“Everything is in order,” Lock said.
He called for the sweeper first and Ales Radomir stepped silently forward. Lock held the screen towards him, thumb-pad first. Ales pressed lightly upon it, waited for the beep, and then removed his thumb and stepped back in the shadows.
“Striker,” Lock then said, and Brander stepped forward, pressing his thumb down in turn.
“And how are things out west?” Brander asked kindly.
“Fine. They’re just fine.”
“Good. That’s good. We’re quite excited for things to begin again.”
Lock looked up at him for a moment and nodded briefly, unsure, as always, how to take him. The screen beeped, and Brander stepped back next to Ales.
“Captain,” Lock said, moving over to where Mazaryk sat. He took the handheld from Lock and pressed his thumb down on its pad until the beep, then he handed it back.
“On behalf of Tournament Administration, and in lieu of your assigned courier,” Lock said, the emphasis clear, “I hereby pronounce all members of Team Black present and accountable.” He pressed his own thumb down and then typed in a code.
“You’re cleared for the draw,” he said quickly, eager to be gone. He packed the handheld away again.
“Leaving so soon?”
“Look at your pager. The countdown is under seventy hours and I have other teams to check in.”
“I had noticed. It’s at sixty-eight.”
“So if you’ll excuse me, I—”
“I noticed Johnnie Northern checked in just fine.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re his courier.”
“I’m neutral. I run for many teams. What’s your point?”
“I hope to run into him again this time around,” Mazaryk said quietly, narrowing his gaze.
Lock recalled the last time the two teams had met. They racked up an accumulated six million in fines and hospitalized no fewer than 14 citizens of Anchorage in their battle. The vast majority of the damage was done by the hands of the very man sitting before him.
“Yes. Well.” Lock said, swallowing. “I’ve got to go, Eddie.”
Lock moved out of the door without another word, nor did any of Team Black call after him.
Chapter Thirteen
NATASHA SASLOW REMINDED KAYLA of a stock of wheat. She was tall, thin, and blond, and she moved with the grace of a swaying field. She was also very quiet, almost silent. Unlike her counterpart Allen Lockton, she would often wait for another to speak before doing so herself. But it was getting late, and couriers were always on the clock. To her credit, though, the only way Kayla could tell that she was annoyed at the delay in checking in Team Green was her occasional questioning look. Lock would have blown a gasket by now, Kayla thought.
“They’ll be here. Probably Ian’s fault. The fucker’s never on time,” Kayla said, in her clipped Irish way.
“I’m sure,” Natasha replied, looking into the distance.
They fell quiet once more while all around them the sounds of Dublin whirled. Cars sped up and slowed down; laughter and shouts echoed out of the concrete banks of the nearby River Liffey. They sat at a table outside of a small pub. Dusk approached and the Temple Bar district was waking up. Kayla started tapping a booted foot on the table stand and bit the nail on her right forefinger.
“Who checked in Grey? Lock?” Kayla asked.
“I did,” Natasha replied. “Lock was needed elsewhere.”
“How were they?”
“Fine. Alex Auldborne was as cordial as ever.”
“I’ll bet,” Kayla said acidly. Natasha swayed to look at Kayla briefly, and then returned her gaze outward. No love was lost between the teams of England and Ireland, but as a courier she was ever impartial. Kayla sniffed and played around with her pager on the table for a moment.
“There they are,” Natasha said, checking her watch and pointing out to a couple walking around the corner. Kayla snapped up, smiling. She shoved her seat out and ran around the table while Natasha slowly rose in her wake, picked up her messenger’s bag, and began deftly opening its various pockets, gathering her tools.
The two walked her way like brother and sister, and Kayla couldn’t help but smile. Seeing them there, walking and talking, it was proof. The Tournament had come alive again. This was her family once more. She found herself trembling with excitement. She tried to replicate this sensation in the seemingly interminable off-season, but she always failed. No man, no drug, no sport—nothing else could compete. This, she thought, is a pure thing. A holy thing to me.
