Meeks gave it to him, and with shaking hands Knight spun the dial and felt the lock give. He used a broom to push the trapdoor open, then looked around the kitchen one last time to see if there was anything he might be able to use or might need to shut down a gas line. A self-igniting blowtorch of the kind that chefs use to caramelise sugar caught his eye. He snatched it up.
Knight tossed the torch up into the crawl space, and then swung his arms twice to loosen them before jumping up and grabbing the sides of the trapdoor frame. He hung there a second, took a deep breath, and raised his legs in front of him before driving them backward with enough force for him to be able to lurch his way up into the cavity between the restaurant ceiling and the roof of the Orbit.
Knight pulled out a slim torch, flipped it on and, pushing the blowtorch in front of him, wriggled towards a piece of copper pipe that bisected the ductwork about six feet away. Knight didn’t have to get much closer to see the bumpy black electrical tape wrapped around it, securing a mobile phone and something else to the gas line.
‘I’ve got the trigger. It’s a small magnesium bomb taped to the gas line,’ he said. ‘It’s not on a timer. He’s going to blow it remotely. Shut down the entire gas system. Put out the Olympic flame. Now.’
Chapter 115
BLOW, WINDS, BLOW.
Lightning flashes and thunder blasts north-west towards Crouch End and Stroud Green, not far at all from where my drug-addled parents gave birth to me. It is fitting. It is fated.
Indeed, as the jackass who runs the International Olympic Committee prepares to have the flags lowered, declare the Games over, and order the flame extinguished, I fully embrace my destiny. Breaking from my stance of rigid attention, I gaze into the black wall of the oncoming storm, thinking how remarkable it is that my life has been like a track oval, starting and finishing in much the same place.
Pulling out a mobile phone from my pocket, I hit a number on speed dial and hear it connect. Pocketing the phone, I take up my rifle, take two strides forward and pivot to my right. Towards the cauldron.
Chapter 116
A FEW MINUTES earlier, Karen Pope trudged out into the west stands of the Olympic Stadium just as IOC President Jacques Rogge, looking haggard and grave, walked to the lectern on the stage. The reporter had just filed her latest update to the Sun’s website, describing the escape of Knight and his children, the death of Marta and her sisters, and the global manhunt for Mike Lancer.
As Rogge spoke over the noise of a rising wind and against the building rumour of thunder, Pope was thinking that these cursed Games were finally almost over. Goodbye and good riddance as far as she was concerned. She never wanted to write about the Olympics again, though she knew that was an impossible dream. She felt depressed and lethargic, and wondered if what she was feeling was as much battle fatigue as the desperate need to sleep. And Knight wasn’t answering his phone. Neither was Jack Morgan, or Inspector Pottersfield. What was going on that she didn’t know about?
As Rogge droned on, preparing to declare the Games at an end, Pope happened to look up at the cauldron atop the Orbit, seeing the flame billow in the wind. She admitted that she looked forward to seeing it extinguished while feeling somewhat guilty about the—
The Queen’s guardsman to the cauldron’s left suddenly lifted his gun, threw off his bearskin hat, walked out in front of the Olympic flame, pivoted and opened fire. The other guard jerked, staggered, and fell to his side and off the platform. His body hit the roof, slid and slipped off the Orbit, plunging and then gone.
Pope’s gasp of horror was obliterated by the screams of the multitude in the stadium rising into one trembling cry before a booming voice coming over the public address system drowned it out: ‘You sorry inferior creatures. You didn’t think an instrument of the gods would let you off that easily, did you?’
Chapter 117
I CLUTCH THE mobile phone in my left hand, speaking into it, and hearing the power in my voice echo back to me. ‘All you SAS snipers out there in the park, don’t be stupid. I’m holding a triggering device. If you shoot me, this entire tower, much of the stadium, and tens of thousands of lives will be lost.’
Below me, the crowd erupts and turns as frenzied as rats fleeing a sinking ship. Seeing them scurry and claw, I smile with utter satisfaction.
‘Tonight marks the end of the modern Olympics,’ I thunder. ‘Tonight we snuff out the flame that has burned so corruptly since that traitor de Coubertin came up with this mockery of the true Games more than a century ago!’
Chapter 118
KNIGHT HEARD THE gunshots and Lancer’s booming threat through an exhaust grate in the ceiling of the ductwork several feet beyond the gas line and the triggering device.
He didn’t have time to try and defuse the trigger, and for all he knew Lancer had booby-trapped it to go off if it was tampered with.
‘How about cutting off the tanks?’ he asked over his radio.
‘It’s a disaster, Peter,’ Jack shot back. ‘He’s welded the valves open.’
Above him, Lancer launched into a longer tirade, beginning with the doctors in Barcelona who had drugged him to prevent him from winning gold in the decathlon, from being named the greatest all-around athlete in the world. And in the background, Knight could hear the petrified crowd trying to escape the stadium. He understood he had only one chance.
He pushed the blowtorch forward and crawled after it, past the gas line and the triggering device, until he lay beneath the exhaust grate.
Through the slats he saw flashes of approaching lightning and the billowing glow of the Olympic flame still burning.
Four bolts held the grate in place. All of them looked sealed in some kind of chemical resin. Maybe he could melt it.
Knight grabbed the blowtorch and ignited it. As fast as he could, he heated the resin until it melted. Then he grabbed the nearest bolt head with the pliers on the Leatherman tool that Meeks had given him and wrenched at it. He felt thrilled when it gave.
Chapter 119
LIGHTNING INSCRIBES THE sky and thunder booms like close cannon fire as I bellow at the crazed crowd trying to escape the stadium, ‘For these reasons and a thousand others, the modern Games must end. Surely you understand!’
But instead of screams of terror, or even calls of agreement, I’m hearing something I did not expect in return. The monsters are booing me. They’re catcalling, and casting filthy slurs on my genius, my superiority.
These are the final indignities of a martyr for a just cause – stabbing, hurtful. But nothing like a roadside bomb, or even a rock, nothing that can stop me from seeing my fate fulfilled.
Still, this rejection is enough to raise a wave of hatred in me like no other, a tsunami of loathing for all the monsters in the stadium before me.