‘A mistake?’ I say in a soft voice. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? You’ve called the dogs in around us. They can smell you, Andjela. They can smell your sisters. They can smell me. They’ve got a cage and gallows waiting.’
Petra’s face twists up in an anger equal to my own. ‘I believe in you, Cronus. I’ve given you my life. I killed both Chinese coaches for you. But yes, I made a mistake. One mistake!’
‘Not one,’ I reply in that same soft voice. ‘You left your wig in the wall at the lavatory at the gymnastics venue. They’ve got your DNA now too. It was impetuous. You did not follow the plan.’
Petra begins to shake and to cry. ‘What do you want me to do, Cronus? What can I do to make it right?’
For several moments I don’t reply, but then I sigh and walk towards her with open arms. ‘Nothing, sister,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing you can do. We fight on.’
Petra hesitates. Then she comes into my arms and hugs me so fiercely that for a moment I’m unsure what to do.
But then my mind seizes on the image of an IV line stuck in my arm and connected to a plastic bag of liquids, and for a fleeting instant I consider what that image has meant to me, how it has consumed me, driven me, made me.
I am much taller than Petra. So when I return her hug, my arms fall naturally around the back of her neck and press her cheek tightly to my chest.
‘Cronus,’ she begins, before she feels the pressure building.
She begins to choke.
‘No!’ she manages in a hoarse whisper and then thrashes violently in my arms, trying to punch and kick me.
But I know all too well how dangerous Petra is, how viciously she can fight if she is given a chance; and my grip on her neck is relentless and grows tighter and stronger before I take a swift step back, and then twist my hips sharply.
The action yanks Petra off her feet and swings her through the air with such force that when I whipsaw my weight back the other way, I hear the vertebrae in her neck crack and splinter as if struck by lightning.
Chapter 81
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
SHORTLY AFTER TEN that morning, Marcus Morris shifted uncomfortably on the pavement outside the Houses of Parliament. But then he looked out forcefully at the cameras and microphones and the mob of reporters gathered around him. ‘Though he remains our respected colleague, someone who worked for more than ten years to see these Games realised, Michael Lancer has been relieved of his duties for the duration of the Olympics.’
‘About bloody time!’ someone shouted, and then the entire mob around Sun reporter Karen Pope exploded, roaring questions at the chairman of the London Organising Committee like losing traders in a stock-market commodity pit.
Most of the questions were ones that Pope wanted answered as well. Would the Games go on? Or would they be suspended? If they went on, who would replace Lancer as the committee’s chief of security? What about the growing number of countries withdrawing their teams from competition? Should they be listening to the athletes who steadfastly argued against stopping or interrupting the Games?
‘We are listening to the athletes,’ Morris insisted in a strong voice. ‘The Olympics will go on. The Olympic ideals and spirit will survive. We will not buckle under to this pressure. Four top specialists from Scotland Yard, MI5, the SAS, and Private will oversee security for us in the final four days of the Games. I am personally heartbroken that some countries have chosen to leave. It is a tragedy for the Games and a tragedy for the athletes. For the rest, the Games go on.’
Morris followed a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers who opened a hole in the mob and moved towards a waiting car. The vast majority of the media surged as one after the LOCOG leader, bellowing all manner of questions.
Pope did not follow them. She leaned against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Parliament buildings and reviewed her notes from the morning and evening before.
In a journalistic coup, she’d tracked down Elaine Pottersfield and learned that, as well as radically intensifying the manhunt for Selena Farrell and James Daring, law-enforcement efforts were also focusing on the starting blocks that had exploded, maiming Filatri Mundaho.
Mundaho remained in a critical condition in Tower Bridge Hospital, but was said to be exhibiting a ‘tremendous fighting spirit’ in the wake of two emergency operations to remove the shrapnel and treat his burns.
The starting blocks were another story. Made by Stackhouse Newton and based on the company’s famed ‘TI008 International Best’ system’, the starting blocks that had exploded had been used ten times by ten different athletes in the previous days of qualifying.
The blocks had been conducted to and from the track by IOC officials, and had been set up by a crew of timing specialists who claimed to have observed no issue with the blocks before the explosion. Several of those timing specialists had actually been injured at the same time as Mundaho.
Between competitions, the blocks had been locked away in a special room below ground at the stadium. The Olympic track-and-field official who had locked the blocks away on the Saturday evening before the explosion was the same official who had unlocked the storage room late on Sunday afternoon. His name was Javier Cruz, a Panamanian, and he had been the most grievously injured of the race officials, losing an eye to the flying metal.
Scotland Yard bomb experts said the device was a block of metal machined to replicate exactly Stackhouse Newton standards. Only this block had been hollowed enough for shaved magnesium to be inserted along with a triggering device. Magnesium, an incredibly combustible material, explodes and burns with acetylene intensity.
Pottersfield said, ‘The device would have killed a normal man. But Mundaho’s superhuman reaction time saved his life if not his limbs.’
