Siege (37 page)

For the past few months, at the back of her mind she’d toyed with the idea of appealing against her dismissal from the Met and trying to resurrect her career as a police officer. But this had scuppered any such ambitions completely. There was no way on earth they could let her back in now.

But Tina didn’t regret what she’d done. A man had once told her that you should judge your actions by how much good they do; if the good outweighed the bad, then those actions were worth it. The man who’d said it might have been a killer many times over, but even so Tina felt he had a valid point. And tonight, the good she’d done far outweighed the bad.

She stubbed her cigarette out on a waist-high stone flowerpot, and rubbed her hands against the cold. She could do with warming up but she had no desire to go back inside, where Arley’s mum would only keep bombarding her with questions. And to be fair, who could blame her? But right now she wasn’t interested in answering them.

A black cab turned into the street, stopping directly outside. It was Arley, still in her DAC finery, although it was looking somewhat dishevelled. Tina had always thought there was something pompous about the uniform of the senior officers in the Met, and she wondered what the taxi driver must have thought when Arley had hailed him.

After paying him, Arley walked up the steps to where Tina was standing, stopping in front of her. She took a deep breath, and threw her arms round Tina. ‘Thank you so much for what you’ve done. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.’

Tina pulled away gently. ‘Save the hugs for the children, Arley. You haven’t got much time.’

Arley took a step back. ‘Have you called the police?’

‘I have, but I haven’t told them where to find us. I’m going to need to call them again now and tell them to come here.’

‘Can’t you leave it for a little while?’

Tina shook her head. ‘I left a crime scene containing the body of the man I killed. I can’t afford to avoid them. Neither can you right now.’

Arley gave an understanding nod. ‘Then I guess I’d better hurry up.’

Tina stepped aside to let her past. She didn’t envy Arley, having to tell her children that they’d lost their father. It was going to be a hard conversation, especially after all they’d been through. But they were good, brave kids and they would have family around them. And at least, unlike many of the victims of that day, they still had their lives in front of them.

Lighting another cigarette, she put up her collar against the cold and walked slowly up the street, waiting until she finished it before making the call.

Then she walked back down to the house and sat down on the bottom of the steps to wait.

IT WAS A
mild afternoon for December, but raining steadily, as it had been for days, and already very dark, as the mourners filed slowly out of the ancient church. Beyond the wall stood a very wet-looking camera crew – the only sign that the funeral of Martin Geoffrey Dalston was any more than just a run-of-the-mill event. Dalston was by no means the first victim of the terrorist attack on the Stanhope to be buried, but there was a rumour that he was in line for a posthumous bravery award, which probably explained the presence of the camera crew.

Scope had stood at the back of the church, keeping well out of sight, and consequently he was one of the first people out. He wore a beanie hat with a scarf pulled up over half his face, so that no one would recognize him, but unfortunately the walking stick he was having to use, courtesy of the bullet in his arse, was a bit of a giveaway. During the week he’d spent in hospital the police and the staff had kept the media at bay, but since then everyone had been trying to get some sort of comment from him. Scope knew he was a big story – the guy who’d taken on the terrorists and saved the lives of dozens of hostages. They’d dug up and picked over his past. His eighteen-year military service, including two tours each in Iraq and Afghanistan; marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and fatherhood at nineteen; the affairs; the messy divorce; and, most poignant of all, the tragedy of his daughter.

That was the part Scope hated about it the most. Dredging up what had happened to Mary Ann for the entertainment of the masses. He didn’t want anyone knowing about her. It was none of their business, and never would be. He was surprised, though, that the media hadn’t delved further into what had happened after her death. If they had, they’d have discovered an explosive story that would have satisfied even the most jaded reader. Maybe one day they would, and he’d be found out. But there was no point in him worrying about that now. He’d done what he had to do.

