Grandmaster (20 page)

"That's a list of the tournaments I'll be playing in for the next six months," Gilead said. "I'll keep in touch. If there's anything you want done near any of those cities, you just let me know. If it helps to disrupt anything Nichevo's doing, so much the better." He smiled; it was a rich smile that involved his entire face, and it warmed Starcher as much as Gilead's blue eyes usually chilled him. "Don't worry so much. I'll be all right," Gilead said.

"You'll be a piece of meat that I throw to the dogs," Starcher grumbled.

Gilead answered, "Some meat's poison, and some dogs die." He rose from his chair, and Starcher said, "Wait. We haven't talked about anything yet. Expenses. Salary. Anything."

"I don't need any money, Mr. Starcher," Gilead said as he walked toward the door. "I just want to work, and I want you to live up to your end of the bargain."

Starcher nodded and rose from behind his desk. He picked up the one-page memorandum on Zharkov and walked across the room to hand it to Justin. "I thought you might want to see this," he said.

Gilead read it quickly, his face impassive, then handed it back. "The part about killing a monastery of monks is true," he said. "The rest is all lies."

"They're giving him a medal," Starcher said.

Gilead again fingered the amulet around his neck. He said, "I've already given him a medal to wear. He has it on his throat."

When Gilead left, Starcher went back to his desk, opened its bottom left drawer and took out a file folder. Inside it, he put Justin Gilead's tournament schedule, but before he returned it to the drawer, he penned across the top: "The Grandmaster."

That was 1971. Justin Gilead, at twenty-seven, was to become Starcher's best field agent.

 

A
t first, Starcher used Gilead very sparingly
, and on only the smallest and safest of projects. Pick up a document in one country and deliver it to another, interview someone who claimed to know about some internal frictions in one of the Soviet Union's satellite states.

Starcher ran these operations privately, keeping Gilead's involvement secret even from his superiors at Langley. Time, Starcher knew, was on his side. The world of intelligence and espionage was passing from its monopoly by paid, salaried agents into a freebooting world of informers, dissidents, interested citizens, and ideological volunteers. The day was not long off when a Justin Gilead would not be dismissed out of hand by the CIA, but welcomed to work with them.

Meanwhile, Gilead was handling all his assignments from Starcher with efficiency and quiet competence. The big break came in 1972 when President Nixon was planning to visit Communist China. The CIA was quaking, knowing beyond a doubt that Russia would be planning something to prevent the two other superpowers from forging any kind of alliance, so Langley put out a nervous call to its administrative personnel all over the world to report any contacts they might have with anyone who lived in China, worked there, visited there, who might have heard rumors about what was being planned. Starcher sent in the name of Justin Gilead.

At the last minute, on the eve of Nixon's flight, the CIA got word from an informer network that Chinese assassins on Nichevo's payroll were standing by in Hong Kong, ready to kill the American president. Langley flooded the area with personnel, looking for the killers. Andrew Starcher made a quiet call to Justin Gilead, who was playing in Hong Kong in a Far East chess open tournament. The would-be assassins vanished, as if they had slipped off the edge of the earth. When the smoke of confusion had cleared away, it was obvious even to Langley that Justin Gilead had somehow been responsible.

Starcher was called back to CIA headquarters to discuss the matter. He acknowledged that he had been using Gilead on small missions for over a year. "I was testing him," he explained.

"Where did he come from?" the director of operations said.

"He came here one day to sign up, but it didn't work. Later on, he looked me up in France, and I thought it was worth a try. He globe-trots around, and being a chess player is a great cover."

The meeting ended with Starcher being commended wryly for his wonderful way with recruitment and being told not to keep Justin Gilead to himself. "If he's that good, let's all use him," the chief of operations said.

"It's okay by me," Starcher said.

But it wasn't okay by Gilead. The Grandmaster himself told that to the first CIA official who came to talk to him. "I work only for Starcher," Gilead said.

"Why's that? We're all on the same side," the CIA official said.

And Gilead, who did not want to tell anyone at Langley that he and Starcher had made a deal for Alexander Zharkov, said simply, "I trust him. I don't trust any of you."

