Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller) Read online

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "For the ride, as you Americans say," the Russian said. "Sit back and enjoy."

  The locks on the back doors clicked automatically as the driver engaged them from the front of the cab. He jerked forward to move into traffic and sped down the highway away from the heart of Havana. The headlights stayed in position behind them.

  With luck, Justin thought, they were taking him to where Starcher was.

  Yuri Durganiv pushed open the door to the cabin, saw Starcher lying still on the cot, and stepped inside. He held his revolver in his hand as he sat on a chair at the small table, waiting for the American to waken from his sleep.

  Starcher had been awake before he heard the key at the door. He had slept soundly, but he opened his eyes with a long, loud display of groaning and waking up, then looked around as if he were frightened.

  "Where am I? What is this place?" He wondered who this man was. He spoke Russian fluently, but he looked Hispanic. Any ideas Starcher had about overpowering him vanished when Yuri Durganiv stood to his full six-feet-four-inch height.

  "I came to see if you were hungry," Yuri said.

  "Yes. I'm starved. Why am I here?"

  "All things in due time," Yuri said.

  "I heard you on the phone before. Was that Russian you were speaking?"

  "Yes."

  "You don't look like a Russian," Starcher said.

  "And you don't look like an assassin. Or even like a big spy for the CIA," Yuri said. He was smiling.

  "An assassin? You've got the wrong man."

  "No, Andrew Starcher, I've got the right man."

  "Why am I here?"

  "You will only be here for a while," Durganiv said. "Then you have other places to go."

  "Where is Zharkov?" Starcher asked.

  "He is back in the city."

  "Am I going to see him?"

  "If he wishes. Perhaps. Perhaps not. He will let us know."

  "You work for him?"

  "Yes. There is food here. Sit at this table and eat."

  He locked the door, then changed places as Starcher sat at the table before the platter of food. Durganiv sat on the edge of the cot, the gun still at the ready in his hand, watching carefully.

  Starcher picked at a few mouthfuls, then asked, "Why did you say I was an assassin?"

  "Aren't you?"

  "No."

  "I don't think the world will believe that, Mr. Starcher. Eat."

  Starcher ate. Things were going all right. Durganiv was still underestimating him. If it became necessary, Starcher had no doubt that he'd be able to get the gun from behind his left ankle and put a bullet into the big man's eyes before he knew what killed him.

  If he had to. But first he would wait and see what happened.

  He ate.

  A half-hour out of Havana, the cab pulled to the side of the wide highway. Justin was hustled at gunpoint into the trailing car. Two more of the KGB men he had seen at the José Marti were in the car. He was pushed into the back seat and covered by guns from front and back. The car sped off down the highway, moving east, away from Havana. None of the men spoke to Justin.

  Twenty miles farther down the road, the car turned off the highway and through an opening in a long row of white fence posts that stretched for miles in either direction.

  A hundred yards inside the fence posts, there was a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire atop. It bore the words "Electric Fence. Keep Out," in Spanish.

  The driver opened the gate with a key, drove through, and then went back to relock the fence. Neither of the other two men moved to help; neither of them took his gun off Justin.

  "What is this place?" he asked in English.

  "A slaughterhouse," the man in the front seat answered. The man next to Justin said something in Russian, and all three men laughed.

  Justin realized that the men did not know he spoke Russian.

  The man had said, "Yes. A slaughterhouse for this one."

  They planned to kill him. "What kind of slaughterhouse?" Justin asked innocently, again in English.

  "This is the Agrupación Genetica de la Habana," the driver said.

  "What is that?"

  "A state-owned dairy and cattle farm. They do animal experiments here to improve meat and milk production. Now stop talking; you are talking too much."

  "Why am I here?"

  "Perhaps because you talk too much to the wrong people," the man next to Justin said.

  "I don't understand what's going on. I'm a chess player. Why are you holding guns on me? What are you doing?"

  "We're chess lovers. We don't want you to play Zharkov tomorrow. You might win."

  "Will Zharkov be here?" Justin asked.

  "No."

  They were riding deeper into the country now, along a narrow, well-paved road. The driver turned sharply right. His tires spat gravel as he skidded.

  "Slow down. We don't all want to die," the man in the front seat snapped in Russian.

  They drove toward the woods now, and the narrow road became not much more than a path. There was no light ahead of them, only the funnel of light from the car's headlights.

  The car moved into a blacktopped clearing. Justin could see a connected series of low buildings in front of the car's headlights.

  "You're very privileged, Mr. Gilead," one of the Russians said.

  "Oh?"

  "You're going to be permitted to see one of the most secret installations in the world."

  "I don't know what I've done to deserve the honor," Justin said.

  "This is a Soviet testing center for bacteriological warfare," the man alongside him said. He was obviously the senior KGB agent; the others deferred to him.

  "I thought you said this was a dairy farm, a cattle ranch," Justin said.

  "It is. And there is a lot of livestock here, and a large sealed area, and here, in these buildings are tested new poisons and gases on those dairy animals. And sometimes other animals. Far out of sight of people, and with no danger to the peace-loving population of Free Democratic Cuba."

