Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller) Page 37

  He heard the door to the chamber open.

  "Well, I might as well shoot him now," a voice said in Russian.

  "Your ass," another Russian voice answered. "Get blood all over my suit? You put holes in him and he leaks. Forget it. First we carry him to the woods. Then we shoot him."

  "All right. That makes sense."

  "Of course, it does. That is why the great Zharkov of the great Socialist Republic has put me in charge of you two idiots."

  "It doesn't make that much sense."

  The three men came into the room.

  "This smells awful. You sure I'm not going to die in here?"

  "Only from the neck down. You've been dead from the neck up ever since I've known you."

  "I wasn't the one who wanted to start the body leaking."

  "Shut up and carry."

  Two men hoisted Justin Gilead by his legs and under his shoulders.

  "He's light," one said.

  "Not so light that just us two are carrying him. What the hell are you doing?"

  "Somebody has to hold the doors for you," the KGB leader said.

  "From each according to his abilities..." the first man said.

  Breathing is all. He heard the words again.

  He felt himself being lifted and then carried from the room. He had never lost consciousness.

  He had closed down his body's internal systems without eliminating his awareness of his surroundings. Science said that the brain needed oxygen to live, to think, to work, but Tagore had shown him that the brain was the most efficient cannibal. Close down the rest of the body's systems. Muscles that did not move needed no oxygen; stomachs that did not digest could stay, suspended, for hours or days, without oxygen. And from all those unused body organs, the brain sucked away every last molecule of oxygen to keep itself alive. Because without his brain, man was less than man, and might as well be dead.

  This Tagore had taught him, and he had taught him the way to return from trance, without a telltale twitch or jerk of the muscles, without a giveaway groan, without the languorous stretching of a cat. One moment he seemed unconscious; the next he was fully alert, but to an observer, no difference was detectable… until the Grandmaster chose to move.

  He kept his eyes closed. He sensed that the men were tiring because he felt their arms lowering. They were holding him so low now that his buttocks almost grazed the grass. He smelled the fresh nighttime air. Oxygen washed through his body.

  "Up ahead," the leader called. His voice was fifty feet away. "Just a little more. I see a spot."

  Justin opened his eyes the narrowest crack. It was a dark night; the moon was hidden behind a heavy cover of clouds.

  "Damn, he's heavy," the man at his feet said. "I thought you said he was light."

  "All right, so he's heavy. We'll dump him and then put some lead in him to make him heavier. At least we won't have to carry him back. He still smells of that poison."

  "Where the hell'd our brilliant leader go?" the man at Justin's feet said. "I can't see a thing."

  "I think he's behind those trees. Let's hope he found a hole to dump this one in. I don't want to dig tonight."

  The man holding his ankles juggled him for a moment, trying to adjust his grip, and in that moment, Justin Gilead lowered his leg, then bent his knee, and extended his leg upward, with accelerating speed, like the snap of a whip, and buried the toes of his shoe in the man's Adam's apple. The man dropped to the ground without a sound.

  In an instant, Justin's feet were on the ground. The man behind him growled, "What—?" But before he could move, Justin had wrenched his wrists loose from the man's hands.

  He spun. The Russian reached for the gun inside his jacket, but the Grandmaster’s arms were already locked around the man's neck, the heel of his right hand pressing against the right side of the man's skull.

  Justin could feel vibrations under his left bicep as the man struggled to call out, but the force of his hold had cut off his air supply, and the man could only softly hiss. His arms flayed in front of him; forgotten was his gun in his pocket. Then there was a snap as the neck broke.

  The man's hands froze in midair for a moment, then slowly dropped in front of him. Justin gently lowered him to the ground.

  He turned toward the small stand of trees where the third man, the head agent, had gone. Even in the total darkness, Justin could see better than normal men, and he saw a movement. He dropped to the ground as the Russian walked out from behind the trees.

  "Come on, you two," the head agent called, then stopped. "Hey, where the hell are you? Come on. This is no time to be playing games. I've found a hole up here. Good for a grave. Anatoly? Josef? Where are you?" He stopped and listened, but heard nothing except the sound of insects in the Cuban night.

