But for Fox, there was far more to life than making money. He harboured a burning anger at the way his country had been sold down the river by politicians who’d opened the floodgates to millions of immigrants; who’d watered down their once great culture to such an extent that it no longer even existed; who’d helped to create a soft, fat people whose poor were more interested in claiming benefits and watching reality TV than in doing anything to stop the rot all around them; and whose rich just wanted to make themselves ever richer. Fox wanted to wake the people up. He wanted to cause chaos and terror, to smash the old established order and pave the way for a new, more honourable society. It was this desire that had pushed him into extremism, and into the arms of others who shared his views.
From there it had been only a small step to the position he found himself in today. An introduction from one of his extremist contacts had put him in touch with Ahmed Jarrod, aka Wolf, a man with rich backers, and an exciting and lucrative proposition. Wolf wanted Fox to set up a small, hand-picked team of mercenaries to assist him in carrying out a devastating terrorist attack on the UK. It would be an opportunity for Wolf’s backers (who Fox had always assumed were an Arab government) to get revenge on the UK for its perceived interference in their affairs. For Fox, who knew that Muslim extremists would get the blame for this, it was the perfect opportunity to divide and infuriate the British people, and give the establishment the bloody nose it so richly deserved. The irony of fighting alongside the type of people he despised in a battle against his own people was not lost on him. But in common with all other extremists, he was convinced his actions were necessary, and served a greater good.
He stopped outside the Deco suite, while Wolf stopped outside the Garden.
They nodded at each other, and Fox raised his rifle and opened the door, excited by the shock he was about to deliver.
The music got louder as he walked through a foyer with high ceilings and expensive-looking art on the walls, and into the bedroom.
They were on the bed. Three of them. All naked. A middle-aged Arab with a pot belly and a flaccid penis flanked by two much younger women, a Thai and a long-legged blonde, both of whom were clearly pros. The Thai had a tightly rolled fifty-pound note in her hand and looked like she was just about to snort one of two long lines of coke that ran from the Arab’s dick almost to his belly button.
For a moment Fox felt as shocked seeing them as they obviously were to see him. Then he moved the rifle round and put a bullet through the iPod speaker system.
The room fell silent.
‘Please,’ the man on the bed said, trying to cover himself up, ‘take whatever you want.’
Fox shot him once in the forehead, then turned the gun on the two women. But he didn’t fire. The rich Arab deserved his fate, they didn’t. Like him, they were only doing their jobs. He gestured to them to get out of bed and get dressed. They both stood and, trying hard not to look at their client, who lay motionless on the bed in a rapidly spreading halo of blood, started pulling on their clothes.
Fox lowered the gun and walked over to the bedside table where a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label sat next to an open wrap of coke and two full ones. He’d never understood the allure of hard liquor and drugs. All they did was addle your brain and make you weak physically. There were plenty more enjoyable ways of having a thrill.
Like taking over a hotel in the middle of a big city in front of the whole world.
With a flick of his hand, Fox scattered the coke on to the floor. Then he walked over to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked out across Hyde Park, where the emergency vehicles and news crews were beginning to gather in numbers. In the sky above he could see two police helicopters circling. Fox knew that in a situation like this the authorities would set up an exclusion zone round the building as soon as possible, and do everything they could to keep the media at a safe distance where they could do no harm. They would have learned the lesson of Mumbai, where the terrorists had been able to check the movements of the police outside the hotel just by watching the TV. Fox was expecting a far more sophisticated approach tonight. The problem for their adversaries was that he and the others were ready for it.
He let the curtain fall back into place and turned away. The girls were dressed and looking at him expectantly. He was about to tell them to follow him out when Wolf came into the room.
‘We have a problem,’ he told Fox.
‘What is it?’
‘Not something I can talk about in front of these two.’
He produced a pistol from his overalls and shot the Thai girl in the face. Then, as the blonde tried to turn and make a dash for it, he put a bullet in the back of her skull, sending her sprawling on to the bed.
Wolf looked at the Arab. ‘Is this man a Saudi?’
