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.’
Chapter 82
Friday, 10 August 2012
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—
She heard a crash from above her on the old production floor. Voices laughed and jeered before another crash echoed through the abandoned factory. She froze, thinking.
Teagan had been in the factory a dozen times in the last year, and she’d never once encountered another human being inside and did not expect to. The building was contaminated with solvents, heavy metals and other carcinogens, and the exterior fence carried multiple hazardous-waste warning signs to that effect.
Her initial reaction was to go on the attack. But Cronus had been explicit. There were to be no confrontations if they could be avoided.
She switched off her torch, spun around, felt for the door of the storeroom and shut it. She groped in her pocket for the padlock, found it finally, and set the hasp through the iron rings on the door and the jamb. A bottle bounced down the staircase behind her and shattered on the basement floor. She heard footsteps coming and drunken male voices.
Teagan reached up in the darkness to snap the lock shut and felt the hasp catch before she ran a few steps and then paused, unsure. Had it locked?
A torch beam began to play back towards the staircase. She took off without hesitation this time, up on her toes the way sprinters run. She had long ago committed the layout of the factory to memory and dodged into a hall that she knew would take her to a stone stairway and a bulkhead door.
Two minutes later, she was outside. Dawn threw its first rosy fingers of light across the London sky. She heard more crashing and hooting inside the factory and decided it was probably a mob of drunken yobs bent on vandalism. She told herself that once they got a whiff of that basement they wouldn’t be doing any further exploring. But as she crawled back through the hole in the fence, all Teagan could think about was the padlock, and whether it had clicked shut after all.
Chapter 83
MID-AFTERNOON THAT SECOND Friday of the Games, the third from last day of competition, Peter Knight entered the lab at Private London and hurried gingerly to Hooligan, holding out a box wrapped in brown paper and parcel tape.
‘Is this a bomb?’ Knight asked, dead serious.
Private London’s chief scientist tore his attention away from one of the Sun’s sports pages, which featured a piece on England’s chances in the Olympic football final against Brazil. He looked uneasily at the package. ‘What makes you think it’s a bomb?’
Knight tapped a finger on the return address.
Hooligan squinted. ‘Can’t read that.’
‘Because it’s ancient Greek,’ Knight said. ‘It says, “Cronus”.’