“Who do you think you are, Allen Lockton?” Brander’s voice seemed everywhere at once, echoing against the rafters and back upon the two men. “You think you can come here, to our home, to our people, and demand our captain?”
Lock pictured a giant Russian bear growling in his ear, and he felt the weight of the gun between his shoulder blades, pinning him to the ground. Frank was right there next to him, both men like butterflies on a corkboard. The sheer speed with which everything had devolved was astounding to Lock’s oxygen-starved brain. Seconds ago they’d all been standing near the fireplace.
“You forget your place, courier. So I ask you again. Who is this new Team Blue?”
Air wasn’t coming to Lock. No air, no words. Soon no thoughts, then no pain, only darkness. It was enticing to Lock.
“Answer him Lock, for Christ’s sake!”
Some modicum of empathy must have struck Brander’s strange brain, or so Lock thought, because Brander reduced the pressure on his back and air crept into Lock’s lungs like molasses, molecule by molecule, until he could form words, and finally feel the stinging pain from the shot in full, like a horde of ants digging at his chest.
“Wait!” he screamed. “Give me a second! Please!”
“Time is short, Lock. The winds have shifted. Greer Nichols is playing a wild card. What is he doing? Who are they?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Blue is dead!”
Brander nodded at Ales. “Shoot Mr. Youngsmith,” he said.
Frank screamed a short, clipped protest just before Ales shot him once in the temple. His head snapped to the left like it was jerked on a string and he slumped where he lay, decompressing into the wooden flooring, silent and still. Lock sobbed.
“You honestly thought you’d pay no price? You thought you’d get in and out for free?”
“The Council,” Lock heaved, “they won’t stand for this. You’ll be banned. You’ll be expelled. There is a protocol! Mazaryk of all people knows that. He respects it—”
“—Protocol? Rules? We are the Council now. We are the rules. Now speak.” Lock heard him creak to standing and the soft, sure click of the hammer of his gun being drawn back.
“Okay!” Lock sucked in a breath. “The team, the team exists,” he panted.
“I know that. Lock.”
“I gave Greer the sheet with the names. They called it the Blue Sheet. I picked it up at a drop point near a cornfield outside of Boise, Idaho, and brought it to him. It was a sealed flash drive. That’s all I know. I would never look at the sheet myself. If I broke the seal I’d lose my job. My job is everything to me.”
Brander seemed to ponder something. Lock was afraid to turn around and see.
“Go on,” he said.
“That’s it! I gave him the sheet! Told him to snap out of it! To move forward!”
“I don’t believe you. You may be a courier, but you’re still an American. Somewhere deep inside you is an affinity for Blue. Are they all in New York City?”
“...New York City?” Lock asked, turning just so to catch Brander out of the corner of his eye. Brander had been thinking to himself, but he leveled his gun at Lock once more, and Lock clamped shut his eyes. He could hear Ales rustling about over Frank, then a slow, steady scrape of his body being dragged across the floor. Had he killed him? Frank was hearty, but in no way was he healthy. He’d taken a hammer to the head.
“Yes, Lock. New York City.”
“You have to believe me, I never saw the Blue Sheets. But even if I did, they were just names, nothing else! How... what do you know about New York City?”
“Not good enough.”
“You think Greer Nichols would trust me with that information then send me here to find you? He might as well hand them to you himself!” Lock was regaining a measure of confidence. The frustration in Brander’s voice was satisfying. Black didn’t understand something, and it was driving them mad. “Is Frank... where are you taking him?”
“I should throw you to the wolves out there,” Brander said.
“Those are your people, Brander. You whipped them into this frenzy.”
“They are mine. I am theirs.”
“Eddie’s going after them, isn’t he? The new team? He’s going to New York.”
Brander said nothing.
“He killed Northern and Hix, and now he’s going to kill this new crew.”
Brander placed his gun to Lock’s head.
“It won’t stop Blue. Others will follow. What are you afraid of? Why bother with them?” Lock was saying whatever his racing mind landed upon, his words falling out of his mouth.
“It’s not my place to know,” Brander said, his tone friendly, possessed of that disconcerting, mismatched buoyancy once again.
Then he shot Lock in the head.
Chapter Fifteen
TROYA PARKER QUICKENED HER pace. Even walking with Chester, she still felt dreadfully alone, and she felt like everybody knew it—as if she wore the word in bold lettering on a string around her neck. Cy had been gone for almost two weeks now, and with no end to this Tournament insanity in sight, there was no telling how long he’d stay away. When he did call, he was clipped and rushed. Sometimes he whispered, and Troya found herself whispering back, until the conversation seemed like an illicit deal. She felt like her fiancé had been stolen from her.
Whenever she asked him specifically what it was that he was doing out there, how he was involved with this organization, he muttered things about the possibility that someone was listening in on the conversation. If her father had any idea that she had allowed this type of nonsense, he would be so appalled he’d have to pour himself a glass of something strong, which he hated, and take some air to keep himself from breaking something in the house. And when he was done, he’d turn to her and say I told you so.
