Siege (5 page)

The silence in the room was absolute.

And then they heard it. A dull but unmistakeable thud coming from the south.

Fox straightened up and took a deep breath. There was no going back now. The operation had begun.

16.05

THE MAN CALLED
Scope heard it in the cramped flat he’d been renting for the past month. A faint but distinctive boom. It was a sound that would always remind him of heat and death. He ignored it. After all, he was in the middle of a big, sprawling city where the unnatural noises of constant human activity were always coming at him from one direction or the other. He guessed it was probably just a crane dropping its load on one of the many building sites that dotted this surprisingly drab part of west London. It was all a far cry from the peace and tranquillity of home – a place he hadn’t seen in far too long.

Thankfully, he was almost done here. One last job and then he would be gone.

He finished dressing and looked at himself in the mirror. The face that stared back at him was lined and gaunt, with hollow cheekbones and skin that was dark and weather-beaten from the sun. He’d been handsome once, or so he’d been told by more than one woman who wasn’t his mother. But no longer. He’d lost a lot of weight this past year. Now he bore the haunted look of a man who’d seen and done far too much and there was a hardness in his flint-grey eyes that was impossible to disguise.

Still, he was going to have to try.

He produced a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the breast pocket of his cheap black suit – the type a mid-ranking hotel manager would wear – and put them on, adopting a polite, almost obsequious expression. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said, addressing the mirror with a respectful, customer-oriented smile. ‘May I have a word? It’s about a small discrepancy on your latest bill.’

Not perfect, but it would have to do.

Turning away, he picked up the tools he was going to need from the pockmarked coffee table, all small and easily concealable, and secreted them about his person. Finally, he slipped the hotel nametag introducing him as ‘Mr Cotelli, Manager’ into his breast pocket and headed for the front door of the rental flat.

A woman’s scream from somewhere down the hall outside stopped him as he turned the handle.

More memories tore across his vision. Recent ones. The converted farmhouse at the end of the track. The naked girl tied to the bed, bleeding. The boyfriend with his long, tangled hair and sunken, cokehead cheeks. On his knees, narrow eyes focused on the barrel of the pistol. The interrogation. The answers. The pleading.

Then the thunderous blast of the gun around the filthy room and the bullet blowing the boy’s brains all over the bare wall. And the girl’s desperate screams starting all over again, because she was convinced that Scope was going to kill her next.

He shivered, waiting for the memory to pass, surprised by the strength of the guilt he felt.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he said aloud to himself. ‘It’s nearly over.’

He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. A man’s drunken shouting had replaced the scream. It was coming from the flat at the end. In the time he’d been here, the guy and his old lady had been constantly yelling and shrieking at each other, and more than once he’d considered going round there and telling – or getting – them to shut the hell up. But he’d always resisted. There was no point drawing attention to himself, which was why he’d chosen a dump like this in the first place, and thankfully he wasn’t going to have to put up with it for much longer.

Holding this particular thought at the front of his mind, he made his way down to the street and, conscious of the wail of sirens starting up from pretty much every direction, hailed the first passing cab and asked the driver to take him to the Stanhope Hotel.

EVEN MORE THAN
half an hour later Elena still couldn’t believe what she’d done. She’d assaulted one of the hotel’s best customers. What on earth did you do about that?

Her response had been to get on with her job, and, as always, there was plenty to be getting on with. Already she’d had to deal with a regular business guest who was kicking up a fuss at reception because the room he’d specifically ordered wasn’t available; a couple whose room wasn’t ready because the previous guests had only just been (at last) evicted, and who were trying to wangle a partial refund (they didn’t get one); and three separate complaints about missing room service meals. And all the while she’d been waiting for the inevitable call from Siobhan, the general manager, or a representative of the Stanhope’s owners, the GreenSky Group, telling her that she was dismissed. Or worse still, someone from GreenSky actually showing up and escorting her from the building in front of all the other staff – a humiliation she didn’t think she’d be able to handle.

But so far Elena had heard nothing, not even from Mr Al-Jahabi, who she’d half-expected to come storming into the lobby demanding an immediate apology. So she just carried on.

