Private Games

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

SHORTLY AFTER TEN that morning, Marcus Morris shifted uncomfortably on the pavement outside the Houses of Parliament. But then he looked out forcefully at the cameras and microphones and the mob of reporters gathered around him. ‘Though he remains our respected colleague, someone who worked for more than ten years to see these Games realised, Michael Lancer has been relieved of his duties for the duration of the Olympics.’

‘About bloody time!’ someone shouted, and then the entire mob around Sun reporter Karen Pope exploded, roaring questions at the chairman of the London Organising Committee like losing traders in a stock-market commodity pit.

Most of the questions were ones that Pope wanted answered as well. Would the Games go on? Or would they be suspended? If they went on, who would replace Lancer as the committee’s chief of security? What about the growing number of countries withdrawing their teams from competition? Should they be listening to the athletes who steadfastly argued against stopping or interrupting the Games?

‘We are listening to the athletes,’ Morris insisted in a strong voice. ‘The Olympics will go on. The Olympic ideals and spirit will survive. We will not buckle under to this pressure. Four top specialists from Scotland Yard, MI5, the SAS, and Private will oversee security for us in the final four days of the Games. I am personally heartbroken that some countries have chosen to leave. It is a tragedy for the Games and a tragedy for the athletes. For the rest, the Games go on.’

Morris followed a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers who opened a hole in the mob and moved towards a waiting car. The vast majority of the media surged as one after the LOCOG leader, bellowing all manner of questions.

Pope did not follow them. She leaned against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Parliament buildings and reviewed her notes from the morning and evening before.

In a journalistic coup, she’d tracked down Elaine Pottersfield and learned that, as well as radically intensifying the manhunt for Selena Farrell and James Daring, law-enforcement efforts were also focusing on the starting blocks that had exploded, maiming Filatri Mundaho.

Mundaho remained in a critical condition in Tower Bridge Hospital, but was said to be exhibiting a ‘tremendous fighting spirit’ in the wake of two emergency operations to remove the shrapnel and treat his burns.

The starting blocks were another story. Made by Stackhouse Newton and based on the company’s famed ‘TI008 International Best’ system’, the starting blocks that had exploded had been used ten times by ten different athletes in the previous days of qualifying.

The blocks had been conducted to and from the track by IOC officials, and had been set up by a crew of timing specialists who claimed to have observed no issue with the blocks before the explosion. Several of those timing specialists had actually been injured at the same time as Mundaho.

Between competitions, the blocks had been locked away in a special room below ground at the stadium. The Olympic track-and-field official who had locked the blocks away on the Saturday evening before the explosion was the same official who had unlocked the storage room late on Sunday afternoon. His name was Javier Cruz, a Panamanian, and he had been the most grievously injured of the race officials, losing an eye to the flying metal.

Scotland Yard bomb experts said the device was a block of metal machined to replicate exactly Stackhouse Newton standards. Only this block had been hollowed enough for shaved magnesium to be inserted along with a triggering device. Magnesium, an incredibly combustible material, explodes and burns with acetylene intensity.

Pottersfield said, ‘The device would have killed a normal man. But Mundaho’s superhuman reaction time saved his life if not his limbs.’

Pope flipped her notebook closed and reckoned she had enough material for her piece now. She thought of calling Peter Knight to find out if he could add anything to what she knew, but then she spotted a tall figure leaving the visitors’ gate at the side of the Houses of Parliament, shoulders hunched forward as he hurried south on St Margaret Street in the direction opposite to that being taken by the now dissipating mob of reporters.

She glanced back at them, realised that none of them had spotted Michael Lancer, and ran after him. She caught up with Lancer as he entered Victoria Tower Gardens.

‘Mr Lancer?’ she said, slowing beside him. ‘Karen Pope – I’m with the Sun.’

The former Olympics security chief sighed and looked at her with such despair that she almost didn’t have the heart to question him. But she could hear Finch’s voice shouting at her.

‘Your firing,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s fair?’

Lancer hesitated, struggling inside, but then he hung his head. ‘I do. I wanted the London Games to be the greatest in history and the safest in history. I know that we tried to think of every possible scenario in our preparations over the years. But the truth is that we simply did not foresee someone like Cronus, a fanatic with a small group of followers. In short, I failed. I’ll be held responsible for what happened. It’s my burden to bear and no one else’s. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to begin to live with that for the rest of my life.’