Pope flipped her notebook closed and reckoned she had enough material for her piece now. She thought of calling Peter Knight to find out if he could add anything to what she knew, but then she spotted a tall figure leaving the visitors’ gate at the side of the Houses of Parliament, shoulders hunched forward as he hurried south on St Margaret Street in the direction opposite to that being taken by the now dissipating mob of reporters.
She glanced back at them, realised that none of them had spotted Michael Lancer, and ran after him. She caught up with Lancer as he entered Victoria Tower Gardens.
‘Mr Lancer?’ she said, slowing beside him. ‘Karen Pope – I’m with the Sun.’
The former Olympics security chief sighed and looked at her with such despair that she almost didn’t have the heart to question him. But she could hear Finch’s voice shouting at her.
‘Your firing,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s fair?’
Lancer hesitated, struggling inside, but then he hung his head. ‘I do. I wanted the London Games to be the greatest in history and the safest in history. I know that we tried to think of every possible scenario in our preparations over the years. But the truth is that we simply did not foresee someone like Cronus, a fanatic with a small group of followers. In short, I failed. I’ll be held responsible for what happened. It’s my burden to bear and no one else’s. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to begin to live with that for the rest of my life.’
Chapter 82
Friday, 10 August 2012
LAST TIME I’LL have to visit this hellhole, Teagan thought five days later as she pushed a knapsack through a hole that had been clipped in a chain-link fence surrounding a condemned and contaminated factory building several miles from the Olympic Park.
She wriggled through after the knapsack, then picked it up and glanced at the inky sky. Somewhere a foghorn brayed. Dawn was not far off and she had much to do before she could leave this wretched place for ever.
The dew raised the scent of weeds as she hurried towards the dark shadow of the abandoned building, thinking how her sister Petra must be settling into her new life on Crete. Teagan had read the story about the fingerprint and had feared that Cronus would be insanely angry with her si
ster. Instead, his reaction had been practical rather than vengeful: her sister was being sent to Greece early to prepare the house where they would live when all this was over.
Entering the building through a window she’d kicked out months before, Teagan imagined the house where Petra was: on a cliff above the Aegean, whitewashed walls dazzling against a cobalt sky, filled with all they could ever want or need.
She turned on a slim red-lensed torch, clipped it to the cap she wore, and used the soft glow to navigate through what had once been the production floor of a textile mill. Wary of loose debris, she made her way to a staircase that descended into a musty basement.
A stronger odour came to her soon enough, so eye-wateringly foul that she stopped breathing through her nose and put the knapsack up on a bench that had only three legs. Bracing her weight against the bench to stop it from rocking, she took out eight IV bags.
Teagan arranged them in their proper order, and then used a hypodermic needle to draw liquid from a vial before shooting equal amounts into four of the bags. Finished, she took the key that hung on a chain around her neck and picked up the eight IV bags, four in each hand.
When she reached the door where the stench was worse, she set the bags on the floor and slid the key into the padlock. The hasp freed with a click. She pocketed the lock and pushed the door open, knowing that if she were to breathe in through her nose now she’d surely retch.
A moan became a groan echoing up out of the darkness.
‘Dinner time,’ Teagan said, and closed the door behind her.
Fifteen minutes later, she left the storage room feeling confident in the steps she had taken, the work she had done. Four days from now the—
She heard a crash from above her on the old production floor. Voices laughed and jeered before another crash echoed through the abandoned factory. She froze, thinking.
Teagan had been in the factory a dozen times in the last year, and she’d never once encountered another human being inside and did not expect to. The building was contaminated with solvents, heavy metals and other carcinogens, and the exterior fence carried multiple hazardous-waste warning signs to that effect.
Her initial reaction was to go on the attack. But Cronus had been explicit. There were to be no confrontations if they could be avoided.
She switched off her torch, spun around, felt for the door of the storeroom and shut it. She groped in her pocket for the padlock, found it finally, and set the hasp through the iron rings on the door and the jamb. A bottle bounced down the staircase behind her and shattered on the basement floor. She heard footsteps coming and drunken male voices.
Teagan reached up in the darkness to snap the lock shut and felt the hasp catch before she ran a few steps and then paused, unsure. Had it locked?
A torch beam began to play back towards the staircase. She took off without hesitation this time, up on her toes the way sprinters run. She had long ago committed the layout of the factory to memory and dodged into a hall that she knew would take her to a stone stairway and a bulkhead door.
Two minutes later, she was outside. Dawn threw its first rosy fingers of light across the London sky. She heard more crashing and hooting inside the factory and decided it was probably a mob of drunken yobs bent on vandalism. She told herself that once they got a whiff of that basement they wouldn’t be doing any further exploring. But as she crawled back through the hole in the fence, all Teagan could think about was the padlock, and whether it had clicked shut after all.
Chapter 83
MID-AFTERNOON THAT SECOND Friday of the Games, the third from last day of competition, Peter Knight entered the lab at Private London and hurried gingerly to Hooligan, holding out a box wrapped in brown paper and parcel tape.
‘Is this a bomb?’ Knight asked, dead serious.
Private London’s chief scientist tore his attention away from one of the Sun’s sports pages, which featured a piece on England’s chances in the Olympic football final against Brazil. He looked uneasily at the package. ‘What makes you think it’s a bomb?’
