Siege (31 page)

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 ground floor windows. She put her ear to the glass and heard the sound of a TV.

Slowly, carefully, Tina made her way round the back of the cottage. A back door led into an unlit utility room with washing machine and sink, and beyond that Tina could see a narrow hallway with a staircase and the glow of lights at one end. Nothing moved inside, but there was definitely someone in there.

Putting on her gloves, Tina tried the back door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. It didn’t matter. The lock looked as ancient as everything else about the cottage. She’d been trained in covert entry years before when she was in SOCA, and she’d brought a set of picks with her tonight.

Even so, she paused. The man who’d kidnapped Arley’s children was armed and extremely dangerous. He’d already killed her husband, and Tina knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her. Far better just to call the police, or better still Arley herself.

Except she hadn’t found the kids. Not yet.

Tina felt her whole body tense. She was going in. It was just the way she was. All her instincts told her to hold back, but in the end it made no difference. She wanted to find those kids and make them safe. If anything happened to them because she hadn’t done all she could … Well, she found it hard enough to live with herself anyway.

Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the picks and set to work, and in thirty seconds she had the door unlocked. It would have been twenty, but she was out of practice.

Slowly, she turned the handle and crept inside.

LIAM ROY SHETLAND, CODENAMED
Bull, had been buzzing all day. He’d finally killed a man. Put a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.

It was one of the most amazing things he’d ever experienced. Better even than sex, and similar too, in a weird way. There’d been this incredible rush as the bloke died – like having a really big orgasm. He’d been reliving every detail in his head ever since – the way the blood had splattered on the floor; the funny little grunt the bloke had made. Which was just as well really, because otherwise the day would have been shit boring, hanging round on his own in a house that reeked of mould, babysitting a couple of brats, and without even a Playstation or the net to keep him occupied. Just a tiny little telly with nothing but Freeview.

But the time was fast approaching when he would achieve the kind of notoriety he’d been dreaming of all his life, and he could feel the anticipation building. This was his chance to prove wrong all the bastards who’d ever doubted him. His mum. His teachers. The Paki at the Job Centre who always used to look down his nose at him. All of them.

The handler should be calling him any time now, telling him he could leave. There wasn’t a lot of time left if he was going to get to the rendezvous in time. His instructions were simple. He was to drive the van as close as he could to the Stanhope Hotel, and park it in as public a place as possible. There was a bomb in the back, set to go off at eleven p.m., and he needed to be well away from it when it blew. Fox had given him a rucksack containing a smaller bomb, and his job was to take this and continue towards the Stanhope on foot. When he got to the outer cordon where the crowds and TV cameras were gathered, he’d been told to get rid of the bag somewhere among them, without making it look too obvious, and then get the hell out, because the rucksack bomb was timed to go off at 11.15.

Liam was pleased he’d been given such responsibility by Fox, who was a bloke he seriously admired. Fox was the kind of soldier Liam wanted to be, and he was jealous of him in that hotel with the others, holding the whole world at bay. He’d been watching what was happening on the telly for most of the day, proud that he was a part of it all, although he still couldn’t quite understand why they had to work with Arabs and Muslims, the very people he most hated, even though Fox had explained it to him several times.

His mobile bleeped and he checked the screen. It was a text from the handler. All it said was WE’RE READY.

Liam smiled, leaning over and picking up the gun from the table next to him.

It was time to do the kids.

TINA WAS HALFWAY
up the staircase when she heard what she was sure was the bleep of a phone coming from beyond the half-open door that led into the living room – the only room downstairs she hadn’t yet checked for signs of the children. A couple of seconds later, it was followed by the sound of someone – a man, from the noise he was making – clearing his throat loudly and moving around.

It was too late to go back downstairs now. She was trapped in no-man’s land, and the weapons she was carrying – a piece of lead piping in one hand, a can of pepper spray in the other – were no use from a distance.

Making a snap decision, she continued up the last few stairs as quickly as she could, gritting her teeth when one of them creaked loudly, and darted behind the wall at the top just as the living room door opened with a loud squeak, and the man cleared his throat again.

There were three doors up here, two on her side of the landing, one on the other. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she opened the nearest one and stepped inside, and was immediately assailed by the smell of urine.

They were both on the floor in the middle of the empty room, lying on their fronts, trussed up from head to foot with duct tape like caterpillar larvae. As she gently closed the door behind her, they both started wriggling and making moaning noises beneath their gags.

‘It’s OK,’ Tina whispered, coming closer and feeling a huge sense of relief. ‘I’m here to help. Your mum sent me. You’ve just got to stay quiet for a second.’

They both fell silent and stopped moving. Tina crouched down beside the girl, whose name she’d forgotten, and, after putting down the weapons, removed the duct tape covering her mouth as gently as she could, before doing the same with the tape covering her eyes. This way the girl could see who she was dealing with. She blinked up at Tina with wide, frightened eyes, and Tina smiled back at her reassuringly, putting a finger to her lips.

‘Do you know how many men are holding you here?’ she whispered.

‘Two came to our house this morning,’ the girl whispered back. ‘They both had guns. I haven’t heard any talking down there, so I don’t know if they’re both still here, but one definitely is. He was up here a little while ago.’

‘OK. Now, I’m going to untie you both and then we’re going to go out of the window as quietly as possible. Understand?’

The girl nodded. She looked incredibly relieved that Tina was there. Next to her, the boy, who Tina remembered was called Oliver, rolled on to his side to face her and made a noise behind his gag.

She immediately leaned over and began to remove the tape round his eyes, at the same time pulling out her phone so she could text Arley the news.

