Secondly, Dragon cut a hole in the back of the bin and ran the wires through there and under the delivery room door, so they’d be impossible to spot without moving the bin.’
‘They could have moved the bin.’
Fox smiled. ‘We’d have heard them. Dragon also taped a grenade between the bin and the one next to it, on the underside where you can’t see it. If anyone moved anything, it would have come free and blown.’ He gave the detonator to Bear, telling him to handle it carefully, then pulled a pair of noise-suppressing headphones from his backpack. ‘You might want to wear these when you set off the bomb. I’m going to be upstairs in one of the function rooms. As soon as I hear it go off, I’ll open up with the AK and chuck out a couple of grenades. If you get the chance, unload a few rounds yourself, but then make your way back to the mezzanine floor using the emergency staircase. We’ll rendezvous there.’
‘What if they keep coming? They’re not going to want to give up just like that.’
‘They’ll be sitting ducks out there so they’re going to want to get back and regroup. Also, as soon as Wolf hears all the commotion, he’s going to get on to the negotiator and threaten to kill all the hostages unless they pull back.’ He patted Bear on the shoulder. ‘They’ll pull back. Remember, they’ve had hardly any time to prepare for this and we’re forcing their hand. They’ll be making mistakes too.’
Bear shook his head slowly. ‘I never thought I’d end up killing fellow British soldiers.’
‘They’re unavoidable casualties,’ said Fox, who had no desire to get into a debate about the morality of what they were doing. It was way too late for that. ‘You want to make the government fall, you want to make the people angry, this is the way you do it. Plus, you’ve got the best motivation of all: if you don’t kill them, you can bet your life that they’ll kill you.’
Bear nodded slowly as he thought this through, then grinned. ‘Reminds me of the old days,’ he whispered, peering out into the gloom. ‘Waiting for the enemy to appear.’
‘And we got out of that OK, didn’t we? We’ll get out of this too. Then we can all retire.’ Fox got to his feet, keeping low. ‘Rendezvous back in the mezzanine foyer. I’ll be waiting for you there. Good luck.’
Keeping to the shadows, he slipped back through the kitchen and headed upstairs.
Barely a minute later he was inside the Meadow Room on the mezzanine floor, a mid-sized function room with a long boardroom table and chairs and an electronic whiteboard taking up one wall. He stood in the corner of the room, the AK-47 in his hands, and looked round the edge of the curtain, into the courtyard below.
This was it. The culmination of months of training and planning. He slowed his breathing, knowing how important it was to remain calm as he prepared for the coming onslaught. One more hour and he’d either be a very rich man or a dead one.
He looked at his watch. 22.01.
Seventy-three
22.01
TINA WAS DRIVING round the maze of rain-soaked residential streets where the van she was looking for was supposed to be parked, as she had been for over twenty minutes now, when her phone rang.
‘They sent me a video from Howard’s phone,’ Arley announced breathlessly. ‘My children were alive ten minutes ago.’
‘That’s brilliant news.’ Tina had thought they would be, but she still felt a rush of relief. ‘Were there details in the video that could be of any use to us?’
‘Only that it was shot inside a house.’
‘And a location?’
‘I’ve just emailed it to you. It’s not exact, but it’s down to a twenty- or thirty-metre area around Pride Street, within the same wider location as the van.’
‘I drove down Pride Street two minutes ago and I didn’t see a van, but I’ll have another look now. But listen, Arley, I’m not risking my neck here. I’m unarmed. I’ll see if I can find the house, but that’s it.’
‘If you can find proof that the kids are there, that’s all I need. Then the security forces can deal with it. But I need to know for sure. Please. We’re so close.’ The desperation was clear in her voice.
‘Have the SAS made the decision to go into the hotel yet?’ asked Tina, knowing that if they had, she was going to have to make this thing public.
‘Not yet, but it’s going to come soon.’
‘OK. Leave things with me, and make sure you get the ANPR people to get in touch with you if that van starts moving. I’ll call you the moment I have something.’
Tina ended the call and shook her head. She shouldn’t be doing this. Yet she couldn’t help feeling an excitement she hadn’t experienced in many months. In fact, not since the last time she’d found herself acting totally illegally by teaming up with a wanted killer in order to bring an even worse one to justice. Tina had always attracted trouble. It was in her nature. But she also prided herself on always doing what she thought was the right thing.
Except this time she wasn’t at all sure she
She pulled over. Her laptop was open on the seat next to her and she picked it up and checked the hotmail account, opening the attachment from Arley’s email of three minutes earlier.
It showed a small-scale street map of the area she was in with an irregular red circle over a section of Pride Street that was about two hundred yards west of her current location. Pride Street backed on to a railway track, and as Tina looked at the map more closely, she could see that there was a track running behind the houses with another house at the end of it, next to the railway line – one she hadn’t seen earlier on the bigger map. The house was just inside the red circle, and it struck Tina that it was isolated enough for the kidnappers to have got the children out of the back of the van without attracting attention.
There was no time to check whether or not it had been rented recently, so she pulled back out again and accelerated towards the railway line.
She almost missed the narrow turning with the dead end sign that, according to the map, led down to the house she was interested in. Slowing up, she caught a glimpse of a high-wire fence about thirty yards distant just as a train passed on the other side of it with a steady rumble.
Straight away she knew that it was too risky to drive down there, in case someone was watching. Instead she continued further down the street, still checking the parked cars just in case she was wrong and the children were being kept somewhere else, but after thirty yards and no sign of any red van, she found a spot and parked.
Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the can of pepper spray she’d bought in France from the glove compartment, as well as an eight-inch piece of lead piping – both totally illegal for a civilian to be in possession of, but small beer in comparison to the crimes she’d already committed that night. She slipped the pepper spray into her coat pocket and the lead piping into the back of her jeans, and then got out and hurried along the street, keeping her head down against the rain and the cold.
The turning down to the house was little more than a muddy track, with overgrown brambles and scrub on either side. There were tyre tracks in the mud but it was difficult to tell whether they were recent or not.
Keeping to the side of the track, Tina followed it as it turned at a narrow angle in front of the barbed-wire fence before ending at the entrance to a small rundown cottage that was almost entirely obscured by high vegetation and an unsteady-looking brick wall. Parked in the narrow carport in front of the cottage, beyond two ancient wrought-iron gates, was the red van they were looking for.
Tina stopped. There were lights on in the ground floor of the cottage and all the curtains, upstairs and downstairs, were drawn. This was the place, she knew it.
She should have got straight back on the phone to Arley and told her that she’d done as much as she could. But she didn’t. Instead she switched her phone to vibrate and climbed over the gates, tiptoeing across the gravel until she was level with the driver’s window of the van. She peered inside. The front was empty, while the rear was hidden by a makeshift curtain, and she couldn’t see or hear anything. Satisfied it was empty, she approached the cottage along the edge of the driveway, keeping close to the undergrowth before stopping outside the first of the
