Private Games (Private 3)

Knight held his ribs, still struggling for air as the Rasta driver took off after the black cab, which was well ahead of them by now, turning hard west along Pont Street.

‘I catch her, mon!’ the driver promised. ‘Dat crazy one tried to kill you!’

Lancer was looking back and forth between the road ahead and Knight. ‘You sure you’re okay?’

‘Banged and bruised,’ Knight grunted. ‘And she wasn’t trying to run me down, Mike. She was trying to run you down.’

The driver power-drifted into Pont Street, heading west. The black cab was closer now, its brake lights flashing red before it lurched in a hard right turn into Sloane Street.

The Rasta mashed the accelerator hard. They reached the intersection with Sloane Street so fast that Knight felt sure they’d actually catch up with the woman who’d just tried to kill him.

But then two more black cabs flashed past them, both heading north on Sloane Street, and the Rasta was forced to slam on his brakes and wrench the wheel so as not to hit them. Their cab went into a screeching skid and almost hit another car: a Metropolitan Police vehicle.

Its siren went on. So did its flashing lights.

‘No!’ Lancer yelled.

‘Every time, mon!’ the driver shouted in equal frustration as he slowed his vehicle to a stop.

Knight nodded, dazed and angry, staring through the windscreen as the taxi that had almost killed him melted into the traffic heading towards Hyde Park.

Chapter 8

BRIGHTLY FLETCHED ARROWS whizzed and cut through the hot mid-morning air. They struck in and around yellow bullseyes painted on large red and blue targets set up in a long line that stretched across the lime-green pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground near Regent’s Park in central London.

Archers from six or seven countries were completing their final appointed practice rounds. Archery would be one of the first sports to be decided after the 2012 London Olympic Games opened, with competition scheduled to start mid-morning on Saturday, two days hence, with the medal ceremony to be held that very afternoon.

Which was why Karen Pope was up in the stands, watching through binoculars, boredom slackening her face.

Pope was a sports reporter for the Sun, a London tabloid newspaper with six million readers thanks to a tradition of aggressive bare-knuckle journalism and publishing photographs of young bare-breasted women on page three.

Pope was in her early thirties, attractive in the way that Renée Zellweger was in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary but too flat-chested ever to be considered for the Sun’s page three. Pope was also a dogged reporter, and ambitious in the extreme.

Around her neck that morning hung one of only fourteen full-access media passes granted to the Sun for the Olympics. Such passes had been severely limited for the British press because more than twenty thousand members of the global media would also be in London to cover the sixteen-day mega-event. The full-access passes had become almost as valuable as Olympic medals, at least to British journalists.

Pope kept thinking that she should be happy to have the pass and to be here covering the Games at all, but her efforts this morning had so far failed to yield anything truly newsworthy about archery.

She’d been looking for the South Koreans, the gold-medal favourites, but had learned that they had already finished their practice session before she arrived.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said in disgust. ‘Finch is going to kill me.’

Pope decided her best hope was to research a feature that with lively writing might somehow make the paper. But what sort? What was the angle?

Archery: Darts for the Posh?

No – there was absolutely nothing posh about archery.

Indeed, what in God’s name did she know about archery? She’d grown up in a football family. Earlier that very morning Pope had tried to explain to Finch that she’d be better off assigned to athletics or gymnastics. But her editor had reminded her in no uncertain terms that she’d only joined the paper from Manchester six weeks before and was therefore low-person on the sports desk.

‘Get me a big story and you’ll get better assignments,’ Finch had said.

Pope prodded her attention back to the archers. It struck her that they seemed so calm. It was almost as though they were in a trance over there. Not like a cricket batsman or a tennis player at all. Should she write about that? Find out how the bowmen got themselves into that state?

C’mon, she thought in annoyance, who wants to read about Zen in sports when you can look at bare boobs on page three?

Pope sighed, set down her binoculars, and shifted her position in one of the blue grandstand seats. She noticed, stuffed down into her handbag, a bundle of mail that she’d grabbed leaving the office and started going through the stack, finding various press releases and other items of zero interest.

Then she came to a thick Manila envelope with her name and title printed oddly in black and blue block letters on the front.