But the debt. The debt was gone! And rather than make her feel better about things, when she stared at that zero balance she felt worse. First she felt dizzy, then she felt dirty. As if she’d gotten away with something she shouldn’t have. And she felt like other people knew it too; random people walking on the street that held eye contact for a half beat longer than they should.
She turned from the avenue back on to her street and Chester stopped to sniff about an old mailbox tucked away behind the scaffolding of a building that had been under construction for all three years she and Cy had lived in their apartment. Troya guessed it was once a large single-family home someone had purchased and tried to split into three smaller apartments by floor. Somewhere along the line the cash had dried up, the project had stopped, and was slowly backtracking; a little rust here, a missing handrail there. Sheets of plastic fluttered from empty window wells like strips of silk. The mailbox behind the scaffolding had graffiti on it: a stylized arrow. Because of the cockeyed positioning of the mailbox, the arrow pointed almost exactly at her apartment across the street and down the block. She’d found it a few days ago when Chester had stopped to do his business there, and it had unsettled her since.
Just a harmless coincidence, she was sure. Although now, in the early dark of winter, it was menacing. She rubbed her arms while she waited for Chester to do his customary circling and get down to it.
“You’ve peed here a hundred times before. Just go already.”
Chester looked up at her before returning to his inspection. Troya shook her head. All around her people were coming home from work, or from frittering the day away in the city. The cabs were backing up at the corners, and she could hear the city breathing: honking and calling and puffing steam and smoke from the streets and the rooftops. But in this hidden alcove was stillness. Not an easy thing to find in New York City, and disconcerting to someone not used to it. When her phone buzzed in her coat pocket it startled her so much she let out a tiny yelp. She fished it out, pulling off her glove with her teeth. Cy.
“Hey,” she said, suddenly breathless.
“Hi.” He sounded reticent, even nervous.
; “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I guess.”
“What did they do to you?” Off in the distance something fell and clattered farther down the thin alleyway. Chester moved to investigate before Troya cut him short on the leash.
“I met her.”
“What the hell you mean her?” Troya popped her hand on her hip, leash and all. Chester was yanked back a step.
“She’s just a kid, Troy,” he whispered suddenly.
“Now you listen to me Cyrus Bell, this shit has gone on long—”
“I don’t know how they expect her to lead anything. She’s still in high school!” He let out a desperate sort of laugh.
Troya stopped herself. Chester finally raised his leg and let loose. Fitting. So this was it then. Some Cheyenne farmer’s daughter clipped the last, strained rope of their relationship, and now she was in free fall. She stepped back a hitch as if slapped, tears welling in her eyes. Chester wrapped himself around her legs and strained at his leash. When she didn’t move he looked back at her expectantly. When she still didn’t move, he sat down.
“So that’s it then,” she said in a wavering whisper.
“Listen, I don’t want you in New York anymore.”
Troya narrowed her eyes. “Hey. Asshole. You can throw away the past three years of your life if you want, nothing I can do about that, but I won’t sit here and listen to you tell me where I can and can’t live. I found the apartment. You move. And I get Chester. Get your own goddamn dog.”
There was a moment of silence. “Wait, what? I’m saying I want you to come to Cheyenne with me. I’m staying in this huge house here and there’s plenty of room. I got the okay.”
There was one more second of pricking pain in her heart as she processed what he said and what he meant, then relief washed over her.
“I can’t explain all of this to you over the phone anymore,” he continued. “You gotta be here, with me. Plus, the more I learn about these people, the less I want you alone.”
“What about the apartment?” she asked, trying to drain the emotion from her voice.
“Forget the apartment. Just start packing your bags.”
“When? For how long? Cy, you can’t just tell me to—”
“As soon as you can! I don’t know how long. Nobody knows how long. Tickets are at the gate, under your name.” Then she heard him mutter something away from the receiver. “I gotta go.”
“Wait, Cy, how am I supposed to—”
“Call me if you run into any problems. Nothing I can’t handle. Not anymore.”
Then he hung up.
Troya looked at her phone like it could give her the answers she needed, but there were none to be had. Chester let out a short mewling sound and turned himself about before sniffing at the mailbox again. A gust of cold, stale air swept down the alley and snapped Troya back to herself.
“C’mon Ches,” she said, but he’d tangled himself up in his leash again and was hopping about on three legs.
“You’re unbelievable,” Troya said, bending to fuss with him, and just as she managed to get him free she came face to face with the arrow—pointing as always—at her window down the street. But this time there was something else there too: a circle with a cross through it, or perhaps it was the letter “T,” and under that some script that could have passed either for graffiti or a foreign language, it looked a bit like Cyrillic. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been there before.
She blinked against the gathering wind and tugged Chester along. Together they crossed the street and Troya repeated the word “Cheyenne” in her mind like a devotional.
When she locked the front door behind her and unclipped Chester’s leash, she threw it across the living room. It smacked against the wall and clattered on the floor and Chester cowered, backing tail first under the coffee table with his head pressed to the floor. She sat down hard on the couch and ground her teeth. She dropped her head.
“Shit, Ches, c’mere. I’m sorry.”
Chester set his head on his paws.
“Hey, come here. I didn’t mean to... that wasn’t because of you, ya dumb dog. Here, I’ll get you a treat. You want a treat?”
