Private Games (26 page)

But Mundaho’s not dead, Pope thought with satisfaction.

She yelled to Finch: ‘Do we have a number for Mundaho’s sports agent?’

Her editor thought a moment and then nodded. ‘It’s here in a master list we compiled for the Games.’

He gave the number to Pope, who texted a message to the sports agent:
KNOW U R WITH MUNDAHO. CRONUS MAKES CLAIMS AGAINST HIM AND U. CALL ME
.

Pope sent the text, put the phone down and started framing the story on her computer, all the while telling herself that she wasn’t helping Cronus. She was fighting him by exposing him.

To her surprise her phone rang within five minutes. It was an audibly distraught Matthew Hitchens en route to the hospital where they’d taken Mundaho. She expressed her condolences and then hit the sports agent with Cronus’s charges.

‘Cronus isn’t giving you the whole story,’ Hitchens complained bitterly when she’d finished. ‘He doesn’t say why Filatri wanted that kind of money.’

‘Tell me,’ Pope said.

‘His plan was to use the money to help children who’ve survived war zones, especially those who’ve been kidnapped and forced to fight and die as soldiers in conflicts they don’t understand or believe in. We’ve already set up the Mundaho Foundation for Orphaned Children of War, which was supposed to help Filatri achieve his dream beyond the Olympics. I can show you the formation documents. He signed them long before Berlin, long before there was any talk of him winning three gold medals.’

Hearing that, Pope saw how she could fight back. ‘So you’re saying that, in addition to ruining the dreams and life of one ex-boy soldier, Cronus’s acts may have destroyed the hopes and chances of war-scarred children all over the world?’

Hitchens got choked up, saying: ‘I think that just about sums up this tragedy.’

Pope thought of Mundaho, squeezed her free hand into a fist, and said, ‘Then that is what my story will say, Mr Hitchens.’

A FORCE FIVE
typhoon rampages through my brain, throwing daggers of lightning brighter than burning magnesium, and everything around me seems saturated with electric blues and reds that don’t shimmer or sparkle so much as sear and bleed.

That stupid bitch. She betrayed us. And Mundaho escaped a just vengeance. I feel like annihilating every monster in London.

But I’ll settle for one.

I’m more than aware that this move could upset a careful balance I’ve struck for more than fifteen years. If I handle this wrong, it could come back to haunt me.

The storm in my skull, however, won’t let me consider these ramifications for very long. Instead, like watching a flickering old movie, I see myself stick a knife in my mother’s thigh, again and again; and I remember in a cascade of raw emotion how good, how right it felt to have been wronged, and then avenged.

Petra is waiting for me when I reach my home at around four in the morning. Her eyes are sunken, fearful, and red. We are alone. The other sisters have gone on to new tasks.

‘Please, Cronus,’ she begins. ‘The fingerprint was a mistake.’

The typhoon spins furiously again in my mind, and it’s as though I’m looking at her down this whirling crackling funnel.

‘A mistake?’ I say in a soft voice. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? You’ve called the dogs in around us. They can smell you, Andjela. They can smell your sisters. They can smell
me
. They’ve got a cage and gallows waiting.’

Petra’s face twists up in an anger equal to my own. ‘I believe in you, Cronus. I’ve given you my life. I killed both Chinese coaches for you. But yes, I made a mistake. One mistake!’

‘Not one,’ I reply in that same soft voice. ‘You left your wig in the wall at the lavatory at the gymnastics venue. They’ve got your DNA now too. It was impetuous. You did not follow the plan.’

Petra begins to shake and to cry. ‘What do you want me to do, Cronus? What can I do to make it right?’

For several moments I don’t reply, but then I sigh and walk towards her with open arms. ‘Nothing, sister,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing you can do. We fight on.’

Petra hesitates. Then she comes into my arms and hugs me so fiercely that for a moment I’m unsure what to do.

But then my mind seizes on the image of an IV line stuck in my arm and connected to a plastic bag of liquids, and for a fleeting instant I consider what that image has meant to me, how it has consumed me, driven me, made me.

I am much taller than Petra. So when I return her hug, my arms fall naturally around the back of her neck and press her cheek tightly to my chest.

‘Cronus,’ she begins, before she feels the pressure building.

She begins to choke.

‘No!’ she manages in a hoarse whisper and then thrashes violently in my arms, trying to punch and kick me.

But I know all too well how dangerous Petra is, how viciously she can fight if she is given a chance; and my grip on her neck is relentless and grows tighter and stronger before I take a swift step back, and then twist my hips sharply.

The action yanks Petra off her feet and swings her through the air with such force that when I whipsaw my weight back the other way, I hear the vertebrae in her neck crack and splinter as if struck by lightning.

SHORTLY AFTER TEN
that morning, Marcus Morris shifted uncomfortably on the pavement outside the Houses of Parliament. But then he looked out forcefully at the cameras and microphones and the mob of reporters gathered around him. ‘Though he remains our respected colleague, someone who worked for more than ten years to see these Games realised, Michael Lancer has been relieved of his duties for the duration of the Olympics.’

‘About bloody time!’ someone shouted, and then the entire mob around
Sun
reporter Karen Pope exploded, roaring questions at the chairman of the London Organising Committee like losing traders in a stock-market commodity pit.

Most of the questions were ones that Pope wanted answered as well. Would the Games go on? Or would they be suspended? If they went on, who would replace Lancer as the committee’s chief of security? What about the growing number of countries withdrawing their teams from competition? Should they be listening to the athletes who steadfastly argued against stopping or interrupting the Games?

