The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  Ian thought she didn’t understand the full threat of Black when in fact she felt she was the only one who did. She understood Black well enough to know that Eddie Mazaryk always knows. If you want to get the drop on any of them, you must never utter a syllable of your plan. You must not say anything about it to anyone, not even your own team.

  She wanted Pyper to tell her to hold back. She wanted Ian to worry enough to convince Pyper to keep her in the rear out of harm’s way, and it looked as if it was going to work. Then, when everyone thought she was far and away, including Black, she would hunt down the man himself. She would take him out. She harbored no delusions of grandeur, she would most likely end up in a second coma, but it would be an even trade this time. Her for him. With him gone, Pyper and Ian would have a chance of taking out Brander and Ales Radomir. It was the only way.

  ————

  As Pyper watched the gathering dark and the fluorescent streetlights of Dublin float by her window, she prepared. The trick was to take it one step at a time. The first step was getting out of Dublin and assuring the safety of her family. The task was simple enough and her only focus at the moment. Conjecture and hypothesis beyond that was pointless, especially against Black. Whatif thinking could drive a woman crazy. Once they were away, she would tackle the next issue as it presented itself; she always had, and she always would. Ian and Kayla had their own thoughts, she knew, but she also knew that in the end they would look to her, just like her sister did, and just like her father did. The pressure calmed her. She constantly reminded herself that the manner in which she gave the orders, when the time came, was as important as the orders themselves in the eyes of her team. Her calm was integral and contagious and they needed it. She knew Kayla was hurt, and she knew Ian could very well get himself shot taking care of her, so she would order Kayla to stay back. No questions. It was as simple as that. As for whatever was next, she would take it as it came, head on.

  The rain was coming down consistently now, and the horizon was black. Water formed in rivulets that streamed across the windows, blurring the steady progression of muted brick buildings and the looming fall foliage of the trees in the dusk as they passed by. They spoke very little, instead taking the time to reflect. Even Bailey sensed the need for quiet, and busied herself with breathing softly on her window and slowly brushing her finger through the brief fog that appeared there.

  Once back at the Hurley house, Daniel made a cup of tea and sat watching Bailey scamper about with her crayons while the three members of Green gathered their belongings. It didn’t take Ian long; anymore nowadays he packed light, a few t-shirts and some tried and true pairs of jeans, perhaps a week’s worth of undergarments. Enough to look presentable. He could throw everything into his small duffle bag in under a minute. The girls always took longer—Kayla especially, now that she was injured. Every move seemed to take her twice as long. So it was that he found himself sharing a cup of tea with Daniel at their small dinner table while they both waited. Ian flipped a cigarette end over end, itching to smoke as soon as they left.

  “So you’re off again, eh?” Daniel said.

  Ian nodded and sipped at his tea.

  “Any idea when you’ll be back?” he asked, with a hint of eagerness that seemed sad to Ian.

  “I wish I could tell you. Trust me when I say I would much rather be here, sipping tea with you, than off working at the moment.”

  “The road can get long, I know.”

  “Yes it can.”

  “You take care of my daughter, hey?” he said, half smiling.

  “Pyper’s quite good at taking care of herself, but I always watch out for her.”

  Daniel nodded and sat back, hands clasped over his mug. Ian was pondering a second cup as Pyper and Kayla came in, their packs over their shoulders.

  “That’s that then?” asked Daniel.

  “Time to go,” Pyper said, “but we’ll be back, da. We always are.”

  “I know,” Daniel said, clasping his daughter into a deep hug. “Be good.”

  Kayla and Ian said their goodbyes, and just as they turned to go Bailey tore out of her bedroom and, beaming a smile, stopped Ian and held out another of her drawings.

  “Is this for me?” Ian asked.

  Bailey nodded vigorously. “I wish” she began, struggled with the precise words for a moment before exhausting herself with an explosive: “You’ll come back!”

  “Of course I will,” he said, as he unfolded it for his customary perusal before packing it away in his breast pocket.

