Private Games-Jack Morgan 4

The Final Warning

Max

Fang

Angel

DANIEL X SERIES

The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (with Michael Ledwidge)

Daniel X: Watch the Skies (with Ned Rust)

Daniel X: Demons and Druids (with Adam Sadler)

Daniel X: Game Over (with Ned Rust)

WITCH & WIZARD SERIES

Witch & Wizard (with Gabrielle Charbonnet)

Witch & Wizard: The Gift (with Ned Rust)

Witch & Wizard: The Fire (with Jill Dembowski)

ILLUSTRATED NOVELS

Daniel X: Alien Hunter Graphic Novel (with Leopoldo Gout)

Maximum Ride: Manga Vol. 1 (with NaRae Lee)

Maximum Ride: Manga Vol. 2 (with NaRae Lee)

Maximum Ride: Manga Vol. 3 (with NaRae Lee)

Maximum Ride: Manga Vol. 4 (with NaRae Lee)

Maximum Ride: Manga Vol. 5 (with NaRae Lee)

Middle School (with Chris Tebbetts and Laura Park)

For more information about James Patterson’s novels, visit www.jamespatterson.co.uk

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For Connor and Bridger,

chasers of the Olympic dream – M.S.

Acknowledgements

WE WOULD LIKE to thank Jackie Brock-Doyle, Neal Walker and Jason Keen at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games for their willingness to be helpful, candid and yet understandably circumspect regarding a project like this one. The tour of the park construction site was incredibly instructive. We would not have got anywhere without Alan Abrahamson, Olympic expert and operator of 3Wire.com, the world’s best source of information about the Games and the culture that surrounds it. Special thanks go out as well to Vikki Orvice, Olympic reporter at the Sun and a wealth of knowledge, humour and gossip. We are also grateful to the staff at the British Museum, One Aldwych and 41 for their invaluable aid in suggesting settings for scenes outside the Olympic venues. Ultimately, this is a fictional story of hope and an affirmation of the Olympic ideals, so please forgive us a degree of licence regarding the various events, venues and characters likely to dominate the stage during the London 2012 Summer Games.

It is not possible with mortal mind to search out the purposes of the gods

– Pindar

For then, in wrath, the Olympian thundered and lightninged, and confounded Greece

– Aristophanes

Prologue

Wednesday, 25 July 2012: 11:25 p.m.

THERE ARE SUPERMEN and superwomen who walk this Earth.

I’m quite serious about that and you can take me literally. Jesus Christ, for example, was a spiritual superman, as was Martin Luther, and Gandhi. Julius Caesar was superhuman as well. So were Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolf Hitler.

Think scientists like Aristotle, Galileo, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Consider artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo – and Vincent Van Gogh, my favourite, who was so superior that it drove him insane. And above all, don’t forget athletically superior beings like Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Jesse Owens.

Humbly, I include myself on this superhuman spectrum as well – and deservedly so, as you shall soon see.

In short, people like me are born for great things. We seek adversity. We seek to conquer. We seek to break through all limits, spiritually, politically, artistically, scientifically and physically. We seek to right wrongs in the face of monumental odds. And we’re willing to suffer for greatness, willing to embrace dogged effort and endless preparation with the fervour of a martyr, which to my mind are exceptional traits in any human being from any age.

At the moment I have to admit that I’m certainly feeling exceptional, standing here in the garden of Sir Denton Marshall, a snivelling, corrupt old bastard if there ever was one.

Look at him on his knees, his back to me and my knife at his throat.

Why, he trembles and shakes as if a stone has just clipped his head. Can you smell it? Fear? It surrounds him, as rank as the air after a bomb explodes.