The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  She was not.

  She very nearly ran into him, her gaze focused on the floor as it was.

  “Can I help you?” he snipped, to the delight of the girls nearby. He smiled as they tittered, but as Ellie looked up at him she could tell by a brief, peripheral flick of his eye, a tiny aversion to her own, that he’d rather be watching someone else at this and not be taking part himself. A small gathering was watching, so she leaned in close.

  “Tom,” she murmured, not caring how undeservedly familiar it sounded. “Do you know that people look up to you? That they remember what you do? You could change things around, here, if you wanted to.”

  She looked directly at him and he was briefly immobilized. He felt oddly chastised. After a moment he stepped aside and she trudged on down the hall. He turned and shrugged at a few friends nearby.

  She couldn’t have known that while people did follow Tom Elrey, seeking to emulate him in their own small ways, it was in fact she that was being watched—by more people than she could know.

  Chapter Four

  GREER SAT HEAVILY BEHIND the swooping arc of his large mahogany desk, thinking. He did a lot of thinking these days. Two months ago he had ushered in the most recent round of the Tournament from this very desk as the Master of Ceremonies. The irony wasn’t lost on him: he’d ushered in the death of his own team. He pondered the dark glint of the monitor before him, where he’d spoken to a representative of the multitudes that had wagered upon Blue... some for sport, some for blood. Could they have played a part in the killings? He’d never known any of the bettors; he couldn’t. He only spoke to the cameras. Such was the way of the Tournament: You never knew who financed you, or why.

  Greer knew that irreparable damage had been done to Blue, and he knew that someone had to answer for it before anyone would ever again think of backing anything resembling a US team. Weak was as good as dead in this game. But he had to tread carefully. There were two sides to this coin: One was grey, the other was black. Greer himself didn’t know which face would land up. Until then, he would be forced to walk the ridged edge.

  He would make his plea for justice known to the Council, the collective body of team administrators like himself. By their individual responses—if any of them did in fact respond—he thought perhaps he could determine their intentions, get a read on them. He was very good at reading people. The English administration would be the most interesting. He was sure they would have something to say. He had two of theirs in prison, after all.

  Greer brushed his hand over his head and rubbed his eyes. He felt imbalanced, precarious. He thought he’d had the talent to win the Tournament: Northern, Nikkie, Max. He’d thought of the three of them like a band wrapped around the iron pegs of the competition... shifting, stretching, adapting, but never breaking. In the end his house had been made of cards. He was hurt by how easily it had been toppled, and he felt guilty for complaining of wounded pride when death itself had paused at his door long enough to scatter it to the wind and leave him standing in the frame. That his hope of rebuilding lay in the hands of a young girl seemed the least of his worries. What did it matter who was at the helm of the ship if that ship was broken upon the rocks? First things first: get afloat again, then worry about who was manning what.

  He’d approved the choice of his recruiters before he’d seen her. When things started heating up in the Tournament, when people started getting hurt, Greer had thought it prudent to have a contingency plan. He’d given the order to research a second string and promptly forgotten about it, much like saving for a rainy day by purchasing a piggy bank and then shoving it on a shelf. Now he’d been forced to take a hammer to it, and what he’d found inside didn’t seem to add up to much.

  Tournament recruiters were ghosts. They were never seen, and answered to nobody. Their methods remained a mystery. If you asked them for names, they would give you names. That was it. But they had done right by his first team, and he had to trust that they would do right by his second. When his apprehension was strongest, when it took the shape of a sort of reeling, mental vertigo, he forced himself to remember the strange feeling he had when he first saw her from up on the hill with Max. Even from a distance he felt a strange clenching of the gut. A measured intake of breath. A flash of possibility. In the way that she’d walked, alone, lightly brushing the snow off of the cars that she passed, he could see her steeling herself for something. There was grit in the way she’d paused at the door and sized up the day before her. Perhaps, he thought, this was what had caught one of his recruiters’ eyes as well. For Greer, a man with nothing more to lose, even this was enough to at least strike a spark in the direction of the kindling. It wasn’t much, but he’d felt something, and she had caused it.

  He pulled at his cuffs and smoothed his collar as his longtime assistant Bernard adjusted the array of cameras spread out before him. He had to maintain at least a semblance of control. He knew that he was working with borrowed time, at any moment the entire organization could decide to move on without him, without team Blue... without the United States. The only advantage he had was that the demise of Blue had been so unprecedented that the Council hadn’t had time to evaluate it. By all rights he should be stripped of his clearances, told to hand in his cards and codes and clear out his desk. Without his team, he technically was no longer an administrator. He occupied a strange place at the moment. He was a rogue. A non-entity.

  An administrator in good standing wouldn’t dream of personally contacting another administrator. Much like the bettors, the Council was anonymous. They only spoke to each other through proxies or in writing when they had to speak at all, and even this was rare. This would certainly be unprecedented.

  Bernard finished his adjustments. The entire array glinted and blinked like the many eyes of a spider. “Ready?”

  Greer nodded and brushed under his damp collar one final time before glancing at his watch. He waited for a further span of seconds, until his pre-announced time arrived. “Open the channels.”

