The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy)

by Robert Swartwood

  “This man, he told us about the games. He himself was even a viewer. We managed to watch some of the games. Apparently viewers are not supposed to record what happens, but this man did. The man was low level and could not tell us much more than that, but he knew someone higher up. Someone, he said, in the Inner Circle.”

  They went to this man next. It wasn’t as easy as it had been before. This man was much more powerful and well protected. But they managed to abduct him. They forced the information they needed out of this man. They learned more about the games, about the Inner Circle, about Caesar. Then they killed him.

  “This was four months ago,” Bae said. “The man mentioned something about there being a gathering of the Inner Circle. He didn’t know when or where, but that it was going to happen soon. We realized that Caesar operates out of America, so we decided to come here. Ho Sook made the decision to come with us. I believe ... I believe she feels she owes it to me, for once helping her.”

  “Maybe she did it simply because you’re her father.”

  His smile was thin. “A nice thought, but I do not think so.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But what exactly does all of this have to do with me?”

  “We saved your life and the life of your friend in Miami.”

  “Yes you did, and I appreciate that very much.”

  “We plan to kill Caesar.”

  “So do we.”

  “No, you plan to save your friend. Killing Caesar is secondary.”

  “Well whichever one comes first we’ll do. We’re not too picky.”

  “We watched the games when we came here. That is how we managed to track you in Miami. That is how we obtained one of Caesar’s men in Arizona.”

  “Yeah, I meant to ask you about that. How did your daughter catch up with my guy? He’d already been an hour outside of Miami.”

  “My other men were following the SUV once it left the Beachside Hotel.”

  “And Caesar’s man from Arizona—you killed him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But first you tortured him.”

  Bae said nothing.

  “What all did he give you?”

  “That the Coliseum was to be in New York City. At the building called the Fillmore. Tonight.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “How did you learn of this?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, but this isn’t my story time. Let’s just say I know about it, and I plan to be there tonight.”

  “We also plan to be there.”

  “So I’ve gathered. Where did you get your invitations?”

  Bae smiled. “We are, how do you say, crashing the party.”

  “Then maybe our paths will cross again.”

  “I am sure they will.”

  “So can you clue me in again on why I’m sitting here?”

  “I felt it would be polite to give you warning. We understand what you plan to do, and I felt it was best to let you know what we plan to do.”

  “Again, the point?”

  “We will hold off killing Caesar as long as we can. So that you can try to save your friend. We know Carver Ellison is a great man. He deserves to live. Or, at the very least, he does not deserve to die in front of those people.”

  “Speaking of which, it’s probably time I got back to my team.”

  “Of course. Chin and Seung will take you back.”

  I stood from the bench and started to turn away when Bae said my name.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Have you heard them yet?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Those five hundred million bells you wrote about in your story.”

  “They’re from a children’s book—a fairy tale. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I would not be so sure. What, again, is the purpose of fairy tales? To tell children that monsters not only exist, but they can still be beaten.”

  I shook my head. “Caesar may be a monster, but this isn’t a fairy tale.”

  “No,” Bae said somberly, “unfortunately it is not. This is life, and as most things which happen in life, it makes this a horror story. Let us just hope tonight at least one of us makes it out alive.”

  58

  Chin and Seung didn’t speak at all on the drive back. They let me out a block away from the place they’d picked me up from. As I stepped out, I said, “Thanks, fellas. I’d offer you a tip, but I don’t seem to have any cash on me right now.”

  I started to shut the door when one of them—Seung, I think—spoke.

  “Good luck tonight.”

  I nodded. “You too.”

  I shut the Escalade’s door and started down the block.

  • • •

  RONNY WAS WAITING for me outside on the sidewalk.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” I said.

  He pulled my disposable cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to me. “Stark called while you were gone.”

  “And?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me anything. Said he would only talk to you.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes.”

  “Where did you tell him I was?”

  “What was I supposed to tell him? I said you were currently indisposed and would call him back.”

  “You haven’t asked yet how my meeting went.”

  “I’m assuming it went well.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning those guys didn’t kill you.”

  • • •

  WE WENT INSIDE and started up the stairs. The building had been a shitty warehouse once. Years ago it had been remodeled and was somehow even shittier now. We were currently renting half of the fifth floor. The other half was deserted.

  I called Stark and said, “Sorry I missed your call.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Didn’t Ronny tell you? I was indisposed.”

  “For half an hour?”

  “I had a bad bean burrito.”

  He was silent for a moment, and I thought the connection had dropped out. Then he said, “You weren’t very nice to the congresswoman.”

