Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller) Page 31

  Perhaps in the end, he himself would die by fire.

  It didn't matter anymore. As long as it happened soon.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Starcher and Justin Gilead sat at a small tile-topped table in one of the cocktail lounges at Mexico City's sprawling airport, with an hour to wait before boarding their flight to Cuba.

  Starcher ordered a Bloody Mary, but the potion was so hotly spiced as to be undrinkable. Justin had no drink. He looked out the window at the airport's crisscrossing of landing strips, watching planes setting down every ninety seconds. His quiet contemplation annoyed the old CIA man.

  Gilead was an impossible human being. Waiting for a plane was any gentleman's lifelong excuse to have a drink; for Justin, it just meant waiting. If the waiter had put a glass of water before him, unbidden, Justin might have sipped it, but more likely he would just have let it sit there while he stared at planes. He made no attempt at conversation. It was as if there were only one thing allowed in his life at any given time and anything else was an intrusion on that.

  A totally impossible human being. Then Starcher thought about Justin staying underwater for thirty minutes and crushing stones to powder in his hands and coming back from a Nichevo grave. An impossible human being. If he was a human being.

  For weeks now, Starcher had been thinking about Justin Gilead, about just who and what the Grandmaster was. He believed that he had spent his childhood raised by a group of mystics in the Himalayas, and he believed that the golden snake medallion Justin always wore around his neck was the sacred amulet of Rashimpur. But what else did he know? What else did he believe? What was the truth?

  Justin would tell him nothing. Starcher finally did what a lifetime in government had taught him to do with insoluble problems: He ignored it and tried to forget it.

  The change that six weeks had wrought in Justin had been almost miraculous. He had been a withered, dying wraith, but now he looked again like the Justin Gilead whom Starcher had known in Europe during the seventies. His body was filled out with muscular flesh. The time spent exercising and sleeping outdoors had tanned Justin's skin and suffused him with the glow of health. He had been virtually a corpse when Starcher had found him on the houseboat; now he looked like what he was, an unusually handsome forty-one-year-old man who moved with the sensitive grace of a large cat.

  The eyes had not changed. They never changed. They were what they had always been: large, clear, as blue as mountain ice in sunlight—and as cold. Sometimes they, too, seemed inhuman in their lack of expression, inhuman in their capacity to fix on a person and make it impossible for him to turn his glance away, as inhuman as if they were the only magnets in a world of metal people. Maybe not human, Starcher thought. Maybe God himself had eyes like that.

  Starcher stirred the Bloody Mary in the hope that the bartender had put most of the spices on top and stirring would weaken the fire, but he knew there was no chance when he saw black pepper grains swirl up from the bottom of the drink as he stirred. Best to let the sediment settle. If their plane was a week late, the drink might finally be bearable.

  And Justin Gilead didn't care. Starcher could sit there drinking a Polynesian spectacular made of equal parts of rum, arsenic, and prussic acid, and he could die writhing on the table, and Gilead would care only if Starcher's dying might somehow affect his plans for the trip to Havana.

  Starcher cleared his throat. Justin looked out at the planes.

  Starcher cleared his throat again, and Justin turned to him, smiled vaguely, noncommittally, and looked back toward the planes.

  Starcher said softly, "I think I'm going to join the Communist party."

  Gilead stared straight ahead.

  "Then I'll become a go-go dancer. I've always liked to dance."

  No response.

  "Skydiving might be a good hobby for me to take up. I'll find out where you're living and crash through the roof. Land right on your chessboard. Mix up the pieces so you can't reconstruct the game."

  Without looking away from the window, the Grandmaster replied, just as softly, "You're too old and homely to be a go-go dancer; the Communist party won't have you; and I'm never going to tell you where I live because I hate having people drop in unannounced."

  "Praised be God," Starcher said. "It lives and it speaks."

  "I'm sorry, Starcher," Gilead said, turning to look at the white-haired CIA man with an apologetic grin. "I'm not much of a traveling companion, am I?"

