent restaurant, feeling the sense of despair emanating from the other hostages. Wolf’s foot was back on that damned pedal. It seemed an impossible task.

  But Elena had long ago learned that if you tried hard enough, nothing was impossible. And she had to make herself believe that now.

  32

  Fox looked around the restaurant at the group of hostages sitting silently on the floor, a smaller and more manageable number than downstairs, then tensed as Wolf put a gloved hand on his shoulder.

  “What do you think about releasing the children?” he hissed.

  This was something Fox had given plenty of thought to. “It’ll make us look merciful, and therefore worth negotiating with,” he answered, casting a dispassionate eye across the room. “We’re playing to the Arab world as well as the West, and right now we just look like a bunch of killers. If we sow some doubt among the enemy, we’ll delay their assault until we’re ready for it.”