[Brackets] (36 page)

“Ummmm…?” asked Cole.

“We haven’t met yet,” said Abby, extending her hand. “We’re old friends of Tucker’s. I’m Abby, this is Rick. We’re happy to finally meet you.” Cole shook her hand and immediately sat back as far as he could in the seat.

“
Unbelievable.
Is there a job that you guys don’t have?” Tucker asked.

“Ah, the real question is, is
there a job that you don’t have,
”
Rick replied. “We say yes. But that can be fixed. We’ll wait till we get back to the hotel to talk about it more. Cole, we don’t really know about you yet. I think we can arrange a more formal meeting for Monday.”

“
What for
?” Tucker asked.

“We’re going to keep that a secret for now.”

Cole rubbed his temples with his palms. “Well, sorry to disappoint you before I even know what’s going on, but I’m going home. I’m done here.”

The announcement silenced the car, and Tucker turned to him, almost hurt.

“Wait, you can’t do that! You can’t get this far and then just leave before the last game.” Tucker looked at Cole’s stony face and realized that he really knew nothing about this person. “You would seriously leave before the championship game? That’s just not right, man.”

“Oh
,
t
hat’s not r
ight?” Cole retorted angrily
. “My entire life hasn’t been right since I filled out that stupid bracket. I’ve been stalked by a giant psychopath with a sling who wants to kill me because he thinks God told him that my bracket
will
make the world end. Today I had to explain to reporters how some guy I didn’t even meet until this afternoon went completely crazy and jumped off an escalator, and then two hours later a middle-aged businessman tried to beat me up on national TV. And that’s not even the stuff that matters, y’know? My girlfriend’s mother has cancer, and I haven’t heard from her in…” Cole stopped, swallowed his thoughts, and proceeded much more slowly. “
I
f she ever was my girlfriend. I don’t know why I said that.
But listen,
I’m tired. I’m going back home, back to my apartment, I’m going to take like five sick days in a row, and I am never touching a bracket again. Ever. So, it was nice meeting all of you, but I am done and gone.”

Tucker didn’t know what to say. If it were one of his
friends back home
, he would tell him that quitting was wrong, that he needed somebody to play against in the final game, that Cole had to hang in. But Cole wasn’t his friend, and Tucker couldn’t dispute that the guy had had a rough few weeks. Tucker was still stewing about it
when they arrived at the front entrance of the hotel.
Cole jumped out
immediately
. His hand was on the door when he leaned down for a
final word to Tucker.

“Thanks for helping me out back there, by the way. I don’t think I said that yet.” Then he closed the door, hard.

“I don’t believe him,” Tucker said, shaking his head
and about to leave the car himself
. “After everything, he’s just going to walk away.”

“Nah. He’ll be back,” said Rick.

“You think so?” asked Tucker.

“Giv
e him a night to sleep it off; h
e’ll have a new perspective. And he’ll remember the million dollars. In the mean time,
hold on a second, stay in your seat.
”
Rick pulled out.
“We have
to talk to you about something while we go on a lovely tour of the D.C. night life.”

Tucker
shook his head, irritated t
hat he wasn’t going to bed yet.
“I’m not doing any more spy missions for you people.”

“We won’t ask you to. Would you like to know who we really are?”

Tucker leaned back
in the seat
. “Um, are you recruiters for a big company interested in smart political people?”

The couple looked at each other. “That’s
actually quite
close,” said Abby. “How did you know we were recruiting?”

“You aren’t the only ones,” said Tucker. “
Another recruiter
told me that you guys were in Li
ncoln to try and
get
Tonkin. That same
person
ended up giving
my ex-girlfriend
a job.”

The couple looked at each other again, even more surprised. Tucker took a second of pride at finally having the upper hand in a conversation.

“That’s interesting,” Rick pondered, “and we want to ask you more about our competition later, for sure. But for now, you’re only half right. We weren’t there to recruit Tonkin.”

“Me?” asked Tucker, bewildered.

“Nope. We came for Dr. Thaifun.”

“Oh.” Tucker stopped to reprocess everything that had happened in the last few weeks. It had made sense when he thought that the couple was after his boss. But now it didn’t. “So how come you kept bothering me about Tonkin?” he asked.

Abby explained. “Well, at first we were just trying to get on
the good side of anyone who had access to the Thai delega
tion. Tonkin was our best shot, and
we thought you were just a lackey who might be able to get us into the room with him.”

“Which you didn’t,” interrupted Rick. “Thanks for nothing.”

Abby continued. “We wanted to see if the rumors about Mongkut were true. He has apparently been the architect behind Pot’s international outreach since the
disaster started a year ago.”

“In that way,” Rick interrupted again, “he’s kind of the Thai Tucker. Not to be confused with someone who tucks in his ties.”

“Huh?”

Abby gave Rick
an annoyed sideways glance and went on
. “So that’s why we were
in Lincoln in the first place, to see if it was worth trying to lure Dr. Thaifun away.
But that kind of changed after we met you.”

