Siege

Thirty

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 round 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-metre 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 round 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 speciality’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 until 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 want to know if they want to negotiate?’

Arley looked up towards 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 to 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’ 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 round.

‘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 before time, thought Arley, as the rain began to come down even harder.