Grandmaster (6 page)

He tossed the gold medallion onto the glass desktop with a clatter.

Starcher stared at it for a moment, unmoving. The gold disc with its ancient coiled snake figurine seemed to glow with a terrible power.

Corfus looked from the medallion to Starcher. "What—what's the matter?"

Starcher reached out for the necklace with tentative fingers. He rubbed the gold thoughtfully. It felt warm to his touch.

So long, so long ago ...

"What did Riesling say?" Starcher asked, pulling off his bifocals with a grimace. The hand that had touched the medallion trembled.

"He said the Grandmaster was alive."

Starcher shot out of his chair. An intense pain coursed down his left arm. "What?"

"It was the last thing he said," Corfus said, confused. "Are you all right?"

Starcher groaned and gasped for air. His chest tightened as if a steel band were squeezing his lungs together. The corner of his desk shot up to meet his gaze; his chair toppled with a heavy crash. "The medallion," he said softly. But of course that was ridiculous. Even the Grandmaster's coiled snake didn't possess the power to stop a man's heart. With a sigh, he lost consciousness in a sea of pain.

 

 

A
lexander Zharkov filled his lungs with the crisp October
air mixed with the smell of new bread from the bakery on Neglimmaya Street. To his left, several blocks away, the twenty towers of the Kremlin's fortress walls pricked the sky. Beyond them, the bright-colored gingerbread domes of St. Basil's Cathedral stood in splendid ancient barbarism.

It was said in the old legends that Ivan the Terrible plucked out the eyes of the cathedral's designers so that its magnificence might never be duplicated. Zharkov's eyes rested for a moment on the structure, as they did each morning. He understood the belligerent, bloody czar of all the Russias, now defiled for his selfish achievements.

He had understood since his days as a student, when he had first set his unworldly eyes on the great cathedral. While his contemporaries set about ensuring the success of their careers by vocally damning the excesses of the corrupt kings and praising the weekly agricultural output of the Ukraine, Zharkov had been silent, listening, planning. Even then he had understood the price of greatness, and respected it.

He turned down a side street lined with modest homes, their shutters open. He nodded to an old grandmother, a
baba
, who swept her steps each morning as Zharkov passed. She smiled toothlessly and watched him walk toward the two-story house that no one on the street spoke of.

The people in the neighborhood knew that it was not a home. It was not a brothel, because no women came or left there. It was not an office, because no office sounds issued from the small house with the tightly closed windows. Only a crew of workmen in a truck came to the dark little house with regularity, letting themselves in before dawn with dollies loaded with electronic equipment, and then let themselves out within the hour. Those neighbors who guessed that the equipment was for electronic security sweeps of the premises kept the information to themselves. Such knowledge was not welcome in Moscow.

The house belonged to Nichevo. Sporadically it served as the meeting ground for five or six serious, silent men. Zharkov was the youngest among them. And the most powerful.

A heavyset man carrying a brown envelope stood at the foot of the steps leading to the front door of the house. They exchanged glances tentatively. Years of secret meetings had inured them both against demonstrative Russian welcomes in full sunlight.

"Comrade," Zharkov said, with the briefest nod toward the brown envelope. He unlocked the front door. It closed behind them with a double click. Zharkov led the heavyset man through the front parlor and into a small office containing little more than a desk, a few uncomfortable wooden chairs, and a wall of new metal file cabinets on which rested incongruously an ornate chessboard inlaid with ebony and ivory.

"You are well, Sergei?" Zharkov said with more warmth once they were away from the inquisitive eyes of the people on the street.

"Well enough. My son wishes to change his course of study at the university. He wants to take up art," the man with the envelope said with a shrug.

Zharkov smiled at the man's obvious discomfort. General Sergei Ostrakov was KGB in the style of Stalin: a trained bear of a man who obeyed blindly, killed easily, lived automatically, and spared little thought for the inconsequentials of life, which included every activity not directly linked to his personal survival. "Art is a worthwhile study," Zharkov said.

"Not for the son of a fighting man. Disgraceful. You are lucky not to be fettered with the burden of a family, Alyosha." He used the friendly Russian diminutive for Alexander, but the name seemed to come from his mouth only with effort.

