Grandmaster (12 page)

He got up and opened the door. The face on the other side warmed him unexpectedly, as it always did.

Katarina Velanova was not a beauty in the classic sense, but her face held the subtle charm of the most complex chess. The quick, intelligent eyes of the woman never failed to fascinate him, shifting with a blink into dark, exotic pools and then brightening just as quickly into the simple joy of a schoolgirl.

She was drenched, her red cotton scarf dark with rain. Beads of water stood out on the clear pale skin—the only thing about her that was perfect—running down the long, sensitive nose and into the corners of her mobile mouth, which never seemed to smile the same way twice. She was tall, nearly as tall as Zharkov, and her eyes met his without the slightest hesitation. Wordlessly she placed both her hands behind Zharkov's head and kissed him. It was a perfunctory greeting, but the sudden touch of her full lips on his shot a quiver of excitement through him as she stepped briskly into the kitchen to set a kettle of water to boil.

She was that rarest of beings, a woman for whom passion was as natural as breathing. And yet Katarina was not a sensualist.

When he had first seen her at work at the KGB, Katarina's face had worn the stern, humorless expression expected of KGB researchers. Her coworkers, who spent their days looking through published information for the benefit of the thousands of Soviet agents who manned the largest espionage apparatus in the world, were mostly female, but they were not regarded as women.

They were automatons, office tools dressed in shapeless sweaters, their fingertips covered by rubber thimbles. They moved like whispers through the enormous KGB complex on Dzerzhinski Square and the modern eight-story building on the outskirts of Moscow that housed the First Chief Directorate for Foreign Affairs.

It had been five years before. Zharkov had just become head of Nichevo and had been in Ostrakov's office to review some manpower estimates on Allied and Western troop movements in Scandinavia.

The KGB man had issued a curt order over the intercom for some files to be brought into the office. Katarina Velanova carried them in. Her eyes boldly met Zharkov's. She smiled at him without embarrassment and nodded before leaving the room.

As soon as he began looking through them, Zharkov realized the files were unusual, because instead of merely reciting facts and statistics and numbers, they offered various conclusions about the Western motives for moving troops, and gave these conclusions a numerical weighting, ranging from most probable to least probable.

"Who prepared these files?" Zharkov asked.

"That bitch who brought them in. And this is the end of it for her," Ostrakov said. "She has no authority to draw conclusions."

"Maybe not the authority, but she has the mind for it," Zharkov said. "A mind of value."

Ostrakov had smiled lewdly and said, "Not a bad little ass, either." When Zharkov looked at him coldly, Ostrakov had said, "Don't play gentleman with me. She's spread that ass all over Dzerzhinski Square. I don't think there's a janitor in this building who hasn't been between her legs."

"I want her to work for me," Zharkov said.

"She's yours. I was going to fire her anyway. What Nichevo does is none of my affair."

Thank God, Zharkov thought. Kremlin policy did not allow for the existence of God, but as far as Zharkov was concerned, something special had to account for Ostrakov's not being able to stick his hands into Nichevo's business.

Katarina Velanova appeared in his office early the following week. It was dinnertime, and the Nichevo building was empty except for the handful of around-the-clock staffers who maintained security and watched the reports that were teletyped into headquarters.

"Comrade Velanova reporting for duty, Comrade Colonel," she had said briskly after being ushered into his office. But why was she smiling? he wondered. It was a knowing smile, as if she were privy to information he did not have.

"Do you like Colonel Ostrakov?" Zharkov said suddenly.

"I think the man is an imbecile," she answered without hesitation.

"And yet you have slept with him?"

"Who told you that?"

"I have been told that you have slept with everybody. Even with cleaning men."

"I have also slept with cleaning women," she said evenly. "Some of them have been of value. Ostrakov is not."

What kind of woman is this? he wondered. How could she speak to him this way? What guarantee did she have that he would not tell Ostrakov, so that by tomorrow she would have a one-way ticket to Siberia?

"You do not remember me, do you?" she asked. It was a simple question. Her eyes were frank, without a trace of coyness or seduction.

