[Brackets] (27 page)

Foul! Foul! Good!
Neeson thought, but his joy was short lived. The refs waived off the basket and called an offensive foul on Other Williams. UCLA was still up by one with fifty seconds left.

“What? You’ve got to be kidding me! That was no offensive foul? Whose pocket
is he
in, huh?” Neeson yelled, slamming
his
beer cup to the ground. Cole
had his hands in the air, whooping
in surprise. Neeson wanted to tell him to shut up, that it wasn’t like it was his bracket anyway. He knew what Jason had done. UCLA made a jumper to bring their lead to three. Forty seconds left.

Neeson felt his phone vibrate. It was a text message from Mr. Graham. “Consider yourself acquired.” He almost flung the phone up the stands to where he imagined Mr. Graham was looking on with the calculation of a stalking spider, but he restrained himself. He wasn’t going to lose control. He simply had to analyze the variables at play and come to a rational conclusion. Good Williams had been injured. By whom? He didn’t know; he hadn’t seen. Other Williams had been penalized. Why? No good reason. Boston College should be winning this game by a landslide—by
an
83%
probability margin, to be precise. But t
hey weren’t. Therefore, the only rational conclusion was that they were being sabotaged. This had happened before; OPUS had been sabotaged before. Was it possible that Graham himself had been in on this all along? Had it been Graham and Jason from the beginning, out to exploit and humiliate him? And Cole and Tucker, too. They were all connected, weren’t they?

BC tried an ill-advised three that missed wildly. Then they fouled the UCLA players after the in-bounds pass, forcing them to shoot free throws. Neeson’s heart sank as one, then the other, went through. Five point game, thirty seconds left.

“Cole,” Neeson had to shout over the crowd just to be heard, “Listen, I know about the bracket. I know it’s not yours. It’s OK, I won’t say anything, but I just need to know how Jason did it. How did he recruit you? Did he know you from before?”

Cole just stared back
.
“Jason who? What are you talking about?”

Neeson pulled back, furious.
Liar!
his mind accused. He knew! He stood in mute shock as BC took another bad shot and UCLA got the rebound. Foul shots. There wasn’t any time or energy left for the Boston players. With fifteen seconds left, everyone knew that UCLA had won. Tucker pulled Cole to his feet and started the crowd of UCLA fans singing:
Nah Nah Nah Nah, Hey Hey Hey, Goood-byyyyyye!

Neeson erupted. Shaking with rage, he grabbed Cole with both hands at the shirt collar and screamed into his face. “That gam
e was mine, you cheater!
” Cole tried to push him off, and Tucker grabbed Neeson by the arm to
separate them
. Neeson threw Cole down over the seats and aimed a punch directly at Tucker’s jaw. Tucker ducked, the punch glancing over his scalp, and pushed into the engineer’s abdomen. Feet slippery with spilled beer, Neeson jammed down onto the seats, struggling against the crowd closing in. Two security guards shoved into him, and when he kicked back, one used pepper spray. The engineer cried out with incoherent rage and pain as he was muscled up the stairs and out the tunnel. Through his tearful, squinting eyes, he got one last look at the arena, but he could see only what he had lost.

-[Midwest Division]-

[
Midwest Division
: Play-in Game]

[
Tuesday
, March 18]

The rolling hills of the Kentucky countryside were covered with morning frost. The sky was white and getting lighter as the weak winter sun rose up gradually from behind a bank of eastern fog. It was light enough to see the gigantic hole in the ground, with all the steel and cement that formed the first foundational walls of a massive structure. Construction workers huddled together, taking quick, practiced sips of near-scalding black coffee as they waited for their heavy tractors to warm up. The grunt of diesel engines interrupted what would otherwise have been a completely quiet
Tuesday
morning in the countryside.

The architect Haj Hitok surveyed the site from beneath a hard hat pulled down to his eyebrows, keeping his hands in the pockets of his thick coat. To his left was a companion, also bundled warmly.

“You know, I am going to be in Miami this weekend. It’s supposed to be 24 degrees down there,” Haj said to his companion.

“I hope you mean Celsius.”

“Of course.”

Haj’s companion was a much older man. Thin strands of grey hair strayed out from underneath his hat, and his keen eyes were heavily framed with wrinkles and the effects of history, his head tending to bow forward just a little.

They stood together in silence for a while. “You have a big hole to fill here, Haj,” the older man said absently.

“That is easy. All we have to do is put a building in it. But then, you will have to fill the building. Frankly, I believe our job is easier than yours.”

“You might be right. It is a competitive market out there. But with this, we will have a competitive advantage. If you’re going to recruit, it’s good to have something either very old or very new. I’m very old, this is very new. Together we should be hard to turn down.”

“But you are not old, Bryan.”

Bryan Casing smiled to himself. “I’ve aged more than my
fair share. I’m hoping that this place will help me pay back the balance.”

The two walked back
toward
the foreman’s trailer, their boots crackling over frozen mud embedded with marks from large tire treads. Haj had to leave soon.

“I am curious about something,” Haj asked. “How will you know whom to target? There are many people who work for me who are smart and talented, but when I try to consider if I would recommend them for this, I just don’t know.”

