The Edge (14 page)

A short while later, the paramedics wheeled out a covered gurney. Jake placed the beads on one side beside Lee’s body. He remembered watching the gymnast on his first day in the camp. He’d been completing a routine on the parallel bars with amazing fluidity and strength. He’d seemed like a nice guy too. All that potential, just snuffed out. He doubted whether the camp could possibly continue now, even if Krantz wanted it to.

Most of the other athletes were peeling off in small groups.
They must be getting used to death by now
, Jake thought.

His dad’s face was grim. ‘We need to talk,’ he said to Jake. ‘In private.’

Together they walked quickly back towards the admin buildings, and his dad led him up into the office which had been Coach Garcia’s.

‘Just wait here,’ he said.

‘What are you going to do?’ Jake asked.

‘Get in touch with my superiors,’ his dad said. ‘They’ve
picked up increased phone activity from Igor Popov. We need more manpower. More surveillance.’

‘Dad, I don’t think Popov’s involved this time. I think Dr Chow might be up to something.’

‘Stay out of it, Jake.’

‘But I saw her injecting something before the paramedics arrived. In Lee’s arm!’

‘Enough, Jake. It was probably adrenalin. Standard procedure. I’m taking you away from here. It’s not safe.’ He was pacing the room. ‘I’m going to make sure personally that Krantz stops people drinking any more of that stuff. Stay here while I make some calls.’

As soon as his dad had left the room, Jake wandered over to the window. He knew he’d seen something strange.

A cold sensation crept over Jake’s skin.

Why did Dr Chow even have a syringe on her in the first place? She must have known she’d need it. Jake gazed across from his dad’s office on the first floor towards the table-tennis studio. The ambulance was pulling away.

A second later, Dr Chow herself came out and stood for a moment, watching it drive off. Her hand went into her pocket, feeling something there.
The syringe.
She walked briskly to one of the golf buggies. She climbed in and drove off.

How had he missed it before? Of course it was her! She’d
been pushing the Olympic Edge almost as much as Phillips. She’d argued with Garcia in the bar the day before he died in the swamp. Jake’s mind was working fast, flicking from image to image. And who’d been the last person to see BeBe before she climbed the board for her final dive? It was Dr Chow, Jake recalled. She’d taken the girl from Brazil into one of the changing rooms. She’d been angry about BeBe’s energy drink. Just what had happened behind that door?

Jake could have thumped himself as he bolted down the stairs and dashed past the receptionist. She shouted something about his father but he didn’t bother to stop. He’d let everything distract him up till now: Oz Ellman, his dad, Phillips, the argument with Tan.

Dr Chow had even been at the scene when Phillips had taken the quickest way down from the twenty-third floor of the LGE building. The truth had been right before Jake’s eyes all along.

J
ake ran across the grass. The medical centre was on the other side of the complex, and it would take a good ten minutes to get there. He tried to control the thumping in his chest. By the velodrome, something beeped in his kitbag. It took a second to realise it was the phone Popov had given him. Jake fished it out and hit the answer button.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Popov hears another athlete has died,’ said a Russian voice.

‘How’s Veronika?’ Jake asked.

‘Mr Popov wants you to know his daughter’s condition is deteriorating. What have you found out?’

‘I think that Dr Chow is responsible,’ said Jake. ‘I don’t know why yet.’

Some muffled conversation echoed down the line, then Popov’s voice came on.

‘Jake, what is happening?’ he asked in a panicked voice.

‘Someone else has died,’ said Jake.

‘I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘You need to find the antidote. Veronika’s getting worse.’

‘I’m doing everything I can!’ Jake insisted.

‘Well, do it quickly,’ Popov said. ‘If she dies, I’ll hold you personally responsible.’

The line went dead.

Jake saw a couple of bikes leaning up against the gate to the cycling track. Their riders were doing stretches a few metres away. Jake ran up, and seized one of the bikes by the handlebars.

‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ shouted a cyclist.

‘Sorry, man, it’s an emergency,’ said Jake, throwing his leg over the seat, and pushing off.

The bike’s owner tried to grab him, but Jake darted out of the way.

‘Come back!’ called the other.

Jake juddered down a set of concrete steps, and narrowly missed a reversing golf buggy. Jumping up on to a kerb, he steered between the dorm blocks and across the grass.

