Private Games Page 17

  Pope laughed again before gesturing at the picture and saying, ‘Think of her in a tight cocktail dress from Liberty of London or Alice by Temperley, and her hair done by Hair by Fairy, and, well, you can’t see it from this angle, but she has this tiny mole on her jaw.’

  ‘A mole?’ Nell sniffed. ‘You mean with little hairs sticking out of it?’

  ‘More like a beauty spot. Like Elizabeth Taylor used to have?’

  Nell looked confused, and then she studied the photograph again.

  A moment later, she gasped, ‘My God – it’s Syren!’

  Chapter 73

  Friday, 3 August 2012

  KNIGHT HEARD FEET padding around at seven-thirty that morning. He opened his eyes and saw Isabel holding her Pooh Bear blanket.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said in high seriousness. ‘When am I three?’

  ‘August the eleventh,’ Knight grumbled, and glanced at that picture of Kate on the moor in Scotland. ‘A week from tomorrow, honey.’

  ‘What’s today?’

  ‘Friday.’

  Isabel thought about that. ‘So one more Saturday and one more Friday, and then the next one?’

  Knight smiled. His daughter always fascinated him with the out-of-the box way her mind worked. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Give me a kiss.’

  Isabel kissed him. Then her eyes widened. ‘We get presents?’

  ‘Of course, Bella,’ Knight replied. ‘It will be your birthday.’

  She got wildly excited, clapping her hands and dancing in a tight circle before stopping dead in her tracks. ‘What presents?’

  ‘What presents?’ Luke asked from the doorway. He was yawning as he came into the room.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ Knight said. ‘It won’t be a surprise.’

  ‘Oh,’ Isabel said, disappointed.

  ‘Lukey three?’ his son asked.

  ‘Next week,’ Knight assured him, and then heard the front door open. Marta. Early again. The world’s first perfect nanny.

  Knight put on a tracksuit bottom and a T-shirt, and carried the twins down the stairs. Marta smiled at them. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘It’s my birthday two Fridays and a Saturday from now,’ Isabel announced.

  ‘And Lukey,’ her brother said. ‘I’m three.’

  ‘You will be three,’ Knight corrected.

  ‘We’ll have to plan a party then,’ Marta said, as Knight set the kids down.

  ‘A party!’ Isabel cried and clapped.

  Luke hooted with delight, spun in circles, and cried, ‘Party! Party!’

  The twins had never had a birthday party, or at least not on the exact date of their birth. That day had been so bittersweet that Knight had moved cake and ice-cream celebrations to a day or two later, and had kept the celebration deliberately low-key. He was torn now over how he should reply to Marta’s suggestion.

  Luke stopped spinning and said, ‘Balloons?’

  ‘Mr Knight?’ Marta said. ‘What do you think? Balloons?’

  Before Knight could answer, the doorbell rang, and then rang again, and again, and again, followed by someone pounding the knocker so hard that it sounded like a mason chipping stone.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’ Knight groaned, heading towards the door. ‘Can you get them breakfast, Marta?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  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
r that I’ll keel over. The light all around me seems ultraviolet except for a diesel-green halo that pulses in time with the ripping sensations in my skull.

  ‘You all right?’ a man’s voice asks.

  I can hear the crying on the phone, which now hangs in my hand at my side. I look up through the green halo and see a grounds worker standing a few feet from me.

  ‘Fine,’ I manage, fighting for control against a rage building in me, making me want to cut the grounds worker’s head off for spite. ‘I’m just a little dizzy.’

  ‘You want me to call someone?’

  ‘No,’ I say, struggling to my feet. Though the green halo is still pulsing and the ripping goes on in my skull, the air around me is shimmering a bit less.

  Walking away from the groundsman, I growl into the phone: ‘Shut that goddamn kid up.’

  ‘Believe me, if I could, I would,’ Marta retorts. ‘Here, I’ll go outside.’

  I hear a door shut and the beeping of a car horn. ‘Better?’

