BY SEVEN P.M. The intensity inside the Olympic Stadium was beyond electric, Knight thought from his position in the stands on the west side of the venue, high above the track’s finish line. The Private London investigator could sense the anticipation rippling through the ninety thousand souls lucky enough to have won a ticket to see who would be the fastest man on Earth. He could also see and hear fear competing with anticipation. People were wondering whether Cronus would attack here.
The event was certainly high-profile enough. The sprint competition so far had gone down as expected. Both Shaw and Mundaho had been brilliant in the 100-metre qualifying heats the day before, each of them dominating and winning easily. But while the Jamaican was able to rest between races, the Cameroonian had been forced to run in the classifications for the 400-metres.
Mundaho had performed almost superhumanly, turning in a time of 43.22 seconds, four one-hundredths of a second off Henry Ivey’s world-record performance of 43.18 at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Two hours ago, Mundaho and Shaw had won their 100-metre semi-final heats, with the Cameroonian just two one-hundredths off Shaw’s world record of 9.58 seconds. The men were getting ready to face each other in the 100-metre dash final. After that, Shaw would rest and Mundaho would have to run in the 400-metre semi- finals.
Gruelling, Knight thought as he scanned the crowd through his binoculars. Could Mundaho do it? Win the 100, 200 and 400 at a single Olympic Games?
In the end, did it matter? Would people really care after all that had happened to London 2012? Aside from the joy that Londoners had expressed earlier in the day when Mary Duckworth won the women’s marathon, the past forty-eight hours had seen a dramatic ratcheting-up of the anxiety surrounding the Games. On Saturday, the
Farrell, it turned out, had been a volunteer UN observer assigned to NATO in the war-torn area. There were still not many details of the professor’s exact duties on the mission, but Pope had discovered that Farrell had been badly hurt in some kind of vehicular accident in the summer of 1995 and had been sent home. After a short convalescence, she’d resumed her doctoral studies and gone on with her life.
The story had caused an uproar that grew when, late on Saturday evening, the body of Emanuel Flores, a Brazilian judo referee, was discovered near a rubbish skip in Docklands, several miles from the ExCel Arena where he’d been working and not on Olympic grounds. An expert in hand-to-hand combat, Flores had nevertheless been garrotted with a length of cable.
In a letter to Pope completely devoid of forensic evidence, Cronus claimed that Flores had accepted bribes to favour certain athletes in the judo competition. The documentation supported the allegations in some ways, and not others.
In reaction, broadcasters and journalists around the world were expressing uniform outrage that Cronus and his Furies seemed to be acting at will. The media were demanding action from the British government. This morning, Uruguay, North Korea, Tanzania and New Zealand had decided to pull their teams from the final week of competition. Members of Parliament and the Greater London Authority had reacted by stridently renewing calls for Mike Lancer to resign or be fired, and for the manhunt for Daring and Farrell to be intensified.
For his part a visibly shaken Lancer had been in front of cameras all day, defending his efforts. Around noon, he had announced that he was relieving F7 of its command over the entrances to the Olympic Park, and bringing in Jack Morgan of Private to oversee the effort. Together with Scotland Yard and MI5, they decided to institute draconian measures at the venues, including secondary screenings, more identification checks, and pat-downs.
It had not been enough to calm the Games. Ten countries, including Russia, floated the idea that the Olympics should be halted until security was assured.
But in an immediate and aggressive response, a staggering number of athletes had signed a digital petition drafted and distributed by the American diver Hunter Pierce that not only condemned the murders, but also defiantly and forcefully demanded that the IOC and LOCOG not give in to the idea of suspending the games.
To their credit, Marcus Morris, London’s Mayor and the Prime Minister were listening to the athletes and dismissing calls to halt the Olympics, saying that England had never bent to terrorism and wasn’t about to start now.
Despite the dramatic increase in security measures, some fans had stayed away from what was supposed to be the biggest event of the games. Knight could see scattered empty seats, something that would have been considered impossible before the start of the Olympics. But then again almost everything that had happened so far would have been considered impossible before the Games.
‘Bloody bastards have ruined it, Knight,’ Lancer said bitterly. The security chief had come up alongside Knight as he was scanning the crowd. Like Knight, Lancer wore a radio nub in his ear tuned to the stadium’s security frequency. ‘No matter what happens from now on, 2012 will always be the tainted—’
The crowd around them leaped to their feet and started cheering wildly. The final competitors in the men’s 100-metre dash were coming out onto the track. Shaw, the reigning Olympic champion, entered first, making little ‘stutter’ sprints and moving his hands like chopping tools.
Mundaho came out onto the track last and jogged in an almost sleepy lope before crouching and then hopping like a kangaroo down the track with such explosive energy that many in the crowd gasped, and Knight thought: Is that possible? Has anyone ever done that before?
‘That man’s a freak,’ Lancer remarked. ‘An absolute freak of nature.’
Chapter 76
THE OLYMPIC FLAME atop the Orbit burned without disturbance or deflection and the flags around the stadium hung flat; the wind had died to nothing – perfect conditions for a sprint race.
The radio nub in Knight’s ear crackled with calls and responses between Jack, the security crew, and Lancer, who’d moved off to get a different view. Knight looked around. High atop the stadium, SAS snipers lay prone behind their rifles. A helicopter passed overhead. The war birds had been circling the park all day, and the number of armed guards around the track doubled.
Nothing bad is going to happen in here tonight, Knight told himself. An attack would be suicidal.
The sprinters went to starting blocks that relied on a state-of-the art fully automated timing – FAT – system. Each block was built around ultra-sensitive pressure plates linked to computers to catch any false starts. At the finish line and linked to those same computers was an invisible matrix of criss-crossing lasers calibrated to a thousandth of a second.
The crowd was on its feet now, straining for better views as the announcer called the sprinters to their marks. Shaw was running in lane three, and Mundaho in lane five. The Jamaican glanced at the Cameroonian pivoting in front of his blocks. Setting their running shoes into the pressure sensors, the speedsters splayed their fingertips on the track, heads bowed.
Ten seconds, Knight thought. These guys spend their whole lives preparing for ten seconds. He couldn’t imagine it: the pressure, the expectations, the will and the hardship involved in becoming an Olympic champion.
‘Set,’ the judge called, and the sprinters raised their hips.
