Siege

Sixty-three

FOX STOOD IN the ballroom satellite kitchen, waiting impassively while Wolf ranted and raved.

‘You were the last person to see him alive, Fox. If it wasn’t you who killed him, who was it?’

‘I have no idea. And why on earth would I want to gouge his eye out?’

‘I don’t know, but it was your idea for us to kidnap him in the first place—’ Wolf stopped in mid flow, interrupted by a dull boom coming from below. ‘What was that?’

‘It sounded like a grenade,’ said Fox, immediately tensing. ‘I set a couple of them as booby-traps on the exit doors to the kitchen.’

Wolf checked the portable TV, then leaned over the laptop. ‘Are we under attack already? You said it would take them time to strike.’

‘What’s the TV showing?’

‘Just the front of the hotel. It all looks the same.’

‘Is there any email message on the laptop?’

‘No, nothing.’

There was an edge of panic to Wolf’s voice, and Fox knew he was going to have to take charge.

‘If they’ve come in via the kitchen, then they’re on their way up now. Come with me.’

Fox walked rapidly out of the kitchen with Wolf behind him. Cat and Bear were guarding the increasingly restless-looking hostages, and they both turned round when they heard the door open.

‘Everything’s all right,’ Fox called out, more for the benefit of the hostages than anyone else. ‘One of the booby-traps went off accidentally.’

Keeping a firm grip on his AK-47, he opened the ballroom doors and went over to the top of the main mezzanine floor staircase, leaning back against the wall to give himself cover as he looked down into the empty hotel lobby. If this was an attack the SAS would have been slowed down by the booby-trapped grenade. There was no sign of them yet.

He heard Wolf come up behind him.

‘Is anything happening?’ he whispered.

Fox pointed his AK-47 down the stairs, finger on the trigger. ‘Nothing yet.’

They waited a full minute. In the background, Fox could hear the faint ringing of the phone in the satellite kitchen. It seemed the negotiators were trying to make contact. If this was a surprise attack, then the element of surprise had long gone. And if it was a full-scale, multi-entry attack, then where the hell was everybody?

‘I don’t think that was the SAS,’ said Fox at last, still watching the lobby.

‘Then what was it?’

‘I’m not sure. We need to investigate.’

‘Are you going to go downstairs?’ asked Wolf.

Fox turned round. ‘I’ve got a better idea. Send Cat. She looks like a civilian, so if it is the military, or the police – and I’m pretty damn sure it’s neither of them – they won’t open fire on her.’

Wolf’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Fox suspiciously. Fox knew that, after the discovery of Michael Prior’s body, Wolf no longer trusted him. He’d spent a good five minutes interrogating him about Prior, and it was clear that Cat had stirred matters as well. In this paranoid place, with the tension mounting, Fox’s suggestion could easily be construed as a plan to get rid of Cat, yet it wasn’t. Sending her down seemed to him the logical thing to do. She was relatively inconspicuous, unlike the rest of them.

Wolf looked past Fox into the silence of the lobby. ‘All right,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We’ll send Cat down.’