Private Games Read online

  Knight’s efforts were hampered by the announcement of the silver-medal award to Great Britain. That sent the host-country crowd up on its feet, clapping, whistling and catcalling. Several lads at the north end of the arena unfurled large Union Jack flags and waved them about wildly, further obscuring Knight’s view.

  The flags were still waving when the Chinese team was called to the high spot on the podium. Knight temporarily abandoned the search and looked for the Chinese coaches.

  Ping and Wu stood off to the side of the floor-exercise mat beside a short, stocky Chinese woman in her fifties.

  ‘Who is she?’ Knight asked one of the men manning the video station.

  He looked and replied, ‘Win Bo Lee. Chairman of the Chinese Gymnastics Association. Bigwig.’

  Knight kept his binoculars on Ping and Wu as the Chinese national anthem began and the country’s red flag started to rise. He was expecting an emotional outpouring from the Chinese head coach.

  To his surprise, however, he thought Ping looked oddly sombre for a man whose team had just won its Olympic event. Ping was looking at the ground and rubbing the back of his neck, not up at the Chinese flag as it reached the arena rafters.

  Knight was about to turn his binoculars north again to look for the two women when Win Bo Lee suddenly wobbled on her feet as if she were dizzy. The assistant coach, Wu, caught the CGA chairman by the elbow and steadied her.

  The older woman wiped at her nose and looked at her finger. She appeared alarmed and said something to An Wu.

  But then Knight’s attention caught jerky movement beside the older woman. As the last few bars of the Chinese national anthem played, Ping lurched up onto the floor-exercise mat. The victorious head coach staggered across the spring-loaded floor toward the podium, his left hand clutching his throat, and his right reaching out to his triumphant team as if they were rope and he was drowning.

  The anthem ended. The Chinese girls looked down from the flag, tears flowing down their cheeks, only to see their agonised coach trip and sprawl onto the mat in front of them.

  Several girls started to scream.

  Even from halfway across the arena, Knight could see the blood dribbling from Ping’s mouth and nose.

  Chapter 62

  BEFORE PARAMEDICS COULD reach the fallen coach, Win Bo Lee complained hysterically of sudden blindness before collapsing with blood seeping from her mouth, eyes, nose, and ears.

  The fans began to grasp what was happening and shouts and cries of disbelief and fear pierced the arena. Many started grabbing their things and heading towards the exits.

  Up in the arena’s security pod, Knight knew that An Wu, the assistant coach, was in mortal danger, but he forced his attention away from the drama developing on the arena floor to watch the camera feeds showing the walkway where the two women had entered the arena. The men manning the security station were inundated with radio traffic.

  One of them suddenly roared, ‘We’ve got an explosion immediately south-east of the venue on the riverbank! River Police responding!’

  Thank God no one heard the bomb inside the arena, because more fans were now moving towards the exits and would have caused a stampede. An Wu dropped to the floor suddenly, bleeding also and adding to the building terror.

  And then, right there on the nearest screen on the security console, Knight spotted the sandy blonde and the redhead leaving the north arena along with a steady flow of jittery sports fans.

  Though he could not make out their faces, the redhead was definitely limping. ‘It’s her!’ Knight shouted.

  The men monitoring the security station barely glanced at him as they frantically tried to respond to questions flying at them over radios from all over the arena. Realising they were being overcome by the rapid pace of developments, Knight bolted for the door to the security pod, wrenched it open and started pushing though the shocked crowds, hoping to intercept the women.

  But which way had they gone? East or west?

  Knight decided they’d head for the exit closest to transportation, and therefore ran down the west hallway, searching among the stream of people coming at him until he heard Jack Morgan shout, ‘Knight!’

  He glanced to his right and saw Private’s owner hustling out of the inner arena.

  ‘I’ve got them!’ Knight cried. ‘Two women, a sandy blonde and a redhead. She’s limping! Call Lancer. Have him seal the perimeter.’

  Jack ran with him, trying to use his phone while weaving through the crowd that was trying to leave.

  ‘Damn it!’ Jack grunted. ‘They’re jamming mobile traffic!’

  ‘Then it’s up to us,’ Knight said and ran faster, determined that the two women would not get away.

  In moments they reached the section of the north hallway he’d watched on camera. There was no way they could have got past him, Knight thought, cursing himself for not taking the east passage. But then, suddenly, he caught a glimpse of them several hundred feet ahead: two women going out through a fire-exit door.

  ‘Got them!’ Knight roared, holding his badge up and yanking out his Beretta. He shot twice into the ceiling, and bellowed, ‘Everyone down!’

  It was as if Moses had parted the Red Sea. Olympic fans began diving to the cement floor and trying to shield themselves from Knight and Jack who sprinted towards the fire-escape door. And that was when Knight understood.

  ‘They’re going for the river!’ he cried. ‘They set off a bomb as a diversion to pull the River Police away from the arena!’

  Then the lights flickered and died, throwing the entire gymnastics venue into pitch darkness.

  Chapter 63

  KNIGHT SKIDDED TO a halt in the blackness, feeling as if he was tottering at the edge of a cliff and struck with vertigo. People were screaming everywhere around him as he dug out a penlight on the key chain he always carried. He snapped it on just as battery-powered red emergency lights started to glow.

  He and Jack sprinted the last seventy feet to the fire-escape door and tried to shoulder it open. Locked. Knight shot out the lock, provoking new chaos among the terrified fans, but the door flew open when they kicked it.

