Elias
Chapter seven
I knew the sequence. First was the soft double thump of both feet hitting the floor.
After a long pause, I heard the mat work, nearly silent except for a slow exhale every thirty seconds.
A week ago, those sounds had been data. This morning, a man I'd kissed was lying on his bedroom floor with a lacrosse ball under his hip. It was no longer merely data.
I got up and dressed, padded out to the kitchen, and sat at the island, scrolling on my phone.
The Eastern Conference final had gone to double overtime before Boston put it away. So it was the Minutemen. They played in an old barn full of Cup banners earned before Nolan was born. St. Louis had one.
I exhaled, and my shoulders dropped an inch. The Guardians had a strong presence in Boston. Eamon knew many of the top security contractors by name. Doyle wouldn't be building a detail on unfamiliar ground. I set the phone down when the shower cut off.
When Nolan appeared, he was moving well. Without a word, he loaded the espresso machine, pulled the shot, and slid a cup across the counter.
When I reached for it, he kept his fingers on the saucer so our hands brushed for a half-second. Then he turned back to the machine and started his own.
Neither of us said anything about the gaming room. Neither of us pretended it hadn't happened either.
My phone buzzed against the counter. It was Michael in Seattle, two hours behind but awake anyway.
"Go," I said, and stepped down the hall.
"Tour's cleared. Legal looked at the invitation six ways. It's exactly what it looks like: the founder showing off for a colleague. You go in as Dr. Ward, look at what they show you, and leave. No wandering, probing, or taking photographs. If a door's closed, leave it closed."
"Understood."
"I mean it, Elias. You're a guest with a doctorate, not a warrant." I heard typing. "The timing works. Their front desk offered eleven, and your guy's at the rink from ten. Doyle's people are securing the building."
"He'll be behind more security at morning skate than I could give him standing in the parking lot."
"Solid coverage." A pause. "Anything else for Mac?"
He asked it at the end of every call, the way you'd ask anything else? at a drive-thru.
Down the hall, the espresso machine hissed and cut out.
"No," I said. "Nothing for Mac."
"You can tell him yourself. He just walked in."
A shuffle, the phone changing hands, and a new voice, lower and unhurried.
"Ward. Michael says you're touring the clinic today."
"In an hour."
"Good. Go be a professor." A pause. "How's your guy sleeping?"
I'd sent Seattle a one-page assessment on Nolan and buried one line about the early wake-ups in the middle of it. Mac had gone straight to it and pulled it out like a splinter.
"Not much," I said. "He's up before five most days. Spends most of the first hour coaxing the body into movement."
"Yeah." A short exhale. "They all do. The good ones, especially. Are you keeping your head, Elias?"
Mac was a former baseball star with multiple All-star appearances. He knew firsthand the toll professional sports took on both bodies and minds.
"Head's fine," I said.
"Call me after the tour," he said. "Not Michael. Me."
The line went back to Michael, then dead. Down the hall, the espresso machine had gone quiet.
I pocketed the phone and walked back to the kitchen, where Nolan was waiting with his coffee.
"Boring?" he asked.
"Boring," I said. It was the easy answer.
***
The building was brick and glass, with nothing on the facade but a street number. Inside, the lobby smelled of eucalyptus. A receptionist sat at the front desk, directing me to sign in.
A door opened, and a man appeared with his hand out. "Dr. Ward. I'm Colin Frey. When Reis said you were coming, I pulled your paper back up to make sure my memory was correct." He grinned. "It was better than I thought. The force-decay curves are impressive."
His handshake was brief and firm. He was fifty or close to it, wearing khakis and running shoes. A laminated badge hung off a Tarn lanyard.
"You didn't cry, though," I said. "Reis told me the paper made one of his fellows cry."
"That's Katie. Everything makes her cry." He waved me through the door to the back. "Come with me. He said show you everything. We don't aim to look impressive, but we get a lot done."
