The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “We traveled across the country to find you,” he said.

  “Did you?” Ellie forced herself to straighten. “And who might you be?”

  “We’re the new Team Blue. That’s all you need to know about us.”

  “Hold on just a second—”

  He shook his head. “I said that’s all you need to know about us.”

  He didn’t even wait for her to reply. He simply rushed forward, his hands clawing at her. She stumbled back but he latched on to her throat and tried to turn her around. She fought to break his grip but he was too fast, spinning her about and pressing her throat in the crook of his elbow. He flexed his bicep and started a squeeze that cut her windpipe by slow degrees, until a gallon of milk hit him square in the face.

  He staggered back as the jug careened off his head, spinning a milky constellation into the sky. It seemed to stun all three men, and then Tom slammed into the leader and swatted at his hands, bowling them both over onto the metal grated flooring. Hot air blasted into Tom’s face as the man flipped on top of him. Ellie leveled a roundhouse kick at him, but he caught it and twisted her foot and she collapsed. He leapt off of Tom and onto her, pinning her to the floor with crushing weight as the other two circled around Tom. He ripped her shirt open, exposing her chest and he smiled when he saw the mark just above her bra, over her heart. The mark of Blue was the Roman numeral for three: three simple, straight lines, bordered in relief.

  “Had to make sure,” he said, still smiling as he raised one club-like fist in the air. Tom jumped up, but was boxed in by the other two. He balled his fists and prepared to run at them when he heard the first gunshot.

  The man on top of Ellie jerked forward and groaned, then rolled slowly on to his side. She kicked away just as a second shot was fired. One of the men in front of Tom screamed and clutched at his back as if harpooned. A third shot dropped the third man like a sack of sand. His hat popped off and his shaved head bounced off the grated floor with a satisfying ting. His eyes closed.

  Cy Bell stood in the parking lot, his gun still up. The small crowd screamed and scattered, then watched from behind the cars with wide eyes. Cy began a slow, deliberate walk towards them. When he reached the one who had straddled Ellie, he nudged him over with his boot. The man groaned, his eyes fluttering. He’d been hit by a diode, not a bullet, but a diode was still debilitating, even for a civilian not polarized with the diode system. A hit in the wrong place might even kill you, no matter who you were. Cy said nothing as he placed his hand under the man’s head then gently lifted it up off the floor.

  “Cy,” Tom said, breathless, “What are you doing?”

  With the calm, deliberate motion of a father administering medicine to a bedridden child, Cy massaged the man’s jaw open with his free hand, and put his gun into the man’s mouth. Tom watched horrified along with the rest of the crowd in the market and outside lot. Cy’s eyes were hollow, almost lifeless. His gaze was that of a snake.

  Ellie placed a hand upon Cy’s, covering his hand and the hammer of his gun at the same time. He looked at it as if in a dream. He studied it, perplexed, and then he followed it back up to Ellie’s face.

  “Cy, let’s go home.”

  “Home,” he repeated flatly, as if the word was foreign to him. But he pulled his gun back and set the man’s head gently down. Then he stood and offered his hand to her. He blinked and seemed to find himself as he pulled her off the ground.

  “From here on out,” Ellie said, “I think we all ought to carry our guns openly all the time.”

  Tom nodded, looking down at the three men, two of them still groaning. “They’re American. They’re supposed to be our people. Our supporters.”

  The three stood and looked out at the crowd. All of them held back, more than a few had fear in their eyes. Some looked upon them with open terror, mouths agape. Everywhere was mistrust and skepticism.

  “We are not at home here. Not yet,” Cy said. “The Black House hangs over everything. It casts a long shadow. People are ... angry. Confused.”

  Ellie zipped her jacket up over her ripped shirt and took a steadying breath. “Every day we waste here is another day Mazaryk gets stronger. Another brick that builds that house. It’s not going away. Not unless someone does something about it.”

  “So what do we do about it?” Tom asked.

  “We pack our bags.”

  Chapter Two

  FRANK PEERED CLOSELY AT a dusty, old book. He brought it out to arm’s length and squinted, cocked his head, then brought it to his nose again. He sneezed across the page. The sound echoed throughout the Hall of Records at the Russian State Library. Several people looked conspicuously up at him.

  “It’s upside down, Frank,” Lock whispered harshly.

  “Oh,” Frank said, flipping the book around. The Cyrillic looked just as Cyrillic to him. No dice. He coughed. “As if I’d get anything out of it anyway.”

  “I told you to look for pictures. Can you look for pictures?”

  “There are pictures everywhere. Look, here’s a picture.”

  “Take the scanner,” Lock whispered, sliding his handheld towards Frank. Frank fumbled at it, eventually snapping a picture as Lock had shown him. He hit the translate button and waited.

  “Looks like it’s a recipe for traditional lamb stew,” Frank said, frowning.

  “We’re looking for maps, Frank. Not just pictures of any old thing. Maps.”

  “Well, to be fair, the stew kind of looks like an overhead map.”

