Grandmaster (29 page)

"Are you in danger? I'll wait nearby, where I can watch."

"No! The soldiers are looking for you. If they find you here, they'll kill you, and me, and everyone else for miles around. Just listen to me, and don't argue." She thrust the parcels at him and pushed him toward the door. "They'll be coming from Lubsana, to the west. So head east, and keep moving. Things ought to be clear in a day or so."

Justin felt helpless. Why was he running again? "I don't know any soldiers," he said. "What do they want me for?"

"They say you rose from the dead. What difference does it make? Don't waste time thinking. Just go." She shoved him into the darkness.

The jeep came within twenty minutes. To Yva's surprise, there was only one man inside, a Russian colonel.

Yva rushed outside. "What's your business?" she shouted.

"I am Colonel Alexander Zharkov. I am looking for a man named Justin Gilead. An American."

An American!
In her wildest dreams, Yva had not imagined that the beautiful boy with no memory was an American. She wondered if Justin even knew it himself. "There is no one here except me," she said.

Zharkov got out of the jeep. "I'll see for myself, if you don't mind."

"Wait," she said, picking her way among the hidden traps. "I'll bring you up." The traps were her only weapon. It would be wise, she knew, not to show her hand too quickly.

Zharkov scanned the inside of the house cursorily, kicking the straw of the bed, flinging Yva's few articles of clothing to the floor. At last, he came to the large wooden table covered with sewing materials. He swept them away with one arm. Beneath, etched into the grain of the wood, was Justin's drawing of the coiled snake.

Zharkov looked at her levelly. Slowly he took out his pistol. "Where is he?"

Yva swallowed. "I never knew his name. He left several days ago. I took his medallion as payment for looking after him. I was going to turn him over to the authorities when he was well..."

"How many days?"

"Three," she said without hesitation. "He was sick until then."

"What did he tell you about himself?"

"Nothing. He couldn't talk."

Something in the fireplace caught Zharkov's eye. He walked over to it, keeping the Tokarev trained on the woman. Reaching into the flames with a poker, he pushed out the charred corner of a checkerboard.

"You're lying," he said evenly. He threw the board at her feet. "I'll be back."

After he left Yva sat down, shaking. The danger was momentarily past, but he would come back with his men. That was a certainty. They would comb the woods for a man traveling on foot. They would guess his direction once they realized that Józek had given them the wrong route. They would alert the other villages to look for Justin. And Czeskow...

There was a cry and a thump from in front of the house. For the first time since she'd buried her dead child, Yva crossed herself. The Russian officer had found the traps.

Peering out the door cautiously, she watched for movement. Zharkov lay on the slope, his arms flung wide, his head bleeding against a rock.

Yva scrambled down the hill to him. First, she picked up the Russian's gun, which was lying a few feet from his right hand, and threw it as far as she could into the shadows. Then she searched the unconscious man for the medallion.

She found it in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket, still wrapped in the piece of dirty cloth she had put it in. She opened the cloth to be sure. The medallion was the same, and again it felt warm in her hand.

"It is not yours," she mumbled softly to the unconscious Russian officer. "Not yours."

She slipped away quietly and moved, with unerring instinct, down the hill to the base of a large tree. Using a rock for a tool, she dug a hole by the tree and buried the medallion. Then she placed the rock over the hole as a marker.

Done. Now, whatever they did to her or to her house, the medallion would be safe for Justin. She said his name aloud. "Justin Gilead. An American." The thought of the strange young man's powerful body, his tender yet strong arms, made her heart beat faster.

She scooped dirt into her apron until it was full, then, laboriously, handful by handful, pushed it all into the gas tank of the jeep.

It was more than six miles to the village. Yva ran the whole distance, planning, praying, regretting that she hadn't shot the Russian officer with his own gun while she'd had the chance.

But maybe things would be all right anyway. The Russian would find his way back to his troops in time, she knew, but that time might be enough for Justin to get away.

She found the doctor, rushing from one house to another, warning the inhabitants about the approaching destruction.

"I need to speak to you," she said.