Pyper Hurley saw her first. Pyper, just a tad taller than Ian, was dressed conservatively in fitted corduroy slacks and a small khaki jacket, its high collar accentuating her slender neck and prim jaw line. Her long brown hair was pulled back and fell down her shoulders. She struck an aloof, regal figure and Kayla thought her beautiful. Kayla herself was short and decidedly childlike in ways that Pyper was not. Her complexion was darker and freckled where Pyper’s was a creamy white. Her hair was dirty blonde, and she hated the feeling of it on her shoulders so she cut it short and pinned it back and down in random places. It was tousled and wild, which was all right, she supposed, but she often wondered how people would take her if she held herself like Pyper. By people she really only meant one person: Ian Finn.
Her gaze lingered longest on Ian. On the cigarette that hung from his lips, suspended. He was lighting up when he saw her. He paused and took it out and smiled at her with open arms. For a moment his dull green eyes flashed.
He was in a plain white t-shirt, so she could see the entirety of their team mark on him. It wound around his left forearm and licked the base of that deadly left hand of his. It was alternately sharp and smooth in shape, and of a dark green ink so pure it almost glistened. It had no definitive design, but from a distance suggested a snake. Unconsciously she touched her own left forearm where she had one exactly like it. The tip of Pyper’s mark, same as theirs, could just barely be seen where it poked out beyond her cuff.
Kayla reached Pyper first. They hugged and stood back and appraised each other, Pyper’s hands on her shoulders. Then Ian was finally close enough and she hugged him too, wondering how long she could linger. She felt Pyper looking at her, and was reminded of her words of caution: “Tread carefully, Kayla.” And Kayla did tread carefully. She saw in Ian’s eyes at least a brother’s love, but also something of a cornered animal, teeth half-bared, growling low. When he fought, the line between bravery and terror was blurred, desperation and courage were slammed together in each pull of that gun. Right now, though, he was smiling. And he was close. That was enough.
“They still payin’ you Ian? Don’t they know you aren’t even really Irish?” Kayla said, smiling wickedly.
“Check the passport, love. And anyway, we north-Irish are more Irish than you,” he responded, softly tracing with his finger the lines of freckles under her eyes. It was a small show of affection he sometimes made, and one that Kayla had spent long hours at night trying to interpret. He stepped back to look at her fully, and she did a mock curtsy.
“Dublin,” he said, shaking his head slightly and gesturing about. “I saw five hen parties on the way in, and ten tour groups. I’m surprised they don’t have you dressed up like a leprechaun, selling Guinness.”
“I like Guinness,” she said, hitting him on the arm.
“So do I.” He smiled.
“And we are three once again,” Pyper said quietly. “Are you ready Kayla?”
Kayla stepped back and straightened herself. Pyper always asked this of them upon their reunion.
“I am.”
“And Ian?”
“Always.”
“Good, then I am as well. Hello, Natasha. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
With something of a start Kayla turned back to Natasha, slightly embarrassed that she had so lost herself. If she was annoyed, Natasha didn’t show it. She brought out her handheld.
“We’ve r
eceived and confirmed your physical exams in which all three of you were pronounced fit for the draw,” she said, looking up pointedly from her screen. “Now for each of you. Sweeper first. Kayla MacQuillan.”
She passed the handheld over to Kayla, who pressed her thumb on the pad until it beeped. Natasha took it back and clicked in a confirmation.
“Striker. Ian Finn,” she said.
Ian transferred his cigarette from his right hand and set it lightly in his mouth again. Leaning forward, he pressed his right thumb onto the pad until the beep. Then he leaned back again and lit up.
“Captain. Pyper Hurley.”
Pyper took the handheld and contemplated it for a moment before pressing her own thumb on the red square. She watched it closely, as if the machine gave the final say. A strange thought, she knew, and an incorrect one. She and she alone would ultimately be culpable for the ensuing success or defeat of her team. Such was the captain’s burden.
