Private Games (33 page)

FOR THE LAST
thirty minutes, his mouth taped shut, his head pounding and painful, Knight had alternated between trying to break free of his bonds, gasping in frustration, and looking longingly at his comatose children, dully aware of the marathon coverage blaring from the television in Lancer’s spare bedroom.

It was 11:55. In mile eleven – kilometre nineteen – just shy of an hour into the race, runners from the UK, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mexico had broken away from the main pack along the Victoria Embankment. They were using each other to chew up ground as they headed past the London Eye towards Parliament at sub-Olympic-record pace despite the blistering heat.

Knight wondered grimly what atrocity Lancer had waiting somewhere along the marathon route. But he refused to contemplate what Marta might have in store for him and the twins in the aftermath of the last race of the Games.

He closed his eyes and began to pray to God and to Kate, pleading with them to help him save their children. He told them he’d be fine about dying if that meant he’d be with Kate again. But the children, they deserved to …

Marta walked into the room, carrying the black assault weapon that Knight had seen the night before as well as a plastic bag containing three litre-sized Coke bottles. Her dark locks had been chopped and dyed, leaving her hair a violent blonde tipped with silver highlights that somehow matched the black leather skirt, tank top and calf-length boots she wore. Her heavy make-up changed her appearance still further. If Knight hadn’t spent so much time around her in the last two weeks he might never have recognised her as the plain nanny who’d first approached him at the playground.

Marta paid Knight no mind, as if he and everyone else in the room were afterthoughts. She set the Coke bottles on a dresser, then cradled the gun and went to Daring’s side. She set the gun down, picked up a hypodermic needle and shot it into the IV line that had been inserted into the museum curator’s arm.

‘Time to wake up,’ she said, and gathered up the gun again.

She fished an apple from her pocket and bit into it. Her attention shifted lazily to the marathon coverage.

Luke stirred and opened his eyes, looking right at his father. His eyes went wide. Then his brows knitted, his face grew beet-red and he began making whining noises, not of fear but as if he desperately wanted to tell his father something. Knight recognised that red-faced expression and understood the meaning behind the stifled cries immediately.

At the noise, Marta looked over with such a cold expression on her face that Knight’s pounding brain screamed at him to make her look at him and not at his son.

Knight began to moan behind his tape. Marta glanced over, chewing her apple, and said, ‘Shut up. I don’t want to hear you cry like your little boy.’

Instead of complying, Knight moaned louder and smashed his feet against the floor, trying not only to alert someone below but to bother Marta. He wanted to get her talking. He knew enough about hostage negotiation to understand how crucial it was to get a captor talking.

Isabel woke up and started to cry.

Marta took up the gun, stomped over to Knight, and laughed. ‘We own the flat below, too. So go ahead, make noise. No one hears you.’

With that she kicked him in the stomach. Knight doubled up and rolled over on his back, gasping and feeling glass from the shattered fruit-juice tumbler crunch beneath him. Luke began to wail. Marta glared at the children. Knight was sure that she was going to kick them. But then she squatted down and ripped the tape off Knight’s mouth. ‘Tell them to shut up or you’re all dead right now.’

‘Luke wants to use the loo,’ Knight said. ‘Take the tape off. Ask him.’

Marta shot him a foul look, then scuttled across to his son and peeled off the tape over his mouth. ‘What?’

Knight’s son shrank away from Marta, but looked at his father and said, ‘Lukey need go poop. Big-boy loo.’

‘Crap in your pants for all I care.’

‘Big-boy loo, Marta,’ the boy insisted. ‘Lukey go big-boy. No nappy.’

‘Give him a chance,’ Knight said. ‘He’s just three.’

Marta’s expression turned into a disgusted sneer. But she got out a knife and cut free Luke’s ankles. Gun in one hand, she hauled Knight’s son to his feet and snarled, ‘If this is another false alarm, I’ll kill you first.’