"Your coat?" Zharkov said.

The KGB man shook his head. "No. I'll just stay a minute." He tossed the envelope onto Zharkov's desk. "There's something in there that might interest you."

He was fishing for something, Zharkov knew, and he refused to rise to the bait. He sat on the soft leather chair behind his desk and slowly lit a cigarette. The envelope remained untouched on the desk.

After a few seconds of awkward silence, Ostrakov spoke again. "This is something in your field of interest," he said. "Kutsenko is attempting to defect to the Americans. He met with an agent last night."

"Which agent?" Zharkov asked mildly, his hooded eyes still looking down at his cigarette.

"We think it was Frank Riesling. He divested himself of any identification before he died, but our researchers made him from some photographs." He thrust his chin toward the brown envelope. "He worked out of Helsinki, taking defectors out through the northern route."

"And what happened?" Zharkov asked.

"Nothing," Ostrakov said. "It's in the envelope."

Zharkov leaned forward and pulled a sheaf of photographs from the envelope. The first was of a fat woman posing for her portrait in front of a mural. The second showed another woman, arms outstretched, falling as her face exploded into fragments.

"Some of these are inconsequential," Ostrakov said offhandedly. He gestured to the photo of the woman in her moment of death. "An accident," he said.

Angrily, Zharkov slammed the photos down on his desk without looking at the rest.

"What happened to Riesling?"

"He's dead."

"Your men killed him?"

"Yes."

"And Kutsenko?"

"He is being watched. I've had him watched for two weeks now," Ostrakov said. "Ever since I learned he was planning to defect. I had his wife fired from her job at the hospital," he said proudly.

"You idiot," Zharkov snapped.

Ostrakov bristled, but Zharkov ignored him and began to look again through the rest of the photos. He blew out a lungful of smoke in disgust. Nichevo had given him a certain power over the KGB, but it would never be enough power to change the mentality of its people. The KGB was cluttered with heavy-handed fools.

"That's the agent," Ostrakov said. The third photograph showed a man reeling to the floor in agony, his shoulder blown away. In the foreground were several shadows hovering around neatly upholstered furniture.

"Where were these taken?" Zharkov asked incredulously.

"At the Samarkand Hotel, around eight o'clock yesterday evening. There was a man taking pictures of the incident, an East German tourist."

"A
tourist?"
Zharkov shouted, throwing the photographs down onto the desk. "You had a man shot to death in the lobby of a busy hotel during peak hours"—he slammed his fist down on the picture of the dying woman— "killing God knows how many innocent bystanders..."

"Only two bystanders, comrade," Ostrakov said coldly. "The German tourist was taking incriminating photographs, as you can see. It was unavoidable." He stepped back a pace, his friendly intimacy replaced by the official persona of his rank. "Colonel Zharkov, I wish to remind you that Nichevo's function does not extend to dictating what the KGB will do."

"You do not have to remind me. Every bungled performance by your organization reminds me." With a snap, he picked up the photographs again.

"I am trying to remember that you are my friend, Comrade Colonel," Ostrakov said angrily. He rambled on, but Zharkov didn't hear him. He was transfixed by the last photograph in the series. It showed Riesling, screaming in pain before the bewildered, terrified face of a dark young man, as a shiny metal object glittered in the air on its way to the floor. The carved surface of the object was facing the camera.

Zharkov held his breath as he pulled a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and held it over the black-and-white photograph. Under the lens, the object leaped into prominence.

It was a medallion bearing the figure of a coiled snake in a circle.

Zharkov closed his eyes. He felt dizzy. The Grandmaster had surfaced.

"It is the same, isn't it?" Ostrakov asked.

Zharkov looked up, his eyes alert and suspicious. "I don't know what you mean," he said.

The KGB man spread his arms. "Alyosha," he said in a strained attempt at friendliness. "We have spent many years together. We have marched in the snows of the Caucasus, killed together in the jungles. We have bathed together and shared women. I know the mark you keep beneath your collar."