  Only a little. My stomach churns when I ask, ‘What do they know?’

  In a halting voice, Marta tells me that they know about the Brazlic sisters, and it all starts again: the ripping, the diesel-green halo, and the ultraviolent rage that so completely permeates me now that I feel like a cornered animal, a monster myself, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who might approach me.

  There’s a bench ahead on the path and I sit on it. ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marta replies, and then explains how she overheard Pope mention ‘Andjela and the other Brazlic sisters’, which had so shocked her that she’d dropped a glass bowl, which had shattered on the kitchen floor.

  Wanting to throttle her, I say, ‘Does Knight suspect?’

  ‘Me? No,’ Marta says. ‘I acted embarrassed and apologetic when I told him the glass was wet. He told me not to worry about it, and to make extra sure the floor was free of glass before letting his little brats walk around.’

  ‘Where are they now, Knight and Pope? What else do they know?’

  ‘He left with her ten minutes ago, and said he would not be back until late,’ Marta replies. ‘I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you. But if they know about the sisters, then they know what the sisters did in Bosnia, and the war-crimes prosecutors know we are in London.’

  ‘They probably do,’ I agree at last. ‘But nothing more. If they had more, they’d be tracking you by one of your current names. They’d be at our doors.’

  After a moment’s silence, Marta asks, ‘So what do I do?’

  Feeling increasingly sure that the gap between who the Furies were and who they have become is wide enough to prevent a connection, I reply, ‘Stay close to those children. We may need them in the coming days.’

  Chapter 75

  Sunday, 5 August 2012

  BY SEVEN P.M. The intensity inside the Olympic Stadium was beyond electric, Knight thought from his position in the stands on the west side of the venue, high above the track’s finish line. The Private London investigator could sense the anticipation rippling through the ninety thousand souls lucky enough to have won a ticket to see who would be the fastest man on Earth. He could also see and hear fear competing with anticipation. People were wondering whether Cronus would attack here.

  The event was certainly high-profile enough. The sprint competition so far had gone down as expected. Both Shaw and Mundaho had been brilliant in the 100-metre qualifying heats the day before, each of them dominating and winning easily. But while the Jamaican was able to rest between races, the Cameroonian had been forced to run in the classifications for the 400-metres.

  Mundaho had performed almost superhumanly, turning in a time of 43.22 seconds, four one-hundredths of a second off Henry Ivey’s world-record performance of 43.18 at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

  Two hours ago, Mundaho and Shaw had won their 100-metre semi-final heats, with the Cameroonian just two one-hundredths off Shaw’s world record of 9.58 seconds. The men were getting ready to face each other in the 100-metre dash final. After that, Shaw would rest and Mundaho would have to run in the 400-metre semi-finals.

  Gruelling, Knight thought as he scanned the crowd through his binoculars. Could Mundaho do it? Win the 100, 200 and 400 at a single Olympic Games?

  In the end, did it matter? Would people really care after all that had happened to London 2012? Aside from the joy that Londoners had expressed earlier in the day when Mary Duckworth won the women’s marathon, the past forty-eight hours had seen a dramatic ratcheting-up of the anxiety surrounding the Games. On Saturday, the Sun had finally published Pope’s story describing the link between the killings and the wanted war-crime suspects, the Serbian Brazlic sisters. She had also detailed how both James Daring and Selena Farrell had served in the Balkans at about the same time as the Brazlics were actively executing innocent men and boys in and around the city of Srebrenica.

  Farrell, it turned out, had been a volunteer UN observer assigned to NATO in the war-torn area. There were still not many details of the professor’s exact duties on the mission, but Pope had discovered that Farrell had been badly hurt in some kind of vehicular accident in the summer of 1995 and had been sent home. After a short convalescence, she’d resumed her doctoral studies and gone on with her life.

  The story had caused an uproar that grew when, late on Saturday evening, the body of Emanuel Flores, a Brazilian judo referee, was discovered near a rubbish skip in Docklands, several miles from the ExCel Arena where he’d been working and not on Olympic grounds. An expert in hand-to-hand combat, Flores had nevertheless been garrotted with a length of cable.

