11. Elias #2
"Two is the org charts are scrubbed, but payroll leaves shadows. I checked benefits filings, state unemployment records, and a workers' comp claim from 2013 that never went anywhere." The typing stopped. "I've got half a name and half a story. Tierney. T-I-E-R-N-E-Y. Give me a day."
***
The hotel was an old brick one a few blocks off the harbor. At midnight, I walked up and down between the beds.
The Steamers had the entire eighth floor; Doyle posted a man at the elevator lobby with a chair and a thermos. I nodded at him as I walked down the hallway.
There was something about the corridor I didn't like. It was narrow, and the carpet deadened nearly all sound. I checked the far stairwell, found it clean, and started back.
Nolan's door opened when I was three rooms away. He stood in the gap in a t-shirt and sweatpants, tablet in one hand, the room dark behind him.
"Thought I heard you not making any noise, so I decided to check," he said.
"That's a real talent, hearing someone being silent."
"I listen for the wrong kind of quiet. It comes with experience."
"You should be asleep."
"I should be a lot of things." He looked down the corridor, one way and then the other, and then leaned his shoulder into the doorframe. "Stay a minute."
I stopped and stood with him in the hotel room doorway.
We talked in low voices about the team. Nolan thought Jamie was too young to know he should be nervous.
It wasn't a conversation that meant anything, but I could have stood there for an hour.
He reached out for my wrist and held it for five seconds.
"Go do your rounds," he said. "One of us should be good at his job."
He checked the corridor again before he shut the door.
Michael called at one when I was back in my room. I took it while standing at my window with the harbor lights in the distance.
"I've got the whole name," he said. "Russell Tierney, protocol technician, on the Carolina engagement's full run, 2012 through '14.
He filed the workers' comp claim in '13 about a repetitive strain injury.
After Carolina, he cycled through two more Tarn engagements, and then he disappeared from the records.
I can't find him anywhere in the industry.
No license renewals, LinkedIn, or conference registrations.
I found him in one other place. It's a property record.
He owns a house two states from yours, free and clear. "
"Alive?"
"The utilities are current and in his name.
" Michael paused. "Elias, he's the only one.
I've been through every payroll twice. Everyone else from the delivery side of that engagement is either dead, retired and impossible to trace, or so far inside Tarn's current org they'd be plotting before we finished saying hello.
Tierney is the one living human who can corroborate the medical side. "
"Then we don't talk about him," I said. "Not to Doyle, the league's people, or anyone in that clinic, no matter how helpful they've been."
"Agreed."
Through the wall, faint and rhythmic, I heard a sound. It was Nolan. There was a slow exhale every thirty seconds. He was on the floor working a lacrosse ball into his hip before the next Cup game.
I turned off my light and tried to sleep.
***
The following morning I grabbed a few moments away with Nolan free skating with half of Boston's police force securing the arena. Frey was already in a booth when I arrived at a diner two blocks from the hotel.
"I ordered you coffee," he said. "It's terrible, but it's the good kind of terrible."
He looked like he hadn't slept much. He had his sleeves shoved up with a legal pad placed at his elbow. When the server left with our orders, he started.
"I re-read the white papers," he said. "They are the published ones from that era. Anybody can pull them." He turned the legal pad around so I could see his handwriting.
"Read the language. It has these terms: Signal management, perceived-exertion recalibration, nociceptive threshold training, and interoceptive load tolerance.
" He tapped each one. "Elias, these aren't enhancement language.
There isn't one word in eleven papers about making anybody faster or stronger.
It's all—" he searched for the word—"volume control. "
"Suppression," I said.
"That's the word. Yeah, suppression." He sat back. "We weren't making them better. We were making them quieter."
We. He hadn't been there. He'd told me it all predated him. Was it a slip or the truth?
"There's more," he said in a lower tone.
"I probably shouldn't share this." He glanced around the room.
"We get alumni through the clinics sometimes.
They are players from that generation, in their forties now, referred for the usual forty-something reasons.
At least that's the way I've always seen it. "
He started to annotate his comments with moving hands.
