Private Games

by James Patterson

  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.’

  Chapter 66

  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.

  That left the focus on ‘an embattled Mike Lancer’ who’d faced the cameras after several members of Parliament had called for him to step down or be fired.

  ‘I’m not one to dodge blame when it’s warranted,’ Lancer said, sounding alternately angry and grief-stricken. ‘These terrorists have managed to find cracks in our system that we could not see. Let me assure the public that we are doing everything in our power to plug these cracks, and I know that Scotland Yard, MI5, F7 and Private are doing everything they can to find these murderers and stop them before any other tragedy can befall what should rightly be a global celebration of youth and renewal.’

  In response to the calls for Lancer’s head, LOCOG chairman Marcus Morris was playing the stiff-upper-lip Brit, adamantly opposed to giving ground to Cronus and positive that Lancer and the web of UK security forces in place would prevent further attacks, find the killers, and bring them to justice.

  Despite the overall gloomy tone of the piece, the video closed on something of a positive note. The scene was the Olympic Village, where shortly after dawn hundreds of athletes poured out onto the lawns and pavements. They burned candles in memory of the slain. American diver Hunter Pierce, Cameroonian sprinter Filatri Mundaho, and the girls of the Chinese gymnastics team had spoken, denouncing the murders as an ‘insane, unwarranted, and direct assault on the fabric of the games’.

  The piece closed with the reporter noting that police divers were continuing to probe the murky depths of the Thames near its confluence with the River Lea. They had found evidence that the speedboat that had slammed into the river wall had contained explosives. No bodies had turned up.

  ‘These facts do not bode well for an already shaken London Olympics,’ he’d intoned, ending the story.

  ‘Knight?’

  Sun reporter Karen Pope was coming through the gate into the playground, looking anxious and depressed.

  Knight frowned. ‘How did you find me here?’

  ‘Hooligan told me you like to come here with your kids,’ she replied and her unease deepened. ‘I tried your house first, then came here.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Knight asked. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m not, actually,’ the reporter said in a shaky voice as she sat down on the bench with him. Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I feel like I’m being used.’

  ‘Cronus?’

  ‘And the Furies,’ she said, wiping angrily at her tears. ‘I didn’t ask for it, but I have become part of their insanity, their terror. At first, you know, I admit it: I welcomed the story. Bloody brilliant for the career and all that, but now …’

  Pope choked up and looked away.

  ‘He’s written to you again?’

  She nodded and in a lost voice said: ‘I feel like I’ve sold my soul, Knight.’

  At that he saw the reporter in an entirely new light. Yes, she was abrasive and insensitive at times. But deep down she was human. She had a soul and principles; and this case tore at both. His estimation of Pope rose immeasurably.

  ‘Don’t think that way,’ Knight said. ‘You don’t support Cronus, do you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she sniffed.

  ‘Then you’re just doing your job: a difficult thing, but necessary. Do you have the letter with you?’

  Pope shook her head. ‘I dropped it off with Hooligan this morning.’ She paused. ‘A messenger brought it to me last night at my flat. He said two fat women met him in front of King’s College and gave him the letter to deliver. They were wearing official Olympic volunteer uniforms.’

  ‘It fits,’ Knight said. ‘What reason did Cronus give for killing the Chinese?’

  ‘He claims that they were guilty of state-sponsored child enslavement.’

  Cronus claimed that China routinely ignored Olympic age rules, doctoring birth certificates in order to force children into what was effectively athletic servitude. These practices were also fraud. Ping and Wu knew that sixty per cent of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team was underage. So did Win Bo Lee, who Cronus claimed was the architect of the entire scheme.

  ‘There are plenty of supporting documents,’ Pope said. ‘Cronus makes the case quite well. The letter says the Chinese “enslaved underage children for state glory”, and that the punishment was death.’

  She looked at Knight, crying again. ‘I could have published it all last night. I could have called my editor and made the deadline for today’s paper. But I couldn’t, Knight. I just … They know where I live.’

  ‘Lukey wants milk, Daddy,’ Luke said.

  Knight turned from the distraught reporter to find his son staring at him expectantly. Then Isabel appeared. ‘I want milk too!’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Knight muttered, and then said apologetically, ‘I forgot the milk, but I’ll go and get some right now. This is Karen. She works for the newspaper. She’s a friend of mine. She’ll sit with you until I get back.’

  Pope frowned. ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Knight said. ‘Fifteen, tops.’

  The repor
ter looked at Luke and Isabel who studied her, and said reluctantly, ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ Knight promised.