  They hurtled down the fire-escape stairs and found themselves above the arena’s back area, which was clogged with media production trucks and other support vehicles for the venue. Red lights had gone on here as well, but Knight could not spot the pair of escaping women at first because there were so many people moving around below them, shouting, demanding to know what had happened.

  Then he saw them, disappearing through an open door at the north-east end of the arena. Knight barrelled down the staircase, dodged past irate broadcast personnel, and spotted a security guard standing at the exit.

  He showed his badge and gasped, ‘Two women. Where did they go?’

  The guard looked at him in confusion. ‘What women? I was—’

  Knight pushed past him and ran outside. Every light at the north end of the peninsula was dead, but thunder boomed and lightning cracked all around, giving them flashes of flickering vision.

  The unseasonal fog swirled. Rain was pelting down. Knight had to throw up a forearm to shield his eyes. When the next flashes of lightning came, he peered along the nine-foot chain-link fence that separated the arena from a path along the Thames that led east and south to the river-bus pier.

  The sandy-blonde Fury was crouched on the ground on the other side of the fence. The redhead had cleared the top and was climbing down.

  Knight raised his gun, but it all went dark again and his penlight was no match for the night and the storm.

  ‘I saw them,’ Jack grunted.

  ‘I did too,’ Knight said.

  But rather than go straight after the two women, Knight ran to the barrier where it was closest, pocketing the light and stuffing the gun into the back of his jeans. He clambered up the fence and jumped off the top.

  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”.’

  Just sacrifice? Knight thought bitterly. Three people dead. For what?

  As he and Pottersfield searched the lavatory, he wondered why Pope had not called him. She must have received another letter by now.

  Twenty minutes into the search, Knight found the loose seat-cover dispensary and tugged it out of the wall. A minute later he fished out a platinum-blonde wig from inside, handed it to Pottersfield, and said, ‘That’s a big mistake there. There has to be DNA evidence on that.’

  The inspector grudgingly slipped the wig into an evidence bag. ‘Well done, Peter, but I’d rather that no one else should know about this – at least, not until I can have it analysed. And most certainly not your client, Karen Pope.’

  ‘Not a soul,’ he promised.

  Indeed, around three that morning, shortly before Knight left the O2 Arena, he’d found Jack again and not mentioned the wig. Private’s owner informed him, however, that a guard at the gate where all Game Master volunteers cleared security distinctly remembered the two chunky cousins who came through the scanners early, one with diabetes, both wearing identical rings.

  The computer system remembered them as ‘Caroline and Anita Thorson’, cousins who lived north of Liverpool Street. Police officers sent to the flat found two women called Caroline and Anita Thorson, but both of them were sleeping. They claimed not to have been anywhere near the O2 Arena much less being accredited Game Masters for the Olympics. They were being brought to New Scotland Yard for further questioning, though Knight did not hold much hope for a breakthrough there. The Thorson women had been used, their identities stolen.

  The taxi pulled up in front of Knight’s house just before dawn with him figuring that Cronus or one of his Furies was a very sophisticated hacker and that they had to have had access at some point to the arena’s electrical infrastructure.

  Right?

  He was so damn tired that he couldn’t even answer his own question. He paid the driver and told him to wait. Knight trudged to his front door, went in, and turned on the hallway light. He heard a creaking noise and looked in the playroom. Marta yawned on the couch, dropping the blanket from her shoulders.

  ‘I’m so
sorry,’ Knight said softly. ‘I was at the gymnastics venue and they were jamming mobile traffic. I couldn’t get through.’

  Marta’s hand went to her mouth. ‘I saw it on the television. You were there? Did they catch them?’

  ‘No,’ he said despairingly. ‘We don’t even know if they’re alive or not. But they’ve made a big mistake. If they’re alive, they’ll be caught.’

  She yawned again, wider this time, and said, ‘What mistake?’

  ‘I can’t go into it,’ Knight replied. ‘There’s a taxi waiting for you out front. I’ve already paid your fare.’

  Marta smiled drowsily. ‘You’re very kind, Mr Knight.’

  ‘Call me Peter. When can you be back?’

  ‘One?’

  Knight nodded. Nine hours. He’d be lucky to be able to sleep for four of them before the twins awoke, but it was better than nothing.

  As if she were reading his mind, Marta headed towards the door, saying, ‘Isabel and Luke were both very, very tired tonight. I think they’ll sleep in for you.’

  Chapter 65

  SHORTLY AFTER DAWN that morning, racked with a headache that felt like my skull was being axed in two, I thundered at Marta: ‘What mistake?’

  Her eyes exuded the same dead quality I’d first seen the night I rescued her in Bosnia. ‘I don’t know, Cronus,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t tell me.’

  I looked around wildly at the other two sisters. ‘What mistake?’

  Teagan shook her head. ‘There was no mistake. Everything went exactly according to plan. Petra even got off the second shot on Wu.’

  ‘I did,’ Petra said, looking at me with an expression that bordered on delirium. ‘I was superior, Cronus. A champion. No one could have executed the task better. And on the river, we jumped off the boat well before it hit the wall and we timed the tides right on the money. We were a perfect ten all round.’

  Marta nodded. ‘I was back at Knight’s home almost two hours before he came in. We’ve won, Cronus. They’ll shut down the Olympics now, for sure.’