The handheld beeped and she handed it back to Natasha. “On behalf of Tournament Administration, I pronounce Team Green present and accountable,” Natasha said. She pressed her own thumb down on the pad and pocketed the handheld.
“And Grey?” Ian asked suddenly, exhaling smoke as he spoke. “Are they clear?”
Natasha looked at him and then at Kayla. Kayla shrugged.
“As I’ve told Kayla, Grey are ready and accounted for, if you must know,” she said, her voice decidedly monotone. “You’re the last. You make eight. That’s all I need,” Natasha said, shouldering her bag and placing her hands on her hips. They would get no more information.
“Thank you, Natasha,” Pyper said.
“Good luck at the draw. You have just over twenty-five hours.”
After one last nod, she set off in long strides down the river’s sidewall. All three members of Green watched her depart, already falling back into the type of comfortable silence that comes with years of practice.
Chapter Fourteen
MURDER.
It was far too heavy a word for Frank Youngsmith. The doctor’s foreboding charge hung upon him on the flight back to Colorado Springs, the strange bullet tucked amongst his socks in his checked bag, buried like pornography.
“Get the word out, or Bill’s death will be just the first in a long, long line.”
Was that a threat? A warning? Frank took his scotchstained paper pad from his fraying breast pocket and decided to make a list of what he knew.
First, there was no fraud. The doctor, in his strange haste, had said as much when he affirmed that all members of the research team on which Bill worked were insured equally by the company BlueHorse Holdings. For whatever reason, the company had actually insured Beauchamp’s research team for the ludicrous amount that they did days before he died.
Second, he had no way of proving this. The one thing his waddling boss wanted him to get, he had failed to get. The anal retentive man in the tracksuit at BlueHorse had ushered him out without ceremony, and the good doctor had flat refused to sign the statement. Unless, that is, Frank got the word out. Whatever that meant. Then he’d slapped the strange bullet in his hand and dashed away.
When he finally reached home, dried out and hoarse from the stale cabin air, he set the unwanted spoils of his trip upon the tiny nightstand by his unmade bed and pondered it in the dark. It wouldn’t satisfy Winston Pickett. His boss wouldn’t give a damn about the bullet. The bullet wasn’t the signed statement. And since his boss didn’t give a damn about Frank, he wouldn’t be happy taking his word and dropping the case because Bill Beauchamp’s death was going to cost the company big time. In leaving for California, Frank had patched up a wound only to return and find it festering. That a job he hated could make him feel so terribly only worsened things. In a slow and pathetic act of defiance, Frank pushed the bullet and file off and to the floor, and eased his head onto his single pillow. He heard the sound of his over-exuberant neighbor, Andy Billings, dropping something into his sink through their shared wall.
“Hey Andy,” Frank said, not knowing quite why.
“I thought you might be back, Frank! How was the trip?” Andy yelled. Andy still didn’t seem to understand that one need only murmur to be heard through their walls.
“Not too good. Work. It sucks, Andy—”
“I hear you, buddy.”
“You don’t happen to know anything about bullets, do you?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Yeah, I know. Just checking, anyway—
“—I make the goddamn things, Frank!”
Frank looked up at his bathroom wall, right where he guessed his neighbor would be standing.
“You there, Frank?”
“What do you mean you make them?” Frank asked, very evenly.
“I mean it goes hand in hand with my huntin’! I got a machine, a new one just this August for my birthday even. See we call it swaging though. Bullet swaging. Just a fancy word. Debbie got it for me. It’s a Corbin! Best on the market.”
“Can you take apart a bullet with your machine?”
“Take apart, put together, pick your jacket, pick your core, fashion your point—”
“Yeah, Andy—”
“They’ve even got this new thing now where you can put your name on your bullets all tiny. Your name!”
“I need you to—”
“This Corbin, they call it a Mighty Mite Precision Press. It’s got needles and scopes and magnification—”
“Listen, Andy, Andy! I need to come over. For a second.”