They moved past Daring and disappeared through the door into the hallway. Knight glanced all around, rolled back slightly, and heard glass crunch again, felt tiny shards of it pricking his arms and back.

The pain jolted his brain into realising his opportunity, and he began frantically arching his back and moving around, fingers groping desperately beneath him. Please, Kate. Please.

The index finger of his right hand felt the keen edge of a larger shard of glass, perhaps two inches long, and tried to coax it into his hand. But he fumbled and dropped it. Cursing under his breath, Knight groped again. But he hadn’t found it when he heard Luke cry, ‘See, Marta? Big boy!’

A second later, he heard a toilet flush. Knight’s fingers searched in a frenzy. Nothing. He heard footsteps, arched his hips one more time and pushed himself back closer to where the glass had shattered. Then Luke walked in, wrists still taped in front of him, beaming at his father.

‘Lukey big boy now, Daddy,’ he said. ‘Lukey three. No nappies.’

‘GOOD JOB, LAD,’
Knight said, lying back, smiling at his son, glancing at Marta – who was still cradling the gun – and feeling a thick chunk from the bottom of the juice glass lying on the floor just below the small of his back.

The fingers of his right hand closed round it just as Marta said to Luke, ‘Go and sit down next to your sister – and don’t move.’ She turned to inspect Daring, who was now shifting on the bed.

‘Wake up,’ she said again. ‘We have to go soon.’

Daring moaned as Knight twisted the chunk of glass into the duct tape around his wrists and began to saw at it. Luke came dutifully towards his father, smiling and saying, ‘Lukey big boy.’

His attention jumping back to Marta, Knight said, ‘Brilliant. Now sit down like Marta told you too.’

But his son didn’t budge. ‘We go home, Daddy?’ Luke said, and Bella began to whine in agreement behind her gag. ‘We go and have party?’

‘Soon,’ Knight said, feeling the tape begin to part. ‘Very soon.’

But then Marta snatched up the gun and a roll of duct tape and started towards Luke. His son took one look at the tape and cried, ‘No, Marta!’

Luke ducked and started to run. Marta became infuriated. Pointing the gun at Knight’s son, she barked, ‘Sit down. Now. Or you die.’

But Knight’s son was too young to understand fully the implications of having a loaded weapon aimed at him. ‘No!’ Luke said impudently, and jumped onto the mattress beside Isabel, his eyes darting around, looking for escape.

‘I’ll teach you, then,’ Marta said, stalking towards Luke, her stare fully on the boy and not on Knight who felt his wrists come free.

As she passed him, looking to corner his son, Knight lashed out with his bound feet.

They connected hard with Marta’s Achilles tendons. She cried out as her legs buckled and she fell sideways to the floor. The gun clattered away.

Knight twisted around, clutching that chunk of glass, and tried to slash her with it. But her reaction time was stunningly fast and practical. She threw up her forearm, taking the cut there before kneeing Knight hard in the chest.

The wind knocked out of him, Knight let go of the glass shard.

Insane with fury, Marta jumped to her feet and snatched up the gun. She marched over to one of the Coke bottles, opened it, and stuffed the muzzle inside and down into the liquid before saying, ‘I don’t care what Cronus wants. I have had enough of you, and your bastard children.’

Marta deftly wrapped duct tape around her bleeding arm, and then around the gun barrel and the mouth of the bottle before swinging around the crudely silenced weapon. Her eyes had gone dark and dead, and Knight had a glimpse of what all those Bosnian boys must have seen when the Brazlic sisters had come calling. With grim intent, Marta marched towards Luke who still sat beside his sister. She said to Knight, ‘The boy goes first. I want you to see how it’s done.’

‘Lancer is going to kill you!’ Knight shouted at her. ‘Just like he killed your sisters!’

That stopped her progress. She turned to him and said, ‘My sisters are very much alive. They have already escaped from London.’

