indulgent moment he imagined what she’d be like as a girlfriend, then banished the thought. The last thing he should be contemplating when stuck in the middle of a situation like this was a young woman’s marital status. Clearly, he needed to get out more.
The medical room was small and cramped, with a treatment area consisting of a bed and chair, which took up most of the floor space, and a set of locked glass cupboards filled with various substances lining the upper walls.
Scope smiled when he saw the set of keys sitting on the room’s only worktop next to a couple of boxes of pills. This was going to be easier than he’d thought.
He slipped the gun into the waistband of his suit, but as he went to pick up the keys, a worrying thought struck him. For someone as scared as the woman behind him should be, she’d seemed extraordinarily calm and together.
Which was the moment when he saw her reflection in one of the glass cabinets. She was standing in the doorway, pulling a pistol with suppressor attached from beneath her jacket, her teeth bared in a snarl.
Scope dived to the floor in one rapid movement, just at the moment the girl fired, her bullet shattering the glass on one of the cabinets and immediately setting off a piercing alarm. Twisting his body round as he fell and ignoring the pain as his head struck a cupboard door, he yanked out his own gun and let off a single round in her general direction in a desperate effort to prevent her getting an accurate shot at him.
But she was quick too and she’d already jumped out of sight behind the door, firing off two more rounds that ricocheted off a cupboard door, narrowly missing his head.
He leaped to his feet, charged forward, and came out of the room in a roll, keeping the gun out in front of him, just in time to see the girl vault over the reception counter. Tightening his finger on the trigger, he took aim from the hip. But he was too late. She was gone.
For a few seconds he didn’t move, waiting to see if she’d reappear. But he also knew that the shots would have alerted the other terrorists so he couldn’t afford to hang around. He got slowly to his feet, assessing the situation. He’d come close to making a fatal mistake by being way too careless, which wasn’t like him. If he’d given her a cursory search, he would have found the gun. But he genuinely hadn’t expected a pretty girl in western clothes to be part of a group of extremists. It was bizarre. But then everything about this whole day had been bizarre, including the fact that he’d already killed five men – two more than he’d planned to.
His problem now was that not only was he trapped, he’d also given away his position. He went back into the medical room and took a quick look round, scanning the glass cabinets for insulin pens, but there was too much stuff in them. It was going to take a good five minutes to find what he was looking for, and right now he simply didn’t have the time.
Putting the keys from the worktop in his back pocket, Scope crept towards the reception counter, keeping low, knowing that the woman would be waiting for him to reappear. He had two shots left. He was going to have to make them count.
The reception counter was maybe fifteen feet long, and the door they’d come in another five feet further on. This meant that she had quite a large area to watch, and she was likely to be using one of the lobby sofas as cover, so she was going to be a good few yards away, which would make it difficult to get an accurate shot in.
He jumped up fast from behind the counter and saw her straight away behind a leather tub chair, resting her pistol against the arm. Swinging his gun arm round, he fired a single shot at her position, keeping his gun arm steady and making no attempt to duck back down, even though all his instincts were telling him to get out of the way of her aim.
The girl fired back, but she was already ducking down behind the chair to give herself better cover, and Scope took the tiny respite this offered to jump over the counter, taking off at a run down the lobby towards the back of the hotel, still keeping his gun pointing in the girl’s general direction.
She was up fast, cracking off three quick shots that were pretty damn close to him given the fact that he was a fast-moving target and she wasn’t getting a lot of time to aim, and he fired his last bullet back, aiming from the hip, not expecting to hit anything but hoping just to buy himself a little time.
It worked. She ducked again, and by the time she was back up he was almost level with the central staircase, running in a zigzag and keeping low, putting some much-needed distance between them.
Which was the moment when he glanced up and saw the masked gunman at the top of the staircase, aiming his AK-47 down at him.
The wall just above Scope’s head erupted as the bullets stitched across it, sending clouds of dust and pieces of plaster flying in all directions, and from somewhere behind him he heard more shooting as the girl tried to take him out. Adrenalin surged through him and he put his head down and kept running, knowing that the gunman’s angle was extremely tight.
More shots ricocheted off the carpet just beside him but he ignored them, kept going, and a second later he was past the staircase and out of range and sight of the gunman on the stairs.
He managed the briefest of glances over his shoulder, saw that the girl had broken out of her hiding place and was now standing twenty yards back, behind one of the sofas, legs apart and slightly bent, both hands on the gun. He dived to the floor and rolled as she fired, then scrambled to his feet, turned a hard left and ran across the lobby floor, aiming for the cover provided by the back of the staircase.
She tried to bring him down with more shots, but he was moving too fast, and two seconds later he was out of sight and charging down the hallway in the direction of the restaurants and the emergency staircase, knowing that he had only just escaped death and that he’d failed Ethan and Abby.
He might have been unarmed and running for his life, but he couldn’t go back yet.
Not until he’d got the drugs.
Sixty-eight
21.39
FROM HIS VANTAGE point at the top of the main staircase, Fox saw Cat race after the fugitive, her face a mask of fury.
He yelled at her to come back but she’d already disappeared from view. Knowing she’d almost certainly get herself killed, he ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time, annoyed with himself for missing the guy when he’d opened up on him with the AK-47.
He raced round the corner, reloading the rifle as he went, catching up with Cat in the main restaurant. She was standing near the bar, gun outstretched, looking round for her quarry. It was clear she’d lost him.
‘We need to get back upstairs quickly,’ he told her, conscious of the fact that all the gunfire would have spooked the hostages in the ballroom.
‘But he’s here somewhere,’ she hissed. ‘He must be. I’m going to find him.’
‘He could have made for the emergency stairs or one of the ground floor rooms.’
‘Why didn’t you hit him when you had the chance?’ she snapped.
‘For the same reason you didn’t,’ he snapped back, pulling off his balaclava and wiping his brow. ‘Because he was too fast. And if he has gone somewhere through that door, you could be walking straight into a trap.’
She turned on him, her dark eyes radiating fury. ‘He murdered my brother. I owe him. But someone like you … a
‘What I understand is that all this gunfire’s going to bring the SAS down on us fast. We need to defend our positions, which means sticking together, not chasing guests round the hotel, whatever they’ve done. Was he the one who caused the explosion in the kitchen?’
‘No. That was someone else trying to escape.’
‘So what was this guy doing in reception?’
‘He was trying to find some medicine for another guest.’
‘Insulin?’
She frowned. ‘How do you know?’
‘I found some in the room where your brother and Leopard were killed. I took it with me. It means he’ll have to break cover again soon. Come on.’
