Authors: James Patterson
‘No,’ Knight said. ‘He’s going to try something here. Something big.’
‘He’ll have to be Houdini,’ Jack observed. ‘You heard them, they’ve gone to war-zone security levels. They’re putting double teams of SAS snipers up high and every available cop in the halls and stairways.’
‘I’m hearing you, Jack,’ Knight said. ‘But given what the insane bastard has done so far, we can’t be sure that
any
security level is going to work. Think about it. Lancer oversaw a billion and a half dollars in security spending for the Olympics. He knows every contingency that Scotland Yard and MI5 provided for in their plans. And for much of the past seven years that lunatic has had access to every inch of every venue as it was built. Every goddamn inch.’
AT THREE-THIRTY THAT
afternoon, echoing through the fourteen-inch gap between the restaurant ceiling and the roof of the Orbit, I hear hydraulic gears being braked and halted, and feel the slow rotation of the observation deck stop. Closing my eyes and calming my breathing, I prepare for what lies ahead. My fate. My destiny. My just and final due.
At ten minutes to four I squeeze the tube of special skin cream onto the turban cloth and use it to turn my skin near-black. A maintenance crew enters and cleans the room below me. I can hear their mops sluicing the floor for several minutes, followed by half an hour of silence that is interrupted only by the soft sounds of the movement it takes to stain my head, neck and hands.
At twelve minutes past four, the first sniffer dog team enters the gents’, and I have the sudden terrible thought that the monsters might have been clever enough to bring an article of my clothing to prime their beasts. But the patrol is in and out in under a minute, fooled no doubt by the smell of the patchouli oil.
They return at five and again at six. When they leave after the third time, I know that my hour is at hand. Cautiously, I grope around under a strip of insulation, finding a loaded ammunition clip put there seven months ago. Pocketing the clip, I lower myself into the stall and then strip off my remaining clothes, leaving me two-tone, black and white, and a terror to behold in the mirror.
Naked now except for my wristwatch, I rip a length of the turban fabric and wrap the two ends around my hands, leaving an eighteen-inch section dangling slack. Taking a position tight to the wall next to the gents’ door, I settle down to wait.
At six forty-five, I hear footsteps and men’s voices. The door opens and comes right up against my face before it swings back the other way to reveal the back of a tall, athletic black monster in a tracksuit and carrying a large duffel bag.
He is big. I assume he’s skilled. But he is no match for a superior being.
The slack turban fabric flicks over his head and settles below his chin. Before he can even react, I’ve got my knee in his back and I’m throttling the life out of him. Seconds later, still feeling the quivering and soft nasal whining of his death, I drag the monster’s body to the farthest stall, and then move to his duffel bag, glancing at my watch. Thirty minutes until showtime.
It takes me less than half that to don the parade uniform of the Queen’s guardsman and set the black bearskin hat on my head, feeling its familiar weight settle above my eyebrows and tight to my ears. After a minor adjustment, I’ve got the leather chinstrap taut and snug against my jaw. Last, I pick up his automatic rifle, knowing very well that it’s empty. I don’t care. The ammo clip is full.
Then I return to the middle stall and wait. At a quarter past seven, I hear the door open and a voice growl, ‘Supple, we’re up.’
‘On it in two,’ I reply, disguising my voice with a cough. ‘Go to the hatch.’
‘See you topside,’ he says.
I hope not, I think before I hear the door close behind him.
Out of the stall now, I go to the door, tracking the sweep second hand of my watch. At exactly ninety seconds, I take a deep breath and step out through the door and into the hallway, carrying the duffel bag.
At a quick pace, eyes gazing straight ahead, my face expressionless, I walk through the restaurant to the glass doors on the right-hand side of the dining room. Two SAS men are already unlocking the doors. As they swing them open, exposing me to the heat, I set my dufflel bag to one side next to another identical one, and charge past them onto the observation platform and towards a narrow doorway that is open and guarded by yet another SAS man.
