The Inner Circle (37 page)

“You know what I just realized?” I asked.
 

“What’s that?”
 

“You haven’t once asked for Carver.”
 

“Why would I ask for him? I know he’s not with you.”
 

“Exactly.”
 

There was a silence, both of us waiting for the other one to speak.
 

Stark said, “You don’t know, do you.”
 

“About what?”
 

“Carver.”
 

“Carver is dead.”
 

Stark shook his head. “No, he isn’t.”
 

“I was there. I saw him get killed.”
 

“You may have
thought
you saw him get killed, but he wasn’t. He was shot, yes, but he’s not dead.”
 

My eyes shifted to the laptop screen, at all those green lines, then up to Maya who was staring back at me with alarm.
 

“What the fuck are you talking about?”
 

“I’d been hoping you would contact me,” Stark said. “I didn’t know how to get in contact with you. Not after I found out about it.”
 

“Found out about what?”
 

“The Coliseum. That’s what they’re calling it. It will be the first of its kind.”
 

I shook my head as if trying to clear it. “You’re not making sense.”
 

“When you had called the first time, I worried they were on to me. I knew it wasn’t Carver. I knew about what happened down in Miami Beach. So then I thought it might be you, but I couldn’t just come out and say it.”
 

“
Hey
,” I shouted. “What are you talking about? What about Carver?”
 

“He’s alive.”
 

I stood in front of Stark, the laptop beside me, but I was no longer in the warehouse basement. Instead I was back in Miami Beach, on the third floor of the Beachside Hotel, having just watched Carver get shot, now trying to pull him back to safety.
 

“They set the entire thing up to trap him,” Stark said. “They didn’t want to kill him—at least not yet.”
 

I was dragging Carver over the blue carpet speckled with seashells, keeping my gun aimed, waiting for the shooter as Carver coughed up blood and tried to speak.
 

“They’ve been keeping him alive ever since. For the Coliseum. Like I said, it’s the first of its kind.”
 

I got Carver around the corner by the elevators, leaving a trail of his blood in our wake, and still he was attempting to produce his one word, still he was coughing up blood.
 

“The games have been going on for decades. The Inner Circle has existed for just as long. But never before have they all come together in one place.”
 

After firing down the hall, trying to keep the shooter at a distance, I was back with Carver and staring into his paling face and hearing him speak his last word.
 

“Whatever Caesar has been working towards, it’s almost complete. He plans to present it to the Inner Circle this weekend.”
 

I was listening as Carver repeated his final word, this time saying it louder, and the look in his eyes changed, expressing something that I never thought I would see, something I didn’t want to believe was true.
 

“But before that, Caesar has a surprise for them, though by now everyone knows what it is. They know it’s Carver, and they’re all excited.”
 

I saw myself leaving him, running toward the fire door, sensing movement behind me and turning back.
 

“For the past five years Carver has become their ultimate antagonist. They are all rich and powerful people, and he is not, and yet he has managed to hurt them time and again.”
 

I saw myself turning back, watching the shooter as he raised the silver handgun and fired at Carver’s face. I heard myself shouting no and wanting to raise my own gun but not having the chance because the shooter was faster. I saw him firing at me, the shots deafening but somehow wide too because I miraculously wasn’t hit as I tore through the fire door ... the fire door, I now remembered, which hadn’t been marked at all when I returned to find Carver’s body gone.
 

 
“Caesar plans to kill him there, in front of everyone. Don’t you get it yet, Ben? Carver’s dying will be the official beginning of the end. It will be the grand finale.”

Part Three

THE COLISEUM

53

From the outside, the Fillmore Theater looked just like any other building along West 43rd Street.
 

It stood right in the middle of the block, four stories high and made completely of granite. Narrow rectangular windows overlooked the street from every floor. Glass double doors made up the main entrance. Off to the left, when facing the building, was the entrance for the underground parking garage.
 

Nondescript would be the best way to describe the Fillmore. Just one anonymous building among a thousand anonymous buildings huddled around Manhattan. It was the kind of building you might glance at when you passed by, but nothing about it would leave a lasting impression in your mind.
 

It was just a building—nothing more, nothing less. The only thing special about it was that tonight it was where the highest and most elite members of the Inner Circle would gather, to witness the games played firsthand, to sit before Caesar and all his wisdom and hear what he had to say and then watch with awe as he took Carver Ellison’s life.
 

It was Saturday morning and Ronny and I, like we’d done the past three days, passed the Fillmore on foot. We were on the other side of the street, walking side by side. Neither of us spoke as we continued down the sidewalk, our stride purposeful, Ronny chewing a piece of gum while I smoked a cigarette. Then we came to the corner and waited for the light to change.
 

“Anything?” Ronny asked.
 

I took one last drag of my cigarette, dropped it to the dirty sidewalk and ground it out with the heel of my sneaker.
 

“Nope.”
 

“What about Mason?”
 

I shook my head.
 

The light changed and we continued on with the rest of the swarm of people crossing Ninth Avenue.
 

Ronny had shaved his beard four days ago when we first arrived to the city. He said it was the first time he’d shaved it since he was in high school. Not even on his wedding day had he shaved it, despite his wife’s protests. Looking back, he said he should have granted her that simple wish. He said the reason he didn’t was the cleft in his chin that he had always been self-conscious about, ever since middle school when the kids would call him Butt Chin. But he had decided he needed a change. He was forty-five years old and he figured he had more important things to worry about. After he’d shaved it, spots of tissue paper dotting his meaty jowls, he’d asked Maya what she thought and she had smiled and said he looked good enough to eat.
 

