Siege

Sixty

‘ARE YOU IN the control room?’ asked the man on the other end of the phone, his voice calm.

Arley walked across the grass, away from the incident room, glancing over her shoulder to check she wasn’t being followed. ‘Not any more.’

‘Is the internet coming back on?’

‘You need that, don’t you? For your plans to work.’

‘That doesn’t concern you. What should concern you are your husband and children. Have you spoken to anyone about our discussions?’

She thought of Tina, and wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake involving someone like her. ‘Of course I haven’t. I need to know my family are alive, though.’

‘All in good time, DAC Dale,’ he said, with a hint of a smile in his voice. ‘Now please answer my question.’

Arley wondered what this man looked like. He sounded middle-aged. She wondered if he had children of his own. She desperately wanted to reason with him, to tell him to please release her children, but she’d been around long enough to know that pleading wasn’t going to work. ‘The internet should have come back on by now.’

‘And what are the plans for an assault?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that the military have taken control of the operation.’

‘Does this mean it’s imminent?’

She knew there was no point lying. ‘Not necessarily, no.’

‘The phrase “not necessarily” is of no use to us. We need to know what’s being planned. So do you, if you ever want to see your family again.’

Arley took a deep breath. Jesus, she had to hold herself together. ‘The military have only just taken control, and it’ll take them some time to organize a rescue operation. I’ll make sure I know their plans.’ She considered adding that she’d already had a meeting with the SAS commander, but held back. There was no point giving this man anything until it became absolutely necessary.

‘I’m going to keep this phone on for the next fifteen minutes. The moment you have an update, call me. Do you understand?’

‘I do.’

‘If you try to trick us in any way, your family will die. Remember that.’

Arley slowly removed the phone from her ear and looked back towards the incident room, wondering if her absence, and the manner in which she’d taken it, was arousing suspicion among her colleagues.

A group of uniformed officers were in conversation next to an armed response vehicle parked nearby, too far away for Arley to hear what they were saying. One of them laughed, and Arley felt an overwhelming jealousy. For him, this was just another night on the job. For her, though, it was a matter of life and death. She could lose the two people she loved most in the world in one bloody moment, and what frightened her above all was that there was no guarantee she hadn’t already done so.

Her phone bleeped. She had a message from the people running the ANPR database at Hendon, and she felt a surge of hope mixed with dread. Had they been able to get a location for the van that was parked in the driveway of her home that morning, the one that had almost certainly been used to abduct her children?

Taking a deep breath, she returned the call.