And then she heard it. The stair that had creaked earlier when she’d been coming up had creaked again. Even louder this time. Another stair creaked, and she stopped.

The man was on his way up.

22.05

ARLEY WATCHED AS
Riz Mohammed picked up the phone and put it to his ear. A second later he was connected to Wolf’s phone in the satellite kitchen on the mezzanine floor, the sound of it ringing over the loudspeaker, filling the tense silence in the room.

This was it. The decoy call. The police’s only part in the operation to free the hostages.

No one spoke as they waited. They all knew what none of the pundits on the news channels on the screens in front of them knew. That an unseen assault was about to take place.

And yet what no one in this room knew, aside from Arley, was that the terrorists were ready and waiting for it. She stood in her customary position in the middle of the room, wearing a mike and earpiece connecting her to the mobile in her pocket. The moment it rang with news from Tina she’d call Major Standard in the SAS control room and tell him what she’d done. It would mean the immediate loss of her job, and the possibility of a whole raft of criminal charges, but in truth she didn’t give a hoot about any of that. All she wanted was her children back with her safe and sound, and to stop the assault on the hotel. Everything else was irrelevant.

‘We’ve got some movement in Worth Street at the back of the hotel,’ said Will Verran. A few minutes earlier he’d connected the incident room to a police camera that had been set up on Worth Street, just inside the inner cordon, and he was watching the screen that showed it.

Arley peered over his shoulder at the screen. Sure enough, she could see a line of dark figures moving through the shadows on the pavement towards the Stanhope’s delivery entrance, before stopping behind a parked lorry, where they were hidden from view. She tensed. This was the assault force. She’d run out of time.

Instinctively she took out her mobile and stared at the blank screen.

Call me, Tina. Please, just call
.

It was all over. For the first time in this whole crisis, she was simply unable to speak. DAC Arley Dale, a high-flying career cop and only a few hours earlier a potential future Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was now knowingly sending a group of men to their certain deaths, and she knew it was something that would haunt her dreams for ever.

In the background, the phone in the Stanhope’s satellite kitchen continued to ring.

TINA STOOD BACK
against the bedroom wall, just behind the door, wondering what the hell the guy who kept clearing his throat was doing. He’d been up here close to two minutes now, yet he hadn’t come in. She’d got the two kids lying back on their fronts so that he wouldn’t notice anything amiss when he eventually came in, but now she was wondering whether she should have tried to get them out of the window and to safety, or at the very least texted Arley to let her know she’d found them and they were OK. But then she heard the flushing of a toilet and knew she’d made the right decision. He was coming.

She could hear his heavy footfalls on the landing, stopping directly outside the door. The boy made a moaning noise beneath the gag as the door opened and the light was switched on.

Tina held her breath, blinking against the light, her hand tight on the pepper spray canister. She’d replaced the lead piping in the back of her jeans because she needed a free hand in case the guy was armed. It was a great weapon if she scored a direct hit on his head, but if she didn’t, it would be next to useless. She needed to blind him, and for that, the spray was perfect.

Her heart hammered as he moved through the open door. She knew she had to be quick. She was only going to get one chance.

And then he was in the room, a huge hulk of a man holding a pistol with a suppressor attached. He turned to shut the door and Tina charged straight into him sideways on, her free hand grabbing his gun arm by the wrist as the force of her attack knocked him back against the wall. She thrust the pepper spray into his face and pressed the button, sending clouds of chilli powder straight into his eyes.

He screamed in pain, and she tried to drive her forehead into his nose, but he was already turning his head, and she only caught his cheek. It didn’t stop her. She butted him again and again, desperately trying to press her advantage and disorient him as she reached into the back of her jeans, yanking out the lead piping.

But then with a roar he ripped his gun hand free of hers, grabbed her by the throat in an iron grip that cut her breath like a knife, before literally throwing her across the room.

As she careered backwards, she stumbled over the legs of one of the kids and her head slammed into the wall with a dizzying thud and then she was on her back on the floor.

‘Bitch!’ he howled, swinging the gun round in a jerky arc as he pawed at his eyes. A shot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off the floor and into the ceiling. He fired again and again, trying to pinpoint Tina without the aid of vision, one bullet passing so close to her head she could see the dust spray from the wall out of the corner of her eye.

And then he was blinking and staggering away from the wall, his gun hand jerking crazily as he searched for a target. The kids were wriggling about wildly, trying to get out of the line of fire, the girl crying openly, and suddenly the weapon was pointing at a spot right between Oliver’s shoulder blades.

Tina’s head was spinning and she felt like throwing up but she knew she had to act, because it looked like the guy was going to pull the trigger, even though it was clear he couldn’t see who he was aiming at.

She still had hold of the lead piping, and using her free hand to propel herself off the floor, she leaped to her feet.

Catching the movement, he swung round to face her, still blinking wildly but managing to take aim. His finger tightened on the trigger at just the moment she threw the lead piping.

It struck him full in the face and his nose erupted, sending blood squirting all over his mouth. Crying out, he lost his footing, his shot going high and wide, and, as he tried to right himself, Tina charged, taking full advantage of his lack of defence to drive a knee into his groin, and her head into his ruined nose.

This time he screamed. Not just in pain, but also in fear, and she sensed him weakening under the ferocity of her assault. Blood was pouring from his nose and he looked dazed, and still unable to see properly.

But he still had a gun, and as he brought it up to aim it at her she grabbed desperately for the barrel, managed to get a grip on the suppressor, ignoring the stinging heat pulsing out of it, and yanked with all the strength she had.