  “Granted, I wasn’t on my best behavior, but on the bright side, I wasn’t as rude as I could have been.”

  “She wasn’t quite convinced after our meeting.”

  I was climbing the stairs, Ronny in front of me. “What are you saying?”

  “She wasn’t quite convinced, but I did everything I could to convince her. She understands the risks. She knows what might happen to her if this all goes south. But she also knows she just can’t sit back and let it happen.”

  “Again, what are you saying?”

  “She’s agreed to help.” Stark released a heavy breath. “She’s scared, Ben. So am I.”

  “Join the club.”

  “Where are you now? I’ll meet you to discuss the details.”

  “How about we just discuss them over the phone instead?”

  Another pause. “You still don’t trust me, do you?”

  “What are the details?”

  Stark sighed again, and then started to talk.

  • • •

  RONNY HAD GONE ahead of me and was waiting at the top of the landing when I caught up to him, closing the phone.

  “We all set?”

  I nodded and said, “I have to be downtown by ten.” I started toward the door but Ronny stepped in my way. “What?”

  “What you were about to tell me before—about Jen and Casey being dead.”

  “What about it?”

  “You need to talk about it.”

  “I haven’t talked about it for two years. I don’t have to start now.”

  I went to step around Ronny but he moved again to block me.

  “You do,” he said.

  “Ronny, don’t piss me off.”

  “Everyone’s inside.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Why?”

  “After what happened, we weren’t even sure y
ou would be back.”

  Since we’d come to the city we had kept the team split in case something happened. It wasn’t wise to put everyone in the same place at the same time. But now it seemed that was what had happened.

  Ronny placed his hand on my shoulder. “You need to let it out, Ben. For your own sake. And if not for your own sake, then at least for Maya’s sake. You owe her that much.”

  I glared back at him, and carefully took his hand off my shoulder. “You know something, Ronny? Sometimes you can be an annoying prick.”

  He smiled. “If I am, I learned it from watching you.”

  • • •

  JUST AS RONNY said, everyone was inside—the Kid, Drew, Beverly, Maya, and Mason Coulter, who had surprised us all and stepped up in a big way this past week. The man certainly had anger issues, but he was able to control the anger for the most part, and was using it to help us get back at the people that had taken his family away. Now he was dressed like a homeless person, in nothing but rags, filthy and smelling like trash. This was because for the past three nights he had literally been sleeping in a dumpster.

  The only person who wasn’t present was Graham. As much as he wanted to help, there wasn’t really anything for him to do, or anything he could do, not in his condition. It was hard for him to accept, especially as he had helped raise Carver and thought of him as a son, but he acknowledged the reality for what it was and stayed back at the farmhouse.

  So it was just the seven of us—six of them and one of me—and when Ronny and I entered, they all turned to look at us.

  The Kid said almost immediately, “Did you talk to Stark?”

  I nodded. “We’re a go.”

  The tension in the room seemed to momentarily lift. While we had hoped the congresswoman would come through, there had never been any guarantee, and we had already prepared a Plan B.

  “So what did those guys want?” the Kid asked.

  “To talk to their guy in charge. He’s kind of like the Korean Carver.”

  The Kid raised an eyebrow at this.

  “They’re going to be there tonight, too. They’re aiming to kill Caesar. They understand our main objective is to get Carver first, so he said they’ll try to hold off as long as possible.”

  “Why don’t they just team up with us?”

  “I’m not sure. I think they, just like us, have trust issues.”

  Ronny cleared his throat. “Ben has something he wants to say to everyone.”

  I shot Ronny a glare but he wasn’t having any of it. He just stood there, his arms crossed, waiting.

  “Ben?” Beverly said. “What is it?”

  I looked at her and started to speak ... but then my gaze shifted and my eyes met Maya’s.

  “Ben?” Beverly said again.

  Staring at Maya, I whispered, “My family.”

  “What about your family?”

  I blinked, looked around the room, took a deep breath. “My family ... they’re dead. Jen and Casey—they’re dead.”

  Beverly shook her head sadly. “But you don’t know that for certain. They may still be alive.”

  “They’re not,” I said, my voice all at once going cold. “I saw them die. After my game, when I wrote my story and the Kid posted it online, they ... they sent out a video. It was encrypted, so only someone like the Kid could find it. Maya wasn’t with us then, and of course neither was Mason, but some of the rest of you might remember Carver taking me away for a day. We met the Kid in Denver, and the Kid ... he showed me the video. It was less than two minutes long. It showed Jen and Casey, both of them tied to separate chairs. And then this person walked into frame—I never saw his face, he always kept his back to the camera—and he said that if I wanted to fuck with them, they were going to fuck with me, and he ... he killed them. Slowly. With a knife.”