Rick started to
loudly hum
the tune “Till
there was yooooouu.”
Abby
promptly
wha
cked him
, and he stopped.

“After we met you, we looked into you a little bit. The more we looked into you, the more interesting you became.
I don’t think you realize how rare it is for someone as young as you are to take such a prominent position in the office of such a high-profile figure as Dr. Tonkin. Has anyone ever mentioned that to you?”

“A few grad students have,” Tucker said quietly.
“My mom seemed to think so
,
too.”

“You were, by far, the youngest and least prominent person at that State dinner. You were writing memos and press releases for Tonkin—you probably didn’t
even
know this—
that
were making it into some pretty high-level circles under Tonkin’s name.
Tonkin, by the way, has everything you’ve ever written in a file that—”

“He showed you my file?”

“
Uh, n
o,
” Abby
confessed
sheepishly.

Tucker was still processing. “
Are you saying that you hacked—”

“More like electronically perused,” said Rick. “It’s kind of my forte, not to brag. The story we told you about getting your memo from the recycling bin was a lie. Sorry. But now we have the complete works of Tucker Barnes in a collectible volume. Very interesting
reads
. We compared some of your recent work to the stuff that Tonkin had sent up to the
‘
powers that be
’
in the State
Department
and elsewhere—”

“So you hacked into the State Department files, too?”

“
No, no, get over the hacking thing. We got all this off of Tonkin’s computer.
It seems that he’s been borrowing your ideas word for word for at least six months, maybe longer. He should be paying you a lot more than he’s paying you. ”

Tuck
er was surprised by the accusation, but it made sense. As he looked out
at the
brilliant lights of the Kennedy Center,
he realized that he wasn’t
even
upset by Tonkin using his ideas. Tucker was writing
them
so that they could be used. What he found more disturbing was the increasing
number of people around him that
seemed to have
secrets he was the last to know ab
out.

“What about the message to Wol Pot?” Tucker asked. “Did you lie about that, too?”

“
Well, y
es and no,” Abby said. “
The
South
Koreans really did need to get that message through.
We don’t really know all the details of how it happened, but somehow
there was a high-up Korean who
found out that our boss had people—us—in Lincoln. They asked him to
have
us get th
at
message to Wol Pot
.
I honestly can’t tell you
why
the Koreans couldn’t do this themselves, but we were happy to do them the favor. Anyway
, we were going to
just do
it ourselves, but by this time we were really interested in you, so we decided to test you a little bit
, see what you would do if we took you off the sidelines and thr
e
w you into the game. And you were brilliant.
”

Tucker
raised his eyebrows
. “How did you know I would go through with it?”

“Ah,” Abby explained
as they came to a traffic light. “W
e knew that you knew that getting the Koreans involved was a good idea. And you didn’t just know it. You could
see
it, couldn’t you?
You see,
we think
you have this talent
.
You seem to be able to take in a lot of information about complex social systems, and then you can make really accurate predictions about outcomes.”

“
It’s the reason your brackets are so good,” Rick cut in excitedly. “It’s because you have a sixth sense about teams.”

“And it’s the reason that you can intuit what will happen between conflicting countries when you’re given a lot of information. You are a prodigy at group behavior prediction.”

“I didn’t know you
could be
a prodigy at that,” Tucker said, dubious
.

“Of course you can,” Rick opined confidently.
“
There are prodigies for everything. If projectile spitting were an Olympic game, at some time there would be a five-time gold medalist.”

They drove within view of the Washington Monument, lit up
like a torch
against the night sky. Tucker shook his head again. “I still have no idea where you’re going with all this.” 

Rick handed back a piece of paper. “Where we’re going with all this is to a very nice skybox at the Verizon Center. It’s brand new. You’re invited up during half-time at the game on Monday. Abby wrote down the
name of the thing
so you won’t forget. Our boss will be there
. He wants to meet you to discuss an op
portunity
with you
.”

“You mean a job?”

“No. I mean an opportunity.”

Tucker took the paper and flicked it in his hands. “OK then. Are we done?”

Rick looked at Abby to make sure. “Yup. No! We got you another seat for the championship game. For Cole, too.”

“Really? I thought ESPN took away the ticket when I said—”

“It’s taken care of. You’ve got one extra. Fill it well.”

“Oh. OK then.
Thank you, that’s
really
cool.
” The car had pulled back up to the valet st
and in front of the hotel. T
ucker opened the door.
“
I guess I’ll see you Monday
,
”
he said, swinging himself out. But
Rick
and Abby
were
jumping out as well, handing the keys to the valet.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh,” said Rick. “We’re working here at the hotel all weekend. Thought it best to hang around. We’re doing the late shift tonight as bell-hops. Is that what they still call us?”

Abby nod
ded. Tucker rolled his eyes, escaped to his hotel room, and fell asleep very quickly.

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