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in the room kept their heads down and typed.
    “This is our nerve center.”
    Nerve center, Myron thought. This guy should be petting a hairless cat. He sounded like a Bond villain.
    He looked over his shoulder at Myron. “Do you know why I don’t fear telling you all this?”
    “Is it my trusting face? That’s come in handy tonight.”
    “No.” He spun back toward Myron. “It’s because there is nothing you could really do. You’ve noticed the security. Sure, the authorities could eventually get in, maybe whoever is on the other end of your smartphone even. By the way, one of my men is driving around with your phone. Just to make it all the more fun, no?”
    “Sounds like big laughs.”
    “But here is the thing, Myron. May I call you Myron?”
    “Sure. Should I call you Fat?”
    “Ha-ha. I like you, Myron Bolitar.”
    “Great.”
    “Myron, you may have noticed that we have no hard drives in here. Everything—all of the information on our clients, our employees, our dealings—is kept in a cloud. So if someone comes in, we press a button, and voilà”—Fat Gandhi snapped his fingers—“there is nothing to be found.”
    “Clever.”
    “I tell you this not to boast.”
    “Oh?”
    “I want you to understand with whom you are dealing before we do business. Just as it is my responsibility to know who I am dealing with.”
    He snapped his fingers again.
    When the screen came back on, Myron almost groaned out loud.
    “Once we heard your name, it didn’t take long to learn much more.” Fat Gandhi pointed to the screen. Someone had paused the video on the title:
    THE COLLISIO N : THE MYRON BOLITAR STORY
    “We’ve been watching your documentary, Myron. It’s very moving.”
    If you were a sports fan of a certain age, you knew the “legend” of Myron Bolitar, former first-round draft pick of the BostonCeltics. If you were not, or if you were younger or foreign like these guys, well, thanks to a recent sports documentary on ESPN called
The Collision
going viral, you still knew more than you should.
    Fat Gandhi snapped his fingers again, and the video started playing.
    “Yeah,” Myron said, “I’ve already seen it.”
    “Oh, come, come. Don’t be so modest.”
    The documentary started off optimistically enough: tinkling music, bright sunshine, cheers from the crowd. Somehow they had gotten clips of Myron playing AAU ball as a sixth grader. Then it moved on. Myron Bolitar had been a high school basketball superstar from Livingston, New Jersey. During his years at Duke University, his legend grew. He was a consensus All-American, a two-time NCAA champion, and even College Player of the Year.
    The tinkling music swelled.
    When the Boston Celtics picked him in the first round of the NBA draft, Myron’s dreams, it seemed, had all come true.
    And then, as the documentary voice-over of doom intoned, “Tragedy struck . . .”
    Sudden stop on the tinkling music. Cue something more ominous.
    “Tragedy struck” in the third quarter of Myron’s very first preseason game, the first—and last—time he would don the green Celtics uniform number 34. The Celtics were playing the Washington Bullets. Up until that point, Myron’s debut had lived up to the hype. He had eighteen points. He was fitting in, clicking on all cylinders, lost in the sweet, sweaty bliss he found only on a basketball court, and then . . .
    The
Collision
filmmakers must have shown the “horrific” replay two dozen times from a variety of angles. They showed it atregular speed. They showed it in slow motion. They showed it from Myron’s vantage point, from above, from courtside. Didn’t matter. The result was always the same.
    Rookie Myron Bolitar had his head turned when Big Burt Wesson, a journeyman power forward, blindsided him. Myron’s knee twisted in a way neither God nor anatomy ever intended. Even from a distance you could actually hear a nauseating sound like a wet snap.
    Bye-bye, career.
    “Watching this,” Fat Gandhi