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.’