Casing folded his arms and leaned his shoulder against the door of the trailer, smiling faintly in reverie. “I had this physics professor in college, Dr. Seldon, who had a saying: ‘The talent factor is a strange attractor, but skill is the rarity that yields singularity.’ He had a lot of sayings like that and I’ve pilfered most of them. The
me
taphors are
n’t very good
, but
what
he was
trying to say
was that talent doesn’t merely stand out. It has a gravitational pull
that attracts people and opportunities. Highly talented people—as you
well
know— always seem to end up at the right place at the right time. And the more focused and refined the talent is, or the more tha
t talent has been transformed into true
skill, the stronger the pull is
.
The
candidates
who are right for us are rare,
but I expect it to be relatively easy to identify them because ours is exactly the kind of organization that they would attract. Call it social physics
. By the way,” he mentioned as an aside, “if you do come across anyone that we might be interested in, let us know. I know the kind of circles you run around in; we would take your recommendations seriously.”

Haj prepared to leave. “I will. Unfortunately I still have some of my best stranded in a small apartment in Bangkok, waiting to see if things will change enough to get back on schedule.”

“How long will you keep them there?”

Haj shrugged. “Who knows? Things as they are…what do you think? Can they recover without a war?”

“Beats me,” Casing conceded. “It’s a political crisis complicated by crop failure complicated by an unstable economy complicated by sectarianism complicated by China complicated by a popular uprising, complicated by, complicated by. If I were you, I’d bring them home and set them on a different project.”

“I’m sure they agree with you.” Haj shook Casing’s hand. “I
will see you in a few months. Contact me if you need me, but I think everything will be fine in my absence for the time being.”

“Thanks again, Haj. Take care,” said Casing, and he watched his architect walk out to the waiting car and drive away. Then he sought shelter in the warm trailer to do some planning. It was funny, he thought, that the conflict in Southeast Asia had just come up in casual conversation. They had been looking at it so intensely over the past few weeks. He thought of checking in on how t
he Thai project was progressing
but decided against it. He trusted his people.

Casing ch
ecked his watch. His internal clock was skewed by several layers of jet lag
, which
had a greater effect on him tha
n he let on. Recruiting was a young person’s game, and, therefore, he had young people to do it. He thought it best to take a nap before driving up to Louisville. His meeting at the KM Center there was going to be very late, and he needed to be at his best.

[
Midwest Division
: First Round]

[Thursday, March 19]

Tucker Barnes looked up at the ticking clock mounted above a portrait of Henry Kissing
er. 11:19 AM in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The first game of the tournament had already begun. But instead of sitting on his couch, wolfing down mountains of his patented Skyline Platter chip and dip with his friends, he was sitting on a folding chair in an office. He had a tie on. And, like an idiot, he had forgotten to charge his phone, so he couldn’t even check the scores. Opening Day was ruined.

He stood up as the door next to his chair opened. An 18-year-old girl in a long brown skirt emerged, bidding an effusively grateful farewell to her host, an old man with a smile that stretched the width of his wrinkled face. Wol Pot, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Thailand, kindly sent her on her way, and then, still smiling, looked past his security guard to Tucker.

“Who is next?” he asked.

Tucker double-checked his clipboard, although he knew very well who was next.

“Sir, you have a few minutes to rest. Then you meet with Lena James, who is an editor for our school newspaper. She’s also head of the largest social action club on campus.” Wol Pot nodded happily and turned back into the
department chair’s
office, where he’d been receiving student visitors for the past two hours. The point man for Wol Pot’s entourage, a
younger
man named Mongkut Thaifun, leaned in to whisper something to the Ambassador, then approached the door with a water pitcher in his hands.

“Would you be kind enough to refill this for the Ambassador?” he asked in impeccably refined English. “Also, you mentioned that he will be meeting with the editor of the school paper. Could you provide us with a copy of today’s issue?”

In the break room next door, Tucker filled the pitcher and scanned the headlines of a
wrinkled
copy of the
Daily Nebraskan. “
Huskers to Crush Mt. Saint Mary’s”; “RHA Expands Student Guest Meal Plan”; “Student WebCams Expose Humanitarian Atrocities.” Tucker could guess which headline Lena wrote; in fact, he knew
who had
FedExed
the webcams.

When he returned, Tucker found Mongkut waiting outside the door. “Mr. Barnes, one more thing.” Mongkut was almost whispering, and Tucker had to lean forward to hear. “It would be very nice if he were to have more of these breaks in his schedule. If he had his way, he would talk to the students all day, but he needs his rest. He doesn’t always—doesn’t ever—like to take the advice of his physician,” Mongkut smiled ruefully, “so it would be kind of you to put an unexpected break in his schedule now and then.”

Tucker nodded. “Are you his doctor?” he asked, handing over the water pitcher. “I thought you were, like…
”

“The butler?” Mongkut finished the sentence
wryly
, saving Tucker from making a tactless error. “No, though sometimes I fill that role. In fact, I attended medical school at Duke University.”

“Wow. That’s cool. Good basketball school. I mean, not this year, but usually. But I’m sure the medical school is really good, too.” Tucker sought for a quick change of subject. “How did you get to work for Wol Pot?”

Mongkut smiled thinly. “Some other time. We’re ready for the next student, please.” Tucker nodded and went to retrieve Lena James from a crowded classroom down the hall.

Ambassador Wol Pot and his delegation were in the city of Lincoln for a summit of Southeast Asian countries hosted by the Secretary o
f State, a native Nebraskan. Wol Pot also happened to be a friend of the political science departm
ent chair, Dr. Theodore Tonkin.
Dr. Tonkin had prevailed on Wol Pot to come
early
and speak at the university.
The ambassador had
agreed, on the condition that he could have an additional full day to talk exclusively to students. It
was
a wonderful arrangement for everyone, except
Tucker. Tonkin had placed his best undergraduate research assistant
in charge of or
ganizing the student interviews, and
Tucker had agreed
. O
nly later had he realized the awful timing of the event
.
During h
is favorite time of the year
, he had to spend the first day as an usher.