Zharkov swallowed, trying to focus on the fat man who seemed to sway in front of him. "Why have you come?" he asked quietly.

"The medallion. We wish to know its significance. Before he died, Riesling passed everything in his possession to the man in the photograph. We've identified him as Michael Corfus. He's a liaison officer at the American embassy, but he's Starcher's deputy in the CIA."

"I know who he is," Zharkov said. "You've captured him, too?"

Ostrakov shrugged. "No. With his diplomatic immunity, he could only be expatriated anyway. We're keeping an eye on him."

"In your usual subtle fashion, no doubt," Zharkov said. He stubbed out the cigarette. He allowed himself only a handful every day and never one before lunch. This idiot and the other fools at the KGB had stuck their blundering fat hands into a sensitive Nichevo operation, and it was Zharkov's own fault. He should have taken greater care to keep the KGB out.

The facts were clear. Riesling had passed the medallion to Corfus. He should never have been allowed to leave the premises, but the KGB decided not to capture him at all. Why should they? They were probably still busy celebrating their successful terrorizing of a hotel full of foreign visitors. Two bystanders dead. Riesling killed. Kutsenko alerted.

All a waste.

And worst of all, the medallion was gone.

He looked up and met Ostrakov's eyes. They were the eyes of a beast of burden, trained to see only what they expected, blind to truth. No, Zharkov would not tell the KGB anything.

"The medallion," Ostrakov prompted.

Zharkov dismissed it with a flick of his hand. "Meaningless," he said. He stood up and extracted from a file cabinet a plain green folder. "The green signifies a closed case," he said, slapping the folder into Ostrakov's open hands. Inside were medical reports, a detailed account of the circumstances of death, and a grainy photograph of a dark-haired man lying in a shallow open grave. The face in the photograph, smeared with dirt and lacerated with small cuts, looked vital even in death. The clothes he wore were rough, handmade garments of the style worn by the
goral
of the Polish highlands. Around his neck was a medallion that bore the image of a coiled snake.

"Who was he? He's wearing the same medallion."

Zharkov answered in a monotone. "The one last night was probably a copy. His name was Justin Gilead. He was a chess player, and the CIA ran him around the world. He was killed in an avalanche in Poland four years ago. I was there at the time."

Ostrakov grunted, tossing down the green folder. "The Americans know about this?"

Zharkov nodded. "I saw that they got copies of the file."

"And your neck, Comrade?" Ostrakov asked bluntly.

Zharkov's hooded eyes flashed. "It is an old scar. It means nothing. Not to me and not to you and not to your superiors. Understand?"

The KGB man sputtered in front of Zharkov's vehemence. "I thought the medal might contain some kind of secret message," he said.

"You should have asked Riesling before your thugs pulled the trigger," Zharkov said dryly. "Where is Kutsenko now?"

"My men have him under surveillance," Ostrakov said.

"I want him left alone," Zharkov said.

Ostrakov's face clouded. "But that's impossible. He is the world chess champion, and he is planning to defect. Impossible. My superiors—"

"And I want his wife to be given her job back. She should be made to believe it was all a mistake."

"I will never be permitted to—"

"I will take full authority for this," Zharkov said. "I'll send a report to the directorate today. They'll understand. Kutsenko is very vital to plans that Nichevo is working on."

"What plans?"

"You know better than to ask that," Zharkov said curtly.

He led Ostrakov through the front parlor and to the door. "If you don't believe me, wait for instructions from your superiors. That is the Russian way, I suppose."

"Zharkov, I've told you—"

"Just try not to kill Kutsenko in the meantime. Or this Corfus. I think I will need him as well."

"You are insulting, Alexander Vassilovitch," Ostrakov said, his face red. "There is a new premier. I do not think Nichevo will continue to ride roughshod much longer."

"Until that happens, good day, Comrade," Zharkov said without expression.

Settling down to write his request to Ostrakov's superiors, his hands passed over the green folder. Inside lay the photograph of the dead Justin Gilead. Zharkov took it out and studied it again. In repose, Gilead's face was almost that of a boy, and it was as a boy that Zharkov best remembered him, hunched over a chessboard in a banquet room of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris.