He looked up and down the empty corridor, his finger tensing on the trigger of his AK-47 as his concern grew.
That was when he heard it. A scraping sound coming from inside one of the nearby rooms, as if someone was scratching at the door with their fingernails.
He walked slowly towards the source of the noise, stopping at the room from where it was coming.
A small dark patch was spreading out from under the door, only just visible against the burgundy of the carpet, and Fox could hear another sound now, alongside the scratching. The tight, gurgling breaths of a man drowning in his own blood.
Keeping his finger on the AK’s trigger, he slipped the key card from the pocket of his overalls, pushed it in the reader and, in one rapid movement, kicked open the door.
It only flew back a foot because it was being blocked by a man lying across it like a human draught excluder. It was one of his own men, the ex-marine Leopard, and his balaclava-clad head had been smashed to a bloody pulp. Blood bubbles formed in his open mouth like petals as he tried to breathe.
Fox kicked the door again, harder this time, shunting the body back a few inches, repeating the process until it opened completely. Stepping over Leopard’s body, he went inside and immediately saw Panther, propped up against the wall on the other side of the room near the bathroom door, still in his waiter’s uniform. His head was slumped forward, his shirt drenched in blood.
Fox felt someone touch him and looked down sharply. Leopard had lifted one of his gloved hands, and the material had briefly touched his leg.
He sighed. Leopard had been a good soldier, but he was no use to him now. He pushed the barrel of the AK against his ruined head and pulled the trigger.
The hand dropped down with a leaden thud, and the rasping breaths stopped.
Fox looked round the room. Leopard’s AK was lying on the bed, its stock smashed so badly that the trigger guard was hanging off, rendering the weapon useless. Near the bed on the floor the body of an old man lay on its side. He’d been shot, but there was no way, given his build and the damage done to Leopard and Panther, that he was the one responsible for their deaths.
Holding his rifle out in front of him, Fox checked the bathroom and the corner cupboard but they were both empty.
There were a few kids’ toys on the floor – Transformers and a model truck – and a black leather handbag sitting on the table on the far side of the bed. Stepping over the toys, Fox picked up the handbag and looked inside, quickly locating an American driving licence in the name of Abigail Ruth Levinson. She looked skinny and petite in the photo, which made Fox pretty sure she wasn’t the killer either, and since it definitely wasn’t someone who still played with Transformers and Tonka toys, someone else was involved. Someone who clearly knew what he was doing.
His hand brushed against something in the handbag, and he pulled out a clear plastic bag containing what looked like stubby blue pens. He looked more closely and saw that the pens contained insulin. So, she was a diabetic, and one who had to inject herself as well. Which meant she’d be needing them again at some point soon.
He slipped the package into the pocket of his overalls and threw the bag on the floor. It was possible that Abigail and the boy were not known to the killer, and therefore no longer with him, but if they were, and he had her insulin, then it might prove useful at some point.
However, in the end, that was scant consolation. Already two of their number were dead, and the Glock that Panther had been carrying was missing.
Fox sighed. Whichever way he chose to look at it, they now had a real problem on their hands.
SCOPE MIGHT HAVE
learned first aid during his days in the military, but he was no doctor, and although the wound didn’t look that serious, he couldn’t tell for certain.
It took him close to five minutes to get through to the emergency services on the hotel room phone. He told the woman on the other end about what was happening in the hotel, keeping out the details of his own involvement, and explained that he was with a woman with a gunshot wound to the leg that needed urgent treatment.
The operator asked him a lot of questions about the injuries, and told him how to stabilize the bleeding.
‘I know all that, and I’ve done everything I can.’
‘Is the patient conscious?’
Scope glanced at the bed where Abby lay on her back, smiling weakly at Ethan, who was crouched next to her, holding her hand and wiping her forehead with a damp cloth, which was what Scope had told him to do, hoping that it might provide him with a distraction and make him feel useful. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘That’s good. Help will be on its way soon.’
‘Help’s already here. I can see it out of the window. What I need to know is when it’s actually going to come in here.’
‘As you can appreciate, the situation is still very unstable, and the paramedics will need clearance from the police.’
Scope didn’t bother asking when that was likely to be. He could tell from the operator’s voice that she wasn’t expecting a change in the situation any time soon. It felt very much like the security forces were preparing themselves for the long haul, which wasn’t good news for either Abby or her son.
‘Remain in your room, try to barricade the door if you can, and wait until help arrives,’ the operator continued. ‘Help will come, I promise. Now, I’m going to put you through to one of my colleagues in the police, who’d like to ask you some questions. Can you hold?’
Scope said he could, hoping that the police officer would have more than platitudes to offer him.
But he didn’t. The cop sounded young, and he asked Scope a lot of questions about what was going on. How the attackers had got in, what their numbers were, that kind of thing. Scope told him the truth. He didn’t know a great deal about what had happened, other than that there appeared to be quite a few gunmen, and that the one he’d heard speaking had what sounded like a Middle Eastern accent. The cop, who sounded way too interested for Scope’s liking and therefore probably had something to do with the intelligence services, then started asking him more personal questions. What was his name? What was he doing in the hotel? Where was he in the building at that moment?
Scope was a good liar. He always had been. His dad had always said he’d have made a great salesman. He told the cop his name was John, that he’d been having a drink in the restaurant upstairs and wasn’t a guest, and that he was hiding in one of the rooms on the second floor. ‘Listen,’ he said at last. ‘If anyone’s looking at the hotel switchboard, they’ll see that someone in this room’s on the phone, so I’m going to hang up now. But you need to get here fast. There are a lot of dead and injured.’
‘We’re going to be with you as soon as we can,’ said the cop with the reassuring calmness that tends to come easily to those who aren’t in the line of fire. ‘In the meantime, stay where you are. And if you’re discovered by any of the gunmen, on no account offer any resistance.’
A bit too late for that, thought Scope, ending the call.
The room’s TV was on Sky News with the volume turned right down, the news ticker running along the bottom of the screen continuing to announce that there’d been a series of terrorist bombs at locations across central London, and now a suspected terrorist attack on the Stanhope Hotel involving a mass hostage-taking by an unknown number of gunmen. A reporter in a trench coat standing in Hyde Park with the Stanhope as a distant backdrop spoke silently into the camera, looking suitably grim-faced. A moment later the camera panned up towards the hotel, focusing on a glass-fronted upper section of the building where the blinds had all been pulled down. The camera panned in closer but it was impossible to see inside, and after a few seconds they cut back to the reporter.
‘When are they going to come and get my mom?’ asked Ethan quietly.
‘Soon,’ said Scope, looking down at the Glock in his hand. Three bullets. That was all he had. Enough for an emergency, nothing else. He knew they were going to have to wait to be rescued. Breaking out would be next to impossible with a young kid and a wounded woman.
‘When’s soon?’
‘As soon as they can get inside. They need to stop the bad men first.’
‘Why don’t you shoot them? You’ve got a gun.’ Ethan looked at him with wide, innocent eyes that pleaded for answers.
‘I haven’t got enough bullets,’ Scope told him, knowing it was best to be honest.
‘It’s going to be OK.’ Abby’s voice was strained, but some strength was returning to it as she reached out and stroked Ethan’s cheek.
Scope pushed the gun into the back of his trousers and went over to the bed. She looked pale and listless, and he could see that she was in a lot of pain.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I feel numb, and it hurts …’ She stopped, and Scope could tell that she was making an effort to keep things together for Ethan’s sake. ‘But I’m OK. When do you think the police will have us out of here?’
‘I don’t know. It could be a while.’
‘Then I’ve got a bit of a problem. I’m a Type One diabetic, and the insulin’s back in my room.’ She looked apologetic. ‘I forgot about it in all the commotion.’
Scope nodded slowly. ‘When do you need to inject yourself again?’
‘When I next eat. Ideally, it should be about seven thirty, but I could hold on a while after that.’
‘Will the gunshot wound affect the timing?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Scope told her, ‘I’ll go back to your room and get it, but if you’re OK, I’ll leave it a little while until things have calmed down. The terrorists will have discovered the two I killed by now, and they’re not going to be pleased.’
‘Of course.’ She smiled weakly. ‘Thank you for doing this for us.’
‘It’s fine. I’ll make sure you and your son stay safe, I promise.’
But even as he spoke the words he wondered if he wasn’t making a big mistake by playing the Good Samaritan.
A SERVICE LIFT
, the only one they’d kept in operation, linked the hotel’s main kitchen to the two satellite kitchens on the mezzanine and ninth floors, and Fox travelled up on it now, along with the Welsh sapper Dragon and the Dane, Tiger, who he’d collected from the ballroom. He’d told them what had happened to the other two men. Neither man was too sad to see the back of Panther, but they’d both known and trained with Leopard, and his death had unnerved them, as had the fact that his killer was still somewhere in the hotel.
‘The plan’s flexible enough to deal with eventualities like this,’ said Fox as they came out of the lift on the ninth floor and moved into the kitchen next to the Park View Restaurant. ‘We’ll find him.’
Dragon and Tiger were professional enough not to argue with this, but Wolf didn’t react in quite the same way when Fox gave him the bad news.
‘What do you mean, they’re dead?’ he hissed, the shock clear in his eyes.
‘Someone killed them both,’ repeated Fox. ‘He used a knife on Panther and beat Leopard to death with his own rifle, smashing it in the process. Whoever it is, he definitely knows what he’s doing.’
‘And what about the MI6 man?’
‘I haven’t had a chance to check. I wanted to let you know what had happened straight away. I’ll go down there in a minute, but I’m sure there’s no problem. No one except us knows he’s there.’
‘Do that. We don’t want to lose him.’ Wolf shook his head in disbelief. ‘Has anyone told Cat about her brother?’
‘No, I thought that was best left to you.’
Wolf rubbed at his pockmarked face through the balaclava. ‘This is very bad news. I knew Panther well. He was a good man.’
Which was something he definitely hadn’t been, Fox thought. ‘I’m not happy either. Leopard was one of mine. But right now we’ve got a much bigger problem. There’s someone in the hotel not connected to us who knows how to kill people, and he’s armed with Panther’s Glock.’
‘Could it be the police or the SAS?’
Fox shook his head. ‘No. If it was the SAS, I’d be dead now. Chances are we all would. This is a guest. It has to be.’
‘Everything’s OK in the ballroom?’
‘Everything’s fine in there, and everyone’s accounted for. Also, Panther and Leopard weren’t carrying grenades, so the only thing missing is the Glock.’
Wolf said nothing for a minute, but Fox could see his fingers tighten on his AK as he struggled for control. ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘We need to clear the top floor and secure it. Then I’ll tell Cat what has happened to her brother.’
Leaving Dragon and Tiger guarding the hostages, Wolf and Fox used the emergency staircase to walk the one floor up to where the Stanhope’s suites were situated.
As soon as they were through the staircase doors, the opulence hit them. There were no thinning carpets up here. Expensive Persian rugs covered the polished mahogany floor, while paintings lined the walls and fresh flowers and exotic plants sprang from china vases, giving the corridor the sweet smell of summer.
Fox despised the fact that the wealthy thought they were above everyone else just because they had money. He hated the fact that they expected others to do their dirty work for them. When he and his fellow soldiers had been stuck in a barracks in the flea-ridden hellhole of Al-Amarah in Iraq, being used for target practice by those Shia lunatics from the Mahdi Army, the rich hadn’t given a shit about them. Instead they’d continued spending their millions while Fox fought to protect them. And when he’d come back from the war, having given ten hard years’ service to his country, having lost friends to IEDs and sniper fire, having survived the bloodshed and the murderous heat, what had they, or the politicians, or any of the bastards, done for him?
Nothing.
There’d been no jobs above minimum wage. There’d been no occupational training, even though it had been promised to every soldier leaving the army. And because he was single, and not an asylum seeker or a teenage mother, they’d put him at the very bottom of the housing list. Fox knew of two men who’d wilted under the strain and committed suicide; another had been sectioned after trying to kill his own mother. But not Fox. He hadn’t wilted. He’d shown ambition, setting up a firm providing security to private companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d done well financially, selling his company at a decent profit to a bigger outfit and remaining onboard as a consultant.