Private Games (Private 3)

The pounding on the door knocker started again before he looked through the security peephole to see an exasperated Karen Pope on his front step.

‘Karen,’ he called out to her. ‘I don’t have time to—’

‘Make time,’ she barked. ‘I’ve made a break in the case.’

Knight ran his fingers back through his sleep-ravaged hair, and then opened the door. Looking like she’d been up all night herself, Pope barged in while Marta went towards the kitchen with Luke and Isabel.

‘Lukey want sausages,’ Luke said.

‘Sausages it is,’ Marta replied as they disappeared.

‘What’s the break?’ Knight asked Pope, heading into the living area and clearing enough toys off the couch for them to sit down.

‘You were right,’ the reporter said. ‘Selena Farrell had a secret life.’

She told Knight that the professor had an alter ego called Syren St James, a name that she would adopt when she went to the Candy Club to pick up women. As Syren, Farrell was everything the professor was not: flamboyant, funny, promiscuous, a party girl of the highest order.

‘Selena Farrell?’ Knight said, shaking his head.

‘Think of that part of her as Syren St James,’ Pope replied. ‘It helps.’

‘And you know all this how?’ he asked, smelling sausages frying off in the kitchen.

‘From a woman named Nell who frequents the Candy Club and has had several one-night stands with Syren over the past few years. She identified her by that mole at her jawline.’

Knight remembered how he’d thought the professor would have been attractive under the right circumstances. He should have listened to his instincts.

‘When was the last time she saw, uh, Syren?’ he asked.

‘Last Friday, late in the afternoon before the Games opened,’ Pope replied. ‘She came into the Candy Club dressed to kill, but blew Nell out, saying she already had a date. Later, Nell saw Syren leave with a stranger, a woman wearing a pill hat with a black lace veil that covered the upper part of her face. I’m thinking that woman could be one of the Brazlic sisters, aren’t you?’

In Knight’s kitchen, something fragile crashed and shattered.

Chapter 74

THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE is well past its first stirring now. Swimmers from Australia are already heading to the Aquatics Centre where the men’s 1,500-metre heats will unfold. Cyclists from Spain are going to the Velodrome for a quick ride before the men’s team pursuit competition later in the day. A Moldovan handball team just passed me. So did that American basketball player – that one with the name I always forget.

It’s irrelevant. What matters is that we’re at the end of week one and every athlete in the village is trying not to think of me and my sisters, trying not to ask themselves whether they’ll be next. And yet they can’t help but think of us, now can they?

As I predicted, the media has gone berserk over our story. For every weepy television tale of an athlete overcoming cancer or the death of a loved one to win a gold medal, there have been three more about the effect we are having on the games. Tumours, they’ve called us. Scourges. Black stains on the Olympics.

Ha! The only tumours and black stains are those generated by the Games. I’m just exposing them for what they are.

Indeed, out walking among the Olympians like this – anonymous, earnest, and in disguise, another me – I’m feeling that, except for a few minor glitches, everything has gone remarkably according to plan. Petra and Teagan took vengeance on the Chinese and executed their escape perfectly. Marta has ingratiated herself into Knight’s life and monitors his virtual world, giving me an inside view of whatever investigations have been launched and why. And earlier this morning, I retrieved the second bag of magnesium shavings, the one I hid in the Velodrome during its construction almost two years ago. Right where I left it.

The only thing that bothers me is—

My disposable mobile rings. I grimace. Petra and Teagan were given precise orders before they left on their latest assignment at midday yesterday, and those orders forbade them from calling me at all. Marta, then.

I answer and snap at her before she can speak, ‘No names, and toss that phone when we’re finished talking. Do you know the mistake?’

‘Not exactly,’ Marta says, with a note of alarm in her voice that is quite rare and therefore instantly troubling.

‘What’s wrong?’ I demand.

‘They know,’ she whispers. In the background I hear a little monster crying.

The crying and Marta’s whisper hit me like stones and car bombs, setting off a raging storm in my skull that destroys my balance, and I go down on one knee for fea