[Brackets] (33 page)

“Your thirty seconds are up.”

“
So
will you do it?”

Tucker looked a
t the envelope
and rejected
all courses
that would make his life more complicated.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t want to get involved.
This isn’t my responsibility.
You can find some
maid
to slip this under his door or something, but I’m not in.”

“Tucker, you know what will happen if he doesn’t get this
message. We know you know. You have to think beyond yourself here.”

Abby sounded so much like Lena in that moment that Tucker immediately stopped listening
.
Stone-faced, he shook his head
.

“Fine,” said Abby, a little critically. She handed him a card. “Here is our number
.
You call us when you change your mind.”

“I thought you said I wouldn’t ever see you again,” Tucker said with a spark of irritation.

Rick grinned. “We said that you wouldn’t
have
to see us again. But if
you decide to help us out, you may
get
to see us again.”

Tucker didn’t say anything. He just nodded towards the exit, and Rick and Abby filed past him, down the hall, around a few remaining partiers, and
out the door
.

“Who were they?” Carla asked, coming up to him as he closed the front door behind the departing couple.

“Oh,” Tucker shrugged, wondering
how
exactly to answer that question. “Just some people that have been trying to get interviews with Dr. Tonkin. I keep telling them that it has to wait until next week, but they keep coming back to bother me about it.”

“They want to talk with Tonkin?” she repeated slowly.

“Yeah,” Tucker said, wondering why she suddenly looked so alarmed. He didn’t think long.

“Come here a minute,” she said, grabbing Tucker’s arm and pulling
him
back into the hallway. Tucker was so surprised that he didn’t think to resist. Carla put him against the wall and pulled up close.

“Uh, you
should know that I have a girl—”

“Shut up, I have to tell you something,” she ordered quietly. He shut up. “I think I know who those people are.” She brushed her hair from her forehead as if thinking things through too late.

“OK.” Tucker wanted the answer.

“I…am not exactly a student here,” she began. Tucker rolled his eyes.

“Does everybody have a secret identity this week?”

“I said shut up,” she ordered again. “I was sent down here as a recruiter to check out a potential hire.”

“You came to give me a job?”

“No,” she snapped, “Tonkin. I came to see if he was really as brilliant as everybody thought he was. But my boss said there might be other people that were also interested in him. That has to be who they are.”

Tucker was dubious. “That’s stupid,” he said. “If someone wants to hire Tonkin, why not just interview him like normal people?
”

“This
is
the interview. Watching him during this Thailand mess is the best way to see how he operates; it’s telling us everything we need to know. Besides, my firm isn’t exactly normal. Not many people know who we are and
my boss
wants to keep it that way.”

“OK,” Tucker muddled. “So what am I supposed to do about this?”

“Keep them away from Tonkin,” Carla responded immediately. “Just for another week. You would be doing him a favor. Can you do that for me?”

Tucker looked down at the girl
and heaved a deep, weary sigh. “Whatever. So I guess this means you didn’t fact-check Tonkin’s statement, huh?”

Carla looked briefly confused
.

“Of course I did. It’s right here.” She pulled out a USB key. “It’s all fine.”

“Hey, if you want to kee
p doing my job so I can get in some game time
, I’ll do whatever you say.” Tucker reached out for the USB key.

It was right then, just as his hand
was touching
Carla’s
and she was still within inches of his face
, that Tucker heard a gasp
from the living room
. He turned ar
ound. Lena was standing there, staring as if she’d just been slapped in the face
.

“What’s she doing here?” she asked, focusing on Carla.

T
ucker quickly
moved
toward her,
his arms in the air like a man at gunpoint.

“
Babe, relax, she was jus
t telling me about o
ffice stuff. It wasn’t anything,
” he said.
But Lena wasn’t listening to Tucker. She was still staring at Carla.

Carla cleared her throat. “I was just leaving,” she said as she
made her way carefully around Lena. Tucker noticed the two
exchange some look of
unspoken
,
private communication. Carla turned away and left.
Others in the room pretended not to notice.

“You two know each other?” Tucker asked.

“We’ve met. She didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Tucker said. “I just met her this morning. When did you meet her?”

Lena looked down at the ground and wrung her fingers. At last, clearly unresolved in her internal conflict, she said, “We should talk about it
later
. I just…I just came by to tell you that
Wol Pot just announced
that he’s ending the hunger strike. It’s all over
. I thought you might want to know.” Then she turned around and
nearly ran out of the front door
.

Tucker just stood there.
When h
e
finally
looked around
, he
noticed
his roommates
staring.

“I got no idea what just happened,” he told them, and went back to his room to think.

*
             
*
             
*
             
*

Late that night in his room, lying on his bed, he fingered the card with a phone number written in careful penmanship that he guessed was Abby’s. He flipped it through his fingers for a few minutes, then opened the envelope with the message in it and read the details. Thailand would denounce Many Hands and accept a Chinese offer to provide assistance to the hard-hit regions in the north, including a free two-year power infrastructure
project
using electricity produced in southern China. South Korea would provide funding and a small force of neutral inspectors who would report directly to Thai authorities to ensure against long-term Chinese encroachment. It didn’t say what the South Koreans would get, but there must have been something.
It could work.

