Private Games

Chapter 120

KNIGHT WAS ALREADY well beyond the exhaust vent, up on the raised platform surrounding the cauldron, and now charging at full tilt through the pouring rain.

Before the madman’s thumb could hit the mobile’s send button, Knight hit Lancer low, hard, and from the side, a stunning blow that caused the crazed Olympian to lurch and fall to the floor of the platform. His automatic weapon skittered away.

Knight landed on top of Lancer, who was still clutching the mobile phone. The former decathlon champion was some ten years older than Knight. But he quickly proved bigger, stronger, and more skilled as a fighter.

Lancer backhanded Knight so hard that the Private London agent was thrown off, and almost slammed his face against the searing wall of the cauldron. The infernal heat and the drenching rain revived him almost instantly.

He twisted, seeing that Lancer was trying to regain his feet. But Knight kicked viciously at the madman’s ankle and connected. Lancer howled, stumbled to one knee and was rising again when Knight got his right forearm around the man’s bull neck from behind, trying to get a choke hold on him and seize the mobile before the gas bomb could be triggered.

He squeezed Lancer’s throat and grabbed at his thumb, trying to pry loose his grip on the phone. But then Lancer jammed his chin down on Knight’s forearm, twisted his torso, and threw elbow punches that struck Knight hard on ribs still bruised from the Fury’s attempt to run him down.

The Private London agent grunted in dire pain but held on, thinking of Luke and Isabel before taking a cue from his son. He bit brutally at the back of the insane man’s head, feeling a chunk of thick scar tissue tear away from Lancer’s scalp. Lancer screamed in agony and rage.

Knight bit again, this time lower, his teeth sinking into neck muscles as a lion might try to cripple a buffalo.

Lancer went berserk.

He swung and bucked, bellowing in blind primal fury and throwing meaty fists over his shoulder, hitting Knight in the head before pummelling his torso with elbow blows again, left and right, blows so hard that several of the Private agent’s ribs cracked and broke.

It was too much for him.

Knight’s breath was knocked out of him and the pain in his side erupted with such force that he grunted, releasing both his bite and the chokehold that he’d had on Lancer’s neck. He fell to the platform in the rain, groaning and fighting for air and a relief from the agony that now consumed him.

Blood dripping from his bite wounds, Lancer turned and glared down at Knight in triumph and in loathing.

‘You had no chance, Knight,’ he gloated, backing away and raising the mobile phone towards the sky again. ‘You were up against an infinitely superior being. You had no—’

Knight flung the Leatherman at Lancer.

It flew end over end before the narrow prongs of the pliers struck Lancer and pierced deep into his right eye.

Staggering backwards, still clutching the mobile, reaching futilely for the tool that had sealed his fate, Lancer let out a series of blood-curdling screams worthy of some mythical creature of doom, like Cronus after Zeus threw him deep into the darkest and deepest pit in Tartarus.

For a second, Knight feared Lancer would find his balance and manage to trigger the bomb.

But then thunder exploded directly over the Orbit, throwing a single white-hot jagged bolt that ignored the lightning rods fixed high above the observation deck and struck the butt end of the Leatherman tool protruding from Lancer’s eye, electrocuting the self-described instrument of the gods and hurling him back and over into the cauldron where he was engulfed and consumed by the roaring Olympic flame.