Siege

Twenty-five

17.30

ELENA SAT ON the ballroom floor along with the other hostages while four of the gunmen, including Armin, stood in a semi-circle guarding them. Usually the ballroom was full of noise and drunken laughter. Now it was like some kind of vast tomb. No one spoke. No one even seemed to want to move. They were all too shocked by what had happened.

What scared Elena the most was how well organized the gunmen were. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and they were so damn calm. Especially the one called Fox, the white man who’d dragged her round the lobby while he set traps and disabled both the lifts and the sprinkler system. She’d just seen him come back up, along with one of the other gunmen, carrying more bags. They’d gone straight into the satellite kitchen, which they seemed to be using as some kind of HQ.

She wondered what it was they really wanted, and what they were trying to prove. She was sure they had to be on some sort of suicide mission. Why else would they disable the sprinkler system unless they planned to set the hotel ablaze?

It angered her that they’d chosen to murder people because it meant they couldn’t be reasoned with. Armin the waiter had killed Aidan in cold blood, just, it seemed, because he could, while Fox had set up bombs and shot at the police in between making conversation with her as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

When she was a young girl, Elena’s grandmother had often told her stories about life under Nazi occupation, stories that had scared and upset her but which had always seemed strangely compelling. How the SS and Gestapo treated the Poles as sub-human; how they executed people for the smallest of infringements, often in public; how they would round up whole villages – men, women, even children and babies – and slaughter them just because someone in another village had killed a German soldier. And Elena had asked her grandmother how they could have committed such evil deeds.

‘Because they were cruel,’ she’d answered, as if this were reason enough. ‘Because they were cruel.’

Just like the gunmen in the ballroom now.

The door to the satellite kitchen opened suddenly and the leader and Fox came out. They strode over to the other terrorists, one after another, and spoke to them in hushed tones.

Then the leader approached Elena and, without warning, yanked her to her feet by her arm. ‘You’re coming with us,’ he snapped in his thick Middle Eastern accent.

‘Where?’ she asked before she could stop herself.

‘Don’t ask questions, bitch. Move.’ Grabbing her by the collar, he shoved the barrel of his assault rifle into her back and made her walk towards the exit. ‘Take us to room 316. Use the staircase.’

Elena did as she was told, conscious that three more gunmen, including Armin and Fox, were also coming with her.

As they reached the emergency staircase she could hear the occasional shouting of panicked guests, and the noise of footsteps on the stairs, and she prayed no one would come running down here, see her, and think they were safe. She’d seen Fox disable the lifts earlier, and right now the staircase was the only way out.

The third-floor corridor was completely silent as Elena led the gunmen through. She wondered how many people were hiding terrified behind their doors. The hotel was currently booked to over eighty per cent capacity, so there would be quite a few of them.

‘Which side’s room 316?’

She pointed right.

‘In a few minutes’ time you’re going to tell the people on this floor to come out of their rooms and line up outside. But first I want you to see exactly what, and who, you’re dealing with.’

Elena felt a growing sense of dread as they stopped outside room 316 and Wolf knocked four times on the door.

A second later it was opened from the inside by a young woman about Elena’s age, with black hair and olive skin. She was barefoot and wearing a figure-hugging black dress that finished above the knee. She looked completely normal, except for one thing: she was holding a pistol with a long cigar-shaped silencer attached to it.

She was also smiling at the leader. ‘Welcome,’ she said in lightly accented English.

Elena looked past her and saw a grey-haired man tied to the tub chair beside the bed, with his back to the window. He had a gag in his mouth and he looked pale and terrified.

They filed into the room and she saw the woman and Armin exchange small smiles. They obviously knew each other, and for some reason the thought filled Elena with rage. Armin was an animal, and she wished she’d called Rav and got him kicked out of the hotel when she’d had the chance.

The leader ordered Elena to stand against the far wall. He then walked over to the man in the chair and, pulling a pistol from his waistband, shoved the gun against his forehead. ‘Hello, Mr Prior,’ he said. ‘I trust you’re comfortable.’ He turned to Armin. ‘Get everything set up. I want this recorded and put online straight away in case they switch us off.’

Elena watched as Armin pulled a laptop out of the rucksack he was carrying and connected it via a cable to a camera. At the same time, the leader removed what looked like a large belt with pouches along its entire length. Then she saw the wires poking out of the pouches and the old-style battery-operated alarm clock in the middle.

Elena knew next to nothing about explosives, but even she could see that this was a bomb.

The leader looped the belt over their prisoner and the chair so that the bomb was resting across his chest with the alarm clock dead centre, while the woman who’d answered the door pulled on a balaclava and went over to join him.

As Armin lifted the camera and began filming, the woman put the barrel of her pistol against the man’s temple. He sat still, his eyes wide, sweat forming on his forehead. She spoke directly into the camera, her voice confident and educated. ‘The man sitting here is Michael Prior, a director of MI6. His job is to oversee the surveillance, arrest, torture and imprisonment of Muslims all over the world, and both he and his government are responsible for the ongoing slaughter of Arab and Muslim civilians. We, as members of the Pan-Arab Army of God, have taken him into our custody, along with a number of other British citizens, and we demand that the British government immediately cease all its current military, political and economic operations against Muslim and Arab countries.’ She pushed the gun barrel harder against the man’s temple, forcing his head to one side. ‘Unless our demands are met in full, he will be executed tonight, at midnight GMT, and this building will go up in flames, along with everyone in it.’

Elena felt her heart sink as the woman stopped speaking, and Armin lowered the camera and started typing on the laptop.

‘OK,’ he said after a few moments. ‘We’ve got the footage online.’

This was the cue for the leader to start giving orders again. He told the woman to take the laptop and go downstairs to the ballroom to reinforce the others. Then he ordered the rest of the men out into the corridor.

Finally, he grabbed Elena roughly by the arm. ‘We need more hostages,’ he said, bringing his face close to hers. ‘And you’re going to get them for us.’