Still he wouldn’t move. Troya cocked her head. Odd. Chester always came at the first mention of the t-word, but he’d gone silent. He was barely breathing.
“Chester?”
He jerked his head a tiny bit, like he was following a bit of dust floating in the air, then he froze again, and Troya realized with a creeping dread that he wasn’t looking at her... he was looking past her, through the crack between the sofa and the recliner, and into the open bedroom behind the couch.
She could see the window from where she sat, and it was closed and locked like it always was in the winter, the reassuring shadow of four wrought iron bars showed through the curtains. The door hadn’t been forced either, so unless it was some wall-walking boogeyman Chester had seen, she was sure it was just the two of them. Then she heard a soft scratching sound and she thought she saw a shadow pass by the window.
She looked about herself and settled on the fist-thick textbook on musical theory that Cy kept on the coffee table to try and look sophisticated. She hefted it in both hands and stood, raising it above her head like a musical Moses as she crept towards the bedroom. Chester stood and followed from a safe distance.
Troya entered the bedroom like it was a cave full of sleeping bats, checking left and right, stepping toe first to the window. She reassured herself that it was locked before she flipped on the lights and yelled out a challenge: “Hiya!”
Nothing.
She heaved a sigh and dropped the book. This whole thing with Cy, with the Tournament, it was getting to her head. It was getting to Chester’s head. It was getting to New York City. It was getting to everything and everyone. She flipped open the shade in a flash and checked her angles. Nobody. But just then she heard a crash in the alley and the brief, clattered ringing of a glass bottle. She tried to get an angle to see to the ground, but it was just out of her line of sight. Then silence.
Troya turned around to find Chester staring at her, but this time he had his tongue lolling out and as soon as he caught her eye his tail started wagging. Whatever had bothered him was long gone, swept out of his tiny brain, forgotten.
Not so for Troya Parker.
Chapter Sixteen
SLOWLY, THE CARGO BAY popped and hissed open to reveal a gray London morning. Ian Finn squinted in the half-light, empty bottle of whisky in his left hand. He rubbed his eyes and craned his neck. The platform was already damp with mist, as were the bright yellow jackets and thick blue headphones of the luggage hands, who looked at him knowingly and said nothing. They pointed him down the tarmac towards a base access stairway that led from the ground up and into the concourse of London’s Heathrow Airport. He’d made it. Greer Nichols had come through again, but Ian knew that this was all of the help he would get. Stoke and Tate wouldn’t wait around. It was his move now.
He had no bag, nothing but the clothes he wore and his gun, slung high and just left of center on his waist, under a white t-shirt and a thin, tan jacket. He hadn’t slept in 18 hours, but he was oddly lucid, eyes bloodshot but clear. He stepped off silently, shuffled quickly under the massive belly of the aircraft towards the stairway, and vaulted up into the concourse above.
Once inside, he moved away from the gate as people were already exiting, emerging from the walkway in silence, fixing their hair or smelling themselves as they moved to the restrooms or wandered about seeking direction. Ian watched furtively from behind a massive stone column from two gates away as he saw them emerge, among the very first. He followed them with a wary eye.
Much like himself, the two carried only what was on them, and so were able to make a quick exit from Heathrow. Ian watched from the back of a gathering crowd at the taxi queue as they stepped into an arriving town car, sleek and black, windows tinted to total obscurity. He lost them for several minutes before he could flag a cab for himself, but h
e wasn’t worried. He felt strangely calm. He would find them. He could do nothing but find them. He felt that even were he to go in the opposite direction, he would eventually be pulled back towards them. The machinations of the world would see to it.
Their car moved quickly from lane to lane, trusting that the drivers around them would brake for them. At one point they slowed near an off-ramp and caused a backup before jumping back into traffic. If Ian followed them lane for lane, they’d be too conspicuous. He told the cabbie to maintain distance.
“I said I’d give you the hundred if you followed them. You get nothing if they see you.” His voice was gravely, gathering debris from within and hitching out from him like water through a rusty pipe.
Within the city of London proper, their car tarried, slowing and then speeding, shifting lanes quickly. Ian sensed that Stoke and Tate were wavering, indecisive about where to go.
“I think they’re lost, brother,” the cabbie said. “Or maybe they see us?” He winced in anticipation of losing the largest tip he might ever receive. Ian was quiet and watchful. He absently thumbed his soft pack of cigarettes in his front pocket.
“Let them get ahead. I think they may turn off soon.”
The cars were approaching Hyde Park, a stately London neighborhood whose namesake sat neatly over a well-trimmed three hundred and fifty acres of land in the center of the city. Its lawns gently abutted trees and even a few scattered lakes, all immaculately maintained throughout the year. The trees even seemed to have turned as one, evenly releasing the last of their canopies of red and yellow with every gust of wind. Ringing the park were exorbitantly expensive lofts and condos, and a bit farther back were small neighborhoods of mansions and estates, private drives accessed through tightly monitored gates where men with badges held clipboards with names and instructions. “Of course,” Ian mumbled aloud. “He’d live nowhere else.” He rested his hand over the slight jut in his coat.
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