Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller) Read online

  Justin Gilead turned to look at Starcher, who was lying on the bed in a pair of oversized boxer shorts. His long socks were held up by black garters. His undershirt was of thin ribbed cotton.

  The room seemed to vibrate with the heavy periodic thud of Latin music. The room had lacked both television and radio, but Starcher had carried a radio in his luggage. The two men played it to foil the listening devices they knew would be concealed in the room.

  Starcher rolled a cigar between his fingers, eyeing it as lovingly as if he were a satyr and it a lifetime supply of the world's most beautiful women.

  Justin sat on the edge of the bed and said softly, "Sure you won't go, Starcher?"

  "No. I don't want to let our friend know I'm here yet. He might recognize me. And don't call me that anymore. Try Andrew." Harry Andrew was the name on the old forged CIA passport Starcher had used to enter Cuba.

  "All right, Andrew." Gilead was smiling.

  "You're looking forward to this, aren't you?" Starcher asked.

  "Yes."

  "Remember our deal. You won't—"

  "You don't have to remind me. And tonight, if I get the chance, I'll talk to Kutsenko."

  Starcher lighted the cigar. He nodded through the heavy smoke, which seemed to settle around him instead of rising to the ceiling.

  After Justin left, Starcher turned off the radio and lay back on the bed. Some of what he had told Justin was true. He did not want to make an appearance just yet, for fear of being recognized. But he also wanted to stay in the room, just in case Zharkov or his Nichevo henchmen had any idea of planting a bomb in Justin's suitcase or poisoning his aftershave lotion. He didn't know the cause of the hatred that Gilead felt for Zharkov, but if it was reciprocal, then Zharkov would unhesitatingly take the first chance to remove Gilead. The Russians had attempted to kill the Grandmaster in the past; Starcher did not want them to succeed now.

  He smoked and thought and waited.

  The pre-tournament cocktail party was held where the games would be played, in the towering main ballroom of the José Marti Hotel. A wide balcony ringed the room along its second-floor level. When Justin arrived, the room held a hundred persons but still looked as deserted as a Kansas wheat field in winter.

  There were only a handful of women, most of them wives of competitors. The rest were chess players, their seconds, local Cuban officials, and members of the world press.

  Justin stopped inside the doorway and scanned the room, but did not see the face he was looking for. When he spied Richard Carey, captain of the United States team, he walked over to join his group.

  "Justin, good to see you again," Carey said gruffly. "You in shape to tangle with these Russian bears?"

  Justin smiled and nodded as Carey pumped his hand vigorously.

  The popular impression was that chess players were slim, effete intellectuals who lived at the chessboard because they were afraid of the real world. But Carey was a bull mastiff of a man with the build and physical presence of a teamster boss. He had big, strong hands, hardened by years of exposure to the weather on the Vermont farm where he lived. His robust frame seemed to belie the quiet, subtle nature of his chess game.

  He was the highest ranked of all active American chess players, his rating just a few points below that of Kutsenko. Many felt that he would be the next challenger for the world championship. Justin did not share that view. In his mind, Carey would not show well in match play—one player meeting another over a long series of games—because of a basic flaw in his game.

  Carey spent too much time poring over positions, looking into them for subtleties that they just did not contain. Occasionally, a position was clear and simple, and the way to exploit it was merely to play routine, basic chess grounded firmly in sound general principles. But Carey overestimated his opponents and played as if every position were a mine field and each move a life-and-death decision.

  All too often, this forced him into time trouble. Without enough time left on his clock, he sometimes had to make his final crucial moves without fully examining positions that did require careful analysis.

  In chess, the clock was merciless, the player's greatest enemy. The American Bobby Fischer, the onetime world champion and great chess genius, was once asked how he managed never to get into time trouble in a game. He responded, "When you're in time trouble, then it just isn't chess anymore."

  Justin did not think Carey would be able to beat Kutsenko and the clock, too.

  The big American introduced Justin to the other members of the American team and some of their seconds. Gilead had seen the two other members at tournaments before, but had never spoken to them.