‘We
are
listening to the athletes,’ Morris insisted in a strong voice. ‘The Olympics will go on. The Olympic ideals and spirit will survive. We will not buckle under to this pressure. Four top specialists from Scotland Yard, MI5, the SAS, and Private will oversee security for us in the final four days of the Games. I am personally heartbroken that some countries have chosen to leave. It is a tragedy for the Games and a tragedy for the athletes. For the rest, the Games go on.’

Morris followed a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers who opened a hole in the mob and moved towards a waiting car. The vast majority of the media surged as one after the LOCOG leader, bellowing all manner of questions.

Pope did not follow them. She leaned against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Parliament buildings and reviewed her notes from the morning and evening before.

In a journalistic coup, she’d tracked down Elaine Pottersfield and learned that, as well as radically intensifying the manhunt for Selena Farrell and James Daring, law-enforcement efforts were also focusing on the starting blocks that had exploded, maiming Filatri Mundaho.

Mundaho remained in a critical condition in Tower Bridge Hospital, but was said to be exhibiting a ‘tremendous fighting spirit’ in the wake of two emergency operations to remove the shrapnel and treat his burns.

The starting blocks were another story. Made by Stackhouse Newton and based on the company’s famed ‘TI008 International Best’ system’, the starting blocks that had exploded had been used ten times by ten different athletes in the previous days of qualifying.

The blocks had been conducted to and from the track by IOC officials, and had been set up by a crew of timing specialists who claimed to have observed no issue with the blocks before the explosion. Several of those timing specialists had actually been injured at the same time as Mundaho.

Between competitions, the blocks had been locked away in a special room below ground at the stadium. The Olympic track-and-field official who had locked the blocks away on the Saturday evening before the explosion was the same official who had unlocked the storage room late on Sunday afternoon. His name was Javier Cruz, a Panamanian, and he had been the most grievously injured of the race officials, losing an eye to the flying metal.

Scotland Yard bomb experts said the device was a block of metal machined to replicate exactly Stackhouse Newton standards. Only this block had been hollowed enough for shaved magnesium to be inserted along with a triggering device. Magnesium, an incredibly combustible material, explodes and burns with acetylene intensity.

Pottersfield said, ‘The device would have killed a normal man. But Mundaho’s superhuman reaction time saved his life if not his limbs.’

Pope flipped her notebook closed and reckoned she had enough material for her piece now. She thought of calling Peter Knight to find out if he could add anything to what she knew, but then she spotted a tall figure leaving the visitors’ gate at the side of the Houses of Parliament, shoulders hunched forward as he hurried south on St Margaret Street in the direction opposite to that being taken by the now dissipating mob of reporters.

She glanced back at them, realised that none of them had spotted Michael Lancer, and ran after him. She caught up with Lancer as he entered Victoria Tower Gardens.

‘Mr Lancer?’ she said, slowing beside him. ‘Karen Pope – I’m with the
Sun
.’

The former Olympics security chief sighed and looked at her with such despair that she almost didn’t have the heart to question him. But she could hear Finch’s voice shouting at her.

‘Your firing,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s fair?’

Lancer hesitated, struggling inside, but then he hung his head. ‘I do. I wanted the London Games to be the greatest in history and the safest in history. I know that we tried to think of every possible scenario in our preparations over the years. But the truth is that we simply did not foresee someone like Cronus, a fanatic with a small group of followers. In short, I failed. I’ll be held responsible for what happened. It’s my burden to bear and no one else’s. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to begin to live with that for the rest of my life.’

LAST TIME I’LL
have to visit this hellhole, Teagan thought five days later as she pushed a knapsack through a hole that had been clipped in a chain-link fence surrounding a condemned and contaminated factory building several miles from the Olympic Park.

She wriggled through after the knapsack, then picked it up and glanced at the inky sky. Somewhere a foghorn brayed. Dawn was not far off and she had much to do before she could leave this wretched place for ever.

The dew raised the scent of weeds as she hurried towards the dark shadow of the abandoned building, thinking how her sister Petra must be settling into her new life on Crete. Teagan had read the story about the fingerprint and had feared that Cronus would be insanely angry with her sister. Instead, his reaction had been practical rather than vengeful: her sister was being sent to Greece early to prepare the house where they would live when all this was over.

Entering the building through a window she’d kicked out months before, Teagan imagined the house where Petra was: on a cliff above the Aegean, whitewashed walls dazzling against a cobalt sky, filled with all they could ever want or need.

She turned on a slim red-lensed torch, clipped it to the cap she wore, and used the soft glow to navigate through what had once been the production floor of a textile mill. Wary of loose debris, she made her way to a staircase that descended into a musty basement.

A stronger odour came to her soon enough, so eye-wateringly foul that she stopped breathing through her nose and put the knapsack up on a bench that had only three legs. Bracing her weight against the bench to stop it from rocking, she took out eight IV bags.

Teagan arranged them in their proper order, and then used a hypodermic needle to draw liquid from a vial before shooting equal amounts into four of the bags. Finished, she took the key that hung on a chain around her neck and picked up the eight IV bags, four in each hand.

When she reached the door where the stench was worse, she set the bags on the floor and slid the key into the padlock. The hasp freed with a click. She pocketed the lock and pushed the door open, knowing that if she were to breathe in through her nose now she’d surely retch.

A moan became a groan echoing up out of the darkness.

‘Dinner time,’ Teagan said, and closed the door behind her.

Fifteen minutes later, she left the storage room feeling confident in the steps she had taken, the work she had done. Four days from now the—