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.
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.
Thirty-five
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
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