He tried to keep his voice flat and uninterested. "Have we met?"

"Long ago. You were meant to forget."

The woman exasperated him more by the minute. "Was it in Russia?"

"No," she answered, dismissing the subject. "I will be here first thing in the morning, Comrade Colonel, to begin my duties. But first I thought you might like to have this." Her eyes twinkling with subdued amusement, she handed him a thick folder.

It took him a moment to concentrate on the sheaf of papers. But by the third page, he could feel his breath coming in short, febrile gusts. Every word of the report—more than sixty pages—was about Justin Gilead. Nothing had been omitted. The names and addresses of Gilead's childhood guardians were included, as well as a listing of all the tournaments and matches he had played in and a complete record of all his games.

"How..." Zharkov began, but he lost the thought. He was absorbed in Katarina's sketches of Gilead's career with the CIA and her inspired guesses about what Gilead had managed to do for the United States while touring the world as an international grandmaster. There were neat hypotheses about his presence in Berlin in 1974, in Cuba during the peak of Castro's romance with the Soviet Union, in the Philippines in the late 1970s.

The information in the dossier had been gleaned from hundreds of sources, most of them obscure reports by field agents now long vanished. Compiling all the data had been a monumental task.

"Why?" he asked finally, laying down the folder. Outside, darkness was falling on the city, and the now powerful light from his desk lamp cast long planes of shadow over Katarina's face.

"Because you alone, of everyone in this nation of fools, know who Justin Gilead is," she said softly.

He snapped to instant attention. "Who are you?" he rasped.

The woman seemed to stand up taller. She said, "I will be here first thing in the morning, Comrade Colonel."

Without waiting to be dismissed, she turned and crossed the bare floor toward the open doorway.

"Stop," he said softly.

She turned. Their eyes met. Justin Gilead was important, and she knew it as well as he did. Of the nearly three-quarters of a million people who worked for the Soviet security machine, she was the only person besides himself who had seen that. Katarina's was indeed a mind of value.

He stared into her face beneath the fringe of her short, dark hair, taking in the enigmatic somberness of the brown eyes, the crooked long nose which, he was sure, reddened quickly in the cold. It was, in its way, rather a wonderful face. Looking into it, he lost track of time and thought. He wondered where he might have seen it before.

As if sharing the blank, electrifying buzz inside his mind, Katarina closed the door leading to the empty outer offices. She did not move from her place, and her eyes never left Zharkov's. Instead, she unbuttoned the white military-style blouse she wore and tossed it on the floor. Her exposed breasts were pale and rounded, and their nipples already stood erect.

Zharkov could not react. What she was doing was unthinkable, the grossest manifestation of decadence. Her behavior should have cost her her job, perhaps even earned her a stint in the city jail.

She stood staring at him. She made no move to entice him with movements of her body or sultry glances, but stood straight, her shoulders squared, as if for inspection. Her face changed in front of his eyes a dozen times or more. She looked by turns childlike and womanly, defiant, ashamed, easeful, tense. But she never broke the electricity with a single word, never gave him any encouragement after her brazen and inexplicable display. Zharkov could easily see her as a Committee informant. Forced by Ostrakov, perhaps, to present the Grandmaster's dossier to him.

No, he thought. Not Ostrakov. He could never have thought to assemble the folder. She had done it for someone else in the KGB, then. Or for herself. For the power women think they have over men by virtue of their sexuality.

She waited. Zharkov rose and walked over to her slowly. He could smell the warmth of her, her womanliness beneath the scrubbed cleanliness of harsh, strong soap.

When he came to her, it was not so much an act of lust as a huge leap of faith. He wanted to trust her, to take her as something that belonged by right to him; at the same time he hated her for filling him with fear and apprehension. Coming up in front of her in two long strides, he lifted her straight skirt upward with a jerk, and tore her silky underpants from her as if they were made of paper.

She closed her eyes. Zharkov cupped his hands around her breasts, feeling the hot smoothness of her skin. Katarina's legs buckled at the knees. The place between them was wet and ready. He took her standing up, his hands clasped around the flesh of her buttocks, where the strong muscles pulsed and pumped and shivered with a wild, animal urgency.

