“What were you doing when you cut yourself, Ian?” he asked, his voice calm and oddly mismatched with the rest of him.
“Sleeping. I was dozing off.”
“No. Right when it happened.”
Ian thought for a moment. He looked out beyond Father Darby. Then it came to him.
“I dropped my book. We were reading and I dropped my book.”
Father Darby smiled and nodded slowly, encouraging him.
“I leaned over my desk. I switched hands with my pencil and leaned off to the right, to get it.”
“And what was your left hand doing? When you did this?”
Ian thought for a moment, shook his head, and then moved his body slightly in a lesser mimicking of how he leaned over to get the book in class that day. As he moved himself out and over the stairs, his left hand moved up a few inches. That was all. Nothing more. Ian looked at Father Darby and shrugged.
“I don’t think my hand was doing anything.”
“It was,” Darby said calmly. “You positioned it for those muscles to click.”
“Click?”
“You drew.”
“I what? Drew?”
“I’d like for you to learn to fire a handgun, Ian.”
Ian leaned back, away from Father Darby.
“A handgun?” His voice cracked.
“Left handed,” Darby said quietly.
It was a moment before Ian spoke.
“Hold on. You think I can... pull a gun, like a—like a quick draw or something? What is this? Is this what this is all about? Some sideshow?”
Father Darby stood watching as Ian shuffled forward to the edge of the stairs. Their talking had hushed the insects nearby and a strange calm settled over the front of the house. Darby seemed to be weighing options. He worked his jaw slightly and looked from Ian off into space and then back to Ian again. He seemed agitated. When he spoke, he spoke slowly and Ian felt that his words had a particular weight, and that they had been mulled over for a long while, well before Darby had appeared at his front porch that night:
“There is an organization. They are interested in you. And have been for some time.”
“What organization? Does this have something to do with my father?”
“It’s not what you think. I can’t tell you anything more. They have forbidden it. They think you are too young at the moment. I disagree, but in matters such as this... I answer to them.”
At these words Ian felt a strange twinge deep in his stomach, near his guts. It reminded him of the sensation he once got after his mother had pulled him back from an intersection just before a bus barreled through; like all the blood that was surging through his veins switched directions on a dime. It wasn’t just the words themselves—it was Father Darby. In all his years of knowing the old priest, he had never heard him speak like this. Ian was speechless. A man of God had just asked him to learn to fire a weapon. A man he had thought answered to nobody but God apparently answered to someone, or something else, and he had already brought Ian into it, without him even knowing.
“I trust you not to insult me by asking if I’m serious,” Darby said.
“Insult you? You had plans for me all along! You used me! You’re still using me! And I don’t even know what for! I went through surgery for you! This was never about me, was it?”
“You have every right to be angry. All I can say is that I know you very well. Far better than you think. I made some assumptions. I made decisions on your behalf. I trust that if you knew the full story, you would be behind these decisions as well.”
“Well tell me the full goddam story!”
“Ian I cannot!” Darby yelled, raising his voice for the first time.
For a moment he stood to his full height, as if a surge of power had rocked through him, but it was fleeting. Then he seemed to deflate, and shortly was his hunched self again. Ian was suddenly very aware of how old Darby was. He had been yelling, cussing even, at a man nearly eighty—at a priest nearly eighty.
“I’m sorry, Father.”
Darby looked up at him and smiled sadly. Both the yellow porch lighting and the shades of night dappled his face at once, accentuating the wrinkles and lines.
“Ian, this is as frustrating for me as it is for you. It’s true I’ve betrayed your trust. If it was up to me, you would know everything, but it isn’t. And I know I’ve no right to ask you to trust me once again, but it’s all I can do.”
“How much does my father know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“A gun? You want me to learn to shoot a gun? I don’t know if I want to be part of a group like that. No guns in the UK, Father, in case you didn’t know. Not for priests and not for students.”