  Lock dropped his hands to the table and looked pointedly at Frank then calmed himself by picking lint from his jacket and pressing the part in his fastidious hair. “Stew doesn’t help us. Focus. We need to know about the Black House. The story behind it. How long it’s been there. Why it was built. That sort of thing. “

  “Hey, lest you forget, I spent my entire previous life digging for evidence of this and that for Barringer Insurance.” Frank soured at the mention his old employer. “I kind of know what I’m doing. The key to this stuff is knowing that what you want is always where you least expect it.” Frank rubbed his ample stomach, which neatly parted his jacket to either side of his short frame. “I’m hungry all of the sudden. It’s all this talk about stew.”

  “Oh really? All of the sudden?”

  “Yeah ...” Frank’s attention faltered as he squinted down the rows of tables and books back towards the entrance. Lock turned to follow him.

  “What is it? That’s like the third time you’ve trailed off into the middle of nowhere.”

  “I keep thinking I see someone ... it’s nothing.”

  Lock looked sharply about the room, chewing lightly on his lower lip. The records wing had filled up since their arrival that morning. They weren’t the only ones looking for answers here anymore. Ever since Eddie Mazaryk declared the Black House as his base of operations, along with those teams that joined him, it seemed like everyone was an amateur sleuth, and Lock didn’t like the company. Not one bit.

  Before he and Frank had been thrown together by Greer Nichols, the administrator of Team Blue, and charged with digging up answers about the Black House, Lock would sometimes go days without saying more than a few words to anyone in his capacity as a global courier for the Tournament. Sometimes, working with Frank, Lock wanted nothing so much as a solo assignment into the middle of a remote forest or down a deep mine. Anything to get away like he used to, with a clear, concise directive: Take thing X from point A to point B. But just when Lock was at the end of his rope, Frank would do something extraordinarily stupid and yet completely redeem himself. It was equally flabbergasting and endearing.

  Then Frank would waste time taking pictures of lamb stew while more and more people, fans, reporters, or just the morbidly curious, were all sniffing up behind them and suddenly Lock was again at the end of his rope.

  They were in a race for information. Mazaryk wanted to take over the Tournament. Even as they sat buried in books they couldn’t read, he was consolid
ating teams and forming a strong-arm alliance. It was their job to figure out why, and how to stop him. Lock sensed that it had something to do with the eight mysterious torches standing above the front portico on the Black House: one for each of the eight teams in the Tournament. Problem was, the torches were old. Older than the Tournament. It made no sense.

  Lock smoothed his hair down again as he watched Frank drop the book he was trying to reshelf. He felt a headache coming on. He closed the thick tome he was working through himself. He thought it looked promising initially, but it was more of a discourse on the surrounding rivers than a history of the city architecture.

  Two men who had been perusing the stacks near Frank and Lock retreated to an old, boxy microfilm reader in the corner. They clicked it on and it powered up with the sound of a shuffling deck of cards. Frank and Lock eyed each other, and then pretended to occupy themselves while keeping an eye on the men as they flipped through reels of old newspaper articles. The men huddled and spoke in low voices, pointing out articles until they stopped on one in particular. They printed several screen shots using an old attached monitor and line printer and then removed their roll of film. After looking around, one man shoved the film into his pocket.

  Lock cleared his throat. “Hey! Hey that’s, uh, library property! That’s for all of us, sir!”

  The man turned his nose at him, smirked, and headed to the door along with his partner. Lock abruptly stood, unsettling the table. By now he’d caught the attention of everyone nearby, including the sleepy librarian behind her desk across the room.

  “Hey!” he said again, and was emphatically shushed. By then the two men were gone. “Damn it!” he whispered harshly.

  “Relax, Lock,” Frank said, standing and moving over to the microfilm machine. He sat down at the monitor. “You can always just reprint,” he said. Two clicks later, he had his own copy of what the two men had seen.

  It was a negative of a photograph of a set of city-planning blueprints. Although it was grainy and overexposed, they could clearly see an open park in the center, ringed by buildings designated as a collection of squares and rectangles. At the head of the park stood a building that both men knew would be the Black House. There were several lines of typed Russian, and two dates: 1919 followed by 1984. Lock took out his handheld and snapped a picture to translate. After a moment it beeped. Lock nodded.

  “The Black House was an official Ministry building. Built in 1919. Renovated in 1984. My guess is that’s when the eight torches were added to the front portico,” Lock frowned.

  Frank grinned until he saw Lock’s disappointment. “What’s wrong with you? It’s a map! It’s what we’ve been looking for!”

  “The microfilm machine,” Lock said, his face sour. “Of course. God knows how many people saw that thing before those two took it. While we were in the cooking section.”

  “Hey. Can we celebrate the small victories here? If we don’t, we may not be celebrating much.”

  “We’re moving too slowly. The whole point is to figure out what’s behind the Tournament. How it became what it is and how to keep it from becoming The Eddie Mazaryk Show. If the British, or the Germans, or whoever figures it out first, before we can tell Greer, any advantage we may have is lost.”

  “Look around you, Lock. It’s already The Mazaryk Show.”

  “Not yet. As long as some teams won’t join him, there’s hope. But our window is closing fast.”