She trembled once and then again, and he sensed himself reaching climax, but at the instant when he was ready to spend, he felt the muscles inside her body impossibly closing down on the shaft of his manhood, squeezing him, cutting off the flow.

For an instant, he experienced something akin to pain, and then she relaxed her muscles and he began thrusting into her again. But when again he was about to spend, she again tightened around him, making it impossible.

And he remembered. He leaned back from her so he could see her face.

She was smiling.

"Now you remember me," she said softly, then leaned forward and pressed the wet tip of her tongue into his ear.

"She
sent you."

"Yes," she said. "I am to be here with you. To help you."

He felt her muscles go soft, and he knew that this time she would permit him to reach his climax, and he carried her upright, her legs locked around his back, over to the sofa in his office and lay down atop her and plunged into her over and over again with a furious passion that bordered on the sadistic.

Finally, he exploded in one giant thrust, and the two of them lay still, unmoving, the silence in the office broken only by their heavy breathing.

Afterward, there were no words of love, no soft caresses. She got dressed as if she were alone in the room, then walked out. Neither of them said good-bye.

She reported promptly the next morning. Zharkov set her to work to develop an intelligence system for Nichevo that could operate independently of the KGB.

They were always formally polite to each other in the office, and only occasionally did Katarina come to his apartment to spend the night with him. He never asked her what she did with her other nights; he did not need to.

The reports that crossed his desk provided that answer. They told Zharkov what the KGB was planning, what its long-range policies were, who was winning the never-ending internal power struggles in the massive agency. He knew that Katarina bribed with sex the way some bribed with money, and a word here, a scrap of paper there, were all pieces in the protective fence she was erecting around Zharkov. She paid for the equipment with her body. They never spoke of it.

The teakettle whistled, bringing Zharkov's thoughts back to the sterile apartment where Katarina was standing, barefoot and laughing, in the middle of the floor. She was dressed in an old shirt of Zharkov's, the bottom half of her draped in a towel that fit her like a sarong. Her wet hair clung to her head in a cap of short, glossy black curls. There was no vanity in her, Zharkov thought, and yet she was beautiful.

"Playing chess?" she teased. She was used to Zharkov's periods of blankness, when he drew into his own thoughts and seemed oblivious to everything around him.

He smiled. "Remembering," he said, and touched her hair.

Her lips moved in a quick, uncertain expression before she turned away. It was the first time in nearly five years that he had shown her any affection.

"I have news," she said, handing him a cup. The tea was strong and sweet, heavily laced with vodka; the fumes stung his eyes. "Andrew Starcher's had a heart attack. He'll probably be retired as soon as he gets out of the hospital."

Zharkov sat bolt upright in his chair.

"In Lenin Medical Center. A nurse on the floor where he was brought lives in my apartment building. She says there was a big to-do over the foreign dignitary in intensive care. Apparently he'll be flown back to America as soon as he can be moved. Meanwhile the door is open for you."

He nodded, understanding immediately what she meant. The CIA's top man in Russia was ill; for a brief period, at least, his role would be filled by an inexperienced deputy named Michael Corfus. If Nichevo was to do any mischief, now would be an ideal time to do it.

The thought brought little joy to Zharkov. There were other things on his mind. Katarina read his expression and said, "What's the matter?"

He rose quickly and handed her the envelope of pictures that Ostrakov had given him. "Look at these."

Katarina sucked in a swift rush of air as she examined the photograph of the woman falling to the floor as her head exploded in a red spray. "I heard about it," she said, "but I didn't know it was this gruesome. The Samarkand? Are they insane?"

"Worse," Zharkov said with disgust. "They are stupid. Ostrakov hires terrorists and then wonders why they can't follow orders. The hotel was filled with tourists."

"Unbelievable. Is he in trouble?"

Zharkov shook his head. "He got out of it this time. The militia was called in. They've arrested two vagabonds, and they're calling Riesling an unidentified lowlife. The two'll be executed before anyone can check anything."