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.
Thirty-four
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