"But it's not right, Elias. There's joint deterioration you wouldn't expect until at least a decade later.
The injuries have no in-game history attached.
The retired players can't point to a game where it happened.
What's really weird," he leaned in, "is you put pressure on the joint and know he should be screaming with pain, and the response just isn't there. "
The server glanced at our coffee cups for refills, but we hadn't touched them.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know. Talk to you, apparently." He reached up to run his fingers through his hair. "You're a strange kind of relief, you know that? Everyone else I could say this to has a stake. You just want to know how it works. That's very restful to be around."
Frey sipped from his cup and set it back down. "How do you do it, by the way? You're watching one of them live inside the stress up close. That has to be hard to watch sometimes."
"It is," I said. "The worst of it's the extra hours and the missed sleep. He's up before five. He spends hours just getting the body moving. Athletes are strange animals. They dedicate themselves in ways a normal person never would."
"They are—animals," Frey said. He picked up the check. "Big one tonight. If you go up two-one, the city will get very quiet."
Animals. Quieter. The words turned my stomach. I'd spent an evening with my thumbs pressing into Nolan's hip while it told the truth. He had a body that was still shouting. He listened and then decided to skate anyway. At least it was still his decision.
What Frey described was a body that had stopped saying anything at all. The man inside never got a chance to make a decision. Tarn didn't teach the players to be brave. They cut the signal and told them the silence was courage.
***
Near silence reigned in the arena after the game horn.
Misha was the star. He refused to let anything pass. He had thirty-one saves, two of them miraculous ones that made the crowd groan.
The single goal of the game reached the net in the third period, and it came after a faceoff.
Nolan won the draw clean back to Wes and then didn't stop.
He drove to the net front and stood there taking cross-checks while Wes wound up, and when the rebound kicked off the goalie's pad it landed on Jamie's stick in the slot.
A quick flick, and the kid buried it. Their goalie never had a chance to set.
Nolan killed most of the last minute guarding the puck against the boards and taking one more finished check. The game horn blew, and the Steamers shoved their sticks into the air.
Looking across the chaos on the ice, Nolan's gaze found me. He held it for two beats.
***
The charter home was quiet, but this time it was due to relief and exhaustion. Half the team slept. Misha read a book with Cyrillic type. Wes worked a crossword puzzle. I had a window seat at the back and two rows up, Nolan slept with his head against the window.
I took out my phone and began to compose a message I should have written a week ago.
Mac — Formal disclosure per policy. I have developed a personal attachment to the principal.
It is mutual and it has become a relationship.
Disclosable as of the night of Game One at which time my judgment regarding the work could plausibly have been affected.
Operational impacts observed to date: attention-splitting during live coverage, twice, logged; no compromise of the protective envelope; investigative work unaffected.
I added one more paragraph.
Requesting guidance, not reassignment. Reassignment mid-series would itself elevate risk to the principal: new operator, no rapport, a client who does not extend trust twice.
I read the whole thing through. Every clause was true, but I didn't send it yet. I decided I couldn't send it in text. I needed to speak with Mac face to face.
It would have to hold. I couldn't have the conversation with a Game Four in limbo.
Two rows up, Nolan shifted in his sleep, and his hand moved across the empty seat as if it was checking for something.
I looked down at the tablet. The draft folder asked if I wanted to save my text. I clicked no.
When Nolan closed the condo door behind him, he reached out to cradle my jaw in his hand. He kissed me once and said, "Sleep. You've got your two a.m. face on."
"I don't have a two a.m. face."
"You have a whole two a.m. wardrobe." He turned to go to bed.
I got a glass of water and sat with my notebook a minute before bed. Michael had verified the contract; it was real. Frey had put it in front of me first. He followed up with the white papers and the story about the alumni with the wrong bodies. It all arrived clean and in order.
He told me he had no one else to tell. I was easy to talk to. All of that was plausible. I walked down the hall to the bedroom, where Nolan was already asleep, and climbed in beside him. I lay awake trying to make it all work.