I’ve timed it perfectly. The guard hisses, ‘Cutting it bloody close, mate.’
‘Shaving it close is what the Queen’s Guard do, mate,’ I say, ducking past him and into a tight stairwell with a narrow steel staircase that rises to a retracting hatch door and open air.
I can see the early-evening sky and clouds racing above me. Hearing distant trumpets calling, I climb towards my fate, so close now that I can feel it like a muscle burn and taste it like sweet sweat on my lips.
THE TRUMPETERS STOOD
to either side of the stage down on the floor of the Olympic Stadium, blowing a plaintive melody that Knight did not recognise.
He stood high in the stands at the north end of the venue, using binoculars to scan the crowd. He was tired, his head aching, and was feeling overly irritated by the lingering heat and the sound of the trumpets launching the closing ceremony. As it stopped, the screens around the stadium jumped to a feed showing a medium-range view of the Olympic cauldron high atop the Orbit and flanked as it had been since the opening ceremony by the ramrod-straight Queen’s guardsmen.
The guardsmen on the raised platform above the roof shouldered their guns, pivoted through forty-five degrees and marched stiff-legged, their free arms pumping, in opposite directions towards two new guardsmen who climbed up onto the roof from hatches on either side of the observation deck and moved towards the platform and cauldron. The guards passed each other exactly halfway between the cauldron and the stairwell. The guards who were being relieved of duty disappeared from the roof and the new pair climbed the platform from either side to stand rigidly at attention beside the Olympic flame.
Knight roamed the crowd for the next hour and a half. As the summer sky began to darken and breezes began to stir, he was buoyed by the fact that despite the threat Lancer still posed, an incredible number of athletes, coaches, judges, referees and fans had decided to attend the closing ceremony when they could just as easily have gone home to more certain safety.
The affair had originally been planned as a celebration as joyous as the opening ceremony had been before the death of the American shot-putter. But the organisers had tweaked the ceremony in light of the murders, and had made it more sombre and meaningful by enlisting the London Symphony Orchestra to back Eric Clapton who delivered a heart-wrenching version of his song ‘Tears in Heaven’.
In that same vein, as Knight moved south inside the stadium, Marcus Morris was now giving a speech that was part elegy to the dead and part celebration of all the great and wonderful things that had happened at the London Games in spite of Cronus and his Furies.
Knight glanced at the programme and thought: We’ve got a few more speeches, a spectacle or two, the turning over of the Olympic flag to Brazil; and then a few words by the mayor of Rio and …
‘Anything, Peter?’ Jack asked over the radio. They’d changed security frequencies in case Lancer was trying to monitor their broadcasts.
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘But it still doesn’t feel right.’
That thought was paramount in Knight’s mind until the organisers broke from the scheduled programme to introduce some ‘special guests’.
Dr Hunter Pierce appeared on the stage along with Zeke Shaw and the four runners who’d won marathon gold. They pushed Filatri Mundaho in a wheelchair before them, a sheet over his legs. Medical personnel followed.
Mundaho had suffered third-degree burns over much of his lower body, and had endured several excruciating abrasion procedures during the past week. The co-world-record holder in the 100 metres should have been in agony, unable to rise from his hospital bed. But you’d never have known it.
The orphaned ex-boy soldier’s head was up, proud and erect. He was waving to the crowd, which leaped to its collective feet and began cheering for him. Knight’s eyes watered. Mundaho was showing incredible, incredible courage, along with an iron will and a depth of humanity that Lancer could not even begin to fathom.
They gave the sprinter his gold-medal ceremony, and during the playing of the Cameroonian national anthem Knight was hard pressed to find someone in the stadium who wasn’t teary-eyed.
Then Hunter Pierce began to talk about the legacy of the London Games, arguing that it would ultimately signify a rekindling of and rededication to Pierre de Coubertin’s original Olympic dreams and ideals. At first Knight was held enraptured by the American diver’s speech.