  "We were just saying how glad we were that Washington didn't put the kibosh on this trip and stop us from coming," Carey told Gilead. "So where have you been, anyway? You kind of vanished there for a while."

  "I was burned out," Gilead said. "I just needed some time off and some rest.”

  "You're feeling all right now?"

  Gilead nodded, his eyes still searching the room. "I'm sorry about Needham getting ill, but it's good to be here. I'm looking forward to playing again."

  "You up to date on your theory?" Carey asked.

  "A little rusty, maybe."

  "There've been a lot of changes," he said, and he began to describe two new variations in the Caro-Kann defense, which had been an opening Justin frequently used. Carey's interpretation immediately led to a dissent from another member of the U.S. team, a tall, gangly midwestern youngster named John Shinnick. His viewpoint was in turn challenged by the team's third member, a brooding and intense Syrian-American named Yassir Gousen. Justin took the opportunity to disengage himself and walk away.

  He saw Ivan Kutsenko across the room, surrounded by a large group of people, and wandered casually in that direction. Justin recognized Victor Keverin, one of the members of the Russian team. At sixty, Keverin was still a brilliant and dangerous player, although he now lacked the physical stamina to be a serious contender for the world championship. Alongside Kutsenko was a young man with brilliant, sad eyes. Justin guessed that he was the youngest member of the Soviet team, Vyacheslav Ribitnov. Justin had studied the analyses of some of his games in Shakmatni, the Russian chess journal. He was a sparkling young player of the kind Russia seemed to produce year after year. They would have meteoric careers for a few years, and then, just as rapidly as their light had flared, it would sputter and die. The contradictions inherent in playing a game that required total intellectual freedom in a regime that crushed intellectual freedom simply became too much for most of them. It was hard to be free at a chessboard and then, moments after leaving the board, become just another faceless number who was told where to go and what to do and where to live and what to think and say.

  Most of them wound up either defecting or allowing their chess skills to deteriorate. The kind of Russian who usually became world champion did not have the eyes that Ribitnov had. Russian chess champions were generally stolid, middle-of-the-road types with a large sense of humor who had made all the emotional adjustments that were necessary and counted themselves lucky to have some measure of freedom, even if only at the chessboard.

  The burnouts were those who thought they should be free all the time. Ribitnov was clearly one of those. But so, too, from his appearance, was Ivan Kutsenko. His face had the haunted look of a captured animal, and his eyes burned with the glazed, darting confusion of a mouse dropped into the cage of a boa constrictor. No wonder he was trying to defect. Given time, Russia would crush his spirit and destroy his genius.

  Justin guessed that the woman at his side, a tiny but strong-looking brunette with severe upswept hair, was his wife, the physician, Lena Kutsenko. She nodded appreciatively as Kutsenko spoke to several men holding pads and pencils. Behind the Russian champion was a wall of men who were large, sullen, and not particularly bright looking.

  Many chess players did not look like chess players. These men did not look like chess players because th
ey weren't. They were, Justin knew, KGB—the inevitable traveling companions of any Russian artists or athletes who were allowed out of their own country to compete. They were there both as bodyguards and as jailers. Justin wondered how a Russian ever managed to win a game, knowing that these grim-faced bears with guns in their armpits were standing around watching every gesture, trying to overhear every word.

  As Justin walked forward, Kutsenko saw him and stepped away from the crowd to greet him. They had never met before, although Justin had seen the young man's photographs. His career was just beginning to soar when Justin went on his ill-fated trip to Poland, and they had never played each other. But Justin had studied the Russian champion's games carefully in the last few weeks. Kutsenko was a player without a weakness; his strategies were subtle and far-reaching; his tactics were precise and powerful, and his concentration was impressive. Justin looked forward to playing him. He had not realized until he saw Kutsenko's face how much he had missed the game of chess, that solitary companion that had been with him as a child and as a man.

  "You are Justin Gilead," Kutsenko said, extending his hand.

  "Yes. It is a pleasure to meet you."