Tuc
ker read through it a few times
and lay back on his bed to think some more.
He looked at the clock. Typically, he would have called his dad by now to deconstruct the game. But it wasn’t a typical night. And if he did what he thought about doing, he might
not have a typical night for a while
.

A few minutes later, he picked up the phone and dialed the number.

The phone rang once.

Rick answered. “Hello?”

“It’s Tucker.”

“Hey! You’re still awake?”

“Yeah, sorry, I didn’t think about the time. I’ve been…did I wake you up?”

“No. Abby’s asleep, but I
just found
Jurassic Park
while I was flipping channels. I love this movie. What’s up?
”

Tucker rubbed his head. “Let me ask you something. Let’s say I sent your message. How would I do it?”

Rick shuffled with something in the background. “You know Wol Pot’s
doctor, Mongkut Thaifun?
”

“Yeah?”

“I hear he likes basketball.”

[
Midwest Division
: Elite Eight]

[Saturday, March 28]

Tucker arrived at the
campus rec center
holding his good sneakers
in his left hand. While he had
been dubious when Rick and Abby told him to show up at the gym at 6:30 AM on a cold Saturday, it somehow didn’t surprise him
to see
Abby behind the admissions counter, giving him a thumbs up and waving him through. Two of the four friends that he had miraculously convinced to wake up that early on a weekend were already there.

The court
had been
newly refurbished
and the
floor, still smelling slightly of varnish, reflected a polished golden yellow. Tucker stood dribbling a ball at the free-throw line, filling the spacious rectangular interior with a reverberating clamor. To him, it was a beautiful sound, loud and lonely, matched only by the quick
schwoop
of the ball going through the net. There was a pure and distinct rhythm to it: bounce, squeak, breath, clang,
schwoop
, bounce, over and over. The simple rhythm of sports.

The basketball game was the only part of Rick and Abby’s plan that he liked. He had been going over it in his mind, internally reciting the lines that they had given him. He glanced at the bag with the unusual gift
inside
. It all seemed way too complicated. No, they had explained, he couldn’t just meet Mongkut somewhere and hand him a note. There were too many ways for a meeting with
anyone from the
Thai delegation to
get leaked
. If Tucker were seen with Mongkut in some back alley, their meeting would be immediately
viewed as
suspicious. But if they had a good reason for meeting, if they did things in broad daylight, there was no chance that their meeting would raise any eyebrows. If anything, their story would make for a heart-warming human interest piece
.

“
And we should know,” Rick had explained. “W
e were journalists.”

Tucker’s other two friends
arrived
, making five all together. The guest of honor was the last to come. Dr. Mongkut Thaifun strolled in, dressed more casually than Tucker had ever seen him, and looking slightly unsure that he was in the right place. Tucker jogged over to him.

“Dr. Thaifun,” he said, reaching out to shake hands, “good to see you again. I’m glad you could make it.”

“I am also,” said the doctor, pulling off his heavy jacket. “Please call me Mongkut.”

Tucker made quick introductions and wasted no time as he took Mongkut and another friend on his own team. They checked the ball at midcourt and began.

Mongkut ran fast, too fast for a half-court game. He could play, but he tried too hard, shot too quickly, and turned the ball over a few times. Tucker wanted to tell
him just to
calm down and pass the ball, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He knew that this man had just spent the last week locked in a motel room in a foreign country trying to attend to a man who was deliberately starving himself. It probably felt good to be out and doing anything. But Tucker’s friend, who did not know Mongkut’s story, had no reservations.

“Hey man, chill. Move the ball around,” he
said. The doctor nodded quickly and
calmed down
obligingly
. Tucker made sure to get him the ball when he could.

After a few games, Tucker followed Mongkut to a water fountain just outside the door. Mongkut took a long drink, then stood up with a smile.

“I thank you for the invitation,” said the doctor. “This has been very good for me. It has been a long week, and there is still much to come.”

“I know. I figured it would be nice for you to do something that wasn’t diplomacy.”

“Indeed,” said Mongkut, “though basketball can be diplomacy, too. Did you know that the relationship between China and South Korea was greatly enhanced in the 1980’s by a visit from the Chinese youth basketball team? It’s true. Sports can be a wonderful tool
for bringing people together
.”

Tucker thought of continuing the conversation with the line, “Speaking of South Korea…
,
” but Mongkut
went on with little pause
.

“What do you think of our situation? How did we do here?” the doctor asked seriously. Tucker had to be frank.

“Honestly, I don’t know if the hunger strike helped. I mean, did anything really change? Did anything get resolved?”

Mongkut laughed humorlessly. “No, nothing is resolved. China insists that the Prime Minister publically condemn the Many Hands organization and revoke all of their rights and drive them out
at gunpoint
. But they do not understand that Many Hands is the only means of support that many in the highlands have. And they are doing more than
just bringing food. They are re
building roads and providing healthcare. The villages in the Thanon Thong Chai range depend almost entirely upon Many Hands functionaries for the resources that the government should be providing.”