  One of the other men said in Russian, "And even if there was an accident, what would we lose? Only Cubans," and all three laughed. Justin pretended he did not understand.

  They parked the car. As Justin got out, he felt the barrel of the KGB man's pistol pressed against the base of his spine.

  "What am I doing here?" Justin asked in English.

  "You're a spy, Gilead," the elder KGB man said. "We thought it would be instructive to give you a tour of this secret installation."

  "Is this where you brought Starcher?" Gilead said suddenly.

  "Starcher? We don't know any Starcher."

  "My second," Justin said. "Where is he?"

  "You ask far too many questions."

  Then the man behind Justin pushed him forward with the barrel of his gun toward a door that the driver had just opened.

  A single light went on inside the low building, and when he entered, Justin saw that a long corridor ran the length of the building. One side was flanked by offices, the other by a series of doors with inset windows. The doors were heavy, wooden, and reminded him of a butcher shop's freezer locker.

  The men pushed Justin at gunpoint down the hallway. Was Starcher here? Justin doubted it now. At first, he had thought they would take him wherever they had taken Starcher, if they had him.

  At the end of the corridor, Justin saw a large computer panel that covered an area five feet square. It was filled with gauges and dials, and as they came closer, he saw that the dials were calibrated to measure blood pressure and pulse rate. Probably it was hooked up to all these small chambers for whatever kind of animal tests they ran there to test poisons and gases.

  The man who had been driving was standing before the last cubicle. As the other three men approached, he opened the door, and the two men on either side of him jabbed Justin with their guns and pushed him inside. The heavy door slammed behind him.

  He looked around q
uickly, trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness, as an overhead light came on.

  Justin was in a room nine feet long by six feet wide. The walls and floor and ceiling were of thin sheet metal. There were microphones placed where the front wall met the ceiling, and overhead was a small grate that covered an exhaust fan. Set into the metal wall was the heavy wooden door. The inside of the door was covered with metal, except for the glass viewing window into the chamber. There was no handle to open the door, and the hinges were recessed into the wood, inaccessible to his hands.

  He went to the viewing window and saw the senior Russian at the control panel.

  The Russian turned, and Justin heard his voice.

  "You wondered what you're doing here," the man said in English. His voice crackled from a loudspeaker overhead in the small chamber. "You've come here to die."

  "I want to see Zharkov," Justin yelled.

  "No need to yell. I can hear you very well. Colonel Zharkov will not be coming tonight."

  "Where is my friend? You're going to kill me anyway. Where is my friend?"

  "I'm sorry. I don't know. That is Colonel Zharkov's business. You are ours."

  "You can't do this to me. I'm an American citizen," Justin said.

  "This has been done to many American citizens," the Russian said. "To many spies. Human research, after all, is the best kind."

  For the first time, Justin noticed that there was a little slot, almost like a mail slot, in the metal over the doorway.

  "Do you have a preference?" the Russian said. Justin looked through the window again. The agent had opened a cabinet and was looking at vials holding various colored capsules. "Something esoteric perhaps," the Russian continued. "Something that paralyzes the nervous system. You'll still be able to see and to think, but you won't be able to move. And then, finally, your eyes and brain will close down, too.

  “Or perhaps something painful. This one causes agonizing spasms. I'm told that some people jerk around so violently that they dislocate their own arms and legs." He looked over at Gilead's face, visible through the window, and smiled. "No, I suppose we'll stick to the proven methods. Cyanide should do it quite nicely."

  Justin was testing the window. The glass was a half-inch thick, and there were two layers of it, separated by a quarter-inch of space, which was filled with a heavy steel grate.

  The grate did not appear to be fastened just under the edges of the window, but deep inside the door frame instead.

  He watched the Russian pour some liquid into a thin glass test tube and then drop in a dark-colored capsule. He quickly put a stopper in the test tube, then walked toward the door. His body covered the viewing window as he reached overhead. Justin moved away from the door, and then saw the slot over the door open and the test tube thrown through it into the small chamber.

  It shattered as soon as it hit the metal floor. Instantly the small room was filled with the bitter nutty smell of cyanide. A visible cloud of gas rose from the floor and began to fill the chamber.

  Justin moved to the far corner of the cell and sat down, facing the wall. He wrapped his arms around his knees and huddled forward.

  The three Russians crowded together to look through the window. The gas was filling the chamber now, clouding it, and Justin's body was growing harder to see.

  Then, as they watched, Justin's hands came free from his legs, and he pitched backward, lying still on the floor, face up. The three Russians looked at one another and nodded.

  "We'll wait a few minutes and then call Zharkov," their leader said.

  Justin remembered. He was back in Rashimpur, twelve years old again, and Tagore had not been happy.

  The old man had reached into the water near the shore of the sacred lake, grabbed Justin's neck, and yanked him, sputtering and gagging, ashore.

  "Breathing is all," Tagore said. "If you breathe not, you live not."

  "It's hard to think about breathing right when you're drowning," Justin had complained, and Tagore had mumbled something to the effect that some boys were untrainable.

  That night, Justin slept in the small grotto that had been carved for him out of the rock of the mountain.