The doctor, exhausted and hoarse, took her arm. "Have they come?"

She nodded. "One. But the rest will come. He knows the stranger was there. There were things I couldn't hide."

The doctor sighed. "Then at least we have warning. Many have fled already. Thank you for your concern."

"My concern isn't for you, or these people," Yva said flatly. "I want you to give the stranger a message if you see him again. I... may not."

"Nonsense, dear. You'll come with my family."

"No!" Yva shouted. "That would be suicide. The Russian officer will be looking for me. I'll be safer in the woods. But I want you to tell the stranger, if he comes back, that the medallion is at the bottom of the hill, by the tree. He'll understand."

"All right," the doctor said, "But you—"

"That message is only for him, understand? No one else. No one. In exchange for this message, I'm warning you to get whoever you care to out of Czeskow."

She walked back to the cabin. It was nearing dawn. She longed for sleep, but there was still much to do. Zharkov would be back with his men in a few hours. It was enough time to pack some provisions and a blanket before she set out to find Justin in the forest, but not enough time to hesitate, even for a moment.

She stopped at the bottom of the hill, near the tree where the coiled snake medallion was buried. The rock marker had not been disturbed. The jeep, useless now, remained where the officer had left it. Zharkov himself was gone, the trap sprung, as she had expected.

But a faint, shadowy glow shone behind the brown oilskin windows. A lamp. Had Justin returned already? Had he been tricked by the calm into believing that nothing would happen?

She rushed up the hill. "Justin?"

"Yva."

"What are you doing here? What—"

The Tokarev was pointed directly at her face.

Zharkov grabbed the shoulder of her dress and pulled her into the room. "Where's the medallion?" It was a command.

"It's—" She looked around. There was no place for her to go now. "It's in Czechoslovakia by now."

Zharkov's jaw clenched. "Where did you meet him?"

"Why should I tell you? Filthy Russian pig. It wasn't yours."

"Tell me where he's gone!" Zharkov's voice was strangled. He grabbed Yva by the neck and slammed her against the wall, jamming the Tokarev into her temple. "Where?"

Yva's heart pounded. Her eyes unwillingly welled with tears.

"Where?" Zharkov repeated, pounding her skull against the wood. She was
his,
he thought, the Grandmaster's woman, and it gave him satisfaction to hurt her. "Is this how he takes care of you? Is this how he looks after you?"

She managed to turn her head slightly. The round, frightened face gathered into a mask of hatred. In one last, defiant gesture, she spat in his face.

Zharkov fired the Tokarev.

 

T
he man who did not know his name
was Justin Gilead returned to the house the following night. There were soldiers in the woods, heading east; they would long ago have passed Yva Pradziad s house.

There seemed to be light everywhere, light and sound and excitement. The lights usually visible from the village were oddly extinguished, but there were other lights from the roadways, and the sounds of horses and cattle carried from isolated places on the wind.

He walked around the house silently, watching, listening. No sound. No light. Had she left? No soldiers. He entered quietly, surprised to find that he could move without disturbing even the pebbles under his feet. He had to have learned that somewhere. Perhaps in the place where he'd gotten the medallion.

"Yva," he whispered. Eve, the first woman. His mother, his teacher, his friend.

He found her, bloody and decapitated. What remained of her face was splattered over the fireplace. A box had been tossed into the new ashes. Across her body were strewn its contents: the chess pieces Justin had whittled from scrap wood.

Justin moaned. A vision of a mutilated old man tied to a burning tree came to him, followed by a nightmare sequence of still photographs: bodies in a lake, a golden hall filled with dead soldiers, a ring of headless women around a bonfire. And now there was yet another picture. Once again, someone who loved him had died in his place. Once again, the Prince of Death had triumphed.

The sound stopped in his throat. In the distance, through the numb, senseless blackness, he saw the village of Czeskow burning.

There was nothing left.

 

 

S
tarcher squinted at the figure coming
toward him through the door to his hospital room. It was a fat man, young, from his gait. His face was obscured, but the overhead fluorescent lights shone through the mass of fuzzy hair on his head. The man spoke softly to the American guard in the room, and the guard left.