So Gilead's assignments continued to come from Starcher, but now, more often than not, they were given to Starcher by the operations desk in Langley.

There was the Russian spy ring in Canada, the Nichevo agent in Indonesia, the Panama Canal, the South African arms supply line. Gilead was on the scene when Frank Riesling was almost caught in East Germany, and somehow the Grandmaster got him out, leaving Riesling babbling about somebody who ripped his way through the steel walls of a building.

Throughout the CIA, the legend of the Grandmaster grew. Starcher was, at first, proud of it. But then he grew fearful. If Justin Gilead's work for the Company was made known, he would become a prime target for the KGB. Or for Nichevo, whose plans he seemed most often to thwart.

Gilead was playing in a tournament in Belgrade when there was an explosion and fire in the hotel he was staying in. Gilead's room had seemed to be the center of the blast and was literally blown apart. No sign of his body could be found.

Starcher put in a nervous twenty-four hours before Gilead showed up at his office in Paris.

"I thought you were dead," Starcher said.

"Obviously not."

"But they tried to kill you?" Starcher asked.

Gilead nodded.

"Justin, this is getting too dangerous. I think it's time you retired. You're not getting paid to do this."

Gilead shook his head. "It wasn't the first time they tried to kill me," he said.

Starcher sat back heavily in his chair. "It's happened before?"

"A half-dozen times," Gilead said. "Don't worry about it. I don't."

"How the hell can you sit there and tell me you're not concerned about the Russians trying to kill you six, seven times?"

"Because they can't do it," Gilead said. He rose from his chair. "Stop looking so worried," he said, then told Starcher that he was taking the next few weeks off and would be in Paris. "My chess game needs work. If you need me, I'll be at the Strand Hotel."

The next day, Starcher got word that Vassily Zharkov had died and his son Alexander had been named to head Nichevo. He went to the Strand to meet Gilead and told him the news in the cocktail lounge.

Gilead nodded. "Good," he said.

His time was coming. He went back to his room and his chessboard.

 

 

I
t took Starcher a moment to realize where he was.

He saw the American guard standing near the door of the Moscow hospital room. The fever had broken. He felt cold and wondered if he was dying. For nearly twenty years he had harbored a secret fear that there might be a God and that if there was, he would not approve of Starcher's way of life. He had even, in his less coherent moments beginning with that day at Langley in 1970, speculated that on his day of judgment he would be forced to confront not Jehovah but Justin Gilead.

It must be close now, he thought. Death's embrace must be terribly close to bring the Grandmaster into his thoughts with such insistence.

He should have objected to Gilead's being used so frequently. If he had not permitted the CIA to run him so often, the boy might have had a chance to live a little longer.

Wait a minute, he thought, trying to organize his confused thoughts. Gilead was alive. Riesling had said so.

But that couldn't be true. He had seen the burial pictures himself, courtesy of Nichevo.

Starcher lay there in the dark, remembering. Outside, he could hear the rough voices of nurses speaking Russian in the hospital corridor.

Justin Gilead. But his death hadn't been the CIA's fault. It had been Starcher's. His fault... his responsibility that Gilead had died so young.

It was May of 1980. Alexander Zharkov had been head of Nichevo for one year. Starcher had met Gilead in a shabby apartment on the Bahnhofstrasse in West Berlin. There had been little communication between them in the past three months, a fact for which Starcher was grateful. Gilead had been run too often, too hard by the CIA. By now, his life was constantly in danger. Starcher knew all that, but he also knew he owed Gilead this assignment.

"You're going into Poland," Starcher said without preliminaries. There was no point in offering Gilead a drink or engaging in casual conversation with the man. Gilead was as asocial as an automaton and seemed to find vaguely distasteful any activity or avenue of thought not related to his work or to chess. It was, Starcher thought at the time, as if Gilead were driven by a personal demon that helped him to endure the Agency's cavalier treatment of his life.

"You'll travel to Gorlitz in southern West Germany tonight. It's only a few miles from there to the Polish border."