  It took until Pyper and Kayla were almost out of the door before they realized he hadn’t moved. Pyper peeked back around the doorframe and smiled.

  “Are you coming with us, Mr. Finn, or has she smitten you?”

  But Ian wasn’t smiling.

  “Ian?” she asked, her smile fading.

  “Where did you see this, Bailey?” Ian asked, his voice hollow.

  “Yesterday,” Bailey said, confused at Ian’s change. “They waved at me. When I walked home. Do you like it?” she added after a moment.

  Pyper quickly moved over to Ian and looked at the picture. It was of three men, crudely outlined, but clearly dressed in black. They wore small black ties that Bailey noted with single lines down the middle of their bodies. One man was very tall and another had large, round spectacles. The man in the middle had a scribbling of black hair that went to his squared shoulders. He was smiling a small black smile.

  “Oh God,” Pyper whispered.

  “Did they do anything to you?” Ian asked, words spilling out of his mouth.

  “No!” Bailey said. Her eyes widened. “They just waved at me, and told me to tell you hello.” She began to cry.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  WHILE GREEN RECEIVED COMMUNION, with the moratorium in its final hours, Johnnie Northern sat at his favorite café just off of Gilman Street in the waning light of a November evening. A cool fall California breeze fussed with the loose collar of his dark shirt as he sat, one arm upon the back of his neighboring chair, gazing mutely at the shaded, tree ringed park across the street where it was dead quiet and peaceful. He swirled the remnants of a cup of coffee in his left hand. He was waiting for Sarah Walcott to appear, but he didn’t look as though he was.

  As the last of the fall sunlight streaked down the street, Sarah came walking. He turned to watch her and smiled. She wore low cut jeans, painted around her hips. Her top was an auburn silk and lace number that might, under other circumstances, have doubled as a classy piece of lingerie. Her sandy blonde hair was straightened and smoothly parted and wisps fell down the right side of her face. She saw Northern and waved. He raised a hand.

  “I was afraid you might not be here,” she said, as she approached and he stood. “Sometimes you disappear.”

  “Not this time. I thought this time I’d stick around.” He motioned for a waiting cab to approach the curb. He popped open the back door and ushered her in. “Shall we?”

  “We shall.”

  As they spoke in the cab, touching on this and that, she asked him how long he’d lived in the area and what he’d been doing with his time. She kept her tone light, trying not to betray her intense curiosity. His responses were perfectly non-committal; he seemed to have been most everywhere and done most everything. He was full of entertaining digressions.

  His focused interest in everything around him, including her, was just shy of alarming. As he spoke she sensed that his eyes took in not only her, and not only their surroundings, but both at the same time and with more intensity than the average man could devote to any single one. When they glinted in the passing lights, she imagined seeing flashes of thought in him, although she couldn’t guess at their form. She shifted closer to him nonetheless.

  The restaurant was a small, intimate affair he’d chosen, and Sarah was surprised not to have heard of it. The walls were a dark red and each table was lit softly by milky globes suspended above. At the far end was a large bay window, and Sarah though
t she saw him glance furtively at it a handful of times, but she couldn’t be sure. He leaned forward to listen and slightly back to speak, and his eyes rarely left her otherwise.

  His very presence intrigued her, from his wry wolfish smile to the small white scars on his left hand, thin and long, like gossamer threads running under his cuff. He had a deep, clean smell, like cold water, and Sarah found herself leaning in and breathing softly to catch it. But perhaps most mysterious of all was the tattoo. He wore his shirt two-buttons down from the collar, and she could see a bit of a softly sloping line of dark ink appear when he leaned in to listen. She wanted very badly to see its entirety. It seemed somehow integral to his being. He’d said it was like a family crest, and she imagined it as a map that held a key to understanding him.

  Given courage by the wine, she chanced to speak about what she’d seen as he got out of the cab: A slight bulge on his lower back, resting just above his tailbone. A flash of cold metal.

