Siege

Sixty-seven

SCOPE WAS TEN feet from the reception area when he heard a door close behind him.

He swung round fast, conscious of the fact that he was away from immediate cover, automatically crouching down and holding the pistol two-handed in a classic shooting position, and saw a young woman standing at the other end of the lobby. Her hands were thrust high in the air and she looked scared stiff.

‘Please,’ she said in a loud whisper. ‘You’re not one of the gunmen, are you?’

Scope let her come towards him. She was young. Late twenties, thirty at most, very attractive, and would have looked faintly vampish in her black dress and stockings if it wasn’t for the bomber jacket she was wearing over the top.

‘Stop right there,’ he said when she was ten feet away. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘I was hiding in the kitchen,’ she answered, still keeping her hands firmly in the air. ‘I heard a noise in the lobby, looked round from behind the door, and saw you. Are you a police officer?’

Scope shook his head, beginning to relax, although he still pointed the gun at her. ‘I’m not, but my advice is get out now.’ He motioned towards the hotel’s front doors. ‘Quickly.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘The doors are locked, and I think they may have booby-trapped them. Look.’

He looked back quickly and, in the reflected light of the emergency vehicles beyond the entrance, saw a holdall tucked away next to the leftmost door. It had two command wires attached that ran across the floor and up the main staircase. ‘Then you need to get back to your hiding place. It’ll be safer there.’

‘I can’t stay in the kitchen. There are bodies everywhere. Can’t I come with you?’

Having someone else to look after was the last thing Scope needed, but it seemed he had little choice. ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Follow me.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve got someone upstairs who needs insulin urgently. I’m looking for the room where they’re storing it.’ He went over and opened the door next to the reception area. ‘Are you coming?’

She nodded, dropped her arms by her side, and followed him inside as he walked through a corridor that ran past the reception bay and into a small foyer with doors going off on three sides. The nearest one had a sign on it identifying it as the medical room. There was no key in the door, but luckily it was unlocked. He stepped inside, flicking on the lights and glancing back briefly to check that the girl was still following him. She gave him a small smile and, in spite of himself, his eyes drifted down towards her ring finger. There was nothing there, and for an indulgent moment he imagined what she’d be like as a girlfriend, then banished the thought. The last thing he should be contemplating when stuck in the middle of a situation like this was a young woman’s marital status. Clearly, he needed to get out more.

The medical room was small and cramped, with a treatment area consisting of a bed and chair, which took up most of the floor space, and a set of locked glass cupboards filled with various substances lining the upper walls.

Scope smiled when he saw the set of keys sitting on the room’s only worktop next to a couple of boxes of pills. This was going to be easier than he’d thought.

He slipped the gun into the waistband of his suit, but as he went to pick up the keys, a worrying thought struck him. For someone as scared as the woman behind him should be, she’d seemed extraordinarily calm and together.

Which was the moment when he saw her reflection in one of the glass cabinets. She was standing in the doorway, pulling a pistol with suppressor attached from beneath her jacket, her teeth bared in a snarl.

Scope dived to the floor in one rapid movement, just at the moment the girl fired, her bullet shattering the glass on one of the cabinets and immediately setting off a piercing alarm. Twisting his body round as he fell and ignoring the pain as his head struck a cupboard door, he yanked out his own gun and let off a single round in her general direction in a desperate effort to prevent her getting an accurate shot at him.

But she was quick too and she’d already jumped out of sight behind the door, firing off two more rounds that ricocheted off a cupboard door, narrowly missing his head.

He leaped to his feet, charged forward, and came out of the room in a roll, keeping the gun out in front of him, just in time to see the girl vault over the reception counter. Tightening his finger on the trigger, he took aim from the hip. But he was too late. She was gone.

For a few seconds he didn’t move, waiting to see if she’d reappear. But he also knew that the shots would have alerted the other terrorists so he couldn’t afford to hang around. He got slowly to his feet, assessing the situation. He’d come close to making a fatal mistake by being way too careless, which wasn’t like him. If he’d given her a cursory search, he would have found the gun. But he genuinely hadn’t expected a pretty girl in western clothes to be part of a group of extremists. It was bizarre. But then everything about this whole day had been bizarre, including the fact that he’d already killed five men – two more than he’d planned to.

His problem now was that not only was he trapped, he’d also given away his position. He went back into the medical room and took a quick look round, scanning the glass cabinets for insulin pens, but there was too much stuff in them. It was going to take a good five minutes to find what he was looking for, and right now he simply didn’t have the time.

Putting the keys from the worktop in his back pocket, Scope crept towards the reception counter, keeping low, knowing that the woman would be waiting for him to reappear. He had two shots left. He was going to have to make them count.

The reception counter was maybe fifteen feet long, and the door they’d come in another five feet further on. This meant that she had quite a large area to watch, and she was likely to be using one of the lobby sofas as cover, so she was going to be a good few yards away, which would make it difficult to get an accurate shot in.

He jumped up fast from behind the counter and saw her straight away behind a leather tub chair, resting her pistol against the arm. Swinging his gun arm round, he fired a single shot at her position, keeping his gun arm steady and making no attempt to duck back down, even though all his instincts were telling him to get out of the way of her aim.

The girl fired back, but she was already ducking down behind the chair to give herself better cover, and Scope took the tiny respite this offered to jump over the counter, taking off at a run down the lobby towards the back of the hotel, still keeping his gun pointing in the girl’s general direction.

She was up fast, cracking off three quick shots that were pretty damn close to him given the fact that he was a fast-moving target and she wasn’t getting a lot of time to aim, and he fired his last bullet back, aiming from the hip, not expecting to hit anything but hoping just to buy himself a little time.

It worked. She ducked again, and by the time she was back up he was almost level with the central staircase, running in a zigzag and keeping low, putting some much-needed distance between them.

Which was the moment when he glanced up and saw the masked gunman at the top of the staircase, aiming his AK-47 down at him.

The wall just above Scope’s head erupted as the bullets stitched across it, sending clouds of dust and pieces of plaster flying in all directions, and from somewhere behind him he heard more shooting as the girl tried to take him out. Adrenalin surged through him and he put his head down and kept running, knowing that the gunman’s angle was extremely tight.

More shots ricocheted off the carpet just beside him but he ignored them, kept going, and a second later he was past the staircase and out of range and sight of the gunman on the stairs.

He managed the briefest of glances over his shoulder, saw that the girl had broken out of her hiding place and was now standing twenty yards back, behind one of the sofas, legs apart and slightly bent, both hands on the gun. He dived to the floor and rolled as she fired, then scrambled to his feet, turned a hard left and ran across the lobby floor, aiming for the cover provided by the back of the staircase.

She tried to bring him down with more shots, but he was moving too fast, and two seconds later he was out of sight and charging down the hallway in the direction of the restaurants and the emergency staircase, knowing that he had only just escaped death and that he’d failed Ethan and Abby.

He might have been unarmed and running for his life, but he couldn’t go back yet.

Not until he’d got the drugs.