  "The chess world has missed you very much," Kutsenko said. "I have studied your games."

  "And I yours," Justin said. As he spoke, Kutsenko, with surprising poise for a man who appeared so reclusively shy, took his elbow and moved back with him toward the group of Russians.

  He nodded to his companions, pointedly ignoring the KGB men standing near, and said, "This is Justin Gilead, the most brilliant American player ever.”

  "Thank you," Justin said. "Perhaps Fischer might have something to say about that."

  "Ooof, Fischer. A patzer. You could give him pawn and move," Kutsenko said, and he and Justin shared a smile over the joke. Fischer's reputation as the greatest chess player the world had ever produced was so solid and stable as to be invulnerable. It could be joked about because it was beyond argument.

  "It is one of the losses of my life that I never played Fischer," Justin said. "And yours too, I suppose."

  Justin knew that the KGB men behind Kutsenko were straining to catch the conversation. He mentioned casually that he had just seen Kutsenko's latest proposals in the Semi-Slav defense in Shakmatni.

  As he expected, it touched off a spate of comments and observations by the chess players and their seconds, each with an opinion, each willing to express it loudly and at any length. And because chess players used an algebraic notation to describe the 64 squares on a chessboard, each square being designated by a letter and number from A-I in the lower left corner of the board to H-8 at the upper right corner, the conversation must have sounded like computer-generated madness to non-chess players.

  "The correct move to maintain pressure on the center," Kutsenko said, "was bishop B-seven. It was all lost with F-five because then knight G-five, H-six, rook E-four and wins."

  "Unless," said Ribitnov, the youngest Russian, "D-six. D-six will hold the middle and force the exchange, and black stands better."

  "No," Victor Keverin interjected. "D-six loses to D-four, preparing E-five."

  The conversation raged back and forth, and, as Justin had expected it would, it soon bored the KGB men, who stepped back from the little cluster of chess players and began talking among themselves. Lena Kutsenko took her husband's glass and walked over to a waiter to exchange it for a fresh glass of bottled water.

  Justin took a few steps away from the group. Kutsenko stepped forward to speak to him.

  "What do you think, Justin?" he asked.

  "I think that in Havana, the sun is hot," the Grandmaster said softly. He studied Kutsenko's face. He was about to finish the identifying password when the Russian chess master's face seemed to drain of color and his eyes became frightened. He looked up at Justin imploringly, then away again. Justin followed Kutsenko's gaze toward the ballroom's main entrance. There stood Alexander Zharkov.

  Justin felt his heart leap. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. Zharkov had not changed. There might have been a little more gray in his hair, but he was still husky and muscular his face still young and unlined, the lizard-lidded eyes still cold and murderous. The Russian's own face paled when he saw Justin Gilead staring at him. Their eyes locked for a frozen moment. Then Zharkov looked away and started across the room.

  Justin felt Kutsenko move back slightly from him, as if to be nearer the other Russian players and seconds. Perhaps only a handful of people in Russia knew what Zharkov did, but that he was a powerful man was evident. The KGB bodyguards abruptly halted their bored conversation and moved back up among the members of the Russian team. One positioned himself between Gilead and Kutsenko. The Russian champion withdrew another half-step.

  Justin wondered if Kutsenko had understood Justin's message to him. Did he know that Justin was the man who would arrange his defection to the United States? He looked at Kutsenko, but the man was so obviously frightened by Zharkov that no emotion but fear could be seen on his face. Then Kutsenko turned back to his wife and spoke to her, and Justin remembered what Starcher had told him about Riesling's death and Corfus's final conversation in the Moscow hospital. It was only a guess that the statement about Havana's weather and sugar crop was a password to identify himself to a potential defector. Riesling had been dying when he said it. It could have been nothing but the delirious babbling of a dying man, meaning nothing. And Corfus's analysis might also have meant less than nothing. The fact was that no one knew for sure whether Kutsenko was a potential defector or not.

  It was like so much of field intelligence work. Guesses, wishes, hopes. No evidence. No realities. Only suppositions and maybes and let's-give-it-a-trys.

