The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “There,” Miguel Jr. said, pointing out of one of the windows. Maria peered out. She saw two white people, a man and woman, casually walking up to the house. The man was dressed in clean slacks and slightly smudged collared shirt. The woman had a nice skirt and a top just a bit too revealing for Maria’s tastes. Both wore exasperated smiles, as if they had been running around the whole city looking for something and finally found it. The man was even quite handsome, if you liked gringos. The woman could be pretty, but her smile harbored a smirk and she looked a tad constipated. They were probably just tourists, a young globetrotting couple, and they were most likely looking for a main road to town. Maria saw no wedding ring on the woman, but the man was walking with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, as if he was on a country stroll, so perhaps he had a ring. She watched as they came to the door. The man rapped lightly three times and then stepped back a few paces and waited, rocking back and forth on his heels.

  Maria looked down at Miguel Jr., who shrugged and stepped behind her, grabbing on to her leg. Maria slid the door catch in place and opened the door just a crack.

  “Yes?”

  The man leaned to his left to see her through the crack and flashed a fetching smile. He cleared his throat and brought a hand from behind his back. He carried in it a small Spanish phrase booklet, in which he had written something down and translated it. He held it in front of him like a caroler and began to read, his accent broken and atrociously Anglo.

  “Hello ma’am. My name is Alex. This next-to-me woman is Christina. We work with your brother from husband. His name is Diego.”

  At that point Auldborne stopped and looked up at her with eyebrows raised, as if to ask whether or not she could understand him. She nodded vigorously. They’re police, she thought. Oh God. Something’s happened to him. They wouldn’t send white people unless something has happened to Diego.

  Auldborne continued:

  “There has been a problem,” he said.

  Maria sucked in a breath and put her hand to her mouth. She looked down at Miguel Jr. “Go out back and get your father,” she whispered. He ran out the back door calling for his dad, and Auldborne paused upon hearing him tramp away. Stoke glanced at him before turning back to watch Maria.

  “Diego has been very hurt. He is in hospital,” Auldborne said, still reading.

  “Was he trying to fix the mower? I told him never fix the mower himself!” Maria said, her voice frantic. Auldborne cocked his head and frowned. He looked down to the sheet once more.

  “May we come in?” he read, then promptly snapped the book closed and held it behind his back once more as he watched Maria.

  Maria looked around herself and the house, then waited for Miguel to come in from the back. She heard him clomping through the kitchen in his garden work boots. He rounded the corner, his face paling.

  “What is it?”

  “They say something has happened to Diego! They’re Americans, maybe. Maybe police or lawyers.”

  Miguel looked through the crack at the two people standing calmly on his porch. He sized them both up briefly and nodded. She undid the latch and slowly opened the door.

  “Please, please, come in. Tell me what has happened.”

  Auldborne took three steps over the threshold before he drew his other hand from behind his back, and in it he carried a dull gray nine-millimeter handgun. With the same flat expression he wore in reading his Spanish he leveled the gun at Miguel, but he watched Maria, waiting for a reaction. Christina Stoke stepped in the house after him and swiftly turned and closed the door. She then took her own small snub-nosed revolver from a holster on her inner thigh.

  Maria had her back turned to the intruders and was readying a place for her guests to sit in the living room, so it was Miguel who saw what was happening first. His eyes grew wide and his mouth worked about but no words came out.

  “Eaaaasy Miguel,” Auldborne said.

  Maria turned around to speak to the two and, upon seeing the guns, immediately screamed bloody murder. She yelled for Miguel Jr., who then started screaming, which only fueled her hysterics so that she started throwing things in their direction thinking they were hurting her child. Auldborne deflected a knitted sham and two sofa pillows before Stoke stepped up and grabbed the boy and held a gun to his head.

  “Hey!” she screamed. “Hey bitch! Stop it! Shut up or I’ll shoot the boy!”

  She jangled the revolver around by his temple to emphasize her point. Maria went from screams to sobs, which were notably quieter. She reached out for her son, but Miguel held her back and looked up at Auldborne, his eyes big pleading pools of water. Already the smallest child had betrayed herself in the back room.

