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.’
Chapter 112
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
Chapter 113
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.’
Knight gaped at him. ‘Are you saying if it blows, everything blows?’
‘No, I don’t …’ Meeks stopped. He turned pale. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
Jack said, ‘Peter and I were with Lancer ten days ago up on the observation deck shortly after he’d finished inspecting security on the cauldron. Did Lancer go down into this basement during that inspection, Stu?’
Meeks nodded. ‘Mike insisted on looking at everything one last time. From the tank and up the line, all the way to the coupling that connects the piping to the cauldron. It took us more than an hour.’
‘We don’t have an hour,’ Knight said.
Jack was already on the steep ladder, preparing to climb down to inspect the giant propane tank. ‘Call in the dogs again, Stu. Send them down as soon as they get here. Peter, trace the gas line up to the roof.’
Knight nodded before asking Meeks if he had any tools with him. The facilities director unsnapped a Leatherman from a pouch on his hip and told Knight he’d send the schematic of the gas-line system to his phone. No more than twenty yards up the spiral staircase that climbed the Orbit, Knight felt his phone buzz, alerting him to the arrival of the schematic.
He was about to open the link when he thought of something that made the diagram seem irrelevant at this point. He keyed his microphone and said, ‘Stuart, how is the gas line to the cauldron controlled? By that I mean is there a manual valve up there that controls the gas flow that will have to be moved for the flame in the cauldron to go out, or will it be done electronically?’
‘Electronically,’ Meeks replied. ‘Before it connects to the cauldron the line runs through a crawl space that’s part of the ductwork in the ceiling above the restaurant and below the roof.’