Right now she was hunting down one of the room service waiters, a new addition to the team called Armin, who’d gone AWOL, and who, according to the kitchen, was the one responsible for at least two of the missing meals. He wasn’t in the usual hiding place in the mezzanine floor’s satellite kitchen – Clinton was still fast asleep in there. She’d asked the catering manager, Rav, to check the male toilets on each floor, but so far he hadn’t shown up there either. As she headed for the fire exit staircase, wondering what could have happened to him, she finally put in a call to Rod.

‘Hi babe, you OK?’ he said, sounding pleased to hear from her.

‘Not really,’ she answered, her voice beginning to shake as she told him about the incident with Mr Al-Jahabi.

When she’d finished, he surprised her by letting out a burst of raucous laughter. ‘Good on ya, babe. It sounds like he’s a right pervert.’

‘But Rod, I could lose my job over this.’

‘Then you’ll have to come back to Oz with me, won’t you?’

She wanted to tell him then that she’d made her mind up to go with him, but decided to break the news when they were sharing a glass of wine after she’d finished her shift and everything had calmed down. ‘I don’t want to leave under a cloud. It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Look, you did the right thing. Don’t worry about it. If they try to sack you over it, we’ll sue the bastards.’

‘Do you think I should call Siobhan and let her know what’s happened?’ she asked, mounting the fire exit steps.

Rod sighed. ‘I would, babe. Otherwise it’ll look like you’re trying to hide something. But don’t worry, all right? You’re going to be fine. We both are.’

She had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go home. To walk out of the hotel and forget the whole bloody job with all its hassles and moaning guests and head back to their little flat and jump straight into his arms. Rod had taken the day off after their late one the previous night – as a self-employed plumber, he could get away with it – and he’d tried to get Elena to do the same. She should have done too. She hadn’t had a day off sick during her whole time at the Stanhope, which given the levels of absenteeism in the hospitality industry almost certainly put her in a minority of one. Instead she’d done the right thing – and now it was going to cost her her job. Siobhan was a supportive GM, and the two of them had always got on well, but Elena couldn’t see her boss siding with her over this one.

‘Shit,’ said Rod down the phone, interrupting her thoughts.

Elena frowned. ‘What is it?’

‘They’re saying on the TV that there’s been an explosion at the Westfield. It sounds like it might be a bomb. Have you heard anything over there?’

The Westfield was barely a mile from where they lived, and she and Rod had been shopping there the other week.

‘No, nothing. But I haven’t been past a TV in the last twenty minutes. Has anyone been hurt?’

‘I don’t think they know yet. It’s only just happened, but they’re saying it’s in the underground car park. Blimey, it’s all going on today, isn’t it? Maybe you ought to come home. Call Siobhan and tell her you’ve been traumatized by your experience with that Arab bloke and get back here for a bit of R and R.’

Elena sighed. ‘I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll take tomorrow off, but I’m the only DM on today so I need to stay put.’

As she spoke, she heard someone talking on the steps above her. Looking up, she saw a young room service waiter on the phone by the third-floor doors. His tray was on the floor in front of him. She’d never met Armin before, but she’d have bet a week’s wages it was him.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Rod. ‘I’ll talk to you later, OK?’

Without waiting for an answer, Elena ended the call and marched up to the waiter.

He quickly ended his own call and replaced the phone in his pocket.

‘Armin,’ she snapped, reading his nametag. ‘Where have you been? Rooms 422 and 608 haven’t received their food orders.’ She looked down at the full tray at his feet. ‘I assume that’s them.’

Armin was lean and wiry, and would have been quite good-looking if it hadn’t been for the pinched, aggressive expression he wore. He looked her up and down dismissively. ‘Sorry,’ he said in heavily accented English, sounding like he didn’t mean it. ‘I got held up.’

‘You left the kitchen more than twenty minutes ago. How held up can you be?’

‘I was on the phone.’

‘Who to?’

He hesitated before answering. ‘A friend.’

