it down by his side. Bear was unarmed. All of them were except him and Wolf.
Three.
Wolf’s gloved finger tensed on the trigger.
Four.
Bear pressed the call button in one swift decisive movement.
The silence in the room was absolute.
And then they heard it. A dull but unmistakeable thud coming from the south.
Fox straightened up and took a deep breath. There was no going back now. The operation had begun.
Eight
16.05
THE MAN CALLED Scope heard it in the cramped flat he’d been renting for the past month. A faint but distinctive boom. It was a sound that would always remind him of heat and death. He ignored it. After all, he was in the middle of a big, sprawling city where the unnatural noises of constant human activity were always coming at him from one direction or the other. He guessed it was probably just a crane dropping its load on one of the many building sites that dotted this surprisingly drab part of west London. It was all a far cry from the peace and tranquillity of home – a place he hadn’t seen in far too long.
Thankfully, he was almost done here. One last job and then he would be gone.
He finished dressing and looked at himself in the mirror. The face that stared back at him was lined and gaunt, with hollow cheekbones and skin that was dark and weather-beaten from the sun. He’d been handsome once, or so he’d been told by more than one woman who wasn’t his mother. But no longer. He’d lost a lot of weight this past year. Now he bore the haunted look of a man who’d seen and done far too much and there was a hardness in his flint-grey eyes that was impossible to disguise.
Still, he was going to have to try.
He produced a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the breast pocket of his cheap black suit – the type a mid- ranking hotel manager would wear – and put them on, adopting a polite, almost obsequious expression. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said, addressing the mirror with a respectful, customer-oriented smile. ‘May I have a word? It’s about a small discrepancy on your latest bill.’
Not perfect, but it would have to do.
Turning away, he picked up the tools he was going to need from the pockmarked coffee table, all small and easily concealable, and secreted them about his person. Finally, he slipped the hotel nametag introducing him as ‘Mr Cotelli, Manager’ into his breast pocket and headed for the front door of the rental flat.
A woman’s scream from somewhere down the hall outside stopped him as he turned the handle.
More memories tore across his vision. Recent ones. The converted farmhouse at the end of the track. The naked girl tied to the bed, bleeding. The boyfriend with his long, tangled hair and sunken, cokehead cheeks. On his knees, narrow eyes focused on the barrel of the pistol. The interrogation. The answers. The pleading.
Then the thunderous blast of the gun around the filthy room and the bullet blowing the boy’s brains all over the bare wall. And the girl’s desperate screams starting all over again, because she was convinced that Scope was going to kill her next.
He shivered, waiting for the memory to pass, surprised by the strength of the guilt he felt.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he said aloud to himself. ‘It’s nearly over.’
He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. A man’s drunken shouting had replaced the scream. It was coming from the flat at the end. In the time he’d been here, the guy and his old lady had been constantly yelling and shrieking at each other, and more than once he’d considered going round there and telling – or getting – them to shut the hell up. But he’d always resisted. There was no point drawing attention to himself, which was why he’d chosen a dump like this in the first place, and thankfully he wasn’t going to have to put up with it for much longer.
Holding this particular thought at the front of his mind, he made his way down to the street and, conscious of the wail of sirens starting up from pretty much every direction, hailed the first passing cab and asked the driver to take him to the Stanhope Hotel.
Nine
EVEN MORE THAN half an hour later Elena still couldn’t believe what she’d done. She’d assaulted one of the hotel’s best customers. What on earth did you do about that?
Her response had been to get on with her job, and, as always, there was plenty to be getting on with. Already she’d had to deal with a regular business guest who was kicking up a fuss at reception because the room he’d specifically ordered wasn’t available; a couple whose room wasn’t ready because the previous guests had only just been (at last) evicted, and who were trying to wangle a partial refund (they didn’t get one); and three separate complaints about missing room service meals. And all the while she’d been waiting for the inevitable call from Siobhan, the general manager, or a representative of the Stanhope’s owners, the GreenSky Group, telling her that she was dismissed. Or worse still, someone from GreenSky actually showing up and escorting her from the building in front of all the other staff – a humiliation she didn’t think she’d be able to handle.
But so far Elena had heard nothing, not even from Mr Al-Jahabi, who she’d half-expected to come storming into the lobby demanding an immediate apology. So she just carried on.
Right now she was hunting down one of the room service waiters, a new addition to the team called Armin, who’d gone AWOL, and who, according to the kitchen, was the one responsible for at least two of the missing meals. He wasn’t in the usual hiding place in the mezzanine floor’s satellite kitchen – Clinton was still fast asleep in there. She’d asked the catering manager, Rav, to check the male toilets on each floor, but so far he hadn’t shown up there either. As she headed for the fire exit staircase, wondering what could have happened to him, she finally put in a call to Rod.
‘Hi babe, you OK?’ he said, sounding pleased to hear from her.
‘Not really,’ she answered, her voice beginning to shake as she told him about the incident with Mr Al- Jahabi.
When she’d finished, he surprised her by letting out a burst of raucous laughter. ‘Good on ya, babe. It sounds like he’s a right pervert.’
‘But Rod, I could lose my job over this.’
‘Then you’ll have to come back to Oz with me, won’t you?’
She wanted to tell him then that she’d made her mind up to go with him, but decided to break the news when they were sharing a glass of wine after she’d finished her shift and everything had calmed down. ‘I don’t want to leave under a cloud. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Look, you did the right thing. Don’t worry about it. If they try to sack you over it, we’ll sue the bastards.’
‘Do you think I should call Siobhan and let her know what’s happened?’ she asked, mounting the fire exit steps.
Rod sighed. ‘I would, babe. Otherwise it’ll look like you’re trying to hide something. But don’t worry, all right? You’re going to be fine. We both are.’
She had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go home. To walk out of the hotel and forget the whole bloody job with all its hassles and moaning guests and head back to their little flat and jump straight into his arms. Rod had taken the day off after their late one the previous night – as a self-employed plumber, he could get away with it – and he’d tried to get Elena to do the same. She should have done too. She hadn’t had a day off sick during her whole time at the Stanhope, which given the levels of absenteeism in the hospitality industry almost certainly put her in a minority of one. Instead she’d done the right thing – and now it was going to cost her her job. Siobhan was a supportive GM, and the two of them had always got on well, but Elena couldn’t see her boss siding with her over