Knight tapped a finger on the return address.
Hooligan squinted. ‘Can’t read that.’
‘Because it’s ancient Greek,’ Knight said. ‘It says, “Cronus”.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Exactly,’ Knight said, placing the box on the table beside the scientist. ‘Just picked it up at the front desk.’
‘Hear anything inside?’ Hooligan asked.
‘No ticking.’
‘Could be rigged digitally. Or remote-controlled.’
Knight looked queasy. ‘Should we clear out? Call in the bomb squad?’
The scientist scratched at his scruffy red beard. ‘That’s Jack’s call.’
Two minutes later, Jack was standing inside the lab, looking at the box. The American appeared exhausted. This was one of the few breaks he’d had from running security at the Olympic Park since taking over on Monday. There had been no further attacks after the Mundaho incident; and that was, in Knight’s estimation, largely due to Jack’s herculean efforts.
‘Can you X-ray the box without blowing us up?’ Jack asked.
‘Can always try, right?’ Hooligan said, picking up the box as if it had teeth.
The scientist took the box to a work table at the far end of the lab. He started up a portable scanner similar to those being used at the Olympic venues, set the box outside the scanner, and waited for it to warm up.
Knight watched the box as if it could seal his fate. Then he swallowed hard – suddenly wanting to leave the lab in case there actually was a bomb in it. He had two children who would be three years old tomorrow. Somehow, he felt, he still had his mother. So could he risk being in a closed room with a potentially explosive device? To get his mind off the danger, he glanced at the screen showing the news highlights and image after image of gold medal-winning athletes from all over the world taking their victory laps, waving the flags of their nations and that of Cameroon.
It had all been spontaneous, the athletes showing their respect to Mundaho and defiance of Cronus. Scores of them had taken up the Cameroonian flag, including the English football team after it won its semi-final against Germany two evenings before. The media was eating it up, selling the gesture as a universal protest against the lunatic stalking the Games.
The American diver Hunter Pierce remained at the fore-front of the protest against Cronus. She had been interviewed almost every day since Mundaho’s tragedy, and each time she had spoken resolutely of the athletes’ solidarity in their refusal to allow the Games to be halted or interrupted.
Mundaho’s condition had been upgraded to ‘serious’: he had third-degree burns and wounds over much of his lower body. But he was said to be alert, well aware of the protests, and taking heart from the global outpouring of support.
As encouraging as that all was, Knight still tore his attention away from the screen in Private London’s lab, believing that the assault would not stop simply because of the athletes’ protests. Cronus would try to attack again before the end of the Games.
Knight was sure of it. But where would he strike? And when? The relay races tomorrow afternoon? The football final between England and Brazil at Wembley Stadium on Saturday evening? The men’s marathon on Sunday? Or the closing ceremony that night?
‘Here we go,’ Hooligan said, pushing the box received from Cronus onto a small conveyor belt that carried it through the scanner. He twisted the scanner’s screen so that they all could see.
The box came into view and so did its contents.
Knight flinched.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jack said. ‘Are those real?’
Chapter 84
THE WOMAN’S DEATHLY-PALE hands had been severed at the wrists with a blade and a saw that had left the flesh smooth and the bones ragged and chipped.
Hooligan asked, ‘Should I fingerprint her?’
‘Let’s leave that to Scotland Yard,’ Jack said.
‘No matter,’ Knight said,
‘I’m betting those hands belong to a war criminal.’
‘Andjela Brazlic?’ Jack asked.
Hooligan nodded. ‘The odds are definitely there, eh?’
‘Why send them to you?’ Jack asked Knight.
‘I don’t know.’
The question continued to haunt Knight on his way home later that evening. Why him? He supposed that Cronus was sending a message with the hands. But about what? The fingerprint she’d left on the box? Was this Cronus’s way of displaying his ruthlessness?
Knight called Elaine Pottersfield and told her that Hooligan was bringing the hands to Scotland Yard. He laid out his suspicions about their identity.
‘If they are Andjela Brazlic’s, it shows dissension in Cronus’s ranks,’ the inspector said.
‘Or Cronus is simply saying that it’s fruitless to track this particular war criminal. She made a mistake. And now she’s dead.’
‘That all?’ Pottersfield asked.
‘We’re going to Kate’s forest in the morning,’ Knight said. ‘And the party is at five-thirty.’
The silence was brief. ‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ she said, and hung up.
Knight reached home around ten, wondering if his sister-in-law would ever come to terms with him – or with Kate’s death. It wasn’t until he was standing at his front door that he allowed himself to realise that three years before, right about this time, his late wife had gone into labour.
He remembered Kate’s face after her waters had broken – no fear, just sheer joy at the impending miracle. Then he recalled the ambulance taking her away. Knight opened the door of his home and went inside, as deeply confused and heartbroken as he’d been thirty-six months before.
The house smelled of chocolate, and two brightly wrapped presents sat on the table in the hallway. He grimaced, realising that he hadn’t yet had the chance to go shopping for the kids. Work had been all-consuming. Or had he just let it be all-consuming so that he would not have to think about their birthday and the anniversary of their mother’s death?
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