Private Games (Private 3)

Chapter 78

KNIGHT WAS SO shocked that he was unable to move for several seconds. Like many in the stadium he watched and listened in gut-clenched horror as Mundaho writhed on the track, sobbing and groaning in agony as he reached down to his charred and bleeding legs.

The other sprinters had stopped, looking back in shocked disbelief at the carnage in lane one. The intense metallic flame died, leaving the track where the blocks had been scorched and throwing off a burned chemical odour that reminded Knight of signal flares and tyres burning.

Paramedics raced towards the Cameroonian sprinter and several race officials who’d also been hit by the burning shrapnel.

‘I want everyone involved with those starting blocks held for questioning,’ Lancer bellowed over the radio, barely in control. ‘Find the timing judges, referees, everyone. Hold them! All of them!’

r /> Around Knight, fans were coming out of their initial shock, some crying, some cursing Cronus. Many began to move towards the exits while volunteers and security personnel were trying to maintain calm.

‘Can you get me on the field, Jack? Mike?’ Knight asked.

‘That’s a negative,’ Jack said.

‘Double that negative,’ Lancer said. ‘Scotland Yard has already ordered it sealed for their bomb-forensics unit.’

Knight was suddenly furious that this had happened to Mundaho and to the Olympics – the Games had been caught up in the festering recesses of a twisted mind and made to suffer for it. He did not care what Cronus was going to claim the sprinter had done. Whatever he had or had not done, Mundaho did not deserve to be lying burned on the track. He should have been blowing the rest of the sprinters away in his quest for athletic immortality. Instead, he was being lifted onto a stretcher.

The stadium around Knight began to applaud as paramedics started to wheel the Cameroonian sprinter towards a waiting ambulance. They had IVs in his arm, and had obviously given him drugs, though Knight could still see through his binoculars that the boy soldier was racked with hideous pain.

Knight heard people saying that London would have to end the Games now, and felt furious that Cronus might have won, that it all might be finished now. But then he heard a cynic in the crowd say that there was no chance the Games would be cancelled. He’d read a story in the Financial Times that indicated that while London 2012’s corporate sponsors and the official broadcasters were publicly aghast at Cronus’s actions, they were privately astounded at the twenty-four-hour coverage the Games were receiving, and the public’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the various facets of the story.

‘The ratings for these Olympics are the highest in history,’ the cynic said. ‘I predict: no chance they’ll be cancelled.’

Knight had no time to think about any of it because Shaw, carrying the Cameroonian flag, suddenly came running out of the stadium’s entryway, along with the dozen or so competitors who were still in the 400-metre competition. They ran to the rear of the ambulance, exhorting the crowd to chant ‘Mundaho! Mundaho!’

The people remaining in the stadium went crazy with emotion, weeping, cheering – and screaming denouncements of Cronus and the Furies.

Despite the medical personnel around him, despite the agony ripping through his body, and despite the drugs, Mundaho heard and saw what his fellow athletes and the fans were doing for him. Before the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the Cameroonian sprinter raised his right arm and formed a fist.

Knight and everyone else in the stadium cheered the gesture. Mundaho was injured but not broken, burned but still a battle-hardened soldier. He might never run again, but his spirit and the Olympic spirit were still going strong.

Chapter 79

FEELING AS THOUGH she wanted to puke, Karen Pope swallowed antacid pills and stared uncomprehendingly at the television in the Sun newsroom as the medics loaded the stout-hearted Cameroonian sprinter into the back of the ambulance. She and her editor, Finch, were waiting for Cronus’s latest letter to arrive. So were the Metropolitan Police detectives who’d staked out the lobby, waiting for the messenger and hoping to trace rapidly where the letter had been collected.

Pope did not want to see what Cronus had to say about Mundaho. She did not care. She went to her editor and said, ‘I quit, Finchy.’

‘You can’t quit,’ Finch shot back. ‘What are you talking about? This is the story of a lifetime you’re on here. Ride it, Pope. You’ve been bloody brilliant.’

She burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to ride it. I don’t want to be part of killing and maiming people. This isn’t why I became a journalist.’

‘You aren’t killing or maiming anyone,’ Finch said.

‘But I’m helping to!’ she shouted. ‘We’re like the people who published the manifesto of the Unabomber over in the States when I was a kid! We’re abetting murder, Finch! I’m abetting murder, and I just won’t. I can’t.’

‘You’re not abetting murder,’ Finch said, softening his voice. ‘And neither am I. We are chronicling the murders, the same way journalists before us chronicled the atrocities of Jack the Ripper. You’re not helping Cronus, you’re exposing him. That’s our obligation, Pope. That’s your obligation.’

She stared at him, feeling small and insignificant. ‘Why me, Finch?’

‘I dunno. Maybe we’ll find out someday. I dunno.’

Pope could not argue any more. She just turned, went to her desk, sat in her seat and put her head down. Then her BlackBerry beeped, alerting her to an incoming message.

Pope exhaled, picked up the mobile and saw that the message was an e-mail with an attachment from ‘Cronus’. She wanted to bash her phone into shards, but she kept hearing her editor telling her it was her duty to expose these insane people for what they were.

‘Here it is, Finch,’ she called tremulously across the room. ‘Somebody better tell the police that there’s no messenger coming.’