Inside, the place was bigger than I expected. I saw float tanks, a force-plate lab better than the one I'd fought a dean two years to fund, and an isokinetic rig I'd only seen in journals. Frey spoke from experience, discussing how he read the data for each piece of equipment.
"We met, by the way," he said. "Denver. It was the ACSM year they had us all in that Hyatt off the convention center, the one built around the big atrium. You gave the asymmetry talk, and about nine of us closed down the lobby bar arguing about it that night."
"I remember the atrium," I said. "The bar's a blur."
"It was a blur at the time." He said it easily and moved on, and I liked him for not making me pretend I remembered any of it.
Near the back of the suite, we passed a door he didn't open. It had a badge reader and no windows. I asked a casual question.
"How far back does your outcome data run? Longitudinally, I mean. If you've been at this since the nineties, somebody's sitting on a beautiful dataset."
He sighed.
"Ordinarily, we might. Current system goes back six years," he said. "Clean, standardized, I'd put it up against anybody's. Before that predates me."
He said current system. At my old university, that hedge meant a botched database migration and a decade of records rotting in a format nobody could open. I'd lived through two of those.
Frey led me back up the corridor the way we'd come and out through the lobby's eucalyptus-scented stillness. He opened the door for me.
"So," he said, pushing it open into the humid heat outside. "You headed back toward the park? I'll walk you out. I've been inside since six."
He fell in beside me on the sidewalk, sleeves shoved halfway up his arms.
"You got the full tour," he said. "First impressions?"
"Honestly? The force-plate lab made me a little sick with envy. I fought a dean for two years and got half of that."
"Everybody says that." He smiled. "That's the nice thing about private money. You ask for the good rig, and somebody buys the good rig. Nobody forms a committee."
"What's the catch?"
"The catch is that the committee exists. You just never see it." Half a block passed. "What'd you make of Reis?"
I gave him my honest answer. "He was brilliant, and he asked me better questions in twenty minutes than my last hiring committee managed in an hour. He was recruiting me the entire time, and I enjoyed it."
Frey laughed. "Yeah. That's him. During my six years of working with him, I've watched him do that to skeptics much more difficult than you."
He lowered his voice.
"Look. You're not in the industry, so you're not a competitor, and you wrote the one paper in my field I never tired of.
So I'll say something I probably shouldn't.
" He put a hand on my shoulder. "This company wasn't always float tanks and supplements at Costco.
In the early days, before me, they ran embedded programs inside pro teams. They enlisted the entire team.
It was early in the two-thousands and lasted into the twenty-tens.
Then it stopped. When I onboarded six years ago, I found out that the legacy files from that era are sealed, blocked by legal contracts. "
"Sealed how?"
"Sealed like a pharma company in litigation, but we're not that. We sell recovery boots." He reached up and brushed his hair off his forehead. "I asked about it once. They told me not to worry about it."
I was quiet for a moment.
"Why tell me?"
"Because you asked about longitudinal data, and I gave you the company's stock answer.
It's been bothering me since." He stopped at the corner where his route bent back toward the clinic.
"I don't know anything, but every company has a drawer they don't open.
" He put his hand out, and the shake was the same as the first one: brief and firm.
"If you're in town through the Final, let's get a drink before this city loses its mind entirely.
I haven't talked shop with anybody who isn't selling me something in years. "
"I'd like that," I said.
He walked back the way we'd come. I turned toward the Colchester. Instead of going up, I got in my car and drove to the rink.
The morning skate was long over by the time I got there, but most of the team was still around. Doyle's man at the players' entrance knew my face and waved me through without a word.
The locker room smelled like I expected: cut tape, liniment, and the wet-rubber reek of gear that never fully dries. Nolan was at the stall that used to be Vern Danaher's, still in his base layer, methodically taping a stick.
Jamie Loughlin, the rookie, dropped onto the bench beside him. "How's the shoulder?" Nolan asked.
"Good. It's good." The kid rolled it to prove his point.