  Safely out of the frame, Bernard tapped away on a laptop and a small green dot on top of the array switched to red. The silence of the room became heavy as Greer composed himself, long enough for Bernard to pause and glance up at him to make sure everything was all right. Bernard mimed the cutting of scissors and cocked an eyebrow to make it a question. Greer subtly shook his head once before speaking.

  “Hello,” Greer said flatly.

  Bernard nodded and turned to monitor the connection.

  “We have a problem,” Greer continued. “I say we because although I and my team have been destroyed, what happened has affected the entire Tournament. There is a killer, or killers, on the loose, and as long as they roam free we cease to be the world’s greatest game and become merely a band of lawless thugs. All of us.

  “We are at the dawn of our worldwide debut. We have one shot at this. One first impression. Are we the future of competition or its ugly past? Complicity in these killings devalues us all to our lowest common denominator. But we still have a chance. No winner can be declared until we sort out the two players still standing and clear the air. Help me to close this chapter, end this cycle as it should be ended so that we all can move forward. I’m going to leave a direct channel open. If you see things as I do, you’ll use it. I’m imploring here. We have very little time.”

  Greer thought about a fitting close, but he was already embarrassed. His face burned at having to debase himself in front of his colleagues and his competition. Instead, with a shake of his head, he cut his transmission. The line went red, but remained open.

  “Now we wait.”

  All was silence for several moments in which Bernard looked awkwardly down at his hands, then tapped idly at the spacebar with his thumbs. Abruptly, the line went from solid to flashing red.

  Bernard brought up the location on his screen. “It’s England,” he said quietly.

  “This ought to be good. Patch it through.”

  Greer’s screen flashed
white and then abruptly came to focus on a small, elderly man, white haired with large, oval reading glasses that hung from a golden chain around his neck. He peered through the screen with watery blue eyes. Greer didn’t recognize him, but he didn’t have to. There was no doubt that this was his counterpart for England’s Team Grey. The man politely cleared his throat.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked, very matter-of-factly, in a perfectly proper, clipped British accent.

  “I’m asking for your help.”

  “My help? Are you mad? You’ve illegally incarcerated my team and you have the audacity to ask for my help?”

  “Not all of them,” Greer replied, narrowing his eyes. “One man, in particular, is notably absent.”

  “Your witch-hunt won’t work, Mr. Nichols. Your lofty ideals don’t match the realities of this organization. This is your flaw.”

  “Yours is that your captain is a coward and a criminal.”

  “And yours is dead. Watch your tongue, Mr. Nichols. The death of Northern came as no surprise to us. Nor that of his hanger-on, Ms. Hix.”

  “I bet it didn’t.”

  “But as usual you’ve jumped to the easiest conclusion, in typically obnoxious American fashion.”

  “Then hand over Auldborne and we’ll straighten all of this out,” Greer said icily, his teeth gritted.

  “I am not Mr. Auldborne’s keeper,” the man replied dismissively. “Listen to me. My quarrel is with the unlawful detainment of our citizenry. If you do not allow Draden Tate and Christina Stoke to go free, we will do it for you.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It is a fact. Good bye, Mr. Nichols. Enjoy sweeping up the broken pieces of your failure. Rest assured that this Council is immeasurably better off for it.”

  These words still ringing in the air, the screen went black once more and the light a solid red. Bernard waited quietly, his face downcast. Greer had only to look at him to know that there were no further incoming calls. The silence became a humiliation once more.

  “Well. I’m not sure what I expected,” said Greer. “Pleading with the competition. Pretty sorry spot to be in.”

  Bernard nodded slowly.

  “We could try to find Alex ourselves. But who will we send? We have no one, and no prospects. Much longer, and we won’t be able to keep the lights on.”

  And then the light blinked red again. Bernard snapped up in his seat. “Incoming, blocked IP.”

  “Patch it through.”

  Greer’s monitor flashed white once more and snapped into focus upon an old priest in full hassock. He had half of a handful of wispy white hair on his head and watched the screen with vibrant brown eyes.

  “Greer Nichols,” he said. Not a question... perhaps a greeting.

  “Yes?” Greer replied.

  “My name is Brendan Darby. I do what you do, but I do it for Ireland.”

  Greer nodded. “Father Darby, for Team Green. I’ve heard of you. Can you help us?”

  “I have no interest in helping you,” Darby said, and Greer deflated. Of course not. He was truly alone in this, he knew. Now that he’d at least tried by asking, he would move on.

  “My striker, however, is a different matter,” Darby said, getting slowly to his feet and exiting the frame. In his place sat a pale, gaunt man with a disheveled mop of curly brown hair. His eyes were a strange green, quiet yet seething, the color of a spring tree bud nearly killed in a snap freeze. Greer recognized him at once.

  “My name is Ian Finn.” His voice held the dry rasp of the ghosts of countless cigarettes. “Let’s talk.”

  Chapter Five

  SHATTERED WINDOWS AND CLOSED doors. That was all that awaited Frank and Lock in Russia.