  “I know you carry a gun, John. But you don’t look like a policeman. Are you a policeman? Please don’t be a policeman...” she said, trailing off and watching his reaction carefully. At first he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, and she was afraid she’d overstepped. He seemed to appraise her intensely for a moment. Then he leaned in very close. She could smell his hair and his skin.

  “I’m no policeman, Sarah,” he said, smiling. “Don’t worry.”

  She wondered how eyes could possibly be that deep of a blue in real life.

  “Then what, exactly, do you do?” she asked, popping one eyebrow.

  “I work for a group of people that represent this country. In a way,” he said, pausing to pick the right words.

  She furrowed her brow. “Do you kill people?”

  He looked down, thinking.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” she said quickly. “Sorry.”

  “Then I won’t,” he said, but he was smiling again.

  “And my father...”

  “You’re father works for the same group, although on the medical end.”

  “And what ‘end’ are you on?”

  “You could call it the business end.”

  On the way back from the restaurant, the cab slowed outside of the dark café. Northern shifted to pull his wallet out of his pocket when Sarah, buzzed by the wine and company, tapped the driver on the back and signaled him to continue forward. Northern watched her in silence for a moment but she only turned to look out of the window, smiling.

  Her apartment consisted of one main room with an apportioned kitchen, two bedrooms, and a sunroom converted to a third bedroom. Pictures of her roommates were peppered about the walls and on the coffee table, but they themselves were conspicuously absent. The floors were wooden and the walls were painted a pleasing array of light reds. There was a well worn, plush couch in the center of the main room, situated opposite a television, and a small bar of mostly sweet liqueurs and one large bottle of rum. The doors to her roommates’ bedrooms were closed and covered in cutouts and clippings and labeled Annie and JESS! in clever magazine montages. Sarah’s bedroom door was adorned similarly, although it was wide open.

  Sarah gave him an abbreviated tour, to which Northern smiled and nodded and occasionally commented, his eyes always watching, taking in everything. She poured them both a drink from the bar that neither of them finished before taking him into her bedroom.

  She sat him down on her puffy queen bed, not bothering to remove any of the decorative pillows, and all the while he wore an amused look, but he seemed more than willing to be moved. She stopped speaking and moved between his knees and unbuttoned his shirt from the bottom up, surely and quickly. When she finally pushed it off of him, she sucked in a breath and pushed herself back to take in the full measure of the art on his right shoulder.

  “My God. That is unreal,” she said.

  Northern said nothing. He didn’t have to. She gently pushed him back and padded her way on to him and leaned her face towards the inking. Very slowly she began to kiss it, running her lips across it with the barest hint of pressure, leaving here and there markings of her lip gloss. He inclined his head to watch her as she took in every dark curve and arc of it before moving across his chest. She didn’t even stop when he raised his hips into hers and reached under himself to pull his gun from its place on his lower back. She pressed back. With one hand he set the gun onto her nightstand. The other hand he ran over her back and the sides of her stomach, his touch sliding with the silk of her shirt like soap.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “ONE HOUR UNTIL THEY can shoot, and they’re here somewhere,” Ian said, peering under the shuttered blinds of Pyper Hurley’s front window. They had ushered Daniel and Bailey into the small storage basement of the house, dropped all blinds, and shut off every light. Although Bailey was skittish with a fear she couldn’t quite understand, she went easily enough when Pyper and Daniel held her hands. Daniel, however, came right back into the front room, determined to understand what was happening in his home. He was about to speak when he saw the faint, dull gleam of a gun in the dark, resting gently in Ian’s left hand. He gawked for a moment, and moved to speak again just as his eldest daughter pulled a small revolver from a holster under her light jacket. His eyes bulged.

  There was a prolonged silence. Suddenly Kayla spoke, returning to something of her old self in the adrenaline of the situation as she came in from checking the rear of the house.