  "I get warmer responses from my luggage," Starcher said. "From perfect strangers. Even from the bartender. At least he cared enough to try to poison me." He rocked the red drink from side to side in his hand and said, "I'm sorry, Justin. I guess you just make me feel guilty. I think I should be entertaining you or something, trying to make you happy. Can you be happy?"

  "You don't understand, Starcher. I am happy."

  "Because you're finally going to kill Zharkov? That's a strange thing to be happy about."

  "Because finally the circle will be complete. Because finally I'll have finished what I was born to do."

  "Born to do ... destiny ... circle ... karma," Starcher sputtered. "I've heard enough of that. What the hell is it that you were born to do? What's so damned important?"

  "I can't tell you," Justin said honestly, with no embarrassment.

  "But you wish you could," Starcher snapped bitterly.

  "No." Justin shook his head. "I don't really wish I could."

  "All right. But just remember—before you go wandering off on whatever mission of destiny is going to complete your circle and round out your karma and iron your underwear or whatever the hell it is that's driving you—remember: You promised that first we would get Kutsenko out of Havana and try to stop whatever Nichevo is up to."

  "I gave you my promise," Gilead said. "You don't have to remind me of it."

  Starcher rose from the table. "I'm going to make a phone call," he said. He didn't know if Gilead had even heard him. The Grandmaster was again staring out the large observation windows at the planes landing.

  Starcher's sister had told him, unable to keep the irritation from her voice, that someone named Harry Kael had been calling him for the last three days.

  "Really, Andrew, he is the rudest person I've ever spoken to. Where did you meet him?"

  "We used to work together," Starcher said. "I'll call him."

  "Are you all right?" his sister asked.

  "I'm feeling fine."

  "You're taking your medicine?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, very good," she said in the somewhat skeptical tone of a teacher whose dumbest student had just turned in a perfect test paper. She waited a few seconds, then hung up.

  Wonderful, thought Starcher. My own sister can't make small talk with me. Maybe it's not Gilead. Maybe it's me. Maybe I just lack the capacity to make friends. Maybe I became a spy because I knew that nobody in the real world would ever talk to me.

  He tracked Harry Kael down through a string of telephone answerers and secretaries until finally the CIA official's voice crackled through the phone: "Starcher, what the hell's going on?"

  "Hello, Harry. Why don't we both start with hello?"

  "Can that shit. What's going on around here?"

  "What are you talking about?" Starcher asked.

  "The goddamned New York Times. Wait. I've got it here." Starcher heard rustling sounds in the background, then Kael again. "Yeah. Here it is. Last week." He was reading. "'Because of illness, international master Stanley Needham of New York has withdrawn from the American chess team, which is scheduled to play a match against a Soviet national team next week in Havana. The U.S. Chess Federation said that Needham's place on the team will be taken by Justin Gilead, an international grandmaster who has been in retirement and not active in competition for the last five years.' What the hell's that all about?"

  "Seems pretty clear to me," Starcher said.

  "I thought Gilead was dead."

  "Guess he's not."

>   "That's it? You guess he's not? You saw the goddamned pictures of him in some Polack grave, and you've been screaming like a psychotic fruitcake about big problems in Cuba and now suddenly Gilead shows up and he's going to Cuba and you say that's it? You've got your hand in this, Starcher. What the hell are you up to? And while you're at it, where the hell is Saarinen? That goddamned Scandinavian pirate has disappeared. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

  "It's easy, Harry," Starcher said. "You see, you were right all along. Gilead, Saarinen, me ... we're all Communists. We've been planning the glorious revolution for years, and now our day is coming. We're all fleeing the United States. We're going to annex Virginia to the U.S.S.R. We're putting Langley up for sale. Your new office will be behind a tailor shop. See? You were right all the time, Harry."

  "Forget the sarcasm. Just tell me what's going on."

  "Harry, I'd love to stay and chat, but my plane is leaving soon."

  "Plane? Where are you? Where are you going? This connection sucks."

  "I'm going to Cuba."

  There was a long silence before Kael said, "Andy, are you really going there?"

