Ten seconds, Knight thought. These guys spend their whole lives preparing for ten seconds. He couldn’t imagine it: the pressure, the expectations, the will and the hardship involved in becoming an Olympic champion.
‘Set,’ the judge called, and the sprinters raised their hips.
The gun cracked, the crowd roared, and Mundaho and Shaw were like twin panthers springing after prey. The Jamaican was stronger in the first twenty metres, uncoiling his long legs and arms sooner than the Cameroonian. But in the next forty metres, the ex-boy soldier ran as if he really did have bullets chasing him.
Mundaho caught Shaw at eighty metres, but could not pass the Jamaican.
And Shaw could not lose the Cameroonian.
Together they streaked down the track, chasing history as if the other men in the race weren’t even there, and appeared to lean and blow through the finish simultaneously with a time of 9.38, two-tenths of a second better than Shaw’s incredible performance at Beijing.
New Olympic Record!
New World Record!
Chapter 77
THE STADIUM ROCKED with cheers for Mundaho and Shaw.
But who had won?
Up on the big screens, the unofficial results had Shaw in first place and Mundaho in second, and yet their times were identical. Through his binoculars, Knight could see both men gasping for air, hands on their hips, looking not at each other but up at the screens replaying the race in slow motion while judges examined data from the lasers at the finish line.
Knight heard the announcer say that while there had been ties in judged Olympic events like gymnastics in the past, and a tie between two American swimmers at the Sydney 2000 Games, there had never been a tie in any track event at any modern Olympics. The announcer said that the referees would examine photos as well as take the time down to the thousandth of a second.
Knight watched referees huddling by the track, and saw the tallest of them shake his head. A moment later, the screens flashed ‘Official Results’ and posted Shaw and Mundaho in a dead tie, with a time of 9:382.
‘I decline to run another heat,’ the referee was heard saying. ‘I consider that to have been the greatest foot race of all time and the timing stands. Both men share the world record. Both men win gold.’
The stadium rocked again with cheers, whistles and yells.
Through his binoculars, Knight saw Shaw gazing up at the results and then over at the referee with scepticism and irritation. But then the Jamaican’s expression melted into a grin that spread wide across his face. He jogged to Mundaho, who was smiling back at him. They spoke. Then they clasped hands, raised them, and jogged towards their cheering fans, holding the flags of Jamaica and Cameroon above their heads in their free hands.
The men took their long victory lap around the stadium together, and to Knight it was as if a pleasant summer shower had come along to wash foul smoke from the air. Cronus and the Furies now seemed not as powerful a force at the London Olympics as they had been just a few minutes ago.
The sprinters running together in a grand display of sportsmanship was their way of telling the world that the modern Games were still a force to be reckoned with, still a force for good, a force that could demonstrate shared humanity in the face of Cronus’s cruel assault.
Shaw said as much when he and Mundaho returned to the finish line and were interviewed by reporters. Knight saw it all up on the big screens.
‘When I saw the tie, I could not believe it,’ the Jamaican admitted. ‘And to tell you the truth, my first response was that I felt angry. I had beaten my own record, but I had not bested everyone as I did in Beijing. But then, after all that has happened at these Games, I saw that the tie was a beautiful thing: good for sprinting, good for athletics, and good for the Olympics.’
Mundaho agreed, saying, ‘I am humbled to have run with the great Zeke Shaw. It is the honour of my life to have my name mentioned in the same breath as his.’
The reporter then asked who would win the 200-metre final on Wednesday night. Neither man needed an interpreter. Both tapped their chests and said, ‘Me.’
Then each of them laughed and slapped the other on the back.
Knight breathed a sigh of relief when both men left the stadium. At least Cronus had not targeted those two.
For the next hour, as the men’s 1,500-metre semi-finals and the 3,000-metre steeplechase final were run, Knight’s mind wandered to his mother. Amanda had promised that she would not turn bitter and retreat into herself as she had after his father’s death.
But Knight’s past two conversations with Gary Boss indicated that was exactly what she was doing. She would not take his calls. She would not take anyone’s calls, even those who wanted to help arrange a memorial for Denton Marshall. According to her assistant, Amanda was spending every waking hour at her table sketching designs, hundreds of them.
He’d wanted to go to see her yesterday and this morning, but Boss had urged him against coming. Boss felt this was something that Amanda needed to go through alone, at least for a few more days.
Knight’s heart ached for his mother. He knew at a gut level what she was going through. He’d thought that his own grief for Kate would never end. And in a sense it never would. But through his children he’d found a way to keep going. He prayed his mother would find her own way apart from through work.
Then he thought of the twins. He was about to call home to say goodnight when the announcer called for competitors in the men’s 400-metre semi-finals.
People were on their feet again as Mundaho appeared in the tunnel from the warm-up track. The Cameroonian jogged out, as confident as he had been before the 100-metre event, moving in his characteristic loose-jointed way.
But instead of taking those explosive kangaroo hops, the Cameroonian began to skip and then to bound, his feet coming way up off the track surface and swinging forward as if he were a deer or a gazelle.
What other man can do that? Knight thought in awe. Where did the idea that he could even do that come from? The bullets flying at his back?