  Justin heard him walk back toward the spot where he and the two other men lay on the ground.

  He was only ten feet away when he saw them. "What the hell is going on?" the man grumbled in annoyance. Justin, his eyes open only a small slit, saw him walking toward them, taking his gun from a hip holster as he did.

  He was standing at Justin's feet, and then kneeling down next to the man whose neck Justin had broken. He felt for a pulse, but there was none. The man stood up and looked around in confusion, seeking whoever had waylaid his two men. There was no one to see. He finished a full turn, a complete revolution with his body, and when he did, the Grandmaster stood in front of him.

  The man recoiled in shock. He raised his gun toward Justin, but as he did, Justin clasped the KGB man's right hand. The Russian's thumb was pressed down into the spot between the hammer and the chamber. When the hammer dropped, it did not hit the back of one of the cartridges, but instead slammed down into the fat part of the Russian's thumb. He howled from the pain. Justin squeezed harder. The Russian could feel the bones of his right hand snapping under the pressure. They sounded like dry twigs breaking under the heavy tread of a careless hunter.

  The man screamed as the metacarpals across the back of his hand separated. Then Justin Gilead had the gun and was pointing it at the Russian.

  "You ... you should be dead," the man said stupidly, his jaw slack.

  "Where is Andrew Starcher?"

  "Starcher?" The Russian's eyes evaded Justin's.

  "That's mistake number one. You're from Moscow. You know that Starcher was the CIA head in Russia. Now he's traveling with me. Where is he?"

  "I don't know."

  "Number two. You're lying," Justin said.

  He cocked the hammer on the revolver.

  The Russian agent said quickly, "It's true. We followed him yesterday, but one of Zharkov's men picked him up. Where he is I don't know."

  "All right," Gilead said. "What is Zharkov doing here in Cuba?"

  "I don't know the answer to that," the man said. He nodded toward the two men on the ground behind Justin. "None of us did. He told us nothing. We were assigned as guards and told to obey his instructions. That's all."

  "I believe you," Gilead said.

  The Russian raised his broken hand, palm out, to his face. "Don't kill me," he said. His nose was running.

  "I killed them," Gilead said coldly.

  "I'm not fighting you. It would be an execution. Don't do this, please. I have a family ..."

  Justin lowered the pistol almost imperceptibly. It was what the Russian was waiting for.

  He stepped forward, past the pistol in Justin's left hand. His other hand had slipped into his pocket and emerged with a long switchblade, which he snapped open even as he drove it toward Justin's exposed belly.

  The knife stopped as if it had been pushed against a brick wall. The Russian looked down and saw with horror that Gilead's bare hand was wrapped around the blade of the knife. And the hand was not bleeding. The Russian tried to free the knife from Gilead's grasp but could not. He looked up with bewildered eyes at the taller American, then twisted the knife loose and pulled it back.

  "That's three," Justin said, and fired the pistol into t
he man's heart. He felt no remorse as the man fell, and he realized, sadly, that killing had become commonplace in his tarnished, pitted life.

  He dragged the bodies off into the woods and put them into a natural declivity in the earth, which he covered with branches and leaves. While he worked, the sky grew noticeably brighter. Dawn was breaking, quickly as it always did in the Caribbean, and the first sliver of sun was appearing on the horizon when he finished.

  He went to the parking lot but could not find the keys for the car. Instead of going back and searching through the dead men's pockets for them, he turned and trotted off toward the main road of the agricultural center several miles away.

  So many deaths, he thought.

  But only one more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  At precisely 10:00 A.M., the referee nodded to Alexander Zharkov and pressed down the button atop Justin Gilead's chess clock.

  Zharkov played pawn to king 4, pressed the button on his own side of the timer, and started Gilead's clock running.

  Gilead was not at the table. Zharkov walked away to watch the start of the day's other three games.

  The spectator section was only half filled because of the early hour. Many chess fans had found a way to take half a day off from their jobs for the matches starting at one o'clock, but getting off at ten required too much of an investment in time.

