Siege (28 page)

Removing the gun from where she’d hidden it, Cat stopped next to him and pointed it at his head.

The stench of burnt flesh coming off him was intense, and there was a huge hole in his stomach that was exposing intestines. But his eyes were bright and alert, and they moved round wildly as he saw the gun. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ he whispered weakly. ‘I’ve got children.’

Cat stared down at him dispassionately. Then, without a word, or even a change in expression, she pulled the trigger, the bullet passing directly through one eye.

Having found no one else in the kitchen, Cat crept back, listening out just in case there was anyone else for her to deal with. But the silence was perfect and total.

And then, as she opened the door leading back into the main part of the hotel, she saw the man on the other side of the lobby, beyond the central staircase, heading towards the reception counter. Even though he had his back to her, and the lighting was fairly dim, she could see that he was holding a gun. She could also see that he was dressed in a suit, which meant he wasn’t one of their group.

Which could only mean one thing: this was the man who’d murdered her brother.

A burst of intense rage shot through her veins and she raised her gun once again, aiming down the sights towards the back of his head, following him as he walked, and wondering why he wasn’t trying to break out of the main doors. Then she lowered it. He was at least thirty yards away – too far to guarantee a direct hit. And anyway, a bullet in the back was far too easy a death for a man like him.

No, this one was going to die slowly, and at her pleasure.

SCOPE WAS TEN
feet from the reception area when he heard a door close behind him.

He swung round fast, conscious of the fact that he was away from immediate cover, automatically crouching down and holding the pistol two-handed in a classic shooting position, and saw a young woman standing at the other end of the lobby. Her hands were thrust high in the air and she looked scared stiff.

‘Please,’ she said in a loud whisper. ‘You’re not one of the gunmen, are you?’

Scope let her come towards him. She was young. Late twenties, thirty at most, very attractive, and would have looked faintly vampish in her black dress and stockings if it wasn’t for the bomber jacket she was wearing over the top.

‘Stop right there,’ he said when she was ten feet away. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘I was hiding in the kitchen,’ she answered, still keeping her hands firmly in the air. ‘I heard a noise in the lobby, looked round from behind the door, and saw you. Are you a police officer?’

Scope shook his head, beginning to relax, although he still pointed the gun at her. ‘I’m not, but my advice is get out now.’ He motioned towards the hotel’s front doors. ‘Quickly.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘The doors are locked, and I think they may have booby-trapped them. Look.’

He looked back quickly and, in the reflected light of the emergency vehicles beyond the entrance, saw a holdall tucked away next to the leftmost door. It had two command wires attached that ran across the floor and up the main staircase. ‘Then you need to get back to your hiding place. It’ll be safer there.’

‘I can’t stay in the kitchen. There are bodies everywhere. Can’t I come with you?’

Having someone else to look after was the last thing Scope needed, but it seemed he had little choice. ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Follow me.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve got someone upstairs who needs insulin urgently. I’m looking for the room where they’re storing it.’ He went over and opened the door next to the reception area. ‘Are you coming?’

She nodded, dropped her arms by her side, and followed him inside as he walked through a corridor that ran past the reception bay and into a small foyer with doors going off on three sides. The nearest one had a sign on it identifying it as the medical room. There was no key in the door, but luckily it was unlocked. He stepped inside, flicking on the lights and glancing back briefly to check that the girl was still following him. She gave him a small smile and, in spite of himself, his eyes drifted down towards her ring finger. There was nothing there, and for an 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.

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
mercenary
’ – she spat out the word – ‘wouldn’t understand that, would you?’

‘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.’

Fox gestured for Cat to follow him, and reluctantly she did so, but they’d only gone a matter of yards when he heard a burst of automatic gunfire from the mezzanine floor, followed by shouts.

‘Jesus,’ he grunted. ‘This is all we need.’

Knowing it was essential he stay calm, Fox pulled on his balaclava and took off up the stairs at a run, charging into the ballroom and what appeared to be a full-scale rebellion in progress. At least a dozen of the hostages were on their feet shouting, while Bear retreated slowly in front of them. From the way brick dust was floating down from the ceiling it was clear he’d fired into it as a warning, and it hadn’t worked. Far more worrying was the sight of Wolf struggling on the floor with a male hostage in a suit who was trying to wrestle the AK-47 out of his hands, and looking like he was getting the better of him.

As Fox strode across the floor, all the hostages looked at him and the fight went out of most of them. But not all. Bear also turned his way, and the hostage closest to him – a middle-aged member of the kitchen staff – seeing that he was momentarily distracted, went for him.

It was a brave move. But stupid, too. He had a distance of twenty feet to cover and he’d covered less than half of it when Fox put the rifle to his shoulder and put a burst of gunfire into the man’s upper body, sending him sprawling backwards until he fell over one of the seated hostages.

‘Sit down now,’ Fox yelled, ‘or you die!’

Everyone hit the floor, except the man fighting Wolf, who’d now yanked the weapon from Wolf and was in the process of getting to his feet, while Wolf held on to one of his legs like an annoying dog, all the trappings of leadership gone from him now.

The hostage pulled away from his grip, turning the weapon round in his hands.

Behind him, Fox could hear Cat firing at him with her pistol and missing. He and Bear then turned their weapons on him and opened up at the same time.