man and searched his pockets. He removed his wallet-to make identification a little more difficult when the police were finally summoned by somebody who’d noticed the smell of decomposition-a set of car keys, a box of nine- millimeter ammunition, and another Walther pistol in a belt holster. He was acquiring quite an armory.
Then he grabbed the man by his heels and dragged him across the level ground toward the crevice he’d noticed. He stopped beside it, laid the body parallel to the opening, and simply rolled it down into the crevice. He tossed a few broken branches and other debris over the corpse, completely concealing it from view. With any luck, it would be several days before anybody discovered the body.
Bronson walked back across the clearing to the end of the ventilation shaft, climbed up the rock until he could shine his flashlight down it, and called out to Angela.
“Can you climb on the chair and follow me out?” he asked.
Her face, pinched with concern, appeared at the end of the shaft.
“Are you okay?” she replied. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. Now, we need to move. The clock’s running and we have to get back to London as quickly as we can.”
Thirty minutes later, they drove back down the track toward the main road and the village of Ludwikowice, but this time in a different car. The keys Bronson had taken from the pocket of the dead man had fitted another BMW, a big four-by-four, which he’d found parked about fifty yards away from the vehicle he and Angela had arrived in. Bronson wasn’t sure how long it would be before the owner of the BMW he’d stolen the registration plates from alerted the police, but it seemed prudent to change vehicles. The one thing he was certain about was that neither of the men who’d driven the four-by-four to the mine would be able to report its theft.
And there was another reason as well. When Bronson had opened the trunk to transfer their bags to the second vehicle, he’d discovered that the trunk lid of the new car had been modified, the plastic covering over the inside of the metal fitted with two concealed catches and a hinge. When it was opened, padded recesses were revealed, clearly designed to hold a pair of submachine guns, a couple of pistols, and half a dozen boxes of ammunition. The only reason he’d discovered the hiding place was that the cover had been opened by the two men to access their weapons when they arrived at the spot, and they hadn’t replaced it fully. One MP5 was still in place: obviously the men had decided to carry only those weapons appropriate for their task.
Bronson had tucked the pistols, the submachine gun and the ammunition into place and snapped the cover shut. Once in place, there was no external indication that the trunk lid was anything other than absolutely standard.
As he drove away, he reflected that he and Angela were almost certainly better armed than the occupants of any police car in any country in the world, with a total of two submachine guns and four pistols, including the Llama, which was now tucked away in Angela’s purse, and the second Walther pistol, the silencer still attached, hidden-but within reach-underneath the driver’s seat.
At the end of the road, Bronson swung the BMW to the right, heading west, back toward the German border. They had a long way to go to get to London, and he knew that time was running out.
What Marcus’s man had blurted out as he lay dying in the Wenceslas Mine meant that the attack on London was imminent. The one event of the Olympic Games that would be sure to attract publicity from around the world was the opening ceremony, scheduled for the evening of the following day. And that, Bronson guessed, was when the attack would take place. Not only would that mean Marcus’s vengeance attack on London would be witnessed by the whole world, but because of the popularity of the event, it would also result in enormous casualty figures.
Whatever Bronson and Angela did, they simply had to stop this catastrophic attack from taking place.
The only problem was, right then, Bronson had no idea how they were going to achieve that.
45
26 July 2012
“One thing that man said still puzzles me,” Angela said, giving a slight shiver as her mind replayed the events that had taken place a few hours ago in the darkness of the Wenceslas Mine.
They’d crossed back into Germany without any problems, and Bronson was simply following the instructions given by the satnav, which was taking them along the fastest possible route to Calais.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“That remark he made about ‘our symbol for the Games.’ I presume he meant something German, but nothing about the Olympics has any link with Germany, surely? I mean, the tradition goes back to ancient Greece, doesn’t it?”
Bronson glanced at her and gave a smile. Then he shook his head.
“What?”
“It’s not often that I know more about something than you do,” he said teasingly. “And you know my dislike of all forms of organized sport. So it’s actually rather odd that I do know something about the Olympics. In fact, I know several things about the Games that most people don’t, but it’s all information I acquired by accident. A couple of months ago I was involved in a surveillance operation that went absolutely nowhere because we had the wrong information, and I spent a couple of nights sitting in the bedroom of a house on a small estate, waiting for a phone call that never came. The only books the owner of the place possessed were about sport, and the only one I found even halfway readable dealt with interesting facts about the Olympic Games.”
“And?”
“And the symbol of the Olympic Games-the famous Rings of Olympus-which most people seem to think was created by the nation that invented the concept, i.e., the ancient Greeks, wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what?”
“Wasn’t anything to do with the Greeks, ancient or modern. The design came from the fertile brain of a French aristocrat named Pierre Fredy, better known as Baron de Coubertin, who’s usually considered to be the father of the modern Olympic Games. He created the symbol in nineteen twelve. The design of five interlocking rings, colored blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background, was intended for the World Congress of nineteen fourteen, but that was suspended because of the First World War. It was later adopted for the Olympic Games. And there’s no truth in the idea that each ring represents a continent. In fact, de Coubertin chose the colors because they appeared on all the national flags of the world.”
“Fascinating,” Angela muttered, but the tone of her voice caused Bronson to glance across at her. “And that has what, exactly, to do with Germany?”
“Nothing, directly,” Bronson admitted, “but the German propaganda machine virtually took over the symbol and used it to glorify the Third Reich in the run-up to the ’thirty-six Games, and afterward. I think that’s why that German used the expression “our symbol”-it was so closely linked with the Nazi party. The Berlin Games were hugely important to Hitler, and he and a man named Carl Diem were largely responsible for creating two Olympic myths that endure to this day.
“The first relates to the Olympic Rings. Hitler was determined that the Games should put Germany, and especially the Nazi party, in the center of the world’s stage, and also establish a kind of link with ancient Greece, with the nation that had founded the Olympics, because Hitler apparently believed that the Greek civilization was a kind of ancient version of the German Reich.”
“That man brought a whole new breadth of meaning to the word ‘deluded,’” Angela said.
“Exactly. So Carl Diem traveled to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle was supposed to have lived, and which was also the site of the Pythian Games, the forerunners of the Olympics. He ordered a stone altar to be constructed there-it included the interlocking rings symbol and was to be used as part of a torchbearers’ ceremony for the Berlin Olympics to be held in Greece. Once the ceremony was over, the altar was left at Delphi and more or less forgotten about. Then a couple of British academics visited the site in the late fifties, found the stone and assumed it dated from the earliest days of the Games, and claimed it established a link between the ancient Greek contests and the modern Olympics. Some history books even today quote this ‘evidence’ as proof that the symbol originated about three thousand years ago. In fact, of course, Carl Diem’s Stone, as it has become known, was just an inspired piece of Nazi propaganda.”
