White Death

by Daniel Blake

  Misha’s forces looked disjointed, but suddenly his pieces were coming from everywhere, weaving mating nets – multiple pieces closing in on the king – with geometric deftness. Kwasi’s own pieces stepped and ducked. He moved his king out into the eye of Misha’s attack, knowing more by intuition than rational thought that the only way to survive was to put his king – put himself – into ever greater danger, and trust that there would always be an escape, no matter how hard it seemed to find.

  Misha thrust; Kwasi parried. A break down the left, some counterplay from Kwasi, and now it was Misha scrambling to cover back. Regroup, recoil. The game of dead pieces was alive: the energy pulsed through the room, stresses curving through space, vortices whirling over the magnetic field of the squares.

  Inessa was rapt. She had never seen anything like this. One moment, it seemed certain that Misha would win and Kwasi die; the next, that Kwasi would win and Patrese die. Perhaps they’d slug each other to a standstill and then start all over again. But more than anything, she wanted to know how this would end; not just this situation, but this game. It was like watching Mozart compose a symphony for you and you alone.

  And while Kwasi was distracted, Patrese was working on using Inessa’s hairpin. In normal circumstances, he could have done it all inside a minute; but the plaster cast made it many times more difficult, and he still had to be careful of Kwasi or Inessa seeing, because this might be his last, best chance, so it was worth taking any amount of time to get it right.

  Keeping his hands beneath the table, he first pulled the plastic covering off the hairpin. Then he bent the end that he’d just uncovered and put it in the keyhole of the cuff. Took it out again and bent it the other way, to make a dogleg. Put the pin back in the keyhole, pointed it toward the cuff’s direction of travel, and pressed hard.

  The cuff clicked open.

  Kwasi looked sharply at Patrese. Both Patrese’s hands were under the table.

  Another noise, this time from upstairs. Kwasi looked up. Maybe nothing. He looked back at Patrese again.

  Patrese pressed his knee against the table leg, just under the cuff, so it wouldn’t fall and hit the floor when he took his hand out. Otherwise, he stayed totally still.

  Kwasi was too far away for Patrese to do anything, even once he got his hand free. Kwasi had a gun. There were several possible weapons on the work surface by the far wall – knives, saws, battery acid – but Patrese would never make it there in time.

  ‘Rook takes b7, check,’ Kwasi said suddenly.

  Another noise from upstairs. No, Patrese thought, they surely wouldn’t be sending in the SWAT team so early; but if they were, then he could help them by …

  ‘That’s a mistake,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Kwasi.

  ‘Rook takes b7. It’s a mistake.’

  ‘The fuck do you know? You trying to put me off? Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘Even I can see it’s a mistake! You’ve lost.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Patrese was shouting too now, and he fancied he could hear running feet coming down the stairs, so he shouted louder to mask the sound and distract Kwasi. Kwasi rushed toward him, gun out and face wild. Patrese wrenched his hand from the cuff and was up and out of his chair, arm coming up and round to knock Kwasi’s hand as he fired. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to deflect Kwasi’s aim a fraction and send the bullet whistling into the wall rather than between Patrese’s eyes.

  Patrese put his knee into Kwasi’s stomach with all the force and anger he could muster. Kwasi doubled over, but he still had the gun. Patrese grabbed one of the vile human pieces and whipped whichever luckless person’s humerus it was across Kwasi’s face, and now Kwasi was up and scrambling and shooting again, once, twice, Patrese sprawling across the floor toward the work surface, grabbing for a knife and the battery acid, and Kwasi had his arm round Inessa’s neck and his gun pressing her hair against her temple, and the first SWAT guy came barreling into the room and shot Kwasi right there, right where he stood, and another SWAT guy was yelling at Patrese to put the knife and the acid down right now, and Inessa was half sobbing and half laughing, and it was all over, as simple and brutal as that.

  Two SWAT guys went over to Kwasi to check that he was dead. Another pulled Patrese upright and asked if he was OK. The room was full of SWAT guys now, like giant insects with all their pouches and webbing. The first guy in there, the one who’d shot Kwasi, tucked his head into his collar. ‘Target eliminated. Hostages safe. Coming out the front, one minute.’

  There was a sudden silence, shockingly loud after all the gunfire and noise.

  ‘Bishop takes b7,’ said Misha.

  64

  Friday, December 31st

  Kazan, Russian Federation

  Patrese liked to go away after big cases, no matter how they’d been resolved. After the case of the Human Torch in Pittsburgh, he’d gone to Thailand; after running down a particularly nasty killer in New Orleans, he’d gone to South America and traveled the entire length of Chile, top to bottom.