He skidded up outside the medical centre and ditched the bike. Dr Chow’s golf cart was already parked up. Jake pushed the door open on to a quiet corridor with treatment rooms
off either side. He went straight to the room at the end: Dr Chow’s laboratory. Without knocking, he burst through the double swing doors.

The doctor was by the sink, emptying sample tubes full of colourless liquid down the drain. She frowned when she saw him, but carried on with what she was doing.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps I can help you?’ said Jake. ‘Destroy some more of the evidence, maybe?’

The doors stopped swinging behind him.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, crossing the lab with the empty tubes in a rack. ‘I’m just making some space in here. The police are sure to want me to act as consultant for Adam’s post-mortem.’

Jake wasn’t fooled. She was
too
cool.

‘I guess you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘To cover your tracks. What did you put into Adam? Some sort of masking agent?’

‘You’ve got a vivid imagination,’ she replied.

Jake kept his back to the door. Somehow this woman – all five foot three of her – had killed Garcia and Phillips. They’d underestimated her, and Jake wasn’t about to make the same mistake. He could smell the sickly tang of Olympic Edge in the air.

‘There’s no doubt it works,’ said Jake, trying to stay calm. ‘Whatever you’ve been putting into that drink does something special.’

Dr Chow leant back against the counter and smiled in a way Jake hadn’t seen before. Arrogant. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Shame it kills people too,’ said Jake.

Her smile vanished. ‘You can’t prove that,’ she said. ‘The police could test almost every bottle in this place, and they’d find nothing. That’s the beauty of my experiments.’

‘Almost every bottle?’ Jake said.

Dr Chow’s eyes shifted for a second to the fridge across the room. A single, unmarked bottle, filled with clear liquid, stood on top.

‘And you killed Coach Garcia and Phillips because they found out?’ said Jake.

‘Pedro thought he could blackmail me,’ she said. ‘He wanted a slice of the pie. All it took was a little injection and the alligators did the rest.’

‘And Phillips?’ said Jake. ‘I saw you kissing. I guess you were just using him to get access to Olympic Edge.’

‘Poor Eddie.’ Dr Chow’s mock concern was nauseating. ‘Not as stupid as he seemed, and too damn nosy for his own good. I quite liked him. For a while.’

‘So much that you pushed him off the roof,’ Jake spat.

Dr Chow laughed. ‘After I slipped some of my special mixture in his coffee, he didn’t take much persuasion. He wanted some fresh air, and that’s exactly what I gave him.’

Jake moved a few steps sideways towards the fridge. If he was right, that bottle contained all the evidence he needed.

‘No one’s going to want an energy drink that kills them,’ he said.

‘I’ve made a few mistakes, sure,’ said Dr Chow, ‘but it’s just a question of balance. It seems to have given people a bit of a temper, even in small doses.’

‘It drives them crazy,’ said Jake, remembering all the fights and the violence on the pitch.

‘A minor side-effect,’ said Dr Chow. ‘Imagine a world where one drink can make an amateur athlete twice as good, and a good athlete Olympic standard.’

‘It sounds like cheating to me,’ said Jake. ‘A shortcut without the hard work.’

Chow laughed. ‘You’re so naive it hurts. What do you think sport is, apart from hunting for an advantage? You don’t see tennis players with wooden rackets, do you? Or runners with old-fashioned pumps? Athletics is all about finding the edge, and soon I’ll have the right formula for a safe and legal route to victory. They’ll give me the Nobel Prize for chemistry.’

‘I’m not sure they award the Nobel Prize to people in jail,’ said Jake. He picked the bottle up off the counter. When he turned again, Dr Chow was pointing a gun at his chest.

‘You’re not going anywhere with that,’ she said. ‘That’s my extra-strength mixture for people who ask too many questions.’

‘I guess this is what you gave to BeBe and Veronika,’ he replied, staring at the gun.

‘BeBe threatened to call the authorities and Veronika was asking too many questions.’

He tightened his grip on the bottle, the evidence. He knew it held Veronika’s only chance of survival. ‘And what about Otto and Adam?’

‘They were just greedy,’ said Dr Chow. ‘Guzzled too much before I’d worked out how to perfect it.’

‘So they die because of your mistakes?’

‘All scientific breakthroughs come at a cost,’ said Chow. ‘Looks like you’ll be donating your body to medical science. It’s for the greater good.’ She took aim at Jake’s head.

‘If you fire that in here, someone will hear,’ Jake blurted, and took a step away from her.

‘I’ll say you attacked me. I’m not sure Detective Merski needs more evidence that you’re bad news.’

Jake glanced at the door. If Dr Chow was a good shot,
she’d take him down easily. And the cops would probably believe her story.

Jake saw her arm tense a split second before she pulled the trigger. He jerked aside as the bullet ricocheted off the wall. He darted to the door. The doctor swung the gun around again. The crack of a bullet split the air as he dived through the double doors and into the corridor. Running towards the exit, he felt something wet on his arm, and wondered if he’d been shot. He heard Dr Chow’s footsteps behind, and the notice board to his left exploded in a shower of glass.

‘Come back here!’ she screamed. Jake pushed through the main door into the sunshine and realised he felt no pain. It wasn’t blood on his arm; it was liquid from the bottle, leaking fast from two holes in the base where the bullet must have passed. Jake watched helplessly as the vital evidence spilled away.

Without thinking, he lifted it to his lips and swallowed great mouthfuls of the clear fluid. It didn’t taste like the Olympic Edge he’d drunk on the first day. This stuff was thicker, like watered-down syrup, and the taste was metallic. Almost at once, he felt a warmth spreading across his chest, and his blood seemed to pump harder through his veins, buzzing right to the tips of his fingers and toes. What the hell was this stuff?

Dr Chow came through the main doors, and pointed the
gun at Jake. He dodged behind the golf cart as the bullet crack sounded, and it whacked off the pavement.

He dived behind the building, running towards a low wall at the back. It was about one and a half metres high, but he vaulted it, barely using his hands for support. His whole body felt lighter, and more agile.

The adrenalin flooded Jake’s system like a tidal wave of raw power. All he knew was that he had to get to Hannigan’s. Rick was the only person who could help him, or Veronika, now.

Jake ran for his life.

J
ake’s heart was thumping like a steam engine in his chest, so hard it felt it might burst through his ribs at any moment. But his skin was cold. He gritted his teeth and fought the urge to scream. What on earth had he done to himself?

An alarm started going off across the complex, a wailing clarion. Dr Chow must have hit some sort of security button. She’d be telling security to stop Jake Bastin at this very moment. He wouldn’t let that happen. He knew that if he slowed down the poisons inside him would take over, and he’d meet the same fate as Adam Lee, convulsing until he died.

Jake saw a detachment of three security guys on his right. One pointed and they began to run to intercept him. There was no way he’d be able to get through the front gates if they were locked. Suddenly he remembered chasing his attacker the other day beside the boating lake. As he reached a practice sandpit, a meaty security guard dived at Jake’s legs.
He put on a burst and twisted back to see the guy get a faceful of sand. The other two looked fitter, and sped after him.

Jake now found an extra burst of speed. He could hear his pursuers panting. One of them was shouting into his walkie-talkie: ‘Towards the lake! Towards the lake!’

Jake started to feel pins and needles creeping into the ends of his fingers. The security guards were dropping off. One bent over, hands on his knees with exhaustion. Jake slid down a bank to the lakeside. The fence was two hundred metres away, but there was another security guard running along the edge of the water towards him. Boats were stacked up in a line against each other by a jetty. Jake darted along the wooden boards, and then jumped on to the first boat. It lurched beneath his feet, but he managed to leap into the next. Then one more. The guard on the bank changed direction as Jake took a deep breath and dived off the last boat and into the cold water. He swam, pulling himself along with powerful strokes, eating up the distance to the far bank.

The guard had to go the long way round, and arrived as Jake was dragging himself out of the water.

‘Stop!’ the guard said, panting. From his belt, he pulled out a short baton. ‘Don’t make me use this!’

Jake heard footsteps on the other side, and realised one of the guards from earlier had caught up as well. ‘Nice one,
Jim,’ he said. ‘You got a lot to answer for, kid.’

Jake felt a pain stab in his upper arm, and clutched his shoulder. It was like an electric shock spreading across his chest. There wasn’t long left. With a lunge, he shoved the nearest guard in the chest, and sent him splashing into the shallows with a cry. The other guard, Jim, swung his baton. He heard it crack across his jaw, but barely felt a thing. Jim stared at him with wide eyes, and Jake dropped to a crouch and drove a fist into his thigh. The guard buckled with a dead leg and lay on the ground moaning.