It had been four days since he’d been run over, but Knight’s sore ribs still made him hiss with pain when he landed on the
paved path. To his left, still well out on the water, he spotted the next ferry coming.
Jack landed beside Knight and together they raced towards the pier, which was lit by several dim red emergency lights. They slowed less than twenty yards from the ramp that led down onto the pier itself. Two Gurkhas lay dead on the ground, their throats slit from ear to ear.
Rain drummed on the surface of the dock. The river bus’s engines growled louder as it approached. But then Knight heard another engine start up.
Jack heard it too. ‘They’ve got a boat!’
Knight vaulted the chain that was strung across the entrance to the ramp and ran down onto the dock, sweeping his gun and penlight from side to side, looking for movement.
A Metropolitan Police officer, the woman who’d been riding the jet sled, lay dead on the pier, eyes bulging, her neck at an unnatural angle. Knight ran past her to the edge of the dock, hearing an outboard motor starting to accelerate in the fog and rain.
He noticed the officer’s jet sled tied to the pier, ran to it, saw the key in the ignition, jumped on, and started it while Jack grabbed the officer’s radio and got on behind Knight, calling, ‘This is Jack Morgan with Private. Metropolitan River Police officer dead on Queen Elizabeth II Pier. We are in pursuit of killers on the river. Repeat, we are in pursuit of killers on the river.’
Knight twisted the throttle. The sled leaped away from the pier, making almost no noise, and in seconds they were deep into the fog.
The mist was thick, reducing visibility to less than ten metres, and the water was choppy with a strong current drawn east by the ebbing tide. Radio traffic crackled on Jack’s radio in response to his call.
But he did not answer and turned down the volume so they could better hear the outboard coughing somewhere ahead of them. Knight noticed a digital compass on the dashboard of the sled.
The outboard was heading north by north-east in the middle of the Thames at a slow speed, probably because of the poor visibility. Feeling confident that he could catch them now, Knight hit the throttle hard and prayed they did not hit anything. Were there buoys out here? There had to be. Across the river, he could just make out the blinking light at Trinity Buoy Wharf.
‘They’re heading towards the River Lea,’ Knight yelled over his shoulder. ‘It goes back through the Olympic Park.’
‘Killers heading towards Lea river mouth,’ Jack barked into the radio.
They heard sirens wailing from both banks of the Thames now, and then the outboard motor went full throttle. The fog cleared a bit and no more than one hundred metres ahead of them on the river Knight spotted the racing shadow of a bow rider with its lights extinguished, and heard its engine screaming.
Knight mashed his throttle to close the gap at the same moment he realised that the escape boat wasn’t heading towards the mouth of the Lea at all; it was off by several degrees, speeding straight at the high cement retaining wall on the east side of the confluence.
‘They’re going to hit!’ Jack yelled.
Knight let go the throttle of the jet sled a split second before the speedboat struck the wall dead on and exploded in a series of blasts that mushroomed into fireballs and flares that licked and seared through the rain and the fog.
Debris and shrapnel rained down, forcing Knight and Jack to retreat. They never heard the quiet sounds of three swimmers moving eastward with the ebbing tide.
Chapter 64
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
THE STORM HAD passed and it was four in the morning by the time Knight climbed into a taxi and gave the driver his address in Chelsea.
Dazed, damp, and running on fumes, his mind nevertheless spun wildly with all that had happened since the Furies had run their boat into the river wall.
There were divers in the water within half an hour of the crash, searching for bodies, though the tidal currents were hampering their efforts.
Elaine Pottersfield had been pulled off the search of James Daring’s office and apartment, and had come to the O2 Arena as part of a huge Scotland Yard team that had arrived in the wake of the triple murder.
She’d debriefed Knight, Jack and Lancer, who’d been rushing to the arena floor when the lights went out and the venue erupted in chaos. The former decathlon champion had had the presence of mind to order the perimeter of the arena sealed after he’d heard Knight’s shots in the hallway, but his action had not come in time to prevent the Furies’ escape.
When Lancer ordered electricians to get the lights back on they found that a simple timer-and-breaker system had been attached to the venue’s main power line, and that the relay that triggered the backup generators had been disabled. Power was restored within thirty minutes, however, which enabled Knight and Pottersfield to study the security video closely while Lancer and Jack went to help screen the literally thousands of witnesses to the triple slaying.
To their dismay the video of the two Furies showed little of their faces. The women seemed to know exactly when to turn one way or another, depending on the camera angles. Knight remembered spotting them leaving the lavatory after the chubby Game Master disappeared and before the medal ceremony began, and said, ‘They had to have switched disguises in there.’
He and Pottersfield went to search the loo. On the way, Knight’s sister-in-law said she’d found flute music on Daring’s home computer as well as essays – tirades, really – that damned the commercial and corporate aspects of the modern Olympics. In at least two instances, the television star and museum curator had remarked that the kind of corruption and cheating that went on in the modern Olympics would have been dealt with swiftly during the old Games.
‘He said the gods on Olympus would have struck them down one by one,’ Pottersfield said as they entered the lavatory. ‘He said their deaths would have been a “just sacrifice”.’