  The room had gone silent. Outside, the city continued to breathe with frantic life, but here right now all was quiet and still.

  Beverly, her hand to her mouth, whispered, “Oh, Ben, why ... why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Carver wanted me to. So did the Kid. But it was my decision, and I told them we would keep it a secret. That ... that the only thing that keeps us going is the hope that our families are still alive. And after what they did to Jen and Casey, it was obvious they had done the same to all of our families. That”—I swallowed—“that we really had nothing to live for anymore. Nothing except making these motherfuckers pay for what they did to us.”

  The silence grew. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.

  Then Beverly, her voice soft, said, “Ben?”

  “Yes, Beverly.”

  “I think I speak for everyone when I say we understand your reason for keeping this from us. But even without knowing exactly what has happened to each of our families, I’m sure we all know that they’re dead. And I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I have had hope this entire time. Not exactly to see my family again—because, again, I have always believed them dead—but that we will eventually reach the people responsible for what happened to them. And tonight it seems that will happen. So yes,” she said, and produced a devilish little grin, “let’s make these motherfuckers pay.”

  59

  “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Try it again.”

  “It’s not going to work.”

  “Try it again,” Maya repeated, her voice all at once hard.

  We stood in an empty room in front of a makeshift desk, a small mirror before us, a contact lens on my finger. For ten minutes now I’d been trying to put in one lens, and no matter how hard I tried, the sucker wouldn’t stick properly to my eye.

  “I’ll be okay with just my glasses.”

  “Try it again.”

  “Maya.”

  “Ben, don’t make me tell you one more time.”

  Normally, I might have smiled at her tone, but her eyes told me she was deeply serious—more serious now than ever before.

  I turned back to the mirror and used my thumb and index finger to widen my left eyelid. Then I slowly moved my finger with the contact lens to my eye, trying to keep it open despite its initial reaction to automatically shut.

  Next thing I knew, I blinked and the contact ended up on my cheek.

  “You’re pathetic,” Maya said.

  “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  Over a year ago Carver had me get a prescription for contact lenses. He said it would be best when trailing players to have contacts instead of glasses. After all, without my glasses I was half-blind, so if they broke or were lost, I would be pretty much useless in the field. And so I had gotten contact lenses and spent an hour trying to put them in, and hated the feeling so much that I never wore them again. But I still had the prescription, and according to Stark (who had heard it from Congresswoman Houser earlier this week), everyone in the Inner Circle tonight would be hiding their identities, which meant they would be wearing masks. And with a mask, my glasses were not going to work.

  “Try it again,” Maya said.

  I turned back to the mirror, then turned back to Maya and said, “Are you seriously mad at me?”

  “You could have told me the truth.”

  “And what good would that have done?”

  “I don’t know. But you could have told me.”

  “There was nothing to tell. They were dead. Telling you or telling anybody wouldn’t have changed that simple fact.”

  “I thought you trusted me.”

  “I do.”

  “But you don’t. Otherwise you would have told me.”

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “Last week at the farmhouse. While everyone else was inside singing and we were outside on the porch.”

  “So over a year later.”

  “Are we really having this discussion right now?”

  “Do you love me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “But are you in love with me?”

  “Maya,” I began, a
nd I meant to say more—what, I wasn’t exactly sure—when there was a knock at the door.

  The Kid poked his head in. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Just trying to put in these contacts,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He stepped into the room and held up a pair of black leather dress shoes. “These are ready to go.”

  “Great. You can set them down wherever.”

  He placed them on the floor, leaned back, and just stood there.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He took a step forward, paused, said to Maya, “Actually, I’d like to talk to Ben alone if that’s okay.”

  She gave no verbal response, just turned and left the room.

  The Kid said, “Trouble in paradise?”

  “Are you here for a reason?”

  “Having trouble with the contacts?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. Any suggestions?”

  “Dude, I got twenty-twenty vision. Don’t know what to tell you.”

  “As always, you’ve been extremely helpful.”

  The Kid walked deeper into the room, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking everywhere but at me.

  “So what’s up?” I asked.

  “I just wanted to go over everything one last time.”

  “You’re more than welcome, but I’m good.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want to go over the Fillmore’s building plans again?”

  “Kid.”

  “Mason said he’s seen activity over there all morning. Utility van after utility van entering the garage and then coming out.”

  “Kid.”

  “What?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m worried about tonight.”

  “We all are.”

  “I have that feeling I sometimes get, that something really bad is going to happen.”