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
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.’
Thirty-six
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.
Up ahead the Stanhope loomed from behind the trees that bordered the park, illuminated by the many lights across its facade. It was a grand Georgian structure, and showed no obvious signs of being the location of a violent attack. There were no fires, no other unusual activity. If it hadn’t been for the flashing lights of the many emergency services vehicles surrounding the hotel on three sides, and the noise of the helicopters overhead, it would have made for a perfectly ordinary night-time scene.
‘Can you give me a rundown of what’s happening?’ Riz asked her as they walked.
‘Things are still sketchy, but we’ve definitely got multiple gunmen, large numbers of hostages in at least two different areas of the building, a lot of people trapped in their rooms, and there’ve been reports of sporadic shooting inside the hotel for the last forty-five minutes. What makes it even more critical is that one of the hostages is the Head of the Directorate of Requirements and Production at MI6 and one of its top people.’
‘You’re joking. What the hell’s he doing in there?’
‘We don’t know yet. The hostage-takers have released a film of him tied up in one of the hotel’s rooms. It’s been picked up by Al-Jazeera and a number of Islamist websites. On the film, one of the hostage-takers is holding a gun to his head and saying that if their demands aren’t met they’ll execute him at midnight. All this is confidential, of course.’
‘Of course. What are their demands?’
‘The broadcast called for all British operations against Muslim and Arab countries to stop, but they haven’t