‘No,’ Knight said. ‘Lancer killed them both. He broke Andjela’s neck, and then cut off her hands and sent them to me. Nada’s throat was cut from ear to ear.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Marta snarled as she came at him, raising the gun.

‘They were found in the same abandoned factory near the gasworks where you kept Selena Farrell.’

That information made Marta pause briefly. ‘How come it hasn’t been on the news?’

‘They probably haven’t alerted the media,’ Knight said, fumbling for an answer. ‘They do that, you know – hide things.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said. Then she shrugged. ‘And even if it is true, so much the better for me. I am sick of them. I think of killing them myself from time to time.’

Marta clicked off the rifle’s safety catch.

SUDDENLY SIRENS WAILED
nearby, coming closer, and Knight’s spirits surged with renewed hope.

‘They’re coming for you now,’ he said, grinning insanely at Marta and the bottom of the Coke bottle. ‘You’re going to the gallows, no matter what you do to me and my children.’

‘No.’ She laughed caustically. ‘If they go anywhere, they go next door, not here. In the meantime, I kill you and then use the tunnel to escape.’

She tried to press the Coke bottle against Knight’s head. But he batted at it with his hand and jerked around as the sirens came closer and louder. He thought: Buy time. At least the twins will be saved.

But then Marta stepped on the side of Knight’s neck with her boot, choking him as she lowered the silenced gun.

He looked up at her cross-eyed and grabbed at her ankles, trying to upset her balance. But she just ground her boot deeper and harder into his neck until his strength was gone.

Marta peered down at him. ‘Goodbye, Mr Knight. Too bad I don’t have a pickaxe.’

KNIGHT THOUGHT OF
Kate in the instant before Marta’s eyes snapped wide open. She screamed in agony, yanked the Coke bottle away from his head and her boot off his neck, and fired the rifle. With a weird wet thud, the silenced gun blew a hole in the wall just above Knight’s head. Coke and plastic fragments showered down on him as Marta screamed in agony once more. Frenzied, she spun away from Knight, groping wildly behind her.

Luke had bitten into Marta’s hamstring, and was holding on like a little bulldog while his nanny furiously pounded against him, screaming again and again. Knight kicked her hard in the shin and she dropped the gun before ramming her elbow hard into Luke’s side.

The boy slammed against the wall and lay still.

Knight crawled after the gun while Marta glared at Luke and felt down her leg for the gaping wound he’d left. She didn’t notice his father until he was inches from the rifle.

She cursed and lunged towards Knight as his finger found the trigger and he tried to swing the gun to point it at her. She swept her other arm round and struck the side of the barrel, deflecting his aim even as the now unsilenced rifle went off again, this time with a deafening boom that disorientated Knight for a second. He looked around, dizzy, praying that he’d managed to shoot Marta somehow.

But then the oldest Fury kicked him in the ribs and ripped the gun from his hands. Gasping – and grinning in triumph – she aimed the muzzle at Knight’s unconscious son.

‘Watch him die,’ she snarled.

The shot this time sounded distant and otherworldly to Knight, but it was aimed perfectly at his breaking heart. He fully expected Luke’s small body to jump at the bullet’s impact.

Instead, Marta’s throat exploded in a slurry of blood before the war-criminal nanny crumpled and sprawled dead between Knight and his son.

Dumbfounded and slack-jawed, Knight twisted his head around and saw Kate’s older sister rising from a shooting crouch.

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER
Pottersfield had shot and killed the wanted war criminal Senka Brazlic, the police inspector and Knight were in her car, sirens and lights on, racing through the streets of Chelsea and heading towards The Mall where the top runners were well into their fourth and final lap of the marathon route.

Ordinarily, the men’s marathon, the final event of the summer Games, would end in the host city’s Olympic stadium. But the London organisers – largely at Lancer’s urging, it turned out – had decided that sending the runners through the scruffy East End was not the best way to sell the city’s stunning attributes to the world.