Darby stepped towards him and leaned a bit down, grasping with his gaze for Ian’s eyes. He found them and brought them up to his own.
“Never mind that. You’ll want to be part of this, Ian. I’d bet my life on it.”
Chapter Twelve
FROM CERTAIN VANTAGE POINTS, mostly high ones, the city of St. Petersburg, Russia, seems an endless myriad of towers. At dawn or at sunset in particular all that can be seen of these many spires are their outlines, black against the sky. Some are bulbous, others needle tipped, and still others are a mixture of both, as if in creating the city God had tossed handfuls of sharp objects across the land like dice, and all of them had landed tip up.
The spires soar into the sky on behalf of several gods. Cathedrals and temples mingle with a small handful of mosques, all blackened by the same dust and soot, all stained by the same passing of the same years. Some are older than others, but almost all are very old, some ancient. St. Petersburg is a city of two parts, much of it destroyed in the Second World War during one of the most destructive sieges of any modern city in history. It was known as Leningrad then, and afterwards it was built anew around the scattered surviving portions. One might, without knowing it, be walking down dark and twisted streets of cobblestones many centuries old, or be leaning upon a wall that has stood for half of a millennium.
The collective lives of generation upon generation of St. Petersburg citizens, their comings and goings, their births and deaths, their passions and secrets, has imbued the city with a heavy and quiet air. Its beauty is unique, tinged with pain, but nonetheless deep and vintage.
It was through this history that Allen “Lock” Lockton walked, down the curved and twisted streets, among the towering spires and dark rock. He walked quickly, as was his way, but quicker than normal for all that. He carried with him a glossy, jet black folder emblazoned with the Tournament seal, and therefore he felt that all of St. Petersburg was somehow watching him. Though his arrival was unannounced, he felt that Eddie Mazaryk and Team Black were expecting him. The very air was expectant. It chilled him and made him see things in the darkened windows and doors that couldn’t be there. He imagined that people watched him specifically, random people at odd intervals on the street corners and under the umbrellas of sidewalk cafes who looked at him as if they knew him. The whole city, he nearly believed, worked for Mazaryk.
Lock himself was only aware of a few individuals who had direct contact with Black, and he was on the lookout for them. They would lead him to the captain. Lock could only go to where he had last met these strange individuals and look from there, and the last time he had seen any of them had been here in St. Petersburg.
He knew all three of them by sight: a tall woman, middle aged, who wore her white hair long and down; an elderly man stooped and with a cane, its handle in the shape of an ivory eagle; and a dark-skinned Turkish child, no more than ten, who wore a gold pendant and never spoke. After five years with the Tournament he had deduced only these three to be in direct contact with Black, but there were no doubt others. How many more, he couldn’t guess. How many of those casting errant glances his way were in league with Black? And yet even the three he knew were three more than any other Tournament courier had found. That was why it was always Lock who had to delive
r to Black, even though the region was well out of his zone. Eddie Mazaryk was notoriously difficult to reach, and Lock was the best the Tournament had at finding people.
Lock listened to the sounds around him, the sibilant Russian of which he knew some, and here and there bits of other languages of which he knew none. He smelled the air, damp from recent rain, and with it the mingled scents of wet wool and the meaty smell of food from a nearby stall. He caught a whiff of coffee here and of vodka there. He wiped his brow of mist and looked about a small, dark courtyard. At its center bubbled a stone fountain so grooved and blunted by the passing of water that whatever shape it once possessed was now just a lump of glittering rock. It was here that he had last been approached. He moved inside of the square, under a rod-iron gate that was chained open, and sat down on one of the flaking wooden benches that ringed it. He sat for twenty minutes, until he could no longer stand the waiting, and he got up once more. He would not find help there this time. But he knew they were watching.