  “Please. Please. Please. No, no shoot,” Miguel said, his already broken English faltering further in his dry mouth. “Take,” he said, pointing around the small living room.

  Auldborne sighed in annoyance, dropped his phrase book on the coffee table with a bang, and began picking stray bits of lint off of his front with his free hand. He pushed the doily patterned curtains back from the nearest window and looked out. The boy was whimpering and a baby in the back was screaming, but things sounded natural, at least. With any luck, nobody would think anything amiss.

  After a moment Draden Tate entered through the back door, tracking bits of garden mud through the kitchen. He caught Auldborne’s eye and shook his head. “Nobody comin’.”

  “Keep watch,” Auldborne instructed. Tate nodded as he receded back out of the room. “And shut that baby up.”

  For a horrendous moment in which both parents could only watch, the hulking man made his way to the back room in which their daughter wailed. Maria began to scrabble forward out of her husband’s grip again. Miguel started to move, but was stilled by a visible increase of pressure upon his son’s temple.

  Without pausing, Tate simply shoved the door to the child’s room shut and continued his way out the back. The wailing was still evident, but muted. Both parents sagged. Auldborne shrugged.

  “Now then,” Auldborne said, taking a deep, cleansing breath. “All of that nastiness is done with.” He smiled at the family each in turn, but none would meet his eye.

  “The idea is not to shoot any of you. That’s the idea, anyway. Do help us out.”

  “They can’t understand you, Alex,” Christina said, the cold barrel of her gun pulsing along with the boy’s left temple.

  “I know that. But I feel I should say it anyway. Pretenses must be made.”

  “You see,” he continued, turning back to the family, “I wasn’t entirely lying back then. This is about Diego.”

  At the mention of his brother’s name Miguel’s eyes gave a flash of recognition.

  “Nothing has happened to him as of yet,” said Auldborne, enunciating with his hands, “But we’re hoping to change all of that, naturally. So let’s all just sit tight for a bit, shall we?”

  ————

  As his house was being invaded and his family held at gunpoint, Diego Vega and his team were resting momentarily on the Mazatlan coastline, many miles away. They were road weary and, although she would never admit it, at least one of their numbers was ashamed of running.

  “You of all people should understand the idea of misdirection,” Diego had said. “The power of the bait. They chase us, but we want it! We are in control.”

  Lilia Alvarez didn’t buy it. What they were doing still felt cowardly. “Well when does it stop being ‘misdirection’ and become ‘running?” she asked Diego.

  “They must be tired,” Felix said as he sat looking out upon the foamy crash of the waves on the trash strewn beach. This stretch of the coastline wasn’t privately owned and tended to accumulate debris. He followed a faded detergent bottle with his quiet eyes as it tumbled about the concrete breakers, alternately sucked under and spit out.

  “This is the best way to deal with hotheaded teams. Let them work themselves into a fit and then hit them when they’re confused and clean up the mess,�
� Felix said.

  Lilia shook her head and stood up, her hands on her slender hips. She wore pants of a smooth, stretchy fabric that clenched around her thighs and fluttered in the wind at her ankles. Felix crossed his arms in a manner that made him look like an old man on a stoop, pondering. Even his speech was low and calm. But his iron gaze hinted at the true rapid fire synapse he possessed, that he could take in an entire scene at a glance and could place objects and people perfectly after a moment’s look. His peripheral vision was as strong as his direct vision, a rare talent and an invaluable tool for a sweeper.

  “Of course you would say that,” Lilia said. “That is what you do. You sweep. But me? I strike. I create the mess that you clean up.”

  “And I lead,” Diego said, quieting the other two just as Ortiz was about to speak. Lilia sat back down and slid over to Diego’s side, where she put her arm around his shoulder.

  “You do. And we follow. I just get worried. Grey makes me nervous. I’m not so sure Alex Auldborne is the type of person to ‘beat himself.’ He likes to beat others. And he is very good at it.”