  Now he’d come to Kazan. It was at Nursultan’s invitation, so it felt slightly like a busman’s holiday, but he was going on to Moscow and St Petersburg afterwards, so that would count as proper vacation. And in any case, it had seemed churlish to refuse. Kwasi was dead, Inessa was awaiting trial, and Nursultan had managed to retrieve all the Misha material, miraculously undamaged in the storming of the lighthouse (though no one had told him how close a SWAT guy had come to putting a bullet through the computer when Misha had spoken at the end of the raid). This was Nursultan’s way of saying thank you.

  Standing next to Patrese, Nursultan looked out over the crowd and clapped his hands in delight. It was fifteen degrees below zero Celsius, but thick coats and vodka would keep the worst of the cold out. Events like this, more often than not you needed to pay the rent-a-mob to turn up and make it look good for the cameras – fifty roubles a head was the going rate – but they’d been turning people away from the gates since lunchtime. This was the rarest thing in a post-Soviet dictatorship: a genuinely popular public gathering.

  When Nursultan had announced to the world a few weeks ago that the Kazan Group had, in association with MIT, developed the world’s first genuine artificial intelligence program, the company’s share price had risen 20 percent inside half an hour. Eat your hearts out, Apple and Microsoft: this was something that would push back the frontiers of science. Every newspaper, magazine and TV station worth its salt had wanted the story: and Nursultan, showman that he was, had obliged, answering the same questions again and again, day after day, and always as though it was the first time he’d ever heard them.

  And now Misha was going to make its first public appearance.

  The Kazan Kremlin is a riot of towers, minarets and ramparts: in other words, halfway to being a chess set itself, and the ideal background for perhaps the biggest and certainly the most famous game of human chess ever played. The board was sixty-four feet by sixty-four feet – allowing the imperial measurement was Nursultan’s nod to MIT’s role in all this – and it wasn’t just any old board. On each move, two squares would light up: the square of the piece which was to be moved, and its destination square.

  The pieces were decked out in costumes whose splendor and elaboration wouldn’t have shamed the Bolshoi. Most of them were played by actors flown in from Europe and trained in stage combat – whenever a piece was taken, it would indulge in a mock fight with its captor – but the knights were real horses ridden by experienced riders, the rooks were wheeled towers that were ten feet tall, weighed half a ton, had an engine and could be driven by the men inside them, and the kings were to be played by rather special guests. The white king was Tartu, now installed as world champion after Kwasi’s default and with the little incident in the Beinecke forgotten in recognition of his help in catching Kwasi. The black king, of course, was Nursultan himself.

  Tartu would be playing white: he would be both king and player, and he
’d relay his moves to Misha. Misha was black. Misha was directly linked to the circuits that powered the lights under the squares. As it announced each move, it would automatically light the necessary squares.

  Thirty pieces were ready and waiting on their starting squares. Nursultan and Tartu came down to join them, waving at the crowd and shaking random hands as they passed. Patrese stayed on the balcony with the other VIPs.

  Nursultan and Tartu took their places. Nursultan called for quiet.

  ‘Pawn to e4,’ called out Tartu.

  The e2 and e4 squares were illuminated. The actor playing the pawn walked slowly forward. The crowd applauded.

  ‘Pawn to c5,’ said Misha, its electronic voice amplified through speakers; and the black pawn also moved.

  They went through the moves. A bishop raised his sword to a horse and the horse trotted off; a pawn struggled with the same bishop before triumphing. First Tartu and then Nursultan shuffled two paces along as they castled, bringing special applause from the crowd. Nursultan beamed.

  On the sixteenth move, Misha moved the rook next to Nursultan one square to its right, so that it was facing down an open line to its white counterpart, inviting the exchange. Tartu thought for a few minutes, and then said: ‘Rook takes e8.’

  The white rook trundled down the line. A couple of pawns on adjacent squares flinched as it passed: half a ton of machinery is half a ton of machinery, especially at ten or fifteen miles an hour. It arrived at its destination, and the black rook it had captured moved smartly back off the board: the rooks were too big to play out the elaborate capture scenes beloved of the smaller pieces.

  The white rook was two squares away from Nursultan. Looking down on the game, Patrese hadn’t really appreciated until now quite how big it was. What a piece of machinery! A few hundred years ago, men had laid siege to enemy fortresses in flimsier structures than this.

  ‘Check,’ said Tartu.

  Even Patrese knew that there was only one legal move Misha could play in reply – take the rook back. The second black rook was still in its starting corner. It should slide across and remove the white rook. Nursultan himself couldn’t move, as his way forward was blocked by his own pawns, and none of his other pieces could interpose themselves on the square between him and the rook. But no matter. There was still a move.

  Twenty seconds passed. A minute.

  ‘Must be a malfunction,’ Nursultan said.

  ‘Misha?’ called Tartu. ‘Misha? There’s only one move.’

  ‘Someone fix machine?’ Nursultan called. ‘Fix it. Now.’

  A faint shadow of unease flitted through Patrese.

  