  As Zharkov walked toward the group, Justin's heart still pounded. At last, after all these years of waiting, his soul had been freed. He was allowed to kill this man who had killed so much of Justin's life. The images flashed, unbidden, unwanted, into his mind: the once peaceful temple at Rashimpur; the great tree charred and dead; Tagore bound to it by wires, dead; the other monks dead. He saw himself bayoneted and thrown into the cold lake, dead. He saw Yva, the Polish girl, her head severed, her village burning. He saw himself in a Polish grave, the earth suffocating him, clawing his way through the cold damp soil like a mindless animal of the night.

  Zharkov always walked with death. He was the Prince of Death, and even though, in his deepest heart, Justin did not believe it, he accepted Tagore’s word: that somehow Zharkov had been born to inflict evil on the world and that Justin had been born to fight back.

  But he had lost his faith. Perhaps once he had believed that he was special, a man chosen by the gods, but not any longer. Now he was just a tired man, tired beyond his years, who still remembered a few tricks of his childhood and hoped that they would be enough to allow him to kill this lifelong enemy and then to die himself.

  For a moment, as Zharkov approached, Justin thought of waiting until the man came into reach, and then stretching out his long, powerful fingers and tearing out Zharkov's throat. It would be easy. And then he could die.

  He could complete the circle, and he could join Tagore and the others of Rashimpur in death.

  They would know their mistake; they would not greet him any longer as Patanjali, as the Wearer of the Blue Hat, but they might greet him as a good man who had tried to do his duty, and perhaps they could make room for him in that far-off place in which their spirits dwelt.

  But there was duty. Duty, as Andrew Starcher would have it, with a capital letter, absolute and inviolate. He had given his word to Starcher. He would keep it.

  There would be time to kill Zharkov. There would be time because Justin had now been freed, and the earth was too small a place for one such as Zharkov to hide from him and the vengeance he would exact.

  Zharkov passed him without a glance and stopped in front of Kutsenko. The Russian champion said, "Good to see you, Colonel. We are pleased that you will be playing with us." Zharkov grunted, an
d Kutsenko looked past him, toward Justin, and said, "There is someone you should meet."

  Zharkov turned and faced Gilead. Even though Kutsenko had taken his arm and was starting to move toward Justin, Zharkov stood planted as firmly as an oak tree.

  "We have met already," he said coldly.

  "Yes," Justin said. "Many times." His soft voice was chilling. "The colonel and I are old friends."

  There was a long silence. When Kutsenko saw that neither man would step forward to offer the other his hand, he released his grip on Zharkov's elbow. "Have you two played before?" he asked timidly, speaking to a space between the two of them.

  "Yes," said Gilead.

  "No," said Zharkov.

  Justin smiled. "Never a real game. Until now. This will be the first, won't it, Colonel?"

  "The first and the last," Zharkov said.

  Then he walked away to find a cocktail waiter, and Justin returned to the American contingent.

  Later, Justin found himself standing next to Lena Kutsenko near a small podium from which the chairman of the Cuban chess federation was reading the schedule of games for the next four days. Dr. Kutsenko's husband was on the other side of the room, surrounded by KGB men. Zharkov had already left.

  Justin learned that he would play Ribitnov, the young Russian, the next day. On Thursday, it would be Victor Keverin, and on Friday, Zharkov. On Saturday, the final day of the match, Justin would play Kutsenko.

  When Dr. Kutsenko heard the pairings, she said to Gilead with a warm smile, "They've obviously saved the best for last. My husband is a great admirer of yours."

  "Thank you," Justin responded in Russian. "Is this your first trip to Havana?"

  "Yes."

  "How do you like it?" Justin asked.

  "Sunshine in January is delightful," she said. "But I suppose it is very hot in Havana in the summertime."

  Justin leaned closer and responded, "But it's good for the sugar crop."

  They had been standing side by side, politely watching the bald sweating Cuban read from a long congratulatory message on the match from various chess dignitaries. Lena Kutsenko turned quickly to look at Justin.