  One hour. When Justin Gilead did not show up by eleven to make his first move, the referee would turn the clock off and award the game to Zharkov by default.

  Zharkov repressed a smile. Default. Death was a very good reason for defaulting.

  The American champion, Carey, was playing the old Russian master, Keverin. Tomorrow, Zharkov would play Carey.

  He caught himself. But of course he would not. The match would of course be canceled out of deference to the Cuban people's great loss of their wonderful and charismatic leader, Fidel Castro.

  What a loss, Zharkov thought. Socialist peoples around the world would mourn the martyr. A martyr for freedom. Gunned down at the peak of his brilliance by a CIA operative who had been cleared for the mission by a fake retirement a few months ago after a heart attack in Russia. Zharkov reminded himself to tell Moscow to change Starcher's medical records. Let the official hospital records show that there was no evidence of Starcher having suffered a heart attack. In fact, Soviet doctors thought that he had feigned the heart attack to obtain some kind of pension or medical insurance fraud, but were too diplomatic to say so.

  Poor Starcher. Poor Fidel Castro. Poor United States.

  The two youngest players, the American Shinnick and the Russian Ribitnov, had just begun their game. One would do well to watch this young man, Zharkov told himself as he looked at Ribitnov. He is brilliant and unstable; his is the kind of mind made for defection. But Zharkov would make sure he never had that opportunity. It was odd, though, that Ivan Kutsenko would take the chance. Zharkov had always thought of him as a mouse, afraid to come out of his hole even for a world of cheese.

  He moved over to another corner of the room and stood watching Kutsenko playing the Syrian-American, Gousen. Their opening was a rather stodgy variation of the queen's gambit declined, and they were still moving through the book lines, moving as rapidly as they could. Each had moved eight times, and neither had yet consumed a minute on his clock.

  Kutsenko met Zharkov s eyes, then looked down at the board.

  Feeling guilty, friend? Zharkov thought. Don't worry; you have served your purpose. You brought Justin Gilead here, and he has died. You did even better. Somehow you managed to entice Andrew Starcher here. For that, when you are declared a nonperson after we return home to Russia, you might get certain benefits that most nonpersons do not have. We might let you have a chess set. Perhaps your wife, the eminent physician, can get a job cleaning bedpans in a hospital. We always look after our own, Kutsenko.

  Zharkov glanced back. The referee was still standing near his table. The Cuban looked at his watch, and Zharkov followed suit. Fifteen minutes more. Then Justin Gilead would be disqualified.

  Zharkov would have won.

  Won the game.

  Won the world.

  The Grandmaster was dead.

  Zharkov stayed near Kutsenko's game because he knew his presence made the world champion nervous. He wants to please me with his game, Zharkov thought. Kutsenko was playing well; he had a good chance of scoring highest in the match. Only the match would never be concluded. Fidel Castro's death tonight would see to that.

  He glanced at the large tournament clock on the wall behind the speaker's podium. Only a few minutes till eleven. He began to stroll back to his table to acknowledge the referee's announcement of Gilead's disqualification.

  Ten feet from his table, he stopped cold, as if he had walked into a wall.

  He could see only the back of the chess clock, but the button was depressed on Gilead's side. Zharkov's own clock was running.

  How? But...

  He walked to the table and saw that black's king pawn had been moved two spaces forward until it faced Zharkov's in the center of the board.

  His heart was beating like a pneumatic drill. It burned him to breathe. He looked around, his eyes wild in his confusion.

  And there, leaning against a far wall, watching him, stood the Grandmaster.

  Zharkov stared at Justin Gilead in disbelief. Gilead smiled back at him and pointed to the chessboard.

  Numbly, Zharkov moved into the chair behind the pieces on his side. He glanced at the clock. Gilead's clock had fifty-five minutes spent. He had gotten to the table at only five minutes to eleven, with only a few minutes to spare before he would have lost the game.

  Zharkov moved his knight to the king bishop three square, hit the clock, and looked up to see Justin Gilead staring at him from across the table.

