Siege

Seventy-six

22.05

ARLEY WATCHED AS Riz Mohammed picked up the phone and put it to his ear. A second later he was connected to Wolf’s phone in the satellite kitchen on the mezzanine floor, the sound of it ringing over the loudspeaker, filling the tense silence in the room.

This was it. The decoy call. The police’s only part in the operation to free the hostages.

No one spoke as they waited. They all knew what none of the pundits on the news channels on the screens in front of them knew. That an unseen assault was about to take place.

And yet what no one in this room knew, aside from Arley, was that the terrorists were ready and waiting for it. She stood in her customary position in the middle of the room, wearing a mike and earpiece connecting her to the mobile in her pocket. The moment it rang with news from Tina she’d call Major Standard in the SAS control room and tell him what she’d done. It would mean the immediate loss of her job, and the possibility of a whole raft of criminal charges, but in truth she didn’t give a hoot about any of that. All she wanted was her children back with her safe and sound, and to stop the assault on the hotel. Everything else was irrelevant.

‘We’ve got some movement in Worth Street at the back of the hotel,’ said Will Verran. A few minutes earlier he’d connected the incident room to a police camera that had been set up on Worth Street, just inside the inner cordon, and he was watching the screen that showed it.

Arley peered over his shoulder at the screen. Sure enough, she could see a line of dark figures moving through the shadows on the pavement towards the Stanhope’s delivery entrance, before stopping behind a parked lorry, where they were hidden from view. She tensed. This was the assault force. She’d run out of time.

Instinctively she took out her mobile and stared at the blank screen.

Call me, Tina. Please, just call.

It was all over. For the first time in this whole crisis, she was simply unable to speak. DAC Arley Dale, a high-flying career cop and only a few hours earlier a potential future Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was now knowingly sending a group of men to their certain deaths, and she knew it was something that would haunt her dreams for ever.

In the background, the phone in the Stanhope’s satellite kitchen continued to ring.