  The flight itself had seemed interminable to Frank, who was a hand-span too fat to fit comfortably in the coach cabin seats. “Working for the most powerful secret organization on earth, you’d think we’d be able to fly first class, or at least economy plus,” he’d said, but Lock had snipped that they were running a job for Blue, and future funding for Blue was shaky. So coach it was.

  Frank was amazed at how far away Russia was. How can something be this far away? he thought. Prior to this trip he’d rarely even looked this far east on a map, yet here he was, on a fifteen hour flight that smelled like farts and industrial toilet cleaner. Lock simply stopped talking to him after about an hour or so of questions about the Tournament, so Frank was forced to amuse himself... the in-flight magazine, reruns of some terrible sitcom, the frozen pats of butter that came with their dehydrated dinner, the barf bag. It was a very long flight for both of them.

  But that wasn’t the half of it. After landing they crammed into a rusted dune buggy that looked like an invitation to tetanus. It had tires twice the size of Frank’s gut and seemed to shed bits and pieces of itself as they’d gone careening down a single road straight out of the worst circle of rural hell. Frank was freezing, jet-lagged, and afraid for his life as they bounced along, the shocks screaming bloody murder over the whipping wind outside. Finally, seemingly at random, Lock plunged off the snowy road and slid to a stop outside of a horror show of a little brown shack, only to find it shuttered and locked. Quiet as a grave.

  “Darn it,” Lock said, dusting flaked wood from his hands after knocking on the door. He popped them on his hips and groaned.

  “That’s it?” Frank asked. “‘Darn it?’ We’ve just spent half a day ripping down the devil’s own highway—and this was your plan? Knocking on a door?”

  Lock wasn’t listening. He was already walking around the perimeter, and Frank loped after him, holding his pants up and out of the snow. “I thought you were supposed to be a whiz bang at this, Allen.”

  “I am,” Lock said distractedly. “This was where I last saw him. And don’t call me Allen.”

  “There’s nobody here. Do we even have enough gas in that death trap to get us back?”

  Lock stopped and turned.

  “You want to go back? Fine. Take the car. You’d be doing me a great service, actually. See, what you don’t seem to understand, Frank, is that this is a job. My job. I don’t go back. Ever. I do this job and you are an impediment to my job. The best thing, the very best thing that could happen to me at this particular juncture, is if you took that four-wheeler and went far away from me.”

  Frank blinked as the swirling wind kicked up eddies of snow. “Well then what would you do? You’d be stranded.”

  “I’d find a way,” Lock grumbled as he turned back to the shack, peering up at the shattered windows above him. “It’s what I do. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to find a way inside this place. Go sit in the car or something.”

  Frank looked at the rust eaten four-wheeler and then back at the house, his two week growth of beard glistening wet with snow. “There’s nobody in there, Lock.”

  “You don’t say. My, Greer certainly knew what he was doing when he hired you, didn’t he? I take it all back. You must have been quite the detective, Dick Tracy.”

  “Claims adjuster,” Frank said, moving over to the flaking wooden door.

  “What? What are you doing?”

  “I was a claims adjuster, not a detective. You want in here?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s locked you see—”

  Frank slammed his bulk into the door.

  “Jesus, Frank,” Lock looked quickly about. Frank stepped away from the door again and slammed the heel of his shoe into the jamb right at the lock. The door shuddered. He stepped back again and heeled it once more. This time he was rewarded with an echoing crack. Lock winced.

  “One more ought to do it,” Frank said, visibly sweating.

  “You know whose place this is right? Have you gathered that?” Lock asked.

  “A psychotic Russian.”

  “To say the least.”

  “Do you want in or not?”

  Lock looked guiltily up and down the road.

  “There’s nobody here, Lock, and last I checked crows can’
t arrest anybody. I don’t know much about much, but from what I gathered before you started ignoring me on the airplane, if we’re not willing to kick down some doors out here, we don’t stand a chance against this Mazaryk guy.”

  Lock looked at Frank a moment more. With his round head steaming in the cold and his breath puffing loudly in the gathering dusk, he resembled nothing so much as a lonely bear. Lock nodded.

  With one more kick Frank snapped the door inward. Bits of wood rattled off into the darkened interior and bounced against the far wall. Lock winced again despite himself.

  “Well, that about does it for the door,” Lock said.

  “That’s what I do.” Frank ushered Lock in grandly. “You find things. I ruin them.”

  Chapter Six

  ELLIE WILLMORE COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time that she’d slept solidly through the night. In fact, she was hard pressed to remember any time at all in which she’d slept uninterrupted for more than a few hours. Ellie had often told her parents that having trouble sleeping was markedly different from insomnia; she had no problems falling asleep, but she had a terrible time staying that way.

  Like most sleeping problems, Ellie’s was part circumstance and part mental. Growing up in Wyoming planted within her a subconscious need for space, for the type of softly waving infinity of the Western plains and the cut of unchecked wind. She loved these things without knowing it, only regretting them when they were taken from her, say, in her bedroom, for instance, which was jammed in the corner of her parent’s basement. There was no moving air there, and no expanse of anything. Her only exit save the stairs was a recessed window, and this only because its absence was a violation of Wyoming fire code. Her parents were of the sort to uniformly obey fire codes.