Private Games by Patterson James Sullivan Mark T
For Connor and Bridger,
chasers of the Olympic dream – M.S.
Acknowledgements
WE WOULD LIKE to thank Jackie Brock-Doyle, Neal Walker and Jason Keen at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games for their willingness to be helpful, candid and yet understandably circumspect regarding a project like this one. The tour of the park construction site was incredibly instructive. We would not have got anywhere without Alan Abrahamson, Olympic expert and operator of 3Wire.com, the world’s best source of information about the Games and the culture that surrounds it. Special thanks go out as well to Vikki Orvice, Olympic reporter at the Sun and a wealth of knowledge, humour and gossip. We are also grateful to the staff at the British Museum, One Aldwych and 41 for their invaluable aid in suggesting settings for scenes outside the Olympic venues. Ultimately, this is a fictional story of hope and an affirmation of the Olympic ideals, so please forgive us a degree of licence regarding the various events, venues and characters likely to dominate the stage during the London 2012 Summer Games.
It is not possible with mortal mind to search out the purposes of the gods
– Pindar
For then, in wrath, the Olympian thundered and lightninged, and confounded Greece
– Aristophanes
Prologue
Wednesday, 25 July 2012: 11:25 p.m.
THERE ARE SUPERMEN and superwomen who walk this Earth.
I’m quite serious about that and you can take me literally. Jesus Christ, for example, was a spiritual superman, as was Martin Luther, and Gandhi. Julius Caesar was superhuman as well. So were Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolf Hitler.
Think scientists like Aristotle, Galileo, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Consider artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo – and Vincent Van Gogh, my favourite, who was so superior that it drove him insane. And above all, don’t forget athletically superior beings like Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Jesse Owens.
Humbly, I include myself on this superhuman spectrum as well – and deservedly so, as you shall soon see.
In short, people like me are born for great things. We seek adversity. We seek to conquer. We seek to break through all limits, spiritually, politically, artistically, scientifically and physically. We seek to right wrongs in the face of monumental odds. And we’re willing to suffer for greatness, willing to embrace dogged effort and endless preparation with the fervour of a martyr, which to my mind are exceptional traits in any human being from any age.
At the moment I have to admit that I’m certainly feeling exceptional, standing here in the garden of Sir Denton Marshall, a snivelling, corrupt old bastard if there ever was one.
Look at him on his knees, his back to me and my knife at his throat.
Why, he trembles and shakes as if a stone has just clipped his head. Can you smell it? Fear? It surrounds him, as rank as the air after a bomb explodes.
‘Why?’ he gasps.
‘You’ve angered me, monster,’ I snarl at him, feeling a rage deeper than primal split my mind and seethe through every cell. ‘You’ve helped ruin the Games, made them an abomination and a mockery of their intent.’
‘What?’ Marshall cries, acting bewildered. ‘What are you talking about?’
I deliver the evidence against him in three damning sentences whose impact turns the skin of his neck livid and his carotid artery a sickening, pulsing purple.
‘No!’ he sputters. ‘That’s … that’s not true. You can’t do this. Have you gone utterly mad?’
‘Mad? Me?’ I say. ‘Hardly. I’m the sanest person I know.’
‘Please,’ he says, tears rolling down his face. ‘Have mercy. I’m to be married on Christmas Eve.’
My laugh is as caustic as battery acid: ‘In another life, Denton, I ate my own children. You’ll get no mercy from me or my sisters.’
As Marshall’s confusion and horror become complete, I look up into the night sky, feeling storms rising in my head, and understanding once again that I am superior, a superhuman imbued with forces that go back thousands of years.
‘For all true Olympians,’ I vow, ‘this act of sacrifice marks the beginning of the end of the modern Games.’
Then I wrench the old man’s head back so that his back arches.
And before he can scream, I rip the blade furiously back with such force that his head comes free of his neck all the way to his spine.