It was a two-hundred-yard walk back to where he’d parked his car, and since he was still out of practice at walking with pins in his leg, his progress was slow. He kept his head down as other mourners overtook him, and was relieved that he wasn’t seen by the camera crew. He’d looked for Abby and Ethan in the church but didn’t think they’d been there, which was probably for the best, although he’d’ve liked to see Ethan again one more time. He’d received a card from them when he was in hospital, thanking him for all he’d done. It had had a Florida postmark, and Ethan had enclosed a picture he’d drawn of Scope as an action man with immense biceps, an ill-fitting suit, and a very big gun. Scope had put it on the table by his hospital bed, and he had it now, packed up among his belongings.

As he reached the car and felt in his pocket for the keys, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round and saw that it was the blonde manager from the hotel whose name, he’d found out afterwards, was Elena Serenko. She was wearing a black dress underneath a long dark raincoat and black headscarf, and she reminded Scope of a young Bette Davis.

‘Hello,’ she said, with a shy smile. ‘I thought I saw you inside the church.’

‘I was trying to keep a low profile. I guess it didn’t work.’

‘The cane doesn’t help. How are your injuries?’

‘I’m on the mend. I was very lucky. I got hit twice and no major internal damage, but I’m going to be walking with this for a while yet.’

‘I wanted to say thank you again for what you did for us in the hotel.’

‘Thank you too. You helped save my life.’

There was an awkward silence, and Scope had the idea that she wanted to say something else.

‘Are you going back to the wake?’ she asked.

Scope shook his head. ‘No. I only came to pay my respects. He was a good man.’

‘Do you know I only knew him for a few hours but I feel like I found out so much about him. Does that make sense?’

‘You can find out a lot about someone in that time. Especially in difficult circumstances.’

‘Martin told me he had a girlfriend once. Someone he’d stayed with in the hotel many years ago, who was the love of his life, and who he hadn’t seen in more than twenty years. It’s mad, I know, but I kept looking for her today. I wanted to talk to her.’ Elena suddenly looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m standing here in the pouring rain telling you all this.’

‘It’s OK.’

There was another awkward silence, this one longer. Scope was about to say something when Elena started speaking again. ‘We had a guest in one of the suites at the Stanhope called Mr Miller. He’d been there for a while, and I have to admit, I didn’t like him very much. On the day of the terrorist attack, he was killed, along with his two bodyguards. But the thing is, the terrorists didn’t kill them. I know that because I heard them talking about it.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know how to say this,’ she continued, looking embarrassed again, ‘but did you know anything about him?’

For a moment, Scope wanted to tell her everything. But he knew it would put Elena in a terrible position. He smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that one. I don’t know how I’d have fitted it in.’ He looked at her steadily, and he could tell she knew he was lying. ‘Have you told the police about it?’

She looked down. ‘No. The police have plenty to keep them busy as it is, and anyway, I’m off to Australia with my fiancé very soon.’ She smiled, and looked him in the eye. ‘We’re about to start a new life.’

He smiled back. ‘Good luck. If I had my time again, I think I’d do the same thing.’

This time there were no awkward pauses. She thanked him almost formally, and said goodbye.

Scope watched her go, suddenly feeling very lonely. He thought of Mary Ann and the trail of revenge that had led to that fateful day at the Stanhope Hotel.

When she’d died of an overdose of unusually pure heroin aged barely eighteen, the news had devastated him. His ex-wife had died six months later in a car accident, hitting a tree on a country road late at night. Scope had often wondered whether it was suicide, and concluded that it probably had been. He could easily have gone the same way too, almost did on more than one occasion when the pain and the loneliness had got too much.

But slowly he’d pulled himself together, and as he’d done so, he’d begun to feel a new emotion. Anger. He realized, almost with surprise, that he wanted to make those who’d contributed to Mary Ann’s death pay, and he’d set about planning how to make this happen.

It was two years from the moment he put a bullet in the man who sold the fatal dose to when he finally got to the individual at the top of the pile.

Frank Miller was running his business from a suite in the Stanhope, ever since a messy divorce of his own. Miller didn’t get his hands dirty. A middle-aged businessman and entrepreneur, he had a colourful background, which included prison for fraud in his youth, but he’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become a multi-millionaire with interests in construction, retail and property. He was also one of the biggest importers of heroin into the UK, and dealt directly with contacts in Turkey and Afghanistan.