Elena considered herself a fair boss, and one who didn’t lose her temper easily, but Armin’s bizarrely unapologetic attitude was infuriating her. ‘You shouldn’t be calling your friends in office hours. Especially when you’re in the middle of delivering room service orders. What were you thinking about? Don’t you want this job? Because there are plenty of people out there who do.’

She stopped, realizing that she’d raised her voice, something she’d always been taught to avoid doing since all it showed was that you were losing control of the situation.

Armin looked her right in the eye, and there was such naked rage in his expression that she took a step back. ‘I said I was sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll deliver the order now.’ He picked up the tray and continued up the stairs, leaving Elena staring after him.

She took a deep breath and ran a hand over her face. The confrontation, short as it was, had really shaken her. Partly it was because she was still in shock from what had happened earlier, but it was more than that. It was because she could tell from the way he’d spoken that he despised her. Yet she’d never even met him before.

Beginning to wonder whether it might actually be quite a good idea to pull a sickie, as Rod had suggested, she turned and started back down the stairs, determined to have a word with Rav and get him to sack Armin the moment his shift was finished.

16.17

THEY LEFT THE
warehouse in a white Transit van with Andrews Maintenance Services written on the side, beneath which was an out-of-service 0207 number. The van had been bought with cash at an auction in Kent two weeks earlier and it was completely clean. Fox was driving, with Wolf in the passenger seat next to him, while the other four were hidden away in the back behind a grimy curtain, along with the bulk of the weaponry.

As Fox turned on to the A40 heading eastbound he could see a pall of smoke over the buildings to the south-east, where the bomb had struck. By the time they reached East Acton and the Westway flyover a steady stream of emergency services vehicles – police, fire and ambulance – were approaching from the other direction. Fox counted seventeen of them altogether in the space of three minutes, and there’d be others coming from different directions as well, severely stretching their resources, as had been the plan.

They turned off the A40 just before the start of the flyover, heading south on the A3220, then taking a left on to Holland Park Avenue, where the traffic suddenly became more clogged. An ambulance drove down the middle of the road coming towards them, its blue lights flashing, and Fox was forced to mount the pavement to let it through.

The atmosphere in the van was tense, and Fox could hear the men shuffling about in the back. Everyone was jumpy. Not just because of what they were about to do but because all of them, except him, had snorted a generous line of speed before they’d left the warehouse. The drug would keep them awake and alert, and lower their inhibitions, making it easier for them to kill people when the time came. It would also dull their natural fear. But for Fox, who’d never taken illicit drugs in his life and wasn’t prepared to start now, two cups of strong coffee had had to suffice.

Wolf’s phone rang. He answered it, identified himself by code-name, then paused while he listened to the person on the other end of the phone. ‘You know what to do,’ he said at last, and ended the call, exchanging looks with Fox.

Fox tightened his fingers round the steering wheel. It was time to put the next stage of the plan into action.

16.28

THE FIRST GREAT WESTERN
from Bristol Temple Meads crawled snake-like into Paddington Station, two minutes behind schedule.

The young man was one of the first to his feet, picking up his rucksack from the floor in front of him. He hauled it over his shoulders, making sure the detonation cord was out of sight but within easy reach, and headed for the exit door at the end of the carriage, stopping to let out a couple of other passengers en route, wondering idly whether or not he was saving their lives by doing so or merely prolonging them for a few minutes. Most of his fellow passengers were business people heading back to town from their meetings in the provinces, or middle-aged theatregoers. He saw no children, God be praised. The young man was ready to do what he had to do, but he had no desire for kids to be caught up in it. He was, after all, a soldier not a butcher.

There was a bottleneck forming as the tiny corridor between carriages became thronged with passengers, and he was forced to stop next to the luggage rack, only feet from the trolley suitcase containing five kilos of explosives rigged up to a battery pack and mobile phone. No one had noticed him bringing it on earlier, and by the time anyone realized that it had been left behind it would be too late. He tried not to look at it, but couldn’t help giving it a glance out of the corner of his eye, wondering what damage it would do, and to whom, when it exploded.