  Just as these words fell from Lilia’s lips, Diego’s phone rang. White’s administration rarely called their team, preferring instead to let them work as they would, so the ring had a distinct weight of foreboding once Diego saw who was calling.

  “What news?” he asked.

  “Something happened,” said the other line, a woman, her Spanish laced with poorly veiled panic.

  “Where are they?” he asked, straightening in his seat.

  “They’ve left a very deliberate electronic signature in eight separate spots in Mexico City in the past forty-five minutes,” said the woman.

  Diego stood.

  “They’re all leading in one direction.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Santa Anna. The last hit was just four miles southwest.”

  “Call Tournament Security, get someone to intervene,” he instructed, his breathing short and rapid as he looked from Lilia to Ortiz. “This is a blatant violation—”

  “We called! But our people in the Federales are too far out! A day away, at least!”

  “I’ve got to get to Mexico City,” he said, his voice suddenly cold and flat.

  “I’ve got three seats on the next flight out from Buelna Airport. You’ve got forty-five minutes until takeoff.”

  He hung up and looked at his team, already gathering their things. His eyes were wide and his face long and down-turned. He looked a good ten years older than his age and his voice was distant as he spoke, his mind trying to wrap itself around the type of team that would openly involve a man’s family in a private war.

  “Change of plans,” he said, sweeping up his bag and shouldering it in one move. “We go to Mexico City.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE IRISH HAD FILED a Tournament-wide flight plan and made it known to the Italian administration, effectively issuing a challenge to meet.

  “Can you believe this? Those Irish bastards think they can tell us where our fight is gonna be!” spat Ignazio Andizi, his wristlets jangling as he paced back and forth, mildly outraged.

  “Portugal,” Tessa said calmly. She was used to Andizi’s bravado.

  “Portugal,” echoed Andizi, “They say it’s half way. Who the hell do they think they are? Am I supposed to be impressed by their geography? That they can pick something halfway in between our two countries? They assume we’ll just meet up like backyard bullies, like—”Andizi momentarily lost his train of thought. “I say we go right over to their drunken country and smash their pale asses right into the blarney stone—

  “—I’ll decide what we do, Ignazio,” Tessa said.

  Andizzi paused, shrugged, and flopped on a nearby couch. He turned to look out of the apartment window at the evening rush of Rome, his legs up and crossed on a nearby chair. He never wore socks, the better to expose his right ankle, across which was inked the Team Gold insignia shared by all three members. It resembled a decorative shin guard, but sharper and more angular, running from the top of the right foot, where it spanned ankle to ankle, and shooting up to a point around mid-shin. It was made of curling and sweeping vine shapes like those found tooled on the barrel of an old western gun, and from a distance it looked like a Spartan’s armored shin guard. Andizzi liked to show it off at every possible opportunity, but he didn’t like people to know that he was showing it off, so he would often wear slacks and prop his right foot up exposing just a bit of it.

  “I appreciate your confidence, Ignazio—” said Tessa.

  “You say confident, I say loud...” said Lorenzo Aldobrandi, their hardened sweeper, smiling widely across his half-moon face as he lay prone upon the floor. He looked as if he might be sleeping in the late fall sun, his back propped up against the wall of his captain’s apartment, his arm slung lazily over his eyes. His teammates knew better. Aldobrandi often rested, but rarely slept.

  “I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with him,” he said.

  Andizzi smiled and plucked at his cuff, admiring the insignia. To him it was a crown wrapped around his leg, a symbol of his mighty country’s past, once the jewel of the world. He intended to restore that glory. In his mind the Italians were the best at everything: They wore the best clothes, drank the best wine, and ate the best food. They drove the best cars, and brewed the best coffee. Their language was the most beautiful, most expressive in the world. It was the well from which a myriad of other, inferior dialects had sprung. Why shouldn’t they rule the world again? And why shouldn’t Gold be the one to usher in that new era?