Fox shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Wolf glared at him. ‘We don’t kill Saudis, understand? It’s not good public relations. Who do you think is bankrolling this whole thing?’
Fox shrugged again. ‘Fair enough. So, what’s the problem?’
Wolf led him out into the corridor and unlocked the Garden Suite. ‘This,’ he said simply, and opened the door.
AS WOLF MOVED
to one side, Fox saw it immediately. An outstretched arm, hanging out from behind one of the interior doors. It belonged to a man, and it looked like there was a small patch of blood on his sleeve.
‘Go inside,’ Wolf told him.
Wrinkling his nose against the stale smell, Fox entered the suite. Keeping his gun pointed in front of him, he walked slowly through the foyer, and into the sitting room, stepping over the arm. It was then that he saw the full extent of the carnage.
There were three men in the room and they were all sprawled out on the shag-pile carpet. The one in the doorway, a well-built, well-dressed man in his early thirties, had had his throat cut, as had another guy, bigger, black, with a bald head and a sharp suit, who was lying on his back ten feet away. The third one looked Greek. He was older, with a thick head of dyed-black curly hair and an open-necked shirt and medallion combination that would have gone down a storm in 1987, when everyone got their fashion tips from
Miami Vice
, but now, frankly, looked ridiculous. He was propped up against a tan leather armchair with his head bowed, and Fox could see he’d been stabbed a number of times in the upper body. He took a deep breath. It reminded him of what Panther had looked like downstairs.
He lifted the man’s head up and saw that he too had a neck wound, although it was not as clean-cut or as deep as those on the others. The blood had stopped flowing from it, but it hadn’t yet coagulated, meaning he hadn’t been dead long.
He dropped the head and stood up, puzzled. It looked like Jack the Ripper had set to work in this room, yet he knew for a fact that none of his people had been up here, and even if they had, they would have used guns rather than knives. There were also very few signs of a struggle. The room was spacious, with exotic houseplants in pots at regular intervals along the walls, yet only one of them had been knocked over. It looked to Fox like all the men had been caught by surprise, and had died within seconds and feet of each other. It meant that whoever had killed them was good.
‘Well?’ said Wolf, coming into the room behind him.
Fox looked round the room one more time. ‘This is the work of the man who killed Leopard and Panther, I’m sure of it. And he’s a pro.’
He walked through to the bedroom and looked around. The bed was made and there didn’t appear to be anything out of place. ‘We need to ask the manager who it was who was staying here. That might give us some indication as to who we’re dealing with.’
Closing the doors of both suites, they made their way back to the emergency staircase. Wolf waited while Fox set a grenade booby-trap behind the door. If Special Forces landed on the roof and came in through the undefended top-floor windows, their arrival would be announced with a loud bang.
‘Don’t say anything about what’s happened up here,’ said Wolf as they headed down the stairs. ‘We don’t want to panic the men.’
Fox nodded. For once he agreed with him. They were unlucky to have attacked the hotel on the day that it contained a man who should have been working for, not against, them, but he knew there was no point in dwelling on this. In battle, events can conspire against you at every turn. The solution was to ride with them and make new plans.
As they walked back into the Park View Restaurant, Wolf nodded curtly at Dragon and Tiger, then called the hotel manager over.
She stood up reluctantly, and Wolf and Fox moved her to one side so that the other two couldn’t hear what was being said.
‘Do you have any soldiers staying here?’ Wolf whispered.
The manager frowned. ‘Not that I know of, but I don’t always know the details of the guest lists.’
‘Do any of your staff have military training?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Fox could see that her curiosity was piqued. ‘Who’s staying upstairs in the Garden Suite?’ he asked.
‘Mr Miller. He’s had the suite for most of the last two months. I think he’s going through a divorce.’
‘What does he do for a living?’
‘I think he’s some sort of businessman, but he keeps himself to himself.’
‘And does he have bodyguards?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I believe he does. But that’s not unusual. We have a number of clients—’
‘Has he got any enemies?’
The manager looked puzzled. ‘No, why? Has anything happened?’
