Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

I’m quite serious about that, and you can take me literally. Jesus Christ, for example, was a spiritual superman, as was Martin Luther, and Gandhi. Julius Caesar was superhuman as well. So were Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolph Hitler.

Think scientists like Aristotle, Galileo, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Consider artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Vincent van Gogh, my favorite, who was so superior it drove him insane. And above all, don’t forget athletically superior beings like Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Jesse Owens, Larisa Latynina, and Muhammad Ali, Mark Spitz, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Humbly, I include myself on this superhuman spectrum as well, and deservedly so, as you shall soon see.

In short, people like me are born for great things. We seek adversity. We seek to conquer. We seek to break through all limits, spiritually, politically, artistically, scientifically, and physically. We seek to right wrongs in the face of monumental odds. And we’re willing to suffer for greatness, willing to embrace dogged effort and endless preparation with the fervor of a martyr, which to my mind are exceptional traits in any human being from any age.

At the moment I have to admit that I’m certainly feeling exceptional, standing here in the garden of Sir Denton Marshall, a sniveling, corrupt old bastard if there ever was one.

Look at him on his knees, his back to me, and my knife at his throat.

Why, he trembles and shakes as if a stone has just clipped his head. Can you smell it? Fear? It surrounds him, as rank as the air after a bomb explodes.

“Why?” he gasps.

“You’ve angered me, monster,” I snarl at him, feeling a rage deeper than primal split my mind and seethe through every cell. “You’ve helped ruin the games, made them a mockery and an abomination of their intent.”

“What?” he cries, acting bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

I deliver the evidence against him in three damning sentences that turn the skin of his neck livid and his carotid artery a sickening, pulsing purple.

“No!” he sputters. “That’s…that’s not true. You can’t do this. Have you gone utterly mad?”

“Mad? Me?” I say. “Hardly. I’m the sanest person I know.”

“Please,” he says, tears rolling down his face. “Have mercy. I’m to be married on Christmas Eve.”

My laugh is as caustic as battery acid: “In another life, Denton, I ate my own children. You’ll get no mercy from me or my sisters.”

As his confusion and horror become complete, I look up into the night sky, feeling storms rising in my head and understanding once again that I am superior, a superhuman imbued by forces that go back thousands of years.

“For all true Olympians,” I vow, “this act of sacrifice marks the beginning of the end of the modern games.”

Then I wrench the old man’s head so his back arches.

And before he can scream, I furiously rip the blade with such force that his head comes free of his neck all the way to his spine.

THURSDAY, JULY 26, 2012, 9:24 A.M.

IT WAS MAD-DOG hot for London. Peter Knight’s shirt and jacket were drenched with sweat as he sprinted north on Chesham Street past the Diplomat Hotel and skidded around the corner toward Lyall Mews in the heart of Belgravia, some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

Don’t let it be true, Knight screamed internally as he entered the mews. Dear God, don’t let it be true.

Then he saw a pack of Fleet Street jackals gathering at the yellow tape of a London Metropolitan Police barricade that blocked the road in front of a cream-colored Georgian townhome. Knight lurched to a stop, feeling like he was going to retch up the eggs and bacon he’d had for breakfast.

What would he ever tell Amanda?

Before Knight could compose his thoughts or still his stomach, his cell phone rang and he snatched it from his pocket without looking at the caller ID.

“Knight,” he managed to choke. “That you, Jack?”

“No, Peter, it’s Nancy,” she replied in her Irish brogue. “Isabel has come down sick.”

“What?” he groaned. “No. I just left the house an hour ago.”

“She’s running a temperature,” his full-time nanny insisted. “I just took it.”

“How high?”