Outside the courtyard he assessed the situation, weighing his options. He glanced down a nearby market street and saw nothing intriguing; he combed the cafes and terraces with his most suspicious eye, marking anything potentially out of place. People moved about the windows doing their own business. Oddly, no one even glanced his way now. Two teenage girls in full school uniforms came around a nearby corner and were walking up the street in his direction, chatting away in rapid Russian. They looked up at him briefly as they passed around him, but took no real notice. He walked to the corner around which they had come and looked down the alleyway there. It was thin, and down its center ran a shallow, trickling storm gutter.
A clothesline was strung above him in the alley and it drooped with saturated sheets that had been caught out in the rain. They dripped heavy drops in a dark line stretching out in front of him, beckoning.
Lock turned around and looked back out onto the main street and saw a few people moving about in the gathering dusk. No one took any notice of him. He turned back towards the alleyway. It was empty. He wiped his brow again and started walking forward. He skirted the dripping sheets, only to walk under more dripping laundry. The rain had come without warning. The alley was silent save for the random splattering of water from the lines above, and the soft murmur of that water as it gathered in the shallow center gutter to flow back out onto the main street. Lock walked slowly, moving from one side of the alley to the other, stepping over the water as he went. He followed it around a soft bend, choosing not to walk down any of the side streets that opened up at intervals to his right and left, and not quite knowing why not.
Ten minutes later he saw the Turk boy.
The alley progressed in a wide, left-leaning circle and Lock was never able to see that far down it at any one time, so he came upon the boy suddenly, and when he did, the boy was staring at him. He was dressed in a small raincoat that reached his knees and he wore black galoshes. A shiny gold chain glinted off his dark skin. His hair was very wet and plastered down about his head and it made his ears stick out. Lock stopped dead and watched him, afraid that if he moved or said anything too quickly he would scare the boy, who might dash off like a rabbit.
But the boy didn’t look scared. In fact, the boy smiled at him, albeit briefly. Then he pointed down a side street just to his left and stood still, like a small statue dripping in the quiet drizzle. Lock moved slowly up to him and looked down the way he pointed. The boy simply watched him, his arm held out.
This side street looked identical to the countless number he had already passed, save for a single ornate lantern burning brightly under a tattered overhang. The lantern illuminated an old wooden sign written in faded Russian, and a dark red, solid-wood door that stood open. Lock looked back at the boy, who looked only at him. Then Lock moved over to the door and inside.
It was an old tavern. The walls were papered in a raised pattern of red felt, and the tables and chairs were the same dark red wood as the door. Two men in the corner played chess on a board that had been carved into the surface of their table. A man smoked a cigarette behind the bar, and another stood reading a paper in front of a thin, spiral staircase. All four looked up at Lock when he entered, lingered briefly upon him, and then resumed their business.
In the silence Lock could hear the clicking of the chess pieces very clearly and the soft hiss of the bartender drawing on his cigarette. He walked up to the bar and the barman looked at him expectantly but said nothing. Behind him, the newspaper rustled as the man by the staircase turned the page. Lock turned to look at him, and after a moment stepped back from the bar and moved over to the staircase. He expected the man to challenge him, or to at least say something, but he never even looked up. Lock set one foot on the staircase, and when the man didn’t respond, Lock slowly climbed the stairs.
Waiting just at the top was Goran Brander, the striker for Black. A towering man, he wasn’t far from the second-story ceiling even leaning casually against the wall as he was. Although he was tall, over six and a half feet, he wore his height well, so that you were only really aware of the full extent of it when standing right next to him. Only then did one sense the power that can be housed in a body with a near-seven foot wingspan. His face was long and aquiline, his nose sharp and extended, not outward but downward. His sharp jaw line begat a sharper, triangular chin. In his trim black suit and thin black tie he looked the type of figure to avoid, and yet despite this, upon seeing him, Lock let out a breath of relief.
“Brander,” he said, regaining something of his steadfast, ramrod composure, “Finally.”
