Private Games (25 page)

Knight heard the announcer say that while there had been ties in judged Olympic events like gymnastics in the past, and a tie between two American swimmers at the Sydney 2000 Games, there had never been a tie in any track event at any modern Olympics. The announcer said that the referees would examine photos as well as take the time down to the thousandth of a second.

Knight watched referees huddling by the track, and saw the tallest of them shake his head. A moment later, the screens flashed ‘Official Results’ and posted Shaw and Mundaho in a dead tie, with a time of 9:382.

‘I decline to run another heat,’ the referee was heard saying. ‘
I
consider that to have been the greatest foot race of all time and the timing stands. Both men share the world record. Both men win gold.’

The stadium rocked again with cheers, whistles and yells.

Through his binoculars, Knight saw Shaw gazing up at the results and then over at the referee with scepticism and irritation. But then the Jamaican’s expression melted into a grin that spread wide across his face. He jogged to Mundaho, who was smiling back at him. They spoke. Then they clasped hands, raised them, and jogged towards their cheering fans, holding the flags of Jamaica and Cameroon above their heads in their free hands.

The men took their long victory lap around the stadium together, and to Knight it was as if a pleasant summer shower had come along to wash foul smoke from the air. Cronus and the Furies now seemed not as powerful a force at the London Olympics as they had been just a few minutes ago.

The sprinters running together in a grand display of sportsmanship was their way of telling the world that the modern Games were still a force to be reckoned with, still a force for good, a force that could demonstrate shared humanity in the face of Cronus’s cruel assault.

Shaw said as much when he and Mundaho returned to the finish line and were interviewed by reporters. Knight saw it all up on the big screens.

‘When I saw the tie, I could not believe it,’ the Jamaican admitted. ‘And to tell you the truth, my first response was that I felt angry. I had beaten my own record, but I had not bested everyone as I did in Beijing. But then, after all that has happened at these Games, I saw that the tie was a beautiful thing: good for sprinting, good for athletics, and good for the Olympics.’

Mundaho agreed, saying, ‘I am humbled to have run with the great Zeke Shaw. It is the honour of my life to have my name mentioned in the same breath as his.’

The reporter then asked who would win the 200-metre final on Wednesday night. Neither man needed an interpreter. Both tapped their chests and said, ‘Me.’

Then each of them laughed and slapped the other on the back.

Knight breathed a sigh of relief when both men left the stadium. At least Cronus had not targeted those two.

For the next hour, as the men’s 1,500-metre semi-finals and the 3,000-metre steeplechase final were run, Knight’s mind wandered to his mother. Amanda had promised that she would not turn bitter and retreat into herself as she had after his father’s death.

But Knight’s past two conversations with Gary Boss indicated that was exactly what she was doing. She would not take his calls. She would not take anyone’s calls, even those who wanted to help arrange a memorial for Denton Marshall. According to her assistant, Amanda was spending every waking hour at her table sketching designs, hundreds of them.

He’d wanted to go to see her yesterday and this morning, but Boss had urged him against coming. Boss felt this was something that Amanda needed to go through alone, at least for a few more days.

Knight’s heart ached for his mother. He knew at a gut level what she was going through. He’d thought that his own grief
for
Kate would never end. And in a sense it never would. But through his children he’d found a way to keep going. He prayed his mother would find her own way apart from through work.

Then he thought of the twins. He was about to call home to say goodnight when the announcer called for competitors in the men’s 400-metre semi-finals.

People were on their feet again as Mundaho appeared in the tunnel from the warm-up track. The Cameroonian jogged out, as confident as he had been before the 100-metre event, moving in his characteristic loose-jointed way.

But instead of taking those explosive kangaroo hops, the Cameroonian began to skip and then to bound, his feet coming way up off the track surface and swinging forward as if he were a deer or a gazelle.

What other man can do that? Knight thought in awe. Where did the idea that he could even do that come from? The bullets flying at his back?

The Cameroonian slowed near his blocks on lane one, at the inside rear of the staggered start. Could Mundaho do it? Run a distance four times longer than what he’d just sprinted in world record time?

Evidently Zeke Shaw wanted to know as well because the Jamaican sprinter reappeared in the entry linking the practice track to the stadium and stood with three of the Gurkhas, all looking north towards the runners about to compete.

‘Mark,’ the official called.

Mundaho set his race shoes with their tiny metal stubs against the blocks. He crouched and tensed when the official called: ‘Set.’

The gun went off in the near-silent stadium.

The Cameroonian leaped off the blocks.

A thousandth of a second later a blinding silver-white light blasted from the blocks as they exploded and disintegrated, throwing out a low-angle wave of fire and hot jagged bits of metal that smashed into Mundaho’s lower body from behind, hurling the Cameroonian off his feet and onto the track where he lay crumpled and screaming.

KNIGHT WAS SO
shocked that he was unable to move for several seconds. Like many in the stadium he watched and listened in gut-clenched horror as Mundaho writhed on the track, sobbing and groaning in agony as he reached down to his charred and bleeding legs.

The other sprinters had stopped, looking back in shocked disbelief at the carnage in lane one. The intense metallic flame died, leaving the track where the blocks had been scorched and throwing off a burned chemical odour that reminded Knight of signal flares and tyres burning.

Paramedics raced towards the Cameroonian sprinter and several race officials who’d also been hit by the burning shrapnel.

‘I want everyone involved with those starting blocks held for questioning,’ Lancer bellowed over the radio, barely in control. ‘Find the timing judges, referees, everyone. Hold them! All of them!’

Around Knight, fans were coming out of their initial shock, some crying, some cursing Cronus. Many began to move
towards
the exits while volunteers and security personnel were trying to maintain calm.