  "Yes."

  "You're going with Gilead?"

  "Yes."

  "You think something's going to happen down there?"

  "Yes. I do," Starcher said.

  "Your being there might make it worse," Kael said sourly.

  "If you had sent somebody else, I wouldn't be going," Starcher said. "Remember? I'm a senile old man."

  "And now you're proving that I was right," Kael said. "I could stop you, you know."

  "You could if I were in the United States," Starcher said. "I have to go now."

  "Andy, wait."

  "What?"

  "I shouldn't do this," Kael said.

  "Don't," advised Starcher.

  "Is this line clear?" Kael asked.

  "Yeah. A pay phone at an airport."

  "Okay. A man named Pablo Olivares. If he looks you up, you might listen to him."

  "Thanks, Harry. I know that was hard for you to do."

  "Be careful," Kael said.

  The sprawling José Marti Hotel, like all the beautiful buildings that remained in Havana since the graying of the sixties, was a relic of Batista's regime. Opulent and grand, with its high archways and ceilings, its baroque splendor reeked of privilege and the hint of banished decadence that gave it the appeal of a royal palace, despite the omnipresent portraits of Fidel Castro in uniform, the cheap new light fixtures that had replaced the crystal art deco wall sconces, and the ugly, thick industrial ropes corralling the long lines waiting for service at the reception desk.

  Alexander Zharkov, too, waited in line. Like the women in the markets, he thought, waving their government-issued numbers in front of Havana's heavily guarded stores. Number A-1 was permitted to shop on Tuesday. The A-2s had to wait until Wednesday, by which time most of the goods were already gone.

  Zharkov lit one of his few cigarettes of the day, prompting a woman in front of him to start complaining loudly in Spanish. But she stopped when a hotel executive came from an office behind the desk and greeted Zharkov.

  "Señor Zharkov, you were pre-registered," he said. "There is no need for you to wait."

  "Thank you," Zharkov said as he accepted a key from the man.

  "You are in room three-seventeen. If you will point out your bags, I will have them sent up."

  Zharkov nodded toward two leather bags near the bellhop's stand, and the hotel official trotted over toward them. Zharkov stepped over the heavy rope that held the lines in order. As he did, the woman in front of him met his eyes, then lowered hers automatically. "Sorry, señor," she mumbled.

  Another wonderful classless society, Zharkov mused as he walked toward the lobby's only working elevator. Another nation of people terrified at the thought that they might have offended someone who had real power. And still, on Sunday nights, they would go to their village squares for the regular indoctrination sessions and chant "All power to the people" and somehow convince themselves that they believed it.

  The elevator was so slow in coming that the bellhop with Zharkov's bags arrived alongside him. Zharkov took the two valises from him and rode up in the elevator alone.

  When he opened the door to room 317, a tall man with Hispanic features rose from the bed. He was deeply tanned, muscular, and balding. Although he would have looked at home anywhere in Cuba, his name was Yuri Durganiv.

  He was Nichevo's best marksman and a special favorite of Zharkov’s, who had sent him to Cuba secretly two years before just to have him in place when he was needed. Durganiv was from Leningrad. He had studied ballet at the Kirov School before growing too tall to be accepted into the company. Even now, at six feet four and two hundred twenty pounds, he moved fluidly, smoothly, giving a sense of restrained power ready to be released at any moment.

  After the door closed behind Zharkov and he dropped his bags, the other man stepped forward and gripped him in a powerful bear hug. "Alyosha, how good to see you. And how good to speak Russian again."

  There was no shortage of Russians in Havana, or anywhere in Cuba, for that matter. But Zharkov had sent Durganiv to Havana in preparation for this assignment with orders to speak only Spanish, to become Cuban, to take advantage of his unusual skin coloration, and to vanish into the native population. He knew that Durganiv had obeyed his orders. As he would always.

  When Fidel Castro died, in four more nights, Durganiv would be the man behind the gun.