Nolan looked at him for one second and went back to the stick. "Get Petey to look at it before the flight."
"It's really—"
"Before tomorrow's skate, Jamie."
The kid left. Nolan finished the tape, spun the stick once, and set it in his stall. Then he saw me.
"You lost?" he asked.
"Came to see where the magic happens." I nodded at the ice buckets and the general carnage. "It's very glamorous."
"It's a spa." He stood. "Give me ten minutes. You can drive me home and tell me how boring the clinic was."
***
Nolan heated two trays from the meal service in the microwave. "It's salmon," he said. "The service is providing meals for two now."
He settled himself on the recliner in the living room with his food on the arm, propping his leg on the ottoman. He clicked the remote control and turned on a hockey tape. I ate standing at the island and watched him view a power play sequence. He ran it back twice, froze it, and let it go.
On the ottoman by his propped leg was the percussion gun. He no longer hid it from me. He clocked me looking at it.
"Hip's stiff," he said.
"Left side?"
"Left side."
I came around the recliner and set two fingers on the crest of his hip, finding the ropey band of muscle that was doing the compensating and pressed.
Nolan winced and then was quiet.
"There," he said, low.
"I know." I worked the band with my thumb, slowly. His breathing changed, quickening slightly. Nolan rolled his head back against the chair, eyes closed.
I lifted my hand before I wanted to.
He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a second. Then he set the remote down and looked at the window instead of at me.
"I ran it," he said. "What happened between us the other night."
"I know you did."
"You work for the team and guys in your line—a thing like this gets out, and you don't work again. At least not at your level."
I set my fork down.
"Let me tell you about the men I work for," I said.
"Mac McCabe and Eamon Price. Mac played Major League Baseball.
He was an all-star, a household name. He had a stalker, and the surrounding threats got specific enough that he needed 24/7 protection, and the lead operator on that detail was Eamon, a close-protection guy. "
Nolan turned his head to look at me, and I continued.
"They crossed the boundaries, and it cost them both.
So Mac retired, and the two of them absorbed the cost and built a company out of it.
That's The Guardians, the company that signs my checks.
The founders are a principal and his bodyguard who became a couple. "
Nolan was quiet for a moment.
"So the firm has a rule," he said.
"The firm has a policy. They insist on disclosure, but it's not necessarily forbidden. Two men who know exactly what this is wrote the rules because they did it first." My voice was steady. "Nobody's career ends over the other night, Nolan. Mine least of all."
"Huh," he said, and reached for the remote.
The part I left out was a clause I knew word for word. At the earliest point at which the operator's judgment could be plausibly affected. A week ago I'd told myself there was nothing to call Mac about because nothing had happened. Something had happened now.
***
Two nights later, I walked into the bar of a hotel on Euclid and met Frey. It was like stepping back into my old life.
The bar had low lighting, a brass rail, and a ballgame on a TV. Frey was at a corner of the bar, saving me a stool.
"I ordered you whatever they had that wasn't a Cup Final special," he said. "Everything else on the menu is blue."
We began talking shop almost immediately. Frey illustrated his points with his hands.
I put one question in, low, somewhere in the middle of it.
"You brought up the era when Tarn worked with full teams. Do you know who ran that? Was it anybody I'd have read?"
"That's the strange part." He tapped the bar. "Nobody. I went looking once, and the names on the old org charts aren't anywhere. The whole thing's a clean sweep. It's like the company molted, casting its old skin aside."
I let it go, and the rest was the best two hours of shop talk I'd had since I left the faculty. I wasn't on guard. It was like sitting on a sofa at home.
Frey had a question for me. "So how does a guy like Mercer do load management in a run like this? He's thirty-four, and the clock has to be ticking."
"He does it on his own," I said. "Honestly, it's the best self-built maintenance program I've ever seen up close. He's disciplined like you wouldn't believe. Most of the real work is private. The team gets the finished product. If I could write him up as a case study, I would."
"Smart," Frey said. "The ones who last always figure it out on their own."