Siege

The Inspiration for Siege

Like everyone else, I was shocked by the brutality of the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, and the utter ruthlessness of the men who took over the hotels, indiscriminately slaughtering the guests. I remember trying to imagine how terrifying it would be to be one of those guests trapped inside the building, knowing that there were people in there with them who actively wanted to kill.

At the time, though, it didn’t make me want to write a book about a hotel siege. I think it all seemed too raw for that. However, in the summer of 2010 I was staying in a big old hotel in Taba Heights, Egypt, very close to the Israeli border, and the idea for Siege hit me. There was a large raised sundeck twenty feet above the pool, from where I had a panoramic view of all the hotel grounds and the Red Sea beyond, and it occurred to me that if a group of terrorists were to storm through the hotel entrance, where two bored and not very efficient-looking security staff stood guard, we’d all be caught like rats in a trap, since there was no way out of the hotel except through the front. Almost immediately after that, I had a vision of a man, possibly a criminal, who was already inside the hotel and up to no good when the terrorists struck – someone who’d be prepared and able to fight back. I knew then I had a story.

The whole burst of inspiration lasted barely thirty seconds, but sometimes it just happens like that.

To be honest, I thought long and hard before putting pen to paper. I think most writers are nervous about creating any story with a strong terrorist connection because of the possibility of being overtaken by real events. I wanted to set the book in London, using a fictional West End hotel, but I was mindful of the fact that the UK’s been on heightened alert for most of the past decade, and that only a year ago intelligence came out of Pakistan warning of a plot to carry out a Mumbai-style attack in London.

In the end, I decided it was worth taking the risk.

However, I wanted to avoid taking the obvious Islamic extremist angle. At the time I was planning the details of Siege, the Arab Spring had just begun, and the call across the Muslim world seemed to be for democracy rather than fundamentalism, making it feel almost out of date to be writing about al-Qaeda-inspired violence. So I decided to make my terrorists extreme right-wing mercenaries allied with agents of an unnamed Arab government who were looking to wreak revenge on the UK for its support of the Arab Spring. To me, that felt like a plausible scenario. It also meant that the terrorists could be well organized, with highly focused goals and ready access to weapons, making them a potentially greater challenge for the authorities than any group they’d dealt with before. Most importantly, some of them planned to get out of the building alive – something which I felt added to the tension of the book.

It took me months to plot Siege. I was keenly aware that a ‘siege’ scenario isn’t necessarily a good format for a book, because after the big bang opening there’s often plenty of time in the middle when very little happens, as both the hostage-takers and the police get down to negotiations. That was why I added the Arley Dale subplot. It helped to keep things moving, so that you, the reader, never had time to get bored. Originally, I wasn’t going to use Tina Boyd in the story, and in the first draft her part was actually taken by an ex-lover of Arley’s called Ray Mason. Ray was also a maverick cop, with an interesting back story, and I liked him enough that I’m definitely going to use him again – possibly even in the next book. But for some reason, Tina worked better. She’s one of those characters who keeps bouncing back into my writing, even though I’d always fully intended to rest her for Siege.

Finally, in March 2011, I was ready to start writing the first draft. It should have been pretty straightforward. I’d created this huge, forty-page, chapter-by-chapter synopsis which told the whole story from start to finish, and I honestly thought I’d have the whole thing done and dusted by the summer.

But as I’ve discovered more than once in my writing career, what looks like a straightforward story doesn’t always turn out that way. Almost as soon as I started writing, I ran into complications. Because of the sheer number of characters and the limited physical area in which they were operating, coupled with the short chapters (most of which had to end in cliffhangers), the logistics of the plot – choreographing where people were so that they ended up in the right places during the climactic scenes – became a bit of a nightmare. Also, trying to make the police response realistic was a challenge. I had visions before I started the book of the police HQ at the scene being like something out of 24, with scores of highly coordinated officers armed with laptops and high-tech comms devices. But when I talked to one senior officer in Counter Terrorism Command, he said that, although the Met trained regularly for these sorts of scenarios, in reality, the initial couple of hours would be pretty chaotic as officers, acting on sketchy and sometimes conflicting information, battled to get to the scene through gridlocked traffic, while those already there were forced to operate pretty much ‘on the hoof’. I wanted to capture this sense of confusion and fear, as well as the coming together of the police response as the lines of command were established. I did take a couple of liberties to ensure the story worked smoothly (most obviously, largely ditching Silver Commander, and having Gold liaise directly with Arley, the Bronze Commander, which wouldn’t usually happen), but I hope I gave an approximate impression of what things might be like in such a tense and fast-moving situation.

Strangely, some characters worked far better than others. The guests in the hotel, and Elena the manager, came quite easily to me – probably because, as a pretty ordinary person myself, I was able to identify with them. More worryingly, though, so did the terrorists, especially Fox, whose character I really enjoyed writing. I was even intending for him to escape at the end of the book, but because he was such a horrible piece of work, with so few redeeming features, I ended up changing my mind.

Scope, though, was a problem from the start. Originally, I didn’t want him to be a good guy. I wrote him as an American hitman carrying out a hit on an American businessman in the Stanhope, but that didn’t work. Then I wrote him as a British drug dealer, who was at the Stanhope to make a major deal, which ended in bloodshed. But the problem was, there were already too many bad guys in the script. So, in the end, I compromised and made Scope a mysterious killer, one who turned out to be a basically good man who’d done some bad things, but only in a bid to avenge the death of his daughter.

Changes were made constantly to the script as I wrote. In one draft, Abby and Ethan were captured, and Scope gave himself up to the terrorists so that they could be freed. He was then tortured for several hours before finally making an escape, helped by Clinton. I later changed this because it seemed implausible that the terrorists would keep Scope alive if they captured him. Elena, too, nearly didn’t make it to the end. In an early draft, she was executed by Cat about halfway through, but I liked her too much, so she came back. That’s one of the fun things about being a writer – being able to commute people’s death sentences.

Even the ending changed pretty dramatically, after I got some negative feedback from my editor (which proved bang on target). Unfortunately, this was only three weeks before the book was due, which meant a whole load of rewriting, so it was all ‘skin of your teeth’ stuff.

Incredibly, I didn’t read it the whole way through until two days before the 21 October deadline, and I was terrified that it would be a load of crap, given how many changes had been made. That’s one of the less fun things about being a writer. You’re so close to the work that it’s very difficult to be objective about how good it is.

Thankfully, when I did read it, I was pretty pleased (and mightily relieved) with the result. More importantly, I hope you were too.

Either way, I’m praying the next one’s easier.

Simon Kernick

November 2011