ELENA GASPED AS the man holding her, who she assumed was the leader, pulled her to her feet.
His grip hurt, but she was getting used to it now. In fact she’d calmed down a great deal, even though it gutted her to have to leave behind her mobile phone on the floor. She’d always been a practical sort of girl, one who preferred to get on with things, and right now she knew she had to deal with the current situation and do her best to stay alive. And that meant cooperating. These men might be animals – to kill Rav, Faisal, Aidan and the others in cold blood like they’d done, they had to be – but for the moment at least they’d stopped shooting.
The man the leader had addressed earlier as Fox took the rucksack from his back and placed it in the middle of the hostages. He opened it up, fiddled about inside for a few seconds, then removed what looked like a roll of cable, which he trailed across the floor over to one of the other gunmen. She saw that there was a press-down lever attached to the roll, which the other gunman put his foot on. She’d seen something similar once on a TV programme about the Beslan siege, and her heart lurched as she realized that it was a detonation device and that the rucksack contained a bomb that would probably kill them all if it exploded.
Elena didn’t resist as the leader marched her across the ballroom floor and into the satellite kitchen. They were followed by Fox, who’d collected rucksacks from two of the other gunmen.
As soon as they were inside, the leader told her to face the wall, with her hands in the air.
She felt a spasm of pure terror. Were they going to shoot her?
But then the two men started peppering her with questions. Where were the master key cards to the rooms kept? What was the password for the hotel’s electronic guest register? Where was the CCTV camera control room?
Elena answered each question honestly, but when the leader asked her how to disable the hotel’s sprinkler system, she hesitated. There could be only one reason why they’d want to know this: so that if it came to it they could set the place on fire. Her mind went back to the Mumbai sieges of 2008, the flames and thick black smoke billowing out from the upper windows of the grand old buildings. She’d felt so sorry for all the people involved in those horrifying events but never for one moment had she expected to find herself in the middle of something similar. It just didn’t happen in somewhere like London.
‘Answer me,’ demanded the leader, ‘or I’ll shoot you through the kneecap.’
‘There’s a box on the wall in the storage room on the ground floor,’ she said quickly, too scared to lie with a gun pointed at her. ‘There’s a lever inside that you pull down to disconnect it manually.’
‘And is the box locked?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. So’s the storage room. The keys to both are in the safe.’
‘I’ll take her down there with me,’ said Fox. ‘I need to secure the downstairs area.’
‘Make sure she doesn’t escape,’ replied the leader. ‘We need her.’
‘I know that. She won’t try anything.’ He looked over at Elena. ‘Will you?’
Elena looked back at him and shook her head emphatically.
Fox took her by the arm, his touch a lot gentler than the leader’s, and led her towards the door.
As she was ushered out of the room, Elena glanced briefly back towards the store cupboard door. She wondered if Clinton the handyman was still in there, and if he was, whether they’d find him. Armin had obviously told them about the satellite kitchen and its potential as an HQ, but she wasn’t sure he’d know about the secret sleeping spot, since the staff who did know about it tended to keep the knowledge to themselves. She hoped not. She liked Clinton. She wanted him to live.
Fox didn’t speak as he hurried her down the staircase. He kept the assault rifle down by his side and if she’d been incredibly brave she could have tried to take it from him, but there was a concentrated intensity and confidence about him that scared Elena almost as much as the aggression of the others did, and she knew she’d never succeed.
As they strode across the lobby, she saw the body of the business man lying just inside the main doors. It was dark outside now, but there were two figures standing just beyond the doors, and she could tell by their fluorescent jackets that they were police officers. They were both looking at the body, and one was talking into his radio. As soon as they saw Fox they took a step back.
Fox told her to get down as he raised the assault rifle to his shoulder in an easy, fluid motion, which made her think that perhaps he had a military background.
She fell to her knees, putting her head in her hands and shutting her eyes, as a heavy burst of automatic weapon fire filled the air. He pulled her up again and, as she opened her eyes, she saw that the bullets had peppered the glass of several of the doors close to where the policemen had been, but that neither of them had been hit. She wondered whether he’d deliberately missed them, and if so, why.
‘OK, let’s go,’ he said, hauling Elena to her feet. ‘I want the front doors locked. Have you got the keys on you?’
‘No, they’re kept in the main safe,’ she said, knowing there was no point lying since Armin would have already told them most of what they needed to know about the workings of the Stanhope.
‘And you know the combination.’
It was a statement rather than a question, and again she told the truth. ‘Yes.’
‘I want all the master key cards too. The ones that’ll open every room, including the suites.’
‘I can get them.’
He looked at her closely for a moment, and she saw that beneath the balaclava he had pale blue eyes. This surprised her. Because these people claimed to be representing an organization called the Pan-Arab Army of God she’d assumed they’d all be Arabs. Yet Fox was clearly white. He spoke with a vague eastern European accent, so perhaps he was a Muslim from the south.
‘I got engaged today,’ she said quickly.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he tightened his grip on her arm and walked across the lobby, stopping beside one of the leather sofas to deposit a rucksack beneath the glass coffee table in front of it, before continuing over to the door that led behind the main reception desk. With Fox following closely behind, Elena walked round the back of the desk and into the CCTV control room where the main safe was kept, relieved that no one was hiding behind the door. She hadn’t seen Walter, the duty security guard, or Katrina, the nineteen-year-old Slovakian receptionist, upstairs in the ballroom and hoped that they’d managed to make a break for the doors in the few short minutes when the lobby had been unguarded. Katrina was such a sweet girl and didn’t deserve to get caught up in something like this. But then, of course, none of them did.
While she opened the safe and took out the keys, she watched Fox out of the corner of her eye as he took a package from another of his rucksacks. He leaned down and carefully placed it beside the desk and out of sight before standing back up and reviewing the bank of screens on the wall.
‘Why isn’t this camera working?’ he said, pointing to the only blank screen.
Elena frowned. The hotel’s CCTV system was generally reliable. It had to be in a place like this where people were free to come and go as they pleased. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It must be faulty.’
‘Where is it?’
She came forward to take a closer look. ‘Up on the top floor. Where the suites are.’
He nodded slowly, then took the key cards and told her to turn off all the lights in the front section of the lobby, which she did manually from behind the reception counter. Finally, he ordered her to lock the hotel’s front doors.
That was the hard part. Being so close to freedom. Being able to see the two police officers she’d seen earlier as they ushered the crowds of onlookers away from the front courtyard; and beyond them people driving past in their cars on Park Lane, utterly oblivious to what was going on in this place. And then the line of trees that bordered Hyde Park, a place where she and Rod loved to walk on summer evenings.
People looked at her, some pointing, as she went from one door to the other, stepping over the body of the dead man, ignoring the sickly smell of faeces as she imprisoned herself, the gunmen and the hotel guests inside. She paused for a moment and looked at her faint reflection in the glass. The stress had stretched and twisted her face, and the blood splatters on her usually impeccable uniform stood out. Immediately her thoughts turned to escape. The outside was so, so near. All she had to do was fling open one of the doors, run for her life in a zigzag motion, keeping low like they did in the movies, and she’d be free.
But behind her, in the glass door, she could see the gunman, Fox, and she knew she’d never make it.
‘Is your fiance here?’ he asked her suddenly.
She wondered if he was going to let her go, and felt a surge of hope mixed with guilt. She knew it would be
