Private Games

Chapter 74

THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE is well past its first stirring now. Swimmers from Australia are already heading to the Aquatics Centre where the men’s 1,500-metre heats will unfold. Cyclists from Spain are going to the Velodrome for a quick ride before the men’s team pursuit competition later in the day. A Moldovan handball team just passed me. So did that American basketball player – that one with the name I always forget.

It’s irrelevant. What matters is that we’re at the end of week one and every athlete in the village is trying not to think of me and my sisters, trying not to ask themselves whether they’ll be next. And yet they can’t help but think of us, now can they?

As I predicted, the media has gone berserk over our story. For every weepy television tale of an athlete overcoming cancer or the death of a loved one to win a gold medal, there have been three more about the effect we are having on the games. Tumours, they’ve called us. Scourges. Black stains on the Olympics.

Ha! The only tumours and black stains are those generated by the Games. I’m just exposing them for what they are.

Indeed, out walking among the Olympians like this – anonymous, earnest, and in disguise, another me – I’m feeling that, except for a few minor glitches, everything has gone remarkably according to plan. Petra and Teagan took vengeance on the Chinese and executed their escape perfectly. Marta has ingratiated herself into Knight’s life and monitors his virtual world, giving me an inside view of whatever investigations have been launched and why. And earlier this morning, I retrieved the second bag of magnesium shavings, the one I hid in the Velodrome during its construction almost two years ago. Right where I left it.

The only thing that bothers me is—

My disposable mobile rings. I grimace. Petra and Teagan were given precise orders before they left on their latest assignment at midday yesterday, and those orders forbade them from calling me at all. Marta, then.

I answer and snap at her before she can speak, ‘No names, and toss that phone when we’re finished talking. Do you know the mistake?’

‘Not exactly,’ Marta says, with a note of alarm in her voice that is quite rare and therefore instantly troubling.

‘What’s wrong?’ I demand.

‘They know,’ she whispers. In the background I hear a little monster crying.

The crying and Marta’s whisper hit me like stones and car bombs, setting off a raging storm in my skull that destroys my balance, and I go down on one knee for fear that I’ll keel over. The light all around me seems ultraviolet except for a diesel-green halo that pulses in time with the ripping sensations in my skull.

‘You all right?’ a man’s voice asks.

I can hear the crying on the phone, which now hangs in my hand at my side. I look up through the green halo and see a grounds worker standing a few feet from me.

‘Fine,’ I manage, fighting for control against a rage building in me, making me want to cut the grounds worker’s head off for spite. ‘I’m just a little dizzy.’

‘You want me to call someone?’

‘No,’ I say, struggling to my feet. Though the green halo is still pulsing and the ripping goes on in my skull, the air around me is shimmering a bit less.

Walking away from the groundsman, I growl into the phone: ‘Shut that goddamn kid up.’

‘Believe me, if I could, I would,’ Marta retorts. ‘Here, I’ll go outside.’

I hear a door shut and the beeping of a car horn. ‘Better?’

Only a little. My stomach churns when I ask, ‘What do they know?’

In a halting voice, Marta tells me that they know about the Brazlic sisters, and it all starts again: the ripping, the diesel-green halo, and the ultraviolent rage that so completely permeates me now that I feel like a cornered animal, a monster myself, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who might approach me.

There’s a bench ahead on the path and I sit on it. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ Marta replies, and then explains how she overheard Pope mention ‘Andjela and the other Brazlic sisters’, which had so shocked her that she’d dropped a glass bowl, which had shattered on the kitchen floor.

Wanting to throttle her, I say, ‘Does Knight suspect?’

‘Me? No,’ Marta says. ‘I acted embarrassed and apologetic when I told him the glass was wet. He told me not to worry about it, and to make extra sure the floor was free of glass before letting his little brats walk around.’

‘Where are they now, Knight and Pope? What else do they know?’

‘He left with her ten minutes ago, and said he would not be back until late,’ Marta replies. ‘I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you. But if they know about the sisters, then they know what the sisters did in Bosnia, and the war-crimes prosecutors know we are in London.’

‘They probably do,’ I agree at last. ‘But nothing more. If they had more, they’d be tracking you by one of your current names. They’d be at our doors.’

After a moment’s silence, Marta asks, ‘So what do I do?’

Feeling increasingly sure that the gap between who the Furies were and who they have become is wide enough to prevent a connection, I reply, ‘Stay close to those children. We may need them in the coming days.’