But then he forced himself to tune her out, to try to think like Lancer and like Lancer’s alter ego Cronus. He thought about the last few things that the madman had said to him. He tried to see Lancer’s words as if they were printed on blocks that he could pick up and examine in detail:
AT THE END, JUST BEFORE YOU DIE, KNIGHT, I’M GOING TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN WITNESS HOW I INGENIOUSLY MANAGE TO SNUFF OUT THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT FOR EVER
.
Knight considered each and every word, exploring their meaning in every sense. And that’s when it hit him, the seventh to last word in the sentence.
He triggered his radio microphone, and said, ‘You don’t snuff out a spirit, Jack.’
‘Come back with that, Peter?’ Jack said.
Knight was already running towards the exit, saying, ‘Lancer told me he was going to “snuff out the Olympic spirit forever”.’
‘And?’
‘You don’t snuff out a spirit, Jack. You snuff out a flame.’
LOOK AT ME
now, hiding in plain sight of a hundred thousand people and cameras linked to billions more.
Fated. Chosen. Gifted by the gods. I am clearly a being superior in every way, certainly superior to pathetic Mundaho and Shaw and that conniving bitch Hunter Pierce, and the other athletes down there on the stage inside the stadium, all of them condemning me as a …
The wind is picking up. I shift my attention into the wind: north-west, far beyond the stadium, far beyond London. Out there on the horizon dark clouds are boiling up into thunderheads. What could be more fitting as a backdrop?
Fated, I think, before I hear a roar go up in the stadium.
What’s this? Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney are coming onto the stage and taking seats at opposite white pianos. Who’s that with them? Marianne Faithfull? Oh, for pity’s sake, they’re singing ‘Let it Be’ to Mundaho.
At their monstrous screeching, you can’t begin to understand how much I want to abandon my stance of attention, rub my scar and end this hypocritical pap right now. But, with my eyes locked dead ahead into the approaching storm, I tell myself to stay calm and follow the plan to its natural and fated ending.
To keep the infernal singing from getting to me, I focus on the fact that, just a few minutes from now, I
will
reveal myself. And when I do I’ll be able to rejoice in their shared horror: McCartney, John, and Faithfull too. I’ll watch them all trampling over Mundaho as they run for the exits and I joyously make one final sacrifice in the name of every true Olympian who ever lived.
HEARING THE CROWD
in the stadium singing ‘Let it Be’, Knight raced towards the base of the Orbit, seeing Jack already there ahead of him, interrogating the Gurkhas guarding the staircase that wound its way up the tower’s DNA-like superstructure towards the circular observation deck.
When Knight arrived, legs cramping and head splitting, he gasped, ‘Was Lancer up there?’
‘They say the only people who went up after three-thirty were some SAS snipers, a dog team, and the two Queen’s guardsmen protecting the—’
‘Can we alert them, the men on the roof?’ Knight said, cutting Jack off.
‘I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘I mean, I don’t think so.’
‘I think Lancer plans to blow up the cauldron, maybe this entire structure. Where’s the propane tank and feeder line that keep the flame alight?’
‘It’s over this way,’ called the strained voice of a man hurrying them.
Stuart Meeks was head of facilities at the Olympic Park. A short man in his fifties who sported a pencil-thin moustache and slicked-back hair, he carried an iPad and sweated profusely as he used an electronic code to open a door set flush in the concrete floor. The steps beneath the door led down into a massive utility basement that ran beneath the western legs of the Orbit and out under the river and the plaza towards the stadium.
‘How big is the tank down there?’ Knight asked as Meeks lifted the door.
‘Huge – five hundred thousand litres,’ Meeks said, holding out the iPad, which showed a schematic of the gas system. ‘But as you can see here it serves all the propane needs in the park, not just the cauldron. The gas is drawn from the main reservoir here into smaller holding tanks at each of the venues – and in the athletes’ village, of course. It was designed, like the electrical station, to be self-sufficient.’