Private Games (20 page)

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.

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.’

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.’

I shook my head. ‘Not even close. The corporate sponsors and the broadcasters won’t let them stop until it’s too late.’

But what mistake could we have made?

I look at Teagan. ‘What about the factory?’

‘I left it sealed tight.’

‘Go and check,’ I say. ‘Make sure.’ Then I go to a chair by the window, wondering again what error we could have made. My mind rips through dozens of possibilities, but the truth is that my information is incomplete. I can’t devise countermeasures if I do not know the nature of this supposed error.

Finally I glare at Marta. ‘Find out. I don’t care what you have to do. Find out what the mistake is.’

AT TWENTY TO
noon that same Wednesday, Knight pushed Isabel in the swing at the playground inside the gardens of the Royal Hospital. Luke had figured out the swing on his own, and was pumping wildly with his feet and hands, trying to get higher and higher. Knight kept slowing him down gently.

‘Daddy!’ Luke yelled in frustration. ‘Lukey goes up!’

‘Not so up,’ Knight said. ‘You’ll fall out and crack your head.’

‘No, Daddy,’ Luke grumbled.

Isabel laughed. ‘Lukey already has a cracked head!’

That did not go over well. Knight had to take them off the swings and separate them, Isabel in the sandbox and Luke on the jungle gym. When they’d finally become absorbed in their play, he yawned, checked his watch – another hour and a quarter until Marta was scheduled to return — and went to the bench and his iPad, which he’d been using to track, the news coverage.

The country, and indeed the entire world, was in an uproar over the slayings of Gao Ping, An Wu and Win Bo Lee. Heads
of
state around the globe were condemning Cronus, the Furies, and their brutal tactics. So were the athletes.

Knight clicked on a hyperlink that led him to a BBC news video. It led with reaction to the killings of the Chinese coaches, and featured parents of athletes from Spain, Russia, and the Ukraine who fretted about security and wondered whether to dash their children’s dreams and insist that they leave. The Chinese had protested vigorously to the International Olympic Committee, and issued a release stating their frustration that the host nation seemed unable to provide as safe a venue for the Games as Beijing had four years before in Beijing.

But the BBC story then tried to lay blame for the security breaches. There were plenty of targets, including F7, the corporate-security firm hired to run the surveillance equipment at the venues. An F7 spokesman vigorously defended their operation, calling it ‘state of the art’ and run by ‘the most qualified people in the business’. The BBC piece also noted that the computer-security system had been designed by representatives of Scotland Yard and MI5 and had been touted as ‘impenetrable’ and ‘unbeatable’ before the start of the Games. But neither law-enforcement organisation was responding to questions about what were obviously serious breaches.