Lone Wolf - Robert Muchamore Page 0,5

out the bottom of a nylon body warmer.

Fay immediately grabbed her mobile and dialled her aunt.

‘Come on,’ Fay mouthed, breath curling in front of her face as she reached the hotel’s revolving doors. She tried to see what the cop was doing inside but the lobby was too dark. Finally there was a click in her ear.

‘Hello, you’ve reached Tamara Cole. I’m not currently available to take your call. If you’d like to leave a message wait for the beep.’

Fay grunted with frustration and left a message as she pushed through the revolving door. ‘Auntie, I just saw a cop heading into the hotel. Leave everything and get the hell out of there.’

As Fay got into the lobby she peered through the oh-so-trendy gloom and saw the cop with the drinks disappear behind a set of closing lift doors. Fay ran to the lifts and pressed the up button. While she waited, she tapped out a text message:

Cops everywhere. Bail now!!!!!

Fay had a horrible queasy feeling as she stepped into the lift. She thought about going to the eighth floor and taking the stairs for the last floor, but she was desperate to give her aunt every possible chance so she decided to risk going straight for the ninth.

The elevator opened into a broad corridor with grandly named meeting rooms off either side. Fay took a step out and immediately saw a commotion. The Windermere was a double-doored conference room at the end of the hallway. Several armed cops stood about and there was a haze of gun smoke and cocaine powder in the air. At least three men lay handcuffed on the carpet, and another was spread-eagled over a long table getting patted down.

Fay’s phone made a ding-doing sound. She had a message from her aunt.

DON’T come upstairs

A senior-looking cop was shouting: ‘How did you let her get out? I want everyone looking for her.’

Fay stepped back into the lift and pressed G, followed by the close door button. It felt like the doors took about a week, but she was soon trundling back down to the lobby, tapping out a text message to her aunt.

Where RU?

All was calm in the lobby. Fay took a deep breath and walked quickly, but not so fast that she’d arouse suspicion. Her heart skipped when she passed a uniformed officer coming through the revolving door into the hotel as she headed out.

Fay didn’t know the area and couldn’t think of anything she could do to help her aunt. The only logical thing seemed to be to put as much distance between herself and the hotel as possible and then arrange to meet up with her aunt later on, provided she got away. If Kirsten didn’t get away then god knows what she’d do.

Fay realised that she was trembling as she crossed the street. Another text from her aunt buzzed in her pocket.

Turn your phone off. Cops might use it to track you.

Fay stopped walking, intending to text straight back. But she got a weird feeling like there was something creeping up on her, and when she looked behind she saw two bulky cops.

‘You’ve not done anything,’ one of them said. ‘We want to ask some questions about your aunt.’

‘My arse,’ Fay said, before breaking into a sprint.

She almost ran straight into the path of an oldie on a Motability scooter. Once she’d regained her balance, Fay ran fifty metres on from the Starbucks and turned into a busy shopping street. The pavements were rammed with pre-Christmas shoppers so she cut on to tram tracks.

After a few hundred metres, Fay took a glance back and saw that one of the cops had dropped back more than seventy metres, while the other had given up completely. The only trouble was, a tram was turning into her path, with the driver frantically ringing a bell for her to get out of the way.

As Fay hopped back on to the pavement, she landed awkwardly on a tram track and stumbled head first into a crowd of shoppers.

‘Grab hold of her!’ the chasing cop shouted.

Fay scraped her knee on the pavement as she hit the ground, alongside a black woman and a tangle of Primark and M&S bags.

‘Sorry,’ Fay gasped.

The woman was furious because some mugs had broken.

‘Keep hold of her,’ the cop shouted, as the crowd parted to let him through.

A man grabbed Fay around the waist and tried to scoop her up, but she managed to catch him in the ribs with the point of