  When the taller man released him, Zharkov stepped back and looked into Durganiv s eyes. Before he could speak, the swarthy Russian smiled and said, "She's all right. She's waiting for you."

  "Thank you," Zharkov said simply.

  Five minutes later, after hanging up his clothes in the plain room's unpainted closet, he left with Durganiv. As they walked through a side door of the hotel toward the parking lot, Justin Gilead and Andrew Starcher came through the main entrance doors to the José Marti.

  It was late afternoon, and the muted sun shone dully through the dirt-streaked windows of the small apartment in the Old Havana section. A sharp triangle of light slashed across the naked belly of Katarina Velanova as she lay in bed next to Zharkov, smoking, staring at the ceiling.

  "I'm sorry you haven't liked it here," Zharkov said. "But I'm glad you're well."

  "Yuri sees to all my needs," Katarina said. "And he has gotten me all the necessary papers, but..." She hesitated and blew a long plume of smoke toward the ceiling. "I haven't anyone to talk to. I don't speak Spanish. Half the Russians here are KGB, and the other half want to be. A chance word, an unfortunate remark from me, and someone might know that Galina Panova is really Katarina Velanova. I am afraid I may meet someone who might have seen me before. So I stay in my room and watch television. They have no Russian programs here, so I am reduced to watching cartoons. At least they have foreign bookstores in Havana."

  "It won't be for too much longer," Zharkov said. "When I go back, I'm going to get rid of Ostrakov. With him gone, there's no reason you won't be able to come back."

  "No?" She raised an eyebrow. "What about the Vozhd?"

  "When this mission is done, I will own him," Zharkov said. "He will last in power only so long as I wish him to. And when he goes, I will succeed him."

  "When this mission is done," she echoed. There was a faint tremble in her voice. Zharkov knew she was worried about the danger of this assignment. He took the cigarette from her hand and took a long puff before handing it back. Then he placed his hand on her bare breast.

  During the months she had been away, he had missed her deeply. He had even wondered, at times, if he had fallen in love with her. Was love possible for one such as he was? He believed that she loved him, but was he able to return love?

  Lying here by her side, he realized that it might even be more than love. It was life. Katarina Velanova was his confidante, the only person to whom he could speak without concealing his meanings. The on
ly one who knew his plans and his dreams and his secret lusts. She was a lover, yes. But more important, she was his friend. His only friend.

  "Don't worry," he said. "This will go smoothly." And with no change in his soft, bedroom-conversation tone, he said, "Justin Gilead arrives today."

  Katarina sat up in the bed. The ashtray slid from her belly and overturned, fouling the sheet with ashes and cigarette butts.

  "Where is he?" she asked.

  "He'll be at the José Marti, where I'm staying."

  She stared at the ceiling, biting her lip, deliberating. Then she spoke. "Let me kill Justin Gilead for you."

  Zharkov chuckled, surprised. "Why? You don't even know him."

  "I know what he means to you, to us. And I can do it."

  "He is not easily killed," Zharkov said.

  "Perhaps. Perhaps not by you or by other men. Perhaps he is too wary, too much on his guard. But I am a woman. I could move close to him in a receiving line somewhere and quietly put a knife into his heart. I'd be gone before anyone found out. Give me the knife, Alyosha. I want to do it."

  "Patience, little tigress," the Russian said.

  "I will do it," Katarina said. "I will do it now." Her lips were a tight line across the milky smoothness of her face.

  "I'm afraid not," Zharkov said. "He has to live until Friday night, anyway. And then I have other plans."

  "Oh?" Her anxious face flicked into a smile. "What plans?"

  "First, poor Justin Gilead, the deranged American spy, will be the one who kills that great people's leader, Fidel Castro. He will try to escape but, alas, a Russian bullet will stop him." He smiled. "A simple plan."

  Katarina was silent. She brushed the ashes and cigarette butts from the bed into the cupped palm of one hand, put them all back in the ashtray, lit another cigarette, and lay back down.

  "An audacious plan," she said softly. "But if it fails, I am going to kill the Grandmaster for you. I hate Justin Gilead."