The Cameroonian slowed near his blocks on lane one, at the inside rear of the staggered start. Could Mundaho do it? Run a distance four times longer than what he’d just sprinted in world record time?
Evidently Zeke Shaw wanted to know as well because the Jamaican sprinter reappeared in the entry linking the practice track to the stadium and stood with three of the Gurkhas, all looking north towards the runners about to compete.
‘Mark,’ the official called.
Mundaho set his race shoes with their tiny metal stubs against the blocks. He crouched and tensed when the official called: ‘Set.’
The gun went off in the near-silent stadium.
The Cameroonian leaped off the blocks.
A thousandth of a second later a blinding silver-white light blasted from the blocks as they exploded and disintegrated, throwing out a low-angle wave of fire and hot jagged bits of metal that smashed into Mundaho’s lower body from behind, hurling the Cameroonian off his feet and onto the track where he lay crumpled and screaming.
Part Four
MARATHON
Chapter 78
KNIGHT WAS SO shocked that he was unable to move for several seconds. Like many in the stadium he watched and listened in gut-clenched horror as Mundaho writhed on the track, sobbing and groaning in agony as he reached down to his charred and bleeding legs.
The other sprinters had stopped, looking back in shocked disbelief at the carnage in lane one. The intense metallic flame died, leaving the track where the blocks had been scorched and throwing off a burned chemical odour that reminded Knight of signal flares and tyres burning.
Paramedics raced towards the Cameroonian sprinter and several race officials who’d also been hit by the burning shrapnel.
‘I want everyone involved with those starting blocks held for questioning,’ Lancer bellowed over the radio, barely in control. ‘Find the timing judges, referees, everyone. Hold them! All of them!’
‘Can you get me on the field, Jack? Mike?’ Knight asked.
‘That’s a negative,’ Jack said.
‘Double that negative,’ Lancer said. ‘Scotland Yard has already ordered it sealed for their bomb-forensics unit.’
Knight was suddenly furious that this had happened to Mundaho and to the Olympics – the Games had been caught up in the festering recesses of a twisted mind and made to suffer for it. He did not care what Cronus was going to claim the sprinter had done. Whatever he had or had not done, Mundaho did not deserve to be lying burned on the track. He should have been blowing the rest of the sprinters away in his quest for athletic immortality. Instead, he was being lifted onto a stretcher.
The stadium around Knight began to applaud as paramedics started to wheel the Cameroonian sprinter towards a waiting ambulance. They had IVs in his arm, and had obviously given him drugs, though Knight could still see through his binoculars that the boy soldier was racked with hideous pain.
Knight heard people saying that London would have to end the Games now, and felt furious that Cronus might have won, that it all might be finished now. But then he heard a cynic in the crowd say that there was no chance the Games would be cancelled. He’d read a story in the Financial Times that indicated that while London 2012’s corporate sponsors and the official broadcasters were publicly aghast at Cronus’s actions, they were privately astounded at the twenty-four-hour coverage the Games were receiving, and the public’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the various facets of the story.
‘The ratings for these Olympics are the highest in history,’ the cynic said. ‘I predict: no chance they’ll be cancelled.’
Knight had no time to think about any of it because Shaw, carrying the Cameroonian flag, suddenly came running out of the stadium’s entryway, along with the dozen or so competitors who were still in the 400-metre competition. They ran to the rear of the ambulance, exhorting the crowd to chant ‘Mundaho! Mundaho!’
The people remaining in the stadium went crazy with emotion, weeping, cheering – and screaming denouncements of Cronus and the Furies.
Despite the medical personnel around him, despite the agony ripping through his body, and despite the drugs, Mundaho heard and saw what his fellow athletes and the fans were doing for him. Before the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the Cameroonian sprinter raised his right arm and formed a fist.
Knight and everyone else in the stadium cheered the gesture. Mundaho was injured but not broken, burned but still a battle-hardened soldier. He might never run again, but his spirit and the Olympic spirit were still going strong.
Chapter 79
FEELING AS THOUGH she wanted to puke, Karen Pope swallowed antacid pills and stared uncomprehendingly at the television in the Sun newsroom as the medics loaded the stout-hearted Cameroonian sprinter into the back of the ambulance. She and her editor, Finch, were waiting for Cronus’s latest letter to arrive. So were the Metropolitan Police detectives who’d staked out the lobby, waiting for the messenger and hoping to trace rapidly where the letter had been collected.
Pope did not want to see what Cronus had to say about Mundaho. She did not care. She went to her editor and said, ‘I quit, Finchy.’
‘You can’t quit,’ Finch shot back. ‘What are you talking about? This is the story of a lifetime you’re on here. Ride it, Pope. You’ve been bloody brilliant.’
She burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to ride it. I don’t want to be part of killing and maiming people. This isn’t why I became a journalist.’
‘You aren’t killing or maiming anyone,’ Finch said.
‘But I’m helping to!’ she shouted. ‘We’re like the people who published the manifesto of the Unabomber over in the States when I was a kid! We’re abetting murder, Finch! I’m abetting murder, and I just won’t. I can’t.’
