Siege

Thirty-four

A SERVICE LIFT, the only one they’d kept in operation, linked the hotel’s main kitchen to the two satellite kitchens on the mezzanine and ninth floors, and Fox travelled up on it now, along with the Welsh sapper Dragon and the Dane, Tiger, who he’d collected from the ballroom. He’d told them what had happened to the other two men. Neither man was too sad to see the back of Panther, but they’d both known and trained with Leopard, and his death had unnerved them, as had the fact that his killer was still somewhere in the hotel.

‘The plan’s flexible enough to deal with eventualities like this,’ said Fox as they came out of the lift on the ninth floor and moved into the kitchen next to the Park View Restaurant. ‘We’ll find him.’

Dragon and Tiger were professional enough not to argue with this, but Wolf didn’t react in quite the same way when Fox gave him the bad news.

‘What do you mean, they’re dead?’ he hissed, the shock clear in his eyes.

‘Someone killed them both,’ repeated Fox. ‘He used a knife on Panther and beat Leopard to death with his own rifle, smashing it in the process. Whoever it is, he definitely knows what he’s doing.’

‘And what about the MI6 man?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to check. I wanted to let you know what had happened straight away. I’ll go down there in a minute, but I’m sure there’s no problem. No one except us knows he’s there.’

‘Do that. We don’t want to lose him.’ Wolf shook his head in disbelief. ‘Has anyone told Cat about her brother?’

‘No, I thought that was best left to you.’

Wolf rubbed at his pockmarked face through the balaclava. ‘This is very bad news. I knew Panther well. He was a good man.’

Which was something he definitely hadn’t been, Fox thought. ‘I’m not happy either. Leopard was one of mine. But right now we’ve got a much bigger problem. There’s someone in the hotel not connected to us who knows how to kill people, and he’s armed with Panther’s Glock.’

‘Could it be the police or the SAS?’

Fox shook his head. ‘No. If it was the SAS, I’d be dead now. Chances are we all would. This is a guest. It has to be.’

‘Everything’s OK in the ballroom?’

‘Everything’s fine in there, and everyone’s accounted for. Also, Panther and Leopard weren’t carrying grenades, so the only thing missing is the Glock.’

Wolf said nothing for a minute, but Fox could see his fingers tighten on his AK as he struggled for control. ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘We need to clear the top floor and secure it. Then I’ll tell Cat what has happened to her brother.’

Leaving Dragon and Tiger guarding the hostages, Wolf and Fox used the emergency staircase to walk the one floor up to where the Stanhope’s suites were situated.

As soon as they were through the staircase doors, the opulence hit them. There were no thinning carpets up here. Expensive Persian rugs covered the polished mahogany floor, while paintings lined the walls and fresh flowers and exotic plants sprang from china vases, giving the corridor the sweet smell of summer.

Fox despised the fact that the wealthy thought they were above everyone else just because they had money. He hated the fact that they expected others to do their dirty work for them. When he and his fellow soldiers had been stuck in a barracks in the flea-ridden hellhole of Al-Amarah in Iraq, being used for target practice by those Shia lunatics from the Mahdi Army, the rich hadn’t given a shit about them. Instead they’d continued spending their millions while Fox fought to protect them. And when he’d come back from the war, having given ten hard years’ service to his country, having lost friends to IEDs and sniper fire, having survived the bloodshed and the murderous heat, what had they, or the politicians, or any of the bastards, done for him?

Nothing.

There’d been no jobs above minimum wage. There’d been no occupational training, even though it had been promised to every soldier leaving the army. And because he was single, and not an asylum seeker or a teenage mother, they’d put him at the very bottom of the housing list. Fox knew of two men who’d wilted under the strain and committed suicide; another had been sectioned after trying to kill his own mother. But not Fox. He hadn’t wilted. He’d shown ambition, setting up a firm providing security to private companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d done well financially, selling his company at a decent profit to a bigger outfit and remaining onboard as a consultant.