  “I don’t see them,” she said, picking up Bailey’s ominous drawing from the dinner table, “but it’s pitch black and pouring rain out and I can’t see anything. They could be out there.”

  “They’re out there,” Ian said again, pulling an unlit cigarette from his lips and tucking it back in his pack. He’d have to wait for that smoke.

  “I agree,” said Pyper, her voice quiet but clear in the dark. “I can feel it.”

  “Is this what you do for work?” Daniel asked, his voice an angry whisper. “Guns, Pyper? Guns?” He took in the full measure of his daughter as if seeing her for the first time. The disappointment Pyper could hear in her father’s harsh whisper hurt her to the quick, but she had no time for it right now. Now, she would focus only on the task at hand. No more.

  “Yes da,” she said, her voice as flat and honest as her gaze. “But we do it for Ireland,” she added, as if that explained it all, and perhaps it did, because Daniel said nothing more, although he worked his jaw about as if he wanted to speak and stared down at his shaking hands.

  “They can’t touch us for the next fifty-five minutes,” Ian said, breaking the silence. “If we’re gonna move, we’d best move.”

  “You don’t know that,” Kayla said quickly. “We don’t have any idea what Mazaryk will do.”

  “Eddie Mazaryk and his company are ruthless,” Pyper said calmly. “But they’ve always had the greatest respect for a level playing field. He won’t break the moratorium. That is one rule he will not break.”

  “Dad,” she said, turning to Daniel, who looked up and then away from her. “Dad,” she said again, softer this time, “the three of us have to get away. It’s us these men want, not you or Bailey, but they’ll likely walk over you to get to us if they have to.”

  Daniel sputtered an attempt to speak, but Pyper simply kissed him on his forehead.

  “I’m sorry da, I’ll explain everything in time. Bailey is scared. She needs you.”

  Daniel gave one last look at them all, and even though it was dark Ian could see the hurt on his face. He tried to think of something to say, but everything rang hollow. He thought about apologizing to Daniel, but he would not apologize for what he was, only perhaps for keeping it from this increasingly vulnerable man, this man who had become a surrogate father to Ian over the years. But before he could speak, Daniel hurried from the room back to the basement and his youngest daughter. Ian was left to wonder at how yet another of his countrymen had come to think of him as a monster.

  “We need to get out of t
his house. Now.” Pyper said, clearing the air.

  “Bastard’s probably been here for days,” Kayla muttered, shaking her head and squinting at the crayon picture in the slatted moonlight.

  Outside there was a crack of thunder and the rain worsened, its timbre near howling. It fell in sheets, as though someone was running a hose across the windows and back again.

  “What’s our move?” Ian asked.

  “Someplace deserted.”

  “We’ll have to get out of the city. Phoenix Park will be deserted in this weather. We’ll go there,” said Pyper.

  “Damn rain,” said Kayla, shaking her head. “The guns don’t like the rain.”

  “Rain is what we’re given, so in rain we’ll work. Watch your first shots for flaring and be sure to factor in water-numbing in your positioning. Put on your glasses.”

  The three of them each took a pair of yellow tinted sunglasses from their jacket pockets and put them on. The lenses had been treated and were water repellent.

  “Right then, time to move. We’ll take my car.”

  Ian moved to the door and popped it open, propping it with his shoe as he aimed into the gloom beyond. The tint of his lenses picked up any faint nearby light. He saw a thin sheet of water pouring from the awning onto the sidewalk in front of him like a yellow beaded curtain. Beyond that all was awash in shapeless mist.

  He walked out under the awning, gun up in both hands, his body close to the rain-dark bricks of the wall. He was immediately damp about the shoulders and on the top of his head. He checked his angles of visibility as best he could before motioning for Pyper to come out, and then Kayla. He soaked in the rain as they darted past him and into the car. His eyes played tricks on him, forming shapes in the erratic blowing droplets. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve but succeeded only in plastering his hair down. They could be anywhere out there just beyond his vision, and he was fairly sure that they were. As if they’d planned the rain.