"Corfus," Starcher said. He had not spoken in so long that his throat was unused to producing sound.

"Shhh. I had to get special dispensation to come here. Any plumbers come around?" He smiled broadly at his own joke. The KGB was famous for stashing surveillance devices in the most unlikely places, on the off chance that the subject in question would do or say something for the hugely overstaffed secret police to dissect and analyze.

"I don't remember. You'd better take a look around."

Corfus searched the small curtained area around Starcher's bed, pausing when a sullen nurse entered for a spot check. After a long, cold look at Corfus, she left, and Corfus pulled a small disc of plastic the size of a button off the electronic buzzer attached to Starcher's bed.

"Thar she blows," the young man said, grinding the button under his heel. "There's probably more. Hold on." He took a portable tape player from his pocket and turned on loud rock music.

"They never stop, do they?" Starcher said.

Corfus leaned over the bed and spoke softly in Starcher's ear. "You're being flown back to HQ."

"When?"

"As soon as you're stable. They're afraid the goon squad'll put a bomb in your bedpan to make you talk."

Starcher exhaled. He seemed to disappear into the folds of the sheets. "I guess this is it, then."

"Hey," Corfus said, pushing the old man's hair out of his eyes. "You'll be back."

"Like hell," Starcher said mildly. "Not at my age!"

There was a long and awkward silence. Corfus put his hands in his pockets and shuffled his feet, then leaned forward again. "Andy," he said quietly, "I don't know if you're still interested in the Riesling business, but I think I've got something."

Starcher eased himself up. "What is it?"

"The stuff in his pockets. Remember those fake passports? He was trying to get someone—two people, a man and a woman—out of the country."

"And?"

"And what he said to me. The stuff about Havana. I think it might tie in."

"A code?" Starcher asked.

"Maybe. The thing that kept sticking in my head was Havana. Why Havana? And then I read today in
Pravda
that there's going to be a chess challenge match in Havana in a couple of months. U.S. versus U.S.S.R. I don't know. It might just be a red herring."

Starcher thought. "Riesling never operated in Cuba."

"Okay," Corfus said with a nod. "But just for argument's sake, let's say he couldn't get Mr. and Mrs. X out of Moscow, or wherever they are. Maybe he turned his stuff over to me so that someone else could get them out.

Starcher blinked.

"And then I started to think about who would want to defect. It wouldn't be anyone military, because Riesling dealt with civilians, am I right? Scientists, that kind of thing. So when I read the piece in Pravda—"

"A chess player."

"Bingo. So I started going over some past issues to see if I could rout out anything about the big-deal chess players over here. Any problems. What I came up with was this." He leaned back to hand Starcher a Russian newspaper clipping. The date, October 5, was scribbled over the top:

 

Tass

Helsinki
—The International Consortium of Pediatricians convened early today at the Privm Hotel in Helsinki, Finland. The main event of the day will be a symposium on the relation between prenatal care and birth defects. The symposium will be conducted by Dr. Lena Kutsenko, chief pediatrician at Moscow University Medical Center.

 

"Ring a bell?" Corfus asked.

"Not Ivan Kutsenko," Starcher whispered incredulously.

"The same. Her husband's the world chess champion. Pride and joy of Mother Russia."

"Riesling's cover was as a journalist for the Associated Press in Helsinki. And he started his last run the day after this clipping."

"It fits, Andy. She could have approached him. I don't know chess from dominoes, but I've heard rumors that Kutsenko's awful nervous about the Havana match. There's some talk out that if the team doesn't win, he may follow Boris Spassky to the land of nonpersons. Russian chess champs aren't allowed to lose."

"Well," Starcher said, "it's a good theory ... but
Kutsenko."

"There's something else. I tried to get hold of Lena Kutsenko at Moscow University Medical Center. Guess who's out of a job."

"They fired her?"

Corfus shrugged. "She's not there. They said she left because of ill health, but they wouldn't say when. It makes me wonder if it isn't tied in somehow with the incident at the Samarkand."