  In truth, Gold was the youngest of the eight Tournament teams, and the other seven never let the Italians forget it. The irony of the newest Tournament team being representative of one of the oldest cultures on earth, headquartered in one of the world’s oldest cities, didn’t escape them. Andizzi thought it fitting. He loved it when others called them a group of rookies. He almost flushed at the thought of the pleasure he would derive in standing over one of the women of Ireland’s team, his knee in her chest, whispering How do you like this rookie now? into her ear as he softly ran his gun up the small hairs of her stomach, stopped at the belly button, and pulled the trigger. He’d never seen Team Green in person, but he’d studied them. He wanted to do it to the sweeper. The feisty one. Kayla MacQuillan.

  But before that, there was the goddamn striker. Ian Finn. His matchup. He would have to get rid of him first. And from what Andizzi had heard, the man was nothing to spit at. Not while he stood, anyway. When he was on the ground Andizzi would do all the spitting he wanted.

  Too wired to sit, Andizzi stood once more and moved to the kitchen table where his guns lay. He was the only member of the Tournament who fought with two guns at all times. He knew the young nerd boy that fought for Japan had two guns on him, but he fired one after the other. Ignazio Andizzi used both together. He was aware that he sacrificed some accuracy in firing one handed, but he also believed that with twice the bullets, accuracy didn’t much matter. His two 9mm handguns gleamed in the sun, both engraved with the same pattern found on all of their right shins. One was made of gold chromed steel, the other of silver chromed steel. Both had mother of pearl inlays on the handles. They were his children.

  He picked up one and then the other, analyzing each with a surgeon’s eye and slowly dismantling each for inspection. Before his team moved out, he would place them both in a modified holster at his lower-back, hammer to hammer, handles out so that they formed a T.

  Lorenzo watched the striker from under the crook of his elbow. Andizzi took an enormous pleasure from this ritual cleaning. He wore a telltale, eager smirk. Lorenzo frowned. If Andizzi wasn’t careful, he might just strut and preen himself straight into a coma.

  “You need to be shooting before you even see Ian Finn. If we run into him without our guns out, it’ll already be too late,” Lorenzo said. “He’s far too fast.”

  Andizzi nodded slowly as he popped a clip into his golden gu
n. He allowed few people to tell him what he needed to do, but his soft-spoken sweeper was one of them.

  “We’ll have to surprise him,” Andizzi said.

  Tessa ran sharp nails through her chestnut brown hair while she watched Andizzi clean.

  “Surprise isn’t necessary. We just have to ensure that he doesn’t shoot until we’re ready,” she said. “He shoots on our terms. When we want. We can’t have him appearing out of nowhere with that left hand of his.”

  “Pyper Hurley, the captain, she knows how to use him. She’s very good at that. If we go to Portugal, they’ll be on us as soon as we get off the plane,” Lorenzo said.

  “Then we’ll have to catch them before that,” Tessa said.

  “Where? Ireland?”

  “No. On the way,” Tessa said.

  Andizzi paused his cleaning and furrowed his dark brow.

  “It’s a direct flight, Tessa. No layovers,” Lorenzo said.

  “Then we catch them in transit,” Tessa said simply.

  “You mean... like in the air?” Andizzi asked.

  “On the airplane,” Tessa said, nodding. “That miracle arm of his won’t be of much use to him in the cabin of a jet, thousands of kilometers high, will it?”

  “But neither will ours, nobody’ll shoot,” Andizzi said.

  “All I ask is for a level playing field. We’ll de-plane ahead of them. Pick them off as they disembark. Every angle will be ours. If the madmen of Black can destroy a dance club with impunity, then we can certainly make a bit of a stir on a runway. We’ll corner them is all. Push them back until we’re clear of the airplane, then pick them off as they are forced to disembark.”

  She pursed her lips, and then blew a kiss out of the window.

  “Then it’s farewell to the fools of the emerald isle,” she said, smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  SHINJUKU STATION PROVIDES ACCESS to all manner of rail transportation, public and private, as well as a myriad of bus lines. Seven island platforms serve fourteen JR line tracks. People from all over the country converge through one of the stations more than two hundred entrances, at least three million people on any given day, making it the busiest train station on earth.