  He ran across the playground and out through the Royal Hospital grounds towards his home in Chelsea. The one-way trip took six minutes exactly and he arrived sweating and breathing hard.

  Knight put his key in the lock and was upset to find the door unlocked. Had he forgotten to secure it? It was completely unlike him, but he was operating on limited, broken sleep, wasn’t he?

  He stepped inside the front hallway. A floorboard creaked somewhere above him. And then a door clicked shut.

  Chapter 67

  KNIGHT TOOK FOUR quiet steps to the front hall closet and reached up high on a shelf for his spare Beretta.

  He heard a noise like furniture moving and slid off his shoes, thinking: My room or the kids’?

  Knight climbed the stairs as stealthily as a cat, looking all around. He heard another noise ahead of him. It was coming from his room. He crept down the hallway, gun up, and peered inside, seeing the desk on top of which his laptop lay shut.

  He paused, listening intently. For several moments he heard nothing more.

  Then the loo flushed. Thieves commonly relieve themselves in the homes of their victims. Knight had known that for years and figured he was dealing with a burglar. Stepping over the threshold into his bedroom, he aimed the pistol at the closed door. The handle twisted. Knight flipped off the safety.

  The door swung open.

  Marta stepped out and spotted Knight. And the gun.

  Gasping, her hand flew to her chest and she screamed, ‘Don’t shoot!’

  Knight’s brows knitted, but he lowered his pistol several inches. ‘Marta?’

  The nanny was gasping. ‘You scared me, Mr Knight! My God, my heart feels like the fireworks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, dropping the pistol to his side. ‘What are you doing here? I’m not supposed to see you for another hour.’

  ‘I came early so you can go to work early,’ Marta replied breathlessly. ‘You left me the key. I came in, saw the buggy gone, and thought you’d gone to the park, so I started to clean the kitchen and then came up to do the nursery.’

  ‘But you’re up here in my bedroom,’ Knight said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marta replied plaintively, and then, in an embarrassed tone, she added: ‘I had to pee. Badly.’

  After a moment’s pause in which he saw no guile on the nanny’s part, he pocketed the gun. ‘I apologise, Marta. I’m under stress. I overreacted.’

  ‘It’s both our faults, then,’ Marta said, just before Knight’s phone rang.

  He snatched it up and immediately heard Isabel and Luke crying hysterically.

  ‘Pope?’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’ the reporter demanded in a harried voice. ‘You said you’d be right back, and your kids are throwing a world-class shit fit.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ he promised and hung up. He looked at Marta, who appeared worried. ‘My friend,’ he said. ‘She’s not very good with kids.’

  Marta smiled. ‘Then it is a very good thing I came early, yes?’

  ‘A very good thing,’ Knight said. ‘But we’re going to have to run.’

  He sprang down the stairs and into the kitchen, seeing that the breakfast dishes had been cleaned and put away. He got milk and put it, some biscuits, and two plastic cups in a bag.

  He locked the front door and together they hurried back to the park, where Luke was sitting off by himself in the grass, whacking the ground with his shovel, while Isabel knelt in the sandbox, crying and imitating an ostrich.

  Pope was just standing there, out of her league, baffled about what to do.

  Marta swooped in and gathered up Luke. She tickled his belly, which caused him to giggle and then to cry, ‘Marta!’

  Isabel heard that, stopped crying, and pulled her hair out of the sand. She spotted Knight coming towards her and broke into a grin. ‘Daddy!’

  Knight scooped up his daughter, brushed the sand from her hair, and kissed her. ‘Daddy’s here. So is Marta.’

  ‘I want milk!’ Isabel said, pouting.

  ‘Don’t forget the biscuits,’ Knight said, handing his daughter and the sack containing the milk to the concerned nanny, who brought the kids over to a picnic table and began to feed them.

  ‘What caused the meltdown?’ Knight asked Pope.

  Flustered, the reporter said, ‘I don’t know, actually. It was just like there was a time bomb ticking that I couldn’t hear until it went off.’

  ‘That happens a lot,’ Knight remarked with a laugh.

  Pope studied Marta. ‘The nanny been with you long?’

  ‘Not a week yet,’ Knight replied. ‘But she’s bloody fantastic. Best I’ve—’

  Pope’s mobile rang. She answered and listened. After several moments she cried, ‘No fucking way! We’ll be there in twenty minutes!’

  The reporter clicked off her phone, and spoke with quiet urgency, ‘That was Hooligan. He pulled a fingerprint off the package that Cronus sent me last night. He’s run it and wants us at Private London ASAP.’