Scope had spent months planning that particular killing, and it had all gone incredibly smoothly. Neither Miller nor his bodyguards had been expecting a thing, and they’d died within seconds of each other. Even so, Scope had still expected to get caught for this particular crime. His luck had held well for a long time, but three killings in a big London hotel was always going to be a risk too far. And yet, because of everything else that had happened in the Stanhope that day, their deaths were being treated as directly connected to the terrorist attack.

So now, three years after her own death, Mary Ann could finally rest in peace.

He took a last look up and down the road, shivering against the cold, wondering whether he would ever be brought to book for what he’d done. In the end, it was out of his hands, and therefore not something worth spending too much time contemplating. Instead, he slowly got back into his car, threw his stick on the seat and, with a deep breath, drove away from the church, and the mourners, and the past.

Like everyone else, I was shocked by the brutality of the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, and the utter ruthlessness of the men who took over the hotels, indiscriminately slaughtering the guests. I remember trying to imagine how terrifying it would be to be one of those guests trapped inside the building, knowing that there were people in there with them who actively wanted to kill.

At the time, though, it didn’t make me want to write a book about a hotel siege. I think it all seemed too raw for that. However, in the summer of 2010 I was staying in a big old hotel in Taba Heights, Egypt, very close to the Israeli border, and the idea for
Siege
hit me. There was a large raised sundeck twenty feet above the pool, from where I had a panoramic view of all the hotel grounds and the Red Sea beyond, and it occurred to me that if a group of terrorists were to storm through the hotel entrance, where two bored and not very efficient-looking security staff stood guard, we’d all be caught like rats in a trap, since there was no way out of the hotel except through the front. Almost immediately after that, I had a vision of a man, possibly a criminal, who was already inside the hotel and up to no good when the terrorists struck – someone who’d be prepared and able to fight back. I knew then I had a story.

The whole burst of inspiration lasted barely thirty seconds, but sometimes it just happens like that.

To be honest, I thought long and hard before putting pen to paper. I think most writers are nervous about creating any story with a strong terrorist connection because of the possibility of being overtaken by real events. I wanted to set the book in London, using a fictional West End hotel, but I was mindful of the fact that the UK’s been on heightened alert for most of the past decade, and that only a year ago intelligence came out of Pakistan warning of a plot to carry out a Mumbai-style attack in London.

In the end, I decided it was worth taking the risk.

However, I wanted to avoid taking the obvious Islamic extremist angle. At the time I was planning the details of
Siege
, the Arab Spring had just begun, and the call across the Muslim world seemed to be for democracy rather than fundamentalism, making it feel almost out of date to be writing about al-Qaeda-inspired violence. So I decided to make my terrorists extreme right-wing mercenaries allied with agents of an unnamed Arab government who were looking to wreak revenge on the UK for its support of the Arab Spring. To me, that felt like a plausible scenario. It also meant that the terrorists could be well organized, with highly focused goals and ready access to weapons, making them a potentially greater challenge for the authorities than any group they’d dealt with before. Most importantly, some of them planned to get out of the building alive – something which I felt added to the tension of the book.

It took me months to plot
Siege
. I was keenly aware that a ‘siege’ scenario isn’t necessarily a good format for a book, because after the big bang opening there’s often plenty of time in the middle when very little happens, as both the hostage-takers and the police get down to negotiations. That was why I added the Arley Dale subplot. It helped to keep things moving, so that you, the reader, never had time to get bored. Originally, I wasn’t going to use Tina Boyd in the story, and in the first draft her part was actually taken by an ex-lover of Arley’s called Ray Mason. Ray was also a maverick cop, with an interesting back story, and I liked him enough that I’m definitely going to use him again – possibly even in the next book. But for some reason, Tina worked better. She’s one of those characters who keeps bouncing back into my writing, even though I’d always fully intended to rest her for
Siege
.