‘You’re not abetting murder,’ Finch said, softening his voice. ‘And neither am I. We are chronicling the murders, the same way journalists before us chronicled the atrocities of Jack the Ripper. You’re not helping Cronus, you’re exposing him. That’s our obligation, Pope. That’s your obligation.’
She stared at him, feeling small and insignificant. ‘Why me, Finch?’
‘I dunno. Maybe we’ll find out someday. I dunno.’
Pope could not argue any more. She just turned, went to her desk, sat in her seat and put her head down. Then her BlackBerry beeped, alerting her to an incoming message.
Pope exhaled, picked up the mobile and saw that the message was an e-mail with an attachment from ‘Cronus’. She wanted to bash her phone into shards, but she kept hearing her editor telling her it was her duty to expose these insane people for what they were.
‘Here it is, Finch,’ she called tremulously across the room. ‘Somebody better tell the police that there’s no messenger coming.’
Finch nodded and said, ‘I’ll do it. You’ve got an hour to deadline.’
Pope hesitated. Then she got angry and opened the attachment.
Cronus had expected Mundaho to die on the track.
His letter justified the ‘killing’ as ‘just retribution for the crime of hubris’, the greatest of all the sins in the era of myth. Arrogance, vanity, in all things prideful and a challenger to the gods, these were the accusations that Cronus threw at Mundaho.
He attached copies of e-mails, texts and Facebook messages between Mundaho and his Los Angeles-based sports agent, Matthew Hitchens. According to Cronus, the discussions between the men were not about competing for greatness for the sake of greatness and for the approval of the gods, as was the case during the ancient Olympics.
Instead, Cronus depicted the correspondence as grossly focused on money and material gain, with lengthy discussions over how winning the sprint jackpot at the London Olympics could increase Mundaho’s global value by several hundred million dollars over a twenty-year endorsement career.
‘Mundaho put up for sale the gift that the gods gave him,’ Cronus concluded. ‘He saw no glory in the simple idea of being the fastest man. He saw only gain, and therefore his arrogance towards the gods shone ever more brilliantly. In effect, Mundaho thought of himself as a god, entitled to great riches and to immortality. For the crime of hubris, retribution must always be swift and certain.’
But Mundaho’s not dead, Pope thought with satisfaction.
She yelled to Finch: ‘Do we have a number for Mundaho’s sports agent?’
Her editor thought a moment and then nodded. ‘It’s here in a master list we compiled for the Games.’
He gave the number to Pope, who texted a message to the sports agent: KNOW U R WITH MUNDAHO. CRONUS MAKES CLAIMS AGAINST HIM AND U. CALL ME.
Pope sent the text, put the phone down and started framing the story on her computer, all the while telling herself that she wasn’t helping Cronus. She was fighting him by exposing him.
To her surprise her phone rang within five minutes. It was an audibly distraught Matthew Hitchens en route to the hospital where they’d taken Mundaho. She expressed her condolences and then hit the sports agent with Cronus’s charges.
‘Cronus isn’t giving you the whole story,’ Hitchens complained bitterly when she’d finished. ‘He doesn’t say why Filatri wanted that kind of money.’
‘Tell me,’ Pope said.
‘His plan was to use the money to help children who’ve survived war zones, especially those who’ve been kidnapped and forced to fight and die as soldiers in conflicts they don’t understand or believe in. We’ve already set up the Mundaho Foundation for Orphaned Children of War, which was supposed to help Filatri achieve his dream beyond the Olympics. I can show you the formation documents. He signed them long before Berlin, long before there was any talk of him winning three gold medals.’
Hearing that, Pope saw how she
could fight back. ‘So you’re saying that, in addition to ruining the dreams and life of one ex-boy soldier, Cronus’s acts may have destroyed the hopes and chances of war-scarred children all over the world?’
Hitchens got choked up, saying: ‘I think that just about sums up this tragedy.’
Pope thought of Mundaho, squeezed her free hand into a fist, and said, ‘Then that is what my story will say, Mr Hitchens.’
Chapter 80
Monday, 6 August 2012
A FORCE FIVE typhoon rampages through my brain, throwing daggers of lightning brighter than burning magnesium, and everything around me seems saturated with electric blues and reds that don’t shimmer or sparkle so much as sear and bleed.
That stupid bitch. She betrayed us. And Mundaho escaped a just vengeance. I feel like annihilating every monster in London.
But I’ll settle for one.
I’m more than aware that this move could upset a careful balance I’ve struck for more than fifteen years. If I handle this wrong, it could come back to haunt me.
The storm in my skull, however, won’t let me consider these ramifications for very long. Instead, like watching a flickering old movie, I see myself stick a knife in my mother’s thigh, again and again; and I remember in a cascade of raw emotion how good, how right it felt to have been wronged, and then avenged.
Petra is waiting for me when I reach my home at around four in the morning. Her eyes are sunken, fearful, and red. We are alone. The other sisters have gone on to new tasks.
‘Please, Cronus,’ she begins. ‘The fingerprint was a mistake.’
The typhoon spins furiously again in my mind, and it’s as though I’m looking at her down this whirling crackling funnel.
Private Games Page 18