  In a letter to Pope completely devoid of forensic evidence, Cronus claimed that Flores had accepted bribes to favour certain athletes in the judo competition. The documentation supported the allegations in some ways, and not others.

  In reaction, broadcasters and journalists around the world were expressing uniform outrage that Cronus and his Furies seemed to be acting at will. The media were demanding action from the British government. This morning, Uruguay, North Korea, Tanzania and New Zealand had decided to pull their teams from the final week of competition. Members of Parliament and the Greater London Authority had reacted by stridently renewing calls for Mike Lancer to resign or be fired, and for the manhunt for Daring and Farrell to be intensified.

  For his part a visibly shaken Lancer had been in front of cameras all day, defending his efforts. Around noon, he had announced that he was relieving F7 of its command over the entrances to the Olympic Park, and bringing in Jack Morgan of Private to oversee the effort. Together with Scotland Yard and MI5, they decided to institute draconian measures at the venues, including secondary screenings, more identification checks, and pat-downs.

  It had not been enough to calm the Games. Ten countries, including Russia, floated the idea that the Olympics should be halted until security was assured.

  But in an immediate and aggressive response, a staggering number of athletes had signed a digital petition drafted and distributed by the American diver Hunter Pierce that not only condemned the murders, but also defiantly and forcefully demanded that the IOC and LOCOG not give in to the idea of suspending the games.

  To their credit, Marcus Morris, London’s Mayor and the Prime Minister were listening to the athletes and dismissing calls to halt the Olympics, saying that England had never bent to terrorism and wasn’t about to start now.

  Despite the dramatic increase in security measures, some fans had stayed away from what was supposed to be the biggest event of the games. Knight could see scattered empty seats, something that would have been considered impossible before the start of the Olympics. But then again almost everything that had happened so far would have been considered impossible before the Games.

  ‘Bloody bastards have ruined it, Knight,’ Lancer said bitterly. The security chief had come up alongside Knight as he was scanning the crowd. Like Knight, Lancer wore a radio nub in his ear tuned to the stadium’s security frequency. ‘No
matter what happens from now on, 2012 will always be the tainted—’

  The crowd around them leaped to their feet and started cheering wildly. The final competitors in the men’s 100-metre dash were coming out onto the track. Shaw, the reigning Olympic champion, entered first, making little ‘stutter’ sprints and moving his hands like chopping tools.

  Mundaho came out onto the track last and jogged in an almost sleepy lope before crouching and then hopping like a kangaroo down the track with such explosive energy that many in the crowd gasped, and Knight thought: Is that possible? Has anyone ever done that before?

  ‘That man’s a freak,’ Lancer remarked. ‘An absolute freak of nature.’

  Chapter 76

  THE OLYMPIC FLAME atop the Orbit burned without disturbance or deflection and the flags around the stadium hung flat; the wind had died to nothing – perfect conditions for a sprint race.

  The radio nub in Knight’s ear crackled with calls and responses between Jack, the security crew, and Lancer, who’d moved off to get a different view. Knight looked around. High atop the stadium, SAS snipers lay prone behind their rifles. A helicopter passed overhead. The war birds had been circling the park all day, and the number of armed guards around the track doubled.

  Nothing bad is going to happen in here tonight, Knight told himself. An attack would be suicidal.

  The sprinters went to starting blocks that relied on a state-of-the art fully automated timing – FAT – system. Each block was built around ultra-sensitive pressure plates linked to computers to catch any false starts. At the finish line and linked to those same computers was an invisible matrix of criss-crossing lasers calibrated to a thousandth of a second.

  The crowd was on its feet now, straining for better views as the announcer called the sprinters to their marks. Shaw was running in lane three, and Mundaho in lane five. The Jamaican glanced at the Cameroonian pivoting in front of his blocks. Setting their running shoes into the pressure sensors, the speedsters splayed their fingertips on the track, heads bowed.