  Chapter 68

  SURROUNDED BY A four-day growth of orange beard, the grin on Hooligan’s face put Knight in mind of a mad leprechaun. It didn’t hurt the image when Private London’s chief scientist did a jig out from behind his lab desk, and said, ‘We’ve got a third name and, as Jack might say, it’s a whopper that set off alarms. I’ve had two calls from The Hague in the past hour.’

  ‘The Hague?’ Knight said, confused.

  ‘Special prosecutor for Balkan War Crimes Tribunal,’ Hooligan said as Jack rushed in, looking pale and drawn. ‘The print belongs to a woman wanted for genocide.’

  It was all coming at Knight so fast that his mind was awhirl with disjointed thoughts. Daring and Farrell had both worked with NATO in some capacity at the end of the Balkan war, right? But war crimes? Genocide?

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ Jack said.

  Hooligan went to a laptop computer and gave it several commands. On a large screen at one end of the lab, a grainy black and white photograph of a young teenage girl appeared. Her hair was chopped short in a bowl cut and she wore a white, collared shirt. Knight could not tell much more about her because the photograph was so blurry.

  ‘Her name is Andjela Brazlic,’ Hooligan said. ‘This picture was taken approximately seventeen years ago, according to the war-crimes prosecutor, which puts her in her late twenties now.’

  ‘What did she do?’ Knight asked, trying to match the girl’s blurry face with the charge of genocide.

  Hooligan gave his computer another command and the screen jumped to an overexposed snapshot of three girls wearing white shirts and dark skirts, standing with a man and a woman whose heads were out of frame. Knight recognised the bowl-cut hairdo on one and realised he’d been looking at a blow-up of this picture. Glaring sunlight obliterated the faces of the other two girls, who had longer hair and were taller. He guessed them to be fourteen and fifteen.

  Hooligan cleared his throat and said, ‘Andjela and her two sisters there – Senka, the oldest, and Nada, the middle girl – were indicted on charges that they participated in genocidal acts in and around the city of Srebrenica in late 1994 and early 1995, near the end of the civil war that exploded on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Allegedly the sisters were part of the kill squads Ratko Mladic oversaw that executed eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Pope said. ‘What makes three young girls join a kill squad?’

  ‘Gang rape and murder,’ Hooligan replied. ‘According to the special prosecutor, not long after this photograph was taken in April 1994 Andjela and her sisters were raped repeatedly over the course of three days by members of a Bosnian militia that also tortured and murdered their parents in front of them.’

  ‘That would do it,’ Jack said.

  Hooligan nodded grimly. ‘The sisters are alleged to have executed more than one hundred Bo
snian Muslims in retaliation. Some were shot. But most were struck through the skull, and post-mortem through the genitals, with a pickaxe – the same sort of weapon that was ultimately used to kill their mother and father.

  ‘It gets worse,’ Private London’s chief scientist pressed on. ‘The war-crimes prosecutor told me that eyewitnesses testified that the sisters took sadistic delight in killing the Bosnian boys and desecrating their bodies, so much so that the terrified mothers of Srebrenica came up with an apt nickname for them.’

  ‘What was that?’ Knight asked.

  ‘The Furies.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jack said. ‘It’s them.’

  A moment of silence passed before Jack said to the reporter, ‘Karen, would you excuse us for a moment? We have to discuss something that has nothing to do with this case.’

  Pope hesitated, and then nodded awkwardly, saying, ‘Oh, of course.’

  When she’d gone, Jack looked back at Knight and Hooligan. ‘I have something to tell you that’s going to be tough to hear.’

  ‘We’ve been fired from the Olympic security team?’ Knight asked.

  Jack shook his head. He looked pale. ‘Far from it. No, I just left a meeting with investigators from the Air Accident Investigative Branch, the ones looking into the plane crash.’

  ‘And?’ Hooligan said.

  Jack swallowed hard. ‘They’ve found evidence of a bomb aboard the jet. There was no mechanical malfunction. Dan, Kirsty, Wendy and Suzy were all murdered.’

  Chapter 69

  ‘THIS BETTER BE good, Peter,’ Elaine Pottersfield grumbled. ‘I’m under insane pressure, and I’m not in much of a mood for a fine-dining experience.’

  ‘We’re both under insane pressure,’ Knight shot back. ‘But I have to talk to you. And I need to eat. And you need to eat. I figured why not meet here and kill three birds with one stone.’