It was Andy’s turn to be silent. He’d lived next to Frank for almost a year now, and never once had Frank shown the slightest neighborly interest.
“Are you telling me you want to swage with me?” Andy asked slowly, the anticipation audible.
“Something like that.”
“Well hell! Of course! The neighbors united!”
Frank was already scrabbling about on his knees, scooping fistfuls of dust bunnies out from under his bed until he felt the tiny solidness of the bullet. He blew the dust off of it.
“I’ve got something I want you to look at,” Frank said.
“What the hell kind of thing is this, Frank? ‘Cause it sure ain’t a bullet. Not any bullet I ever seen.” Andy squeezed his left eye shut in concentration as his right peered through the magnification scope of his Corbin. With surprising delicacy he held the diode between the needle thin clamps of miniature pliers and rotated it in the light of a high-beam halogen. Frank watched over his shoulder.
“Well I was hoping you could tell me. It looks like a bullet.”
“See this tip though? It’s not metal. Come to think of it, this ain’t lead in here neither. It’s not shinin’ right.
“Looks metal to me,” Frank said, moving his head in next to Andy. He smelled stale tobacco in what was left of Andy’s hair.
“Well sure, the jacket’s metal, but the jacket stays with you. It’s what’s inside that counts,” Andy said, winking.
“Can you take the jacket off? Can you make sure?”
“I could...” Andy said, rising from his scope and eyeing the bullet warily.
“But...” Frank prompted
“But I’m not guaranteeing Imna be able to get ‘er back together again. This here, it’s a strange thing,” Andy said, shaking his head.
“That’s fine. Whatever you can tell me has to be better than what I’d get from the thing sitting on my nightstand, even if you do ruin it.”
“All right, all right then. Let’s see what we can do.” Andy sat down once again and moved to pick up the bullet with his tools.
“See now, in swagin’ the rule is keep your hands off the ass,” he looked from the bullet up to Frank and grinned. “But that’s just swagin’, know what I mean Frank?”
“Not particularly.”
“What that means is this. Don’t mess with the rear of the bullet. The hammer point. Otherwise it’s liable to pop off in your face.”
Frank took a small step back.<
br />
“Oh don’t worry Frank,” Andy said, his eyes on his work. “I do this all the time. I’ve screwed up a helluva lot of bullets in my day, and you can’t just toss the damn things and risk Joe Blo’s little boy eating ‘em out of the trash and blowing his gut up. You gotta dismantle ‘em, right?”
“Makes sense,” Frank said, leaning in a tad. As Andy spoke he set one tool down, something akin to a tiny monkey wrench, and picked up an instrument with a needle thin tip. It was like redneck surgery.
“My buddy Manx, he used to just toss his bum bullets until one day his wife dropped the garbage bag on the pavement outside their house and shot their neighbor’s cat. Hand to God. Theeere we go...” Andy said, easing the brass jacket up and over the tip of the bullet.
“Oh shit,” Andy said, freezing mid-motion.
“Shit? What’s shit?”
“It’s caught on something. I don’t wanna lean over it to see neither.”
“Put it back!”
Andy slowly slid the jacket back down the bullet, but froze again.
“Nope, it’s not going back. I had to warp the edges a bit to slip it up in the first place.”
“Well great. That’s just great.”
“It’s not supposed to catch on the upward motion!”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, might as well just pull.”
“Pull it? Just yank it?”
“Up. If I yank it up the powder can’t ignite. At least, it’s not supposed to.”
“Jesus...”
“I gotta do something Frank, I can’t just hold it all my life.”
“All right, fine, just yank it up. I’ll be over here.”
“Okay. Here goes.”
Andy swallowed and then sat for a second in silence. Frank could hear the soft buzzing of the naked overhead bulb above him. The hour was late and the traffic was intermittent, more distant than usual.
With one swift pull, not quite a jerk, but small and controlled, Andy popped the jacket off of the bullet. At the same time, in the relative silence of the garage, both men clearly heard a tiny fizz, like a damp firework.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 12