‘All right,’ snapped Wolf, pushing her away. ‘Sit back down, and don’t say a word to anyone.’
‘We need to make a change of plan,’ said Fox when she’d returned to where she’d been sitting. ‘We’ve lost two men, which leaves us with six. It’s not enough to hold hostages securely in three separate locations. We should keep the MI6 man apart, but we need to take the ones in here down to the ballroom.’
‘But the whole point is to keep them in different places. That way it’s far harder for the security forces to launch an assault.’
‘I know all that,’ said Fox, working hard to keep his voice quiet. ‘But if we keep the hostages up here we’re splitting our resources too much. In fact, it actually makes it
easier
for them to launch an assault. By now they’ll know we’ve brought people up here – it’ll have been caught on the TV cameras. But with the blinds down, they won’t know we’ve moved them, so they’ll still think we’ve got them in separate places.’
Wolf shook his head emphatically. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We stick to the plan.’
His pigheadedness irritated Fox, but he could hear the stubbornness in his voice, and knew he wouldn’t change his mind.
‘I’m doing the right thing,’ said Wolf. ‘You’ll see that. We’ll keep Dragon and Tiger up here, and Cat and Bear in the ballroom.’ He stopped and looked at his watch, his eyes lighting up. ‘It’s nearly twenty past,’ he said. ‘Time we began negotiations.’
18.21
THE HELICOPTER FOLLOWED
the trajectory of Oxford Street, flying five hundred feet above the gridlocked roads, going as far as Lancaster Gate before banking over Hyde Park and landing on a hastily assembled landing pad three hundred yards directly north of the Stanhope Hotel.
Arley was talking to Chief Inspector Chris Matthews outside the command centre – which consisted of two mobile incident rooms side by side, surrounded by a cluster of police vehicles – trying to organize an HQ for the hundred or so Special Forces and their support teams, whose arrival was imminent, when she saw the helicopter coming in. She immediately excused herself and started across the park towards the landing pad, lighting her first cigarette since the crisis had broken nearly two hours ago, and savouring the acrid hit of smoke in her throat. It was pretty much her first moment alone, when she hadn’t been talking to someone about something.
On the ground, all three cordons were now in place around the Stanhope. In total there were about three hundred police officers on the scene, with more arriving all the time, but Arley was pretty sure that there were none more important than the man she was going to see now.
Riz Mohammed was one of the most successful negotiators in the Met. He had the right mix of hardness and empathy to get under the skin of hostage-takers, and it was well known that in ten years in the job he’d never lost a hostage. He also had the priceless asset of being a Muslim, his Jamaican-born parents having converted from Christianity before he was born. Three months earlier, two Algerian terror suspects wanted for the attempted murder of a police officer had taken their neighbours – a family of four, including two young children – hostage in their Brixton flat. They’d been armed with handguns and a very unstable homemade bomb (which, according to Counter Terrorism Command, they’d been planning to use in a suicide bomb attack) and were demanding their freedom and safe passage to Ankara in Turkey, as well as £50,000 in cash, otherwise they’d start killing the hostages one by one. Riz had been given the task of negotiating with the two men, who’d been desperate, angry and hopelessly unrealistic in their demands. Yet over the next excruciating twenty-two hours he’d coaxed, empathized with, listened to, and finally persuaded them both to release the four hostages, before surrendering peacefully.
Arley took three rapid puffs on the cigarette, taking in as much nicotine as possible, before stubbing it underfoot at the edge of the landing pad. She watched as Riz emerged from the cockpit door, covering his ample head of hair from the updraft of the rotor blades.
‘Hello, ma’am, how are you?’ he said, shaking her hand with a firm grip.
As the head of Specialist Operations, the Met’s Kidnap Unit fell under Arley’s overall control, and she’d worked with Riz several times before.
‘I’ve been better. Thanks for coming, Riz. I appreciate it. I know it’s your day off.’
They walked in the direction of the command centre, which sat just inside the central cordon, Arley having to increase her pace to keep up with him. Riz Mohammed was a big man with a big presence.