Siege by Simon Kernick Page B

eighty altogether, and all adults, which made things a little easier. After the earlier shootings, no one was asking any questions or trying to engage in amateur negotiation. A couple of the kitchen staff had minor injuries, but none were seriously wounded. All the seriously wounded were still in the kitchen, and they were going to have to be finished off since there were neither the resources nor, to be frank, the desire to do anything to save them.
    When everyone was sitting down and four of the men had formed a guard around them, Wolf approached the group, still holding the blonde hotel manager by the collar of her jacket. He forced her to her knees in front of him and stood legs apart, chest puffed out, looking every inch the man in charge, as he delivered his own speech to the assembled hostages, which was pretty much a rehash of Fox’s but with an added harangue about the crimes of the West, and the UK in particular, against the Muslim world. He finished by ordering everyone to turn off their mobile phones and put them on the floor where they could be seen.
    There was a flurry of activity as the hostages complied, after which they sat staring intently at the floor as Wolf moved his AK in a lazy arc from one hostage to another.
    The first part of the operation was complete. The hotel was under their control and the hostages subdued.
    Fox looked at his watch. The time was 16.55.

20
    ELENA GASPED AS the man holding her, who she assumed was the leader, pulled her to her feet.
    His grip hurt, but she was getting used to it now. In fact she’d calmed down a great deal, even though it gutted her to have to leave behind her mobile phone on the floor. She’d always been a practical sort of girl, one who preferred to get on with things, and right now she knew she had to deal with the current situation and do her best to stay alive. And that meant cooperating. These men might be animals – to kill Rav, Faisal, Aidan and the others in cold blood like they’d done, they had to be – but for the moment at least they’d stopped shooting.
    The man the leader had addressed earlier as Fox took the rucksack from his back and placed it in the middle of the hostages. He opened it up, fiddled about inside for a few seconds, then removed what looked like a roll of cable, which he trailed across the floor over to one of the other gunmen. She saw that there was a press-down lever attached to the roll, which the other gunman put his foot on. She’d seen something similar once on a TV programme about the Beslan siege, and her heart lurched as she realized that it was a detonation device and that the rucksack contained a bomb that would probably kill them all if it exploded.
    Elena didn’t resist as the leader marched her across the ballroom floor and into the satellite kitchen. They were followed by Fox, who’d collected rucksacks from two of the other gunmen.
    As soon as they were inside, the leader told her to face the wall, with her hands in the air.
    She felt a spasm of pure terror. Were they going to shoot her?
    But then the two men started peppering her with questions. Where were the master key cards to the rooms kept? What was the password for the hotel’s electronic guest register? Where was the CCTV camera control room?
    Elena answered each question honestly, but when the leader asked her how to disable the hotel’s sprinkler system, she hesitated. There could be only one reason why they’d want to know this: so that if it came to it they could set the place on fire. Her mind went back to the Mumbai sieges of 2008, the flames and thick black smoke billowing out from the upper windows of the grand old buildings. She’d felt so sorry for all the people involved in those horrifying events but never for one moment had she expected to find herself in the middle of something similar. It just didn’t happen in somewhere like London.
    ‘Answer me,’ demanded the leader, ‘or I’ll shoot you through the