  "Your men are dead," Gilead said quietly.

  Zharkov could not respond. Words froze in his throat. All he could see was the golden coiled snake around the Grandmaster's neck. Gilead's hair was mussed and his hands dirty, and his clothing was splattered with dirt and mud. He moved his queen knight to the bishop three square, and hit the clock to start Zharkov's time running.

  Zharkov responded instantly with bishop to the queen knight five square, gladly accepting the opportunity to slip easily into the prescribed moves of the Ruy Lopez opening, glad for a few moments in which he did not have to think or react.

  "Where is Starcher?" Gilead asked as he moved the pawn in front of his queen rook forward one square, forcing Zharkov to retreat his attacking bishop.

  "Play the game. You'll find out soon enough," Zharkov snapped.

  "Maybe sooner than that, Zharkov."

  He looked down at the handsome wooden chessboard and realized as they moved swiftly through their opening moves that they were playing exactly the same game they had played when the two had first met each other thirty-one years before. He glanced up at Zharkov. He could see from the Russian's eyes that Zharkov, too, recognized the game.

  Time, Zharkov thought. Time was the key. By arriving late, Justin Gilead had given away fifty-five minutes of his playing time. And on a chess clock, time, once lost, was never regained. Zharkov would hoard his time, he would save it, he would toss complications at Gilead that would force him to study and ponder alternatives, and keep eating up the time on his clock. Gilead had been away from the chessboard for too long; he would not know the different variations that had been studied since then; he would probably not know the new recommendations for moves, the new traps that had been found. Equally important as brilliance in chess was memory. The ability to see a position on the board and to remember having played it or seen it or read about it before, and to remember not just that position but also the positions and the threats that had grown out of it. That was how grandmaster chess was won.

  Zharkov remembered reading an account of an interview with Bobby Fischer. The reporter had finally enticed Fischer into playing a game against him. The reporter's moves t
ook two hours; Fischer's took two minutes. The reporter resigned after twenty-five moves, and Fischer, who had little social grace, did not even bother to compliment him on a surprisingly strong game. Instead, with his one-track mind, he launched into a critique of the game. The reporter was doing fine, Fischer said, until his twentieth move. Fischer swept the pieces off the board with his arm and then immediately set them back up in the position they had obtained at the nineteenth move. "Now here," Fischer said, "you moved this way, and I remembered that in 1901, Mieses versus Mason at Monte Carlo, Mieses made this on move twenty. Your move lost," Fischer said. "From then on in, the game was just technique."

  "You remembered?" the reporter asked Fischer. "You remembered a game from 1901?" And Fischer had replied, "Of course. It was a good game."

  Memory was a key, but memory required working and constant study. Unless Zharkov was very wrong, Gilead had not had that kind of study or work available to him. He would, in a sense, be reinventing the wheel at every move he made, while Zharkov had spent untold hours at the chessboard studying. He would make Gilead use his time. The clock would destroy the Grandmaster.

  The Grandmaster's head was bowed over the chessboard now, studying the position while the clock silently ticked on. Gilead moved a pawn. Zharkov saw that the move had gained Gilead equality. Whenever the player of the black pieces emerged from the opening with an equal position, it was a plus for black. A victory. A small victory, like the victory Gilead had gained over him in the children's chess game so many years ago.

  But, no, he told himself. Gilead had not beaten him then. Zharkov had not been allowed to play the game himself, and while the disgrace of losing to the young American genius had fallen on the young Zharkov, the responsibility had not been his. Instead, the onus should have fallen on the five Russian masters who were seated in the back of the room, analyzing the game and then signaling to Zharkov what moves he should play. The loss was theirs, not his.

  He had never lost to Gilead. Never. Rashimpur was destroyed. The Polish woman had died. Yes, Gilead had survived death, but how had he survived? What had he been doing while Zharkov was marching onward, steadily consolidating his power in the Soviet Union, regularly bringing new people to his side in case there would ever be a power struggle? Gilead had been lost to the world for four years. The victory there was Zharkov's. Gilead had never beaten him in anything.