The striker laughed deeply and softly. “You are welcome. As always.” His voice was slightly accented in the eastern-European way, yet inexplicably gentle. Even now, five years after first speaking with him, it still threw Lock every time he heard that voice come out of that man. It was as if his body and voice were separate entities.
“We’re over here,” he said, lazily pointing through the doorway at his side. After gesturing, he stepped through. Lock followed after.
The room inside was silent. Lock heard the creak of his shoes on the dusty carpeting, and the occasional rattle of wind jostling the windows and slipping through cracks in the foundation below. The room was dark, lit only by the faltering light through two thin, rectangular windows, and by the glow of a small fire in the fireplace in the back. In the shadow of its mantle stood a second man, the firelight reflecting erratically off his small, round eyeglasses. By his short height Lock knew him to be Ales Radomir, the sweeper for Black, lurking silently, as always.
Offset of the fire, another man sat in a massive and faded wingback chair. His hand rested around an amber drink sat upon a thin stand to his right. Brander walked forward towards the chair, nodded once, and then took his place standing next to Ales by the fire. Neither man acknowledged the other. Both scrutinized Lock. Brander’s gaze was calm, but Lock couldn’t see past the fire that flitted over Ales spectacles and this bothered him.
The man himself, Eddie Mazaryk, sat deep in the wingback. His face and skin were smooth and light and his lips small and carved like a doll’s. His hair was fine and dark and long enough to cover the back of his neck. Most of it was held together with a band behind his head, but a few wisps hung down the sides of his face. In the gathering darkness, his eyes picked up the firelight. They were of so pure a shade of brown that they reminded Lock of soil brought up from deep below the earth, or of the rich mud of a lake bed. Eddie Mazaryk held his right hand up in greeting.
“Hello Allen.”
“Eddie.”
“I’m glad you found the place.”
“Yes. Well. They sent me after our first courier wasn’t so lucky,” Lock snipped.
“I’d heard,” Mazaryk said calmly.
“Natasha Saslow is a perfectly capable courier. She’s your courier, Eddie. Let her do her job.”
“She’s new,” Mazaryk said, amused, unused to being spoken to in such a manner.
“She’d find
you if you let her,” Lock continued, glancing back at the two by the fire. “I’ve worked with her personally, she trained in my hemisphere—”
“I know you. And she’s new,” Mazaryk said, a bit harder this time.
“I don’t have time,” Lock said, exasperated. “They stretch me too thin just running correspondence for the Americas—”
“You have time. You just don’t like it. It makes you uncomfortable here.”
Lock paused and righted himself. In the dark glow of the firelight he saw Ales Radomir smile strangely.
“You love a challenge. This little jaunt is not what bothers you.”
“You bother me, Eddie. All I know of you is what I hear. What I’ve heard I don’t like. To be frank.”
“What a terrible thing to say, my friend,” Brander chimed in from behind. He sounded genuinely hurt, yet Lock knew this was absurd. As if he, Allen Lockton, could possibly hurt a man like Brander. Allen carried letters. Brander fired a .50 caliber handgun like it was a supermarket cap gun. He glanced up at Brander, who smiled benevolently down at him. Suddenly Lock felt that he needed to get out of the building. He suppressed a wild urge to run by reminding himself that these three, no matter what their agenda, surely had no issue with a courier. Whoever shot the messenger?
“Let’s get this over with,” Lock said.
He flipped his messenger’s bag around to his front and unzipped it. From a padded pocket within he removed a small handheld device.
“I assume your physician has cleared you to participate,” Lock said.
Still seated, Mazaryk reached over to the stand at his right and grabbed a flat black cellphone. He tapped it. The soft blue glow of the phone’s screen seemed out of place in the old room.
Lock waited for the beep from his handheld. He scrolled through documents until he found the electronic signature of a Dr. Vigo Valclav, a Tournament doctor stationed in Kalingrad, Russia. Dr. Valclav had marked all three members of Black as fit for participation.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 11