Right now Ronny was wearing a Yankees baseball cap low over his face. He had on a light jacket, his hands in the big pockets. In the left pocket was his semi-automatic.
 

I wasn’t wearing a hat. The sky was overcast but still it was bright enough to allow me to wear my prescription sunglasses without looking like a complete jackass. It had allowed me to check out the Fillmore as we’d walked past, searching for any movement from any of the windows, from the main entrance, from even the gaping maw of the parking garage. Nothing. Just like it had been for the past three days. Would have been nice to get a place across the street, an apartment or office where we could set up our surveillance, but this was New York City, and in New York City it practically took a miracle to get a half-decent parking spot.
 

We crossed over Eighth Avenue, heading against the one-way traffic. The city is usually loud, but it grew even louder as we neared Times Square. The constant traffic and the people and the construction that was never on the street you were walking but a block or two away, though if you ever tried searching for that construction you might find yourself walking for an hour with only weariness and impatience to show for it.
 

And the smell wasn’t any better. I’d been in almost every major city across the country, and there was something about New York—particularly Manhattan—where it seemed a thousand different smells had gotten together over time to create a perpetual and ubiquitous stink that refused to leave the sidewalks and streets and alleyways. Even the groups of smokers crowded outside offices and restaurants and bars couldn’t seem to fight that ever-growing stench with their own spreading clouds of nicotine-induced smoke.
 

We came to Seventh Avenue and waited for yet another light. Traffic surged with even more earnest as it headed downtown, mostly swarms of yellow taxis weaving in and out and between other taxis and cars and buses farting exhaust.
 

I took a moment to light up another cigarette and scanned Times Square. Maya had mentioned just last night how it was like the heart of the city. It kept the city alive, she said, Seventh Avenue and Broadway and the rest of the streets ventricles feeding blood into all of Manhattan, keeping it beating and breathing and alive.
 

The light changed and we continued forward. Cars honked, people shouted, snatches of music showered us with persistent beats. Actors and actresses and models stared down from their frozen perches around the Square. Advertisements for soda and sitcoms and musicals bombarded consumers from every direction. The Jumbotron currently hawked the trailer for the latest Disney film. It was enough to make you wonder when they were going to require all the cops walking around the Square to wear some kind of patch or other form of advertisement on the back of their uniforms, maybe something promoting Starbucks or McDonald’s.
 

We continued on to Sixth Avenue, then one block south to Bryant Park. We headed around the park to the New York Public Library, where we waited near the steps with practically everyone else in the city whose only job it seems is to hang out on public library steps.
 

Ronny glanced at his watch. I took one last drag of my smoke and dropped the butt to the ground.
 

“How long?” Ronny asked.
 

“Soon.”
 

He nodded, chomping on his gum.
 

I lit another cigarette and watched the traffic choking the street. After a couple minutes, I spotted Edward Stark in the flood of people crossing over Fifth Avenue. He was dressed down—jeans and a jacket, sunglasses and baseball cap—but what really gave him away was his limp. The limp I had given him earlier this week.
 

“Here he comes,” I said.
 

Ronny stood up straighter, keeping his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his fingers no doubt wrapped around the semi-automatic.
 

The thing was, despite all we had learned Monday, and all we had learned the past four days, we still couldn’t allow ourselves to trust Edward Stark. He seemed on the level, and he probably was, but after everything we had experienced since entering our own individual games, our trust in the human species had become broken. So while we’d agreed to work with Stark, so much so that he was helping lead us into enemy territory, we still couldn’t bring ourselves to trust him one hundred percent.
 

Stark nodded to us but didn’t say anything as he continued up the block. Ronny and I followed. Our pace was slow, because Stark’s pace was slow. Despite everything, I truly felt bad for what I’d done to his toe, and knew there was nothing I could do to show my regret besides having already offered up my apologies.
 

We came to the end of the block and stood directly behind Stark as everyone waited for the light. Then the lights changed and the flood of people started moving. Stark swerved toward a black limousine idling behind a taxi. He opened the back door and climbed inside.
 

Ronny and I exchanged a glance.
 

I motioned at the limo. “After you.”
 

Ronny ducked his head down first to peer inside, then climbed in after Stark. His right hand—the one cradling the semi-automatic—never left his jacket pocket.
 

I unconsciously noted the Beretta currently resting snug in the waistband of my jeans as I slid in right after him, shutting the door behind me. Then I just sat there beside Ronny, while across from us sat Edward Stark and the woman who was our ticket into tonight’s Coliseum.
 

“Hello, Congresswoman,” I said.

54

“Just for the record,” Congresswoman Francis “Frank” Houser said as the limo began to slither its way through the city streets, “I think this is a terrible idea.”
 

“What’s that?” I withdrew an eyeglass case from my jacket pocket, switched out the sunglasses for my regular glasses. “Carpooling?”
 

Her gaze on me turned frosty before it was redirected at Stark. “I knew this was a mistake.”
 

“Ben,” Stark prompted.
 

I cleared my throat. “Congresswoman, I appreciate you taking the time to meet with us, even if it is last minute.”
 

“I couldn’t get into the city any sooner. Edward explained that to you, didn’t he?”