Private Games

Chapter 111

THE TRUMPETERS STOOD to either side of the stage down on the floor of the Olympic Stadium, blowing a plaintive melody that Knight did not recognise.

He stood high in the stands at the north end of the venue, using binoculars to scan the crowd. He was tired, his head aching, and was feeling overly irritated by the lingering heat and the sound of the trumpets launching the closing ceremony. As it stopped, the screens around the stadium jumped to a feed showing a medium-range view of the Olympic cauldron high atop the Orbit and flanked as it had been since the opening ceremony by the ramrod-straight Queen’s guardsmen.

The guardsmen on the raised platform above the roof shouldered their guns, pivoted through forty-five degrees and marched stiff-legged, their free arms pumping, in opposite directions towards two new guardsmen who climbed up onto the roof from hatches on either side of the observation deck and moved towards the platform and cauldron. The guards passed each other exactly halfway between the cauldron and the stairwell. The guards who were being relieved of duty disappeared from the roof and the new pair climbed the platform from either side to stand rigidly at attention beside the Olympic flame.

Knight roamed the crowd for the next hour and a half. As the summer sky began to darken and breezes began to stir, he was buoyed by the fact that despite the threat Lancer still posed, an incredible number of athletes, coaches, judges, referees and fans had decided to attend the closing ceremony when they could just as easily have gone home to more certain safety.

The affair had originally been planned as a celebration as joyous as the opening ceremony had been before the death of the American shot-putter. But the organisers had tweaked the ceremony in light of the murders, and had made it more sombre and meaningful by enlisting the London Symphony Orchestra to back Eric Clapton who delivered a heart-wrenching version of his song ‘Tears in Heaven’.

In that same vein, as Knight moved south inside the stadium, Marcus Morris was now giving a speech that was part elegy to the dead and part celebration of all the great and wonderful things that had happened at the London Games in spite of Cronus and his Furies.

Knight glanced at the programme and thought: We’ve got a few more speeches, a spectacle or two, the turning over of the Olympic flag to Brazil; and then a few words by the mayor of Rio and …

‘Anything, Peter?’ Jack asked over the radio. They’d changed security frequencies in case Lancer was trying to monitor their broadcasts.

‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘But it still doesn’t feel right.’

That thought was paramount in Knight’s mind until the organisers broke from the scheduled programme to introduce some ‘special guests’.

Dr Hunter Pierce appeared on the stage along with Zeke Shaw and the four runners who’d won marathon gold. They pushed Filatri Mundaho in a wheelchair before them, a sheet over his legs. Medical personnel followed.

Mundaho had suffered third-degree burns over much of his lower body, and had endured several excruciating abrasion procedures during the past week. The co-world-record holder in the 100 metres should have been in agony, unable to rise from his hospital bed. But you’d never have known it.

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.’