Private Games

Chapter 99

IN BROAD, BITTER strokes, I tell Knight a story that no one except the Brazlic sisters has ever heard in its entirety, starting with the hatred I was born with, right through stabbing my mother and killing the monsters who stoned me after I went to live with Minister Bob in Brixton, the roughest neighbourhood in all of London.

I tell Knight that after the stoning, in the spring of my fifteenth year, Minister Bob had me enter for a track meet because he thought I was stronger and faster than most boys. He had no idea what I was capable of. Neither did I.

During that first meet I won six events: the 100, 200, javelin, triple jump, long jump and discus. I did it again in a regional competition, and a third time at a junior national meet in Sheffield.

‘A man named Lionel Higgins approached me after Sheffield,’ I tell Knight. ‘Higgins was a private decathlon coach. He told me I had the talent to be the greatest all-around athlete in the world and to win the Olympic gold medal. He offered to help me figure out a way to train full-time, and filled my head with false dreams of glory and a life lived according to Olympic ideals, of competing fairly, may the best man win, and all that nonsense.’

Snorting scornfully, I say: ‘The monster slayer in me bought the phoney spiel hook, line and sinker.’

I go on to tell Knight how I lived the Olympic ideals for the next fifteen years of my life. Despite the headaches that would lay me low at least once a month, Higgins arranged for me to join the Coldstream Guards, where in return for a decade of service I’d be allowed to train. I did so, furiously, single-mindedly, some say maniacally for a shot at athletic immortality that finally came for me at the Games in Barcelona in 1992.

‘We expected the oppressive heat and humidity,’ I say to Knight. ‘Higgins sent me to India to train for it, figuring that Bombay would be worse than Spain. He was right. I was the best prepared, and I was mentally ready to suffer more than anyone else.’

Wrapped in the darkest of my memories, I shake my head like a terrier breaking a rat’s spine, and say, ‘None of it mattered.’

I describe how I led the Barcelona decathlon after the first day, through the 110-metre hurdles, high jump, discus, pole vault, and the 400. Temperatures were in the upper nineties and the oppressive, saturated air took its toll on me: I cramped up and collapsed after placing second in the 400.

‘They rushed me to a medical tent,’ I tell Knight. ‘But I wasn’t concerned. Higgins and I figured I would need a legal electrolytic boost after day one. I kept calling for my coach, but the medical personnel wouldn’t let him in. I could see they were going to put me on an IV. I told them I wanted my own coach to replenish the fluids and minerals I lost with a mixture we’d fine-tuned to my metabolism. But I was in no condition to fight them when they put the needle in my arm and connected it to a bag of God only knows what.’

Looking at Knight, feeling livid, I’m reliving the aftermath all over again. ‘I was a ghost of myself the next day. The javelin and the long jump were my best events, and I cratered in both. I didn’t finish in the top ten and I was the reigning world champion.’

The anger in me is almost overwhelming when I say, ‘No dream realised, Knight. No Olympic glory. No proof of my superiority. Sabotaged by what the modern Games have become.’

Knight stares at me with the same distrustful and fearful expression that Marta gave me when I offered to save her and her sisters in that police station in Bosnia.

‘But you were world champion,’ Knight says. ‘Twice.’

‘The immortals win Olympic gold. The superior wins gold. I was robbed of my chance by monsters. It was premeditated sabotage.’

Knight gazes at me in disbelief now, ‘And so you started plotting your revenge right then – eighteen years ago?’

‘The scope of my revenge grew over time,’ I admit. ‘It began with the Spanish doctors who doped me. They died of supposedly natural causes in September ’93. The referees who oversaw the event were killed in separate car crashes in ’94 and early ’95.’

‘And the Furies?’ Knight asks.

I sit on a stool a few feet from him. ‘Hardly anyone knows that after my regiment ended its service in the Queen’s Guard, we were sent into Sarajevo for a rotation with the NATO peacekeeping mission. I lasted less than five weeks due to a roadside bomb that cracked my head for the second time in my life.’

Knight’s words were less slurred now, and his eyes less glassy when he said ‘Was that before or after you helped the Brazlic sisters escape from that police station near Srebrenica?’

I smile bitterly. ‘After. With new passports and new identities, I brought the Furies to London and set them up in a flat next door. We even cut a secret door behind my armoire and their tapestry so we could appear to live separate lives.’

‘Dedicated to destroying the Olympics?’ Knight asks acidly.

‘Yes, that’s right. As I said, the gods were behind this, behind me. It was fate. How else do you explain that very early on in the process I was asked to be a member of the organising committee and, lo and behold, London won the bid. Fate allowed me to be on the inside from the start, hiding things where I needed them, altering them if they suited my purpose, given full access to every inch of every venue. And now with everyone hunting you and your children, fate will allow me to finish what I’ve begun.’

Knight’s face contorts. ‘You’re insane.’

‘No, Knight,’ I reply. ‘Just superior in ways you can’t understand.’

I stand up and start to walk away. He calls after me, ‘So are you going to wipe out all the Furies before your big finale? Kill Marta and then escape?’

‘Not at all,’ I chuckle. ‘Marta’s out putting your daughter’s necklace and your son’s watch on trains to Scotland and France respectively. When she’s done, she’ll return here, release Mr Daring and then kill your children. And then you.’