But for Fox, there was far more to life than making money. He harboured a burning anger at the way his country had been sold down the river by politicians who’d opened the floodgates to millions of immigrants; who’d watered down their once great culture to such an extent that it no longer even existed; who’d helped to create a soft, fat people whose poor were more interested in claiming benefits and watching reality TV than in doing anything to stop the rot all around them; and whose rich just wanted to make themselves ever richer. Fox wanted to wake the people up. He wanted to cause chaos and terror, to smash the old established order and pave the way for a new, more honourable society. It was this desire that had pushed him into extremism, and into the arms of others who shared his views.

From there it had been only a small step to the position he found himself in today. An introduction from one of his extremist contacts had put him in touch with Ahmed Jarrod, aka Wolf, a man with rich backers, and an exciting and lucrative proposition. Wolf wanted Fox to set up a small, hand-picked team of mercenaries to assist him in carrying out a devastating terrorist attack on the UK. It would be an opportunity for Wolf’s backers (who Fox had always assumed were an Arab government) to get revenge on the UK for its perceived interference in their affairs. For Fox, who knew that Muslim extremists would get the blame for this, it was the perfect opportunity to divide and infuriate the British people, and give the establishment the bloody nose it so richly deserved. The irony of fighting alongside the type of people he despised in a battle against his own people was not lost on him. But in common with all other extremists, he was convinced his actions were necessary, and served a greater good.

He stopped outside the Deco suite, while Wolf stopped outside the Garden.

They nodded at each other, and Fox raised his rifle and opened the door, excited by the shock he was about to deliver.

The music got louder as he walked through a foyer with high ceilings and expensive-looking art on the walls, and into the bedroom.

They were on the bed. Three of them. All naked. A middle-aged Arab with a pot belly and a flaccid penis flanked by two much younger women, a Thai and a long-legged blonde, both of whom were clearly pros. The Thai had a tightly rolled fifty-pound note in her hand and looked like she was just about to snort one of two long lines of coke that ran from the Arab’s dick almost to his belly button.

For a moment Fox felt as shocked seeing them as they obviously were to see him. Then he moved the rifle round and put a bullet through the iPod speaker system.

The room fell silent.

‘Please,’ the man on the bed said, trying to cover himself up, ‘take whatever you want.’

Fox shot him once in the forehead, then turned the gun on the two women. But he didn’t fire. The rich Arab deserved his fate, they didn’t. Like him, they were only doing their jobs. He gestured to them to get out of bed and get dressed. They both stood and, trying hard not to look at their client, who lay motionless on the bed in a rapidly spreading halo of blood, started pulling on their clothes.

Fox lowered the gun and walked over to the bedside table where a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label sat next to an open wrap of coke and two full ones. He’d never understood the allure of hard liquor and drugs. All they did was addle your brain and make you weak physically. There were plenty more enjoyable ways of having a thrill.

Like taking over a hotel in the middle of a big city in front of the whole world.

With a flick of his hand, Fox scattered the coke on to the floor. Then he walked over to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked out across Hyde Park, where the emergency vehicles and news crews were beginning to gather in numbers. In the sky above he could see two police helicopters circling. Fox knew that in a situation like this the authorities would set up an exclusion zone round the building as soon as possible, and do everything they could to keep the media at a safe distance where they could do no harm. They would have learned the lesson of Mumbai, where the terrorists had been able to check the movements of the police outside the hotel just by watching the TV. Fox was expecting a far more sophisticated approach tonight. The problem for their adversaries was that he and the others were ready for it.

He let the curtain fall back into place and turned away. The girls were dressed and looking at him expectantly. He was about to tell them to follow him out when Wolf came into the room.

‘We have a problem,’ he told Fox.

‘What is it?’

‘Not something I can talk about in front of these two.’

He produced a pistol from his overalls and shot the Thai girl in the face. Then, as the blonde tried to turn and make a dash for it, he put a bullet in the back of her skull, sending her sprawling on to the bed.

Wolf looked at the Arab. ‘Is this man a Saudi?’

Fox shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Wolf glared at him. ‘We don’t kill Saudis, understand? It’s not good public relations. Who do you think is bankrolling this whole thing?’

Fox shrugged again. ‘Fair enough. So, what’s the problem?’

Wolf led him out into the corridor and unlocked the Garden Suite. ‘This,’ he said simply, and opened the door.