‘Can you get me on the field, Jack? Mike?’ Knight asked.

‘That’s a negative,’ Jack said.

‘Double that negative,’ Lancer said. ‘Scotland Yard has already ordered it sealed for their bomb-forensics unit.’

Knight was suddenly furious that this had happened to Mundaho and to the Olympics – the Games had been caught up in the festering recesses of a twisted mind and made to suffer for it. He did not care what Cronus was going to claim the sprinter had done. Whatever he had or had not done, Mundaho did not deserve to be lying burned on the track. He should have been blowing the rest of the sprinters away in his quest for athletic immortality. Instead, he was being lifted onto a stretcher.

The stadium around Knight began to applaud as paramedics started to wheel the Cameroonian sprinter towards a waiting ambulance. They had IVs in his arm, and had obviously given him drugs, though Knight could still see through his binoculars that the boy soldier was racked with hideous pain.

Knight heard people saying that London would have to end the Games now, and felt furious that Cronus might have won, that it all might be finished now. But then he heard a cynic in the crowd say that there was no chance the Games would be cancelled. He’d read a story in the
Financial Times
that indicated that while London 2012’s corporate sponsors and the official broadcasters were publicly aghast at Cronus’s actions, they were privately astounded at the twenty-four-hour coverage the Games were receiving, and the public’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the various facets of the story.

‘The ratings for these Olympics are the highest in history,’ the cynic said. ‘I predict: no chance they’ll be cancelled.’

Knight had no time to think about any of it because Shaw, carrying the Cameroonian flag, suddenly came running out of the stadium’s entryway, along with the dozen or so competitors who were still in the 400-metre competition. They ran to the rear of the ambulance, exhorting the crowd to chant ‘Mundaho! Mundaho!’

The people remaining in the stadium went crazy with emotion, weeping, cheering – and screaming denouncements of Cronus and the Furies.

Despite the medical personnel around him, despite the agony ripping through his body, and despite the drugs, Mundaho heard and saw what his fellow athletes and the fans were doing for him. Before the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the Cameroonian sprinter raised his right arm and formed a fist.

Knight and everyone else in the stadium cheered the gesture. Mundaho was injured but not broken, burned but still a battle-hardened soldier. He might never run again, but his spirit and the Olympic spirit were still going strong.

FEELING AS THOUGH
she wanted to puke, Karen Pope swallowed antacid pills and stared uncomprehendingly at the television in the
Sun
newsroom as the medics loaded the stout-hearted Cameroonian sprinter into the back of the ambulance. She and her editor, Finch, were waiting for Cronus’s latest letter to arrive. So were the Metropolitan Police detectives who’d staked out the lobby, waiting for the messenger and hoping to trace rapidly where the letter had been collected.

Pope did not want to see what Cronus had to say about Mundaho. She did not care. She went to her editor and said, ‘I quit, Finchy.’

‘You can’t quit,’ Finch shot back. ‘What are you talking about? This is the story of a lifetime you’re on here. Ride it, Pope. You’ve been bloody brilliant.’

She burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to ride it. I don’t want to be part of killing and maiming people. This isn’t why I became a journalist.’

‘You aren’t killing or maiming anyone,’ Finch said.

‘But I’m helping to!’ she shouted. ‘We’re like the people
who
published the manifesto of the Unabomber over in the States when I was a kid! We’re abetting murder, Finch! I’m abetting murder, and I just won’t. I can’t.’

‘You’re not abetting murder,’ Finch said, softening his voice. ‘And neither am I. We are chronicling the murders, the same way journalists before us chronicled the atrocities of Jack the Ripper. You’re not helping Cronus, you’re exposing him. That’s our obligation, Pope. That’s
your
obligation.’

She stared at him, feeling small and insignificant. ‘Why me, Finch?’

‘I dunno. Maybe we’ll find out someday. I dunno.’

Pope could not argue any more. She just turned, went to her desk, sat in her seat and put her head down. Then her BlackBerry beeped, alerting her to an incoming message.

Pope exhaled, picked up the mobile and saw that the message was an e-mail with an attachment from ‘Cronus’. She wanted to bash her phone into shards, but she kept hearing her editor telling her it was her duty to expose these insane people for what they were.

‘Here it is, Finch,’ she called tremulously across the room. ‘Somebody better tell the police that there’s no messenger coming.’

Finch nodded and said, ‘I’ll do it. You’ve got an hour to deadline.’

Pope hesitated. Then she got angry and opened the attachment.

Cronus had expected Mundaho to die on the track.

His letter justified the ‘killing’ as ‘just retribution for the crime of hubris’, the greatest of all the sins in the era of myth. Arrogance, vanity, in all things prideful and a challenger to the gods, these were the accusations that Cronus threw at Mundaho.

He attached copies of e-mails, texts and Facebook messages between Mundaho and his Los Angeles-based sports agent, Matthew Hitchens. According to Cronus, the discussions between the men were not about competing for greatness for the sake of greatness and for the approval of the gods, as was the case during the ancient Olympics.

Instead, Cronus depicted the correspondence as grossly focused on money and material gain, with lengthy discussions over how winning the sprint jackpot at the London Olympics could increase Mundaho’s global value by several hundred million dollars over a twenty-year endorsement career.

‘Mundaho put up for sale the gift that the gods gave him,’ Cronus concluded. ‘He saw no glory in the simple idea of being the fastest man. He saw only gain, and therefore his arrogance towards the gods shone ever more brilliantly. In effect, Mundaho thought of himself as a god, entitled to great riches and to immortality. For the crime of hubris, retribution must always be swift and certain.’