  He woke when an unfamiliar smell curled into his nostrils. He sat bolt upright on the thin fiber mat that covered the hard stone floor. Smoke. His sleeping chamber was filling with smoke. He looked around. A large stone had been rolled in front of the chamber entrance, and the smoke was pouring in from under one side of it.

  The young Justin jumped to his feet and ran to the stone. He began shouting: "Fire! Help me! Fire! Help! Help!" But no help came. He tried to roll the stone away, but his strength was not enough to move it. The smoke poured in.

  He moved to a far corner and watched as the smoke slowly filled his sleeping chamber. It was wood smoke, bitter and acrid, and it filled his lungs and made him cough.

  A wood fire. There was no loose wood inside Rashimpur. Someone had brought wood and set that fire outside his chamber, then had rolled the rock into place. Someone was trying to kill him.

  And that someone was going to succeed. He coughed again. Tears streamed down his face as his eyes flooded with water.

  He was going to die. He could not get out.

  There was no escape.

  He remembered Tagore's words of another day: "Escape into yourself. There is always room there for you. Escape into yourself."

  The young Justin lay down on the floor. For the first time, he knew that his life depended on the skills that Tagore had been teaching him, and he curled up in a fetal position, closed his eyes, and concentrated on a black spot somewhere inside his mind. The spot grew nearer, growing larger, and when it filled his mind, he created a white spot in the center of it. And then the white spot moved closer until it, too, filled his mind. And in the center of the white spot, he created a dark spot.

  He did not think about the smoke. He thought of nothing except his breathing. An inch at a time he felt his body slowing down. His mind still worked; his senses still functioned; but the body was drifting away from him. Was this death?

  Or was it what Tagore had been teaching?

  He sensed that he was out of his own body, floating in the air above it, looking down on the strange, frightened young boy. His body was safe there, he knew. And above it all soared his mind, watching, realizing that there was only smoke, but no fire; if he did not breathe in poisons, he would live. Justin would survive.

  His mind had separated from his body and willed the body now to go into deep rest. Justin let it go wherever it chose.

  And then he felt no more. He breathed no more.

  Yet in the morning he woke. There was no smoke in the cell. The large rock that covered the entrance had been moved away.

  Tagore appeared in the entranceway.

  "How did you sleep, young Patanjali?" he asked.

  Justin thought for a moment, then said, "Very well, Tagore."

  He thought he saw the old man smile before he turned away to lead Justin to breakfast and then the day's lessons.

  The spirit floats and the body rests. Breathing is all. Escape into yourself.

  Justin lay still in the small chamber, as still as death as the poison swirled about him.

  Zharkov slept.

  He had made love to Katarina many times before, but never had it been so wild, so impassioned, so careeningly breathtaking as it had been tonight. It was as if the impending death of the Grandmaster had caused her body to celebrate, to break loose from some bond, however fragile it had been, and open herself to him fully for the very first time.

  Zharkov woke as soon as the telephone rang.

  "Ola," he said softly.

  "He is dead," the KGB agent said.

  "Are you sure?"

  "He has been there breathing cyanide fumes for three hours. He is dead."

  Zharkov hunched over the telephone, shielding his voice from Katarina. "Make sure. I want you to put bullets in his brain. In his heart. Then take the body out into the woods and bury
it. And bring me the medal he wears."

  "As you wish, Comrade Colonel."

  Zharkov replaced the telephone, took a cigarette from the end table, and lit it. He lay smoking in the dark. Over, he thought. It was all over.

  The KGB agent hung up the telephone and said to the two other men, "Zharkov must think this one is Superman."

  "Why?"

  "He wants us to put bullets in his brain and heart. To make sure he's dead, he says. Dead! Lenin couldn't live through that."

  The small agent who had been driving the car shrugged. "If that's what Zharkov wants, I don't think it's wise to disobey him. What should we do with the body?"

  "He says take it out and bury it in the woods."

  "Digging. I hate digging."

  "Stop complaining. Dig here or dig in Siberia on the railway."

  The chief agent looked at the control panel, and found a string of twelve toggle switches in the upper right corner. He pressed the one for number twelve, and the faint whirring of a fan sounded.

  "We'll have to clean the gas out first," he said. "Then we'll get rid of this Superman, once and for all."

  Starcher woke. He could see the sky. It would soon be dawn.

  He had hoped that a night's rest would help him to think more clearly, but he could still see no solution to his predicament. Zharkov had not come, and there was just no way Starcher could get out of his floating prison. Even if he killed the tall Russian who looked like a Cuban, what would he do then? He was surrounded by Russian navy boats, and there were two small patrol vessels anchored near the cabin cruiser. If he tried to escape, he would be overtaken by the Russian patrols, and if he tried to shoot his way out, they'd probably blow him out of the water. He was outnumbered and outgunned. There wasn't anything to do but wait for a chance.

  Breathing is all.

  Oxygen was returning to his system. The poison that had surrounded him like a mist had gone. His mind was alert, his body ready.

  But he did not move. He lay deathly silent, his body curled in a fetal position. He waited.