"What's the border like?" Justin asked.

"Mountains," Starcher said with some embarrassment. "Three hundred miles of them."

"The entire southern border," Justin said.

"That's right," Starcher said. "Let me tell you what's happening. Since the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia, there's been a big underground movement there. They hide, they wait, they disrupt, and then they hide again. A couple of months ago, a third of the Czech government was ousted on orders of the Soviet Central Committee."

"What's that got to do with Poland?" Gilead asked. "You said I was going to Poland."

"I'm coming to that. There's a movement growing now in Poland, mostly among the laboring groups. With the food shortages, a rebellion's a real possibility. They're talking about it openly up in Gdansk in the North. Now what's happening is that some Czechs are making it across the Carpathian Mountains into Poland, and they're trying to spread the word in the cultural centers like Krakow and Warsaw that if the two countries unite, they can kick the Russians out."

"And the Russians?" Gilead asked. "Do they take this seriously?"

"They've sent troops and tanks. We don't know how many, and the men we send in there just don't come back. That's your job. Travel through the Carpathians, estimate the troops, what kind of hardware they've got and so on."

Justin looked at him steadily. They both knew that Gilead had never received that kind of training and probably could not bring back much information about Soviet weapons in the area.

"I'm not qualified," Justin said.

"I know that, Justin. You've got every right to turn down this assignment. But you asked if the Russians are taking this seriously. I know that Alexander Zharkov himself is in the area now. Nichevo's there. That's how seriously the Russians are taking it."

"I'll go," Gilead said immediately. "I can live in the mountains, and I speak Polish."

"Good luck," Starcher said. "And good hunting."

 

S
tarcher lay in the dark of the hospital room
, his open eyes fixed on the gray ceiling. Justin Gilead went to Poland for one specific purpose; to find Zharkov. And in the crudest of ironies, he found him. Zharkov's face, in fact, was probably the last sight the Grandmaster saw before he died.

Riesling said Justin Gilead was still alive. How could that be? He had seen the pictures. The Grandmaster was dead.

If he was alive, where would he be? What would he be doing? Why hadn't he come forward, at least to spit in Starcher's eye for conning him into doing a job he was utterly unprepared to perform?

Oh, what did it matter anymore? Starcher thought.
Nichevo,
as the Russians were so fond of saying. Who cares? What can anyone do? Why bother? Nothing would ever remove the stain of guilt from Starcher's past. All Starcher remembered now was that he had never spoken with Gilead the way he'd wanted to, had never laughed with him or tried to comfort him in his deep and inexplicable sorrow. In the end, he'd helped to kill him.

He sighed, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

Nichevo.

Book Four

 

 

The Grandmaster

 

 

Poland, 1980

 

J
ustin Gilead crouched in a narrow mountain path
. Fruit trees were in blossom, showering their fragrant petals in blizzards of color. In the distant valley, a small village with its central wooden church looked as if it had been preserved, intact, since medieval times. Ahead of him, the bodies of five men hung by their necks from a line of tall spruce trees.

They were all young, their clothes ragged. One was covered with blood: He had been shot before he was hanged. Nearby, a group of Russian soldiers sat talking beside a modern army tank. They were passing around a bottle of vodka, apparently oblivious to the swinging bodies.

Gilead had seen much the same sight many times over the past 150 miles. He had followed the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains on foot, watching the young Czechs as they made their way over the treacherous, waterlogged passes into Poland. Sometimes he helped them to safety in the tiny, welcoming villages of the
goral
highlands on their way toward Krakow and Warsaw, but more often he just watched them go the way these five had gone. The Russian patrol of the mountain border was scant, but effective enough to handle the few Czechs brave or crazy enough to cross over. Tanks were stationed every five miles or so, with jeeps running constantly between the postings. Along the length of the newly reinforced border were hanged bodies, some of them women, some so young they had not reached their full height. They waited in warning for those who would try to follow them, their bulging eyes open to the high spring wind. Gilead thought bitterly that the Russians were always predictable. Faced with a crisis, they always reverted to barbarism as a response.