  “There is a name here,” Frank said, holding the paper up to the light. “Maybe the architect. We could start there?”

  Lock looked at the paper, then at Frank, then narrowed his eyes. “No. That’s probably the trail that those library thieves are following.”

  “Well then come on! Let’s follow it faster!”

  “We can’t chase fanboys around the city. That’s not how we give Blue an edge. We need a different angle.”

  Frank sighed. “All right.” He let his hands fall to his thighs. “I’ll be in the cooking section. Listen, for dinner what do you say we go back to that kebab place in that old building off the park? Did you love that place as much as I did?”

  “Easy, Frank,” Lock said, scanning the printout. “Maybe we try someplace new for once. The kebab joint isn’t going anywhere ...” He trailed off as Frank ambled down another aisle of books scratching at his sparse head of hair, both men lost in thought.

  What Lock was thinking, and what he didn’t tell Frank, was that he wasn’t sure anymore that he would be able to beat the two who had found the picture before them. Or any number of the thousands of info-grubbers who had popped up around them. Whenever he’d been on the trail of Black before, Eddie Mazaryk had wanted him there. He’d even helped Lock out, dropping occasional hints. Not anymore. They were on their own, and Lock had a creeping suspicion that he was losing his edge. And a terrible, nagging doubt that perhaps he’d never really had one in the first place.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed at his temple. The park was there, too, behind his eyelids. The printout burned briefly into the back of his brain. His stomach growled in hunger.

  Then it occurred to him. He snapped his eyes open and brought the printout inches from his face, scanning the perimeter buildings.

  “Hey Frank,” he whispered.

  Frank peeked over a book, popping an eyebrow.

  “That kebab place,” he said, heading over to him. “How long—”

  “I think until about ten, maybe later with these crowds.”

  “No, the building! How long do you think they’ve been there, in that building?”

  “Forever, if you were to go by the grease on the walls. And the old lady behind the register. I mean the meat alone has probably been spinning on that little spit for a decade—”

  “Those two men are looking for whoever rebuilt the embassy, but that does nothing. An architect is an architect. We need to talk to people who lived there at the time. Nearby. Say, next door.”

  “You sly devil!”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Lock said.

  “I’m buying,” Frank said, snapping his book closed. “With your card. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Three

  THE BLACK HOUSE BECAME a monument to the Tournament. In the few short months since it was revealed as the gathering place for Team Black and their allies, millions had already made the pilgrimage to see the building. An entire ecosystem had developed in the park and surrounding areas. Shops and restaurants sprang up. Stalls were erected and carts arrived selling all manner of Tournament souvenirs. Men walked the crowds draped in beads the colors of the Tournament rainbow, festooned with blinking buttons and glowing toys sporting hastily drawn logos representing the teams, some accurate, some not. Self-professed experts in Tournament lore offered walking tours around the exterior of the Black House and to other supposed locations of Team Black history, mostly inaccurate.

  And everyone watched the eight sconces affixed to the wall above the portico. Everyone knew that they represented the eight original Tournament teams. Four of the sconces blazed brightly, day and night. Four remained dark.

  Just under the sconces and directly above the portico stood a large round window of red stained glass that marked one end of a long hallway on the second floor. At the right time of day it directed a red beam of light upon two thick mahogany doors that marked the entrance to the Red Room, the main room of the house. Inside the Red Room a second matching stained glass window was set high above in the ceiling, and two thin red windows were set to either side of the fireplace. At night the moon bathed the room in a dark wine light, nearly black. During the day the sunlight misted the room a faint red, and one could pass the time watching a shimmering, fiery orb transit the broad length of the floor, crossing over a circular table around which twelve people now sat. Three of them were from Japan, three from Italy, three from England, and the final three from Russia.

  Each player sat with his or her team, and each eyed the others with a wariness that approached animosity
. Although they were sitting now, when they first convened a mere two months earlier the four teams stood in separate corners of the Red Room, refusing to speak to each other. For over five years now they had been trained to fight each other. That they were all at the same table now was to the credit of one man. A man who sat closest to the simmering fireplace. This man was Eddie Mazaryk, captain of Team Black, and orchestrator of the Black House alliance.

  Eddie Mazaryk was small. His hair was long and gathered in the back to expose his slender neck and clenched jaw. He had a flat, unwavering gaze, and his hands were folded one on top of the other on the table. In the hazy afternoon shadows he looked almost boyish, especially next to his hulking striker, Goran Brander. To his other side sat Ales Radomir, his silent sweeper, the glimmering coals of the fire reflecting off his round eyeglasses. Each wore a suit and tie of dark black. Mazaryk listened more often than he spoke, so when he did speak, even a group such as this turned to his attention.

  “I suggest we bring them in,” he said, speaking in English, the one language all of them shared to some degree. He waited only a moment before nodding to a footman at the interior of the doors, who left briefly then returned, ushering in three Chinese men. They were hard looking men, defined in the shoulders and arms, with flinty eyes and an identical, trim style of hair. They wore camouflaged cargo pants of a jade color tucked neatly into jackboots. Each carried a jade cap with a single red star upon the center.