Private Games

Chapter 63

KNIGHT SKIDDED TO a halt in the blackness, feeling as if he was tottering at the edge of a cliff and struck with vertigo. People were screaming everywhere around him as he dug out a penlight on the key chain he always carried. He snapped it on just as battery-powered red emergency lights started to glow.

He and Jack sprinted the last seventy feet to the fire-escape door and tried to shoulder it open. Locked. Knight shot out the lock, provoking new chaos among the terrified fans, but the door flew open when they kicked it.

They hurtled down the fire-escape stairs and found themselves above the arena’s back area, which was clogged with media production trucks and other support vehicles for the venue. Red lights had gone on here as well, but Knight could not spot the pair of escaping women at first because there were so many people moving around below them, shouting, demanding to know what had happened.

Then he saw them, disappearing through an open door at the north-east end of the arena. Knight barrelled down the staircase, dodged past irate broadcast personnel, and spotted a security guard standing at the exit.

He showed his badge and gasped, ‘Two women. Where did they go?’

The guard looked at him in confusion. ‘What women? I was—’

Knight pushed past him and ran outside. Every light at the north end of the peninsula was dead, but thunder boomed and lightning cracked all around, giving them flashes of flickering vision.

The unseasonal fog swirled. Rain was pelting down. Knight had to throw up a forearm to shield his eyes. When the next flashes of lightning came, he peered along the nine-foot chain-link fence that separated the arena from a path along the Thames that led east and south to the river-bus pier.

The sandy-blonde Fury was crouched on the ground on the other side of the fence. The redhead had cleared the top and was climbing down.

Knight raised his gun, but it all went dark again and his penlight was no match for the night and the storm.

‘I saw them,’ Jack grunted.

‘I did too,’ Knight said.

But rather than go straight after the two women, Knight ran to the barrier where it was closest, pocketing the light and stuffing the gun into the back of his jeans. He clambered up the fence and jumped off the top.

It had been four days since he’d been run over, but Knight’s sore ribs still made him hiss with pain when he landed on the paved path. To his left, still well out on the water, he spotted the next ferry coming.

Jack landed beside Knight and together they raced towards the pier, which was lit by several dim red emergency lights. They slowed less than twenty yards from the ramp that led down onto the pier itself. Two Gurkhas lay dead on the ground, their throats slit from ear to ear.

Rain drummed on the surface of the dock. The river bus’s engines growled louder as it approached. But then Knight heard another engine start up.

Jack heard it too. ‘They’ve got a boat!’

Knight vaulted the chain that was strung across the entrance to the ramp and ran down onto the dock, sweeping his gun and penlight from side to side, looking for movement.

A Metropolitan Police officer, the woman who’d been riding the jet sled, lay dead on the pier, eyes bulging, her neck at an unnatural angle. Knight ran past her to the edge of the dock, hearing an outboard motor starting to accelerate in the fog and rain.

He noticed the officer’s jet sled tied to the pier, ran to it, saw the key in the ignition, jumped on, and started it while Jack grabbed the officer’s radio and got on behind Knight, calling, ‘This is Jack Morgan with Private. Metropolitan River Police officer dead on Queen Elizabeth II Pier. We are in pursuit of killers on the river. Repeat, we are in pursuit of killers on the river.’

Knight twisted the throttle. The sled leaped away from the pier, making almost no noise, and in seconds they were deep into the fog.

The mist was thick, reducing visibility to less than ten metres, and the water was choppy with a strong current drawn east by the ebbing tide. Radio traffic crackled on Jack’s radio in response to his call.

But he did not answer and turned down the volume so they could better hear the outboard coughing somewhere ahead of them. Knight noticed a digital compass on the dashboard of the sled.

The outboard was heading north by north-east in the middle of the Thames at a slow speed, probably because of the poor visibility. Feeling confident that he could catch them now, Knight hit the throttle hard and prayed they did not hit anything. Were there buoys out here? There had to be. Across the river, he could just make out the blinking light at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

‘They’re heading towards the River Lea,’ Knight yelled over his shoulder. ‘It goes back through the Olympic Park.’

‘Killers heading towards Lea river mouth,’ Jack barked into the radio.

They heard sirens wailing from both banks of the Thames now, and then the outboard motor went full throttle. The fog cleared a bit and no more than one hundred metres ahead of them on the river Knight spotted the racing shadow of a bow rider with its lights extinguished, and heard its engine screaming.

Knight mashed his throttle to close the gap at the same moment he realised that the escape boat wasn’t heading towards the mouth of the Lea at all; it was off by several degrees, speeding straight at the high cement retaining wall on the east side of the confluence.

‘They’re going to hit!’ Jack yelled.

Knight let go the throttle of the jet sled a split second before the speedboat struck the wall dead on and exploded in a series of blasts that mushroomed into fireballs and flares that licked and seared through the rain and the fog.

Debris and shrapnel rained down, forcing Knight and Jack to retreat. They never heard the quiet sounds of three swimmers moving eastward with the ebbing tide.