They're already across the square and the crowd's going wild here: it really is more like 
the European Games than a Charity Race. What does it look like to you, Jim?'
  'Well Mike, I can see crowds lining the route all the way along Fleet Street: and I've 
been asked by the police to tell people please not to try and drive down to see the race, 
because of course all these roads have been cleared for the event, and if you try and 
drive, really you'll get nowhere.'
  'Who's got the lead at the moment?'
  'Well, Nick Loyer is really setting the pace at this stage in the game, though of 
course as we know there's going to be a lot of tactical running over this kind of 
distance. It's more than a middle-distance, and it's less than a marathon, but these men 
are all tacticians, and they'll each be trying to let the other make the running in the 
early stages.'
  Cameron always said: let the others be heroes.
  That was a hard lesson to learn, Joel had found. When the pistol was fired it was 
difficult not to go for broke, unwind suddenly like a tight spring. All gone in the first 
two hundred yards and nothing left in reserve.
  It's easy to be a hero, Cameron used to say. It's not clever, it's not clever at all. 
Don't waste your time showing off, just let the Supermen have their moment. Hang on to 
the pack, but hold back a little. Better to be cheered at the post because you won than 
have them call you a good-hearted loser.
  Win. Win. Win.
  At all costs. At almost all costs.
  Win.
  The man who doesn't want to win is no friend of mine, he'd say. If you want to do it 
for the love of it, for the sport of it, do it with somebody else. Only public schoolboys 
believe that crap about the joy of playing the game. There's no joy for losers, boy. What 
did I say?
  There's no joy for losers.
  Be barbaric. Play the rules, but play them to the limit. As far as you can push, push. 
Let no other sonofabitch tell you differently. You're here to win. What did I say?
  Win.
  In Paternoster Row the cheering was muted, and the shadows of the buildings blocked the 
sun. It was almost cold. The pigeons still passed over, unable to settle now they'd been 
roused from their roost. They were the only occupants of the back streets. The rest of 
the living world, it seemed, was watching this race.
  
  Cameron unlocked his bicycle, pocketed the chain and pad-locks, and hopped on. Pretty 
healthy for a fifty year old he thought, despite the addiction to cheap cigars. He 
switched on the radio. Reception was bad, walled in by the buildings; all crackle. He 
stood astride his bike and tried to improve the tuning. It did a little good.
  '- and Nick Loyer is falling behind already -'
  That was quick. Mind you, Loyer was past his prime by two or three years. Time to throw 
in the spikes and let the younger men take over. He'd had to do it, though my God it had 
been painful. Cameron remembered acutely how he'd felt at thirty-three, when he realized 
that his best running years were over. It was like having one foot buried in the grave, a 
salutary reminder of how quickly the body blooms and begins to wither.
  As he pedaled out of the shadows into a sunnier street a black Mercedes, 
chauffeur-driven, sailed past, so quietly it could have been wind-propelled. Cameron 
caught sight of the passengers only briefly. One he recognized as a man Voight had been 
talking with before the race, a thin faced individual of about forty, with a mouth so 
tight his lips might have been surgically removed.
  Beside him sat Voight.
  Impossible as it seemed it was Voight's face that glanced back out of the smoked glass 
windows; he was even dressed for the race.
  Cameron didn't like the look of this at all. He'd seen the South African five minutes 
earlier, off and running. So who was this? A double obviously. It smelt of a fix, 
somehow; it stank to high heaven.
  The Mercedes was already disappearing around a corner. Cameron turned off the radio and 
pedaled pell-mell after the car. The balmy sun made him sweat as he rode.
  
  The Mercedes was threading its way through the narrow streets with some difficulty, 
ignoring all the One Way signs as it went. Its slow passage made it relatively easy for 
Cameron to keep the vehicle in view without being seen by its occupants, though the 
effort was beginning to light a fire in his lungs.
  In a tiny, nameless alley just west of Fetter Lane, where the shadows were particularly 
dense, the Mercedes stopped. Cameron, hidden from view round a corner not twenty yards 
from the car, watched as the door was opened by the chauffeur and the lipless man, with 
the Voight look-alike close behind, stepped out and went into a nondescript building. 
When all three had disappeared Cameron propped his bike up against the wall and fol-lowed.
  The street was pin-drop hushed. From this distance the roar of the crowd was only a 
murmur. It could have been another world, this street. The flitting shadows of birds, the 
windows of the buildings bricked up, the peeling paint, the rotten smell in the still 
air. A dead rabbit lay in the gutter, a black rabbit with a white collar, someone's lost 
pet. Flies rose and fell on it, alternately startled and ravenous.
  Cameron crept towards the open door as quietly as he was able. He had, as it turned 
out, nothing to fear. The trio had disappeared down the dark hallway of the house long 
since. The air was cool in the hall, and smelt of damp. Looking fearless, but feeling 
afraid, Cameron entered the blind building. The wall-paper in the hallway was 
shit-coloured, the paint the same. It was like walking into a bowel; a dead man's bowel, 
cold and shitty. Ahead, the stairway had collapsed, preventing access to the upper 
storey. They had not gone up, but down.
  
  The door to the cellar was adjacent to the defunct staircase, and Cameron could hear 
voices from below.
  No time like the present, he thought, and opened the door sufficiently to squeeze into 
the dark beyond. It was icy. Not just cold, not damp, but refrigerated. For a moment he 
thought he'd stepped into a cold storage room. His breath became a mist at his lips: his 
teeth wanted to chatter.
  Can't turn back now, he thought, and started down the frost-slick steps. It wasn't 
impossibly dark. At the bottom of the flight, a long way down, a pale light flickered, 
its uninspired glow aspiring to the day. Cameron glanced longingly round at the open door 
behind him. It looked extremely tempting, but he was curious, so curious. There was 
nothing to do but descend.
  In his nostrils the scent of the place teased. He had a lousy sense of smell, and a 
worse palate, as his wife was fond of reminding him. She'd say he couldn't distinguish 
between garlic and a rose, and it was probably true. But the smell in this deep meant 
something to him, something that stirred the acid in his belly into life.
  Goats. It smelt, ha, he wanted to tell her then and there how he'd remembered, it smelt 
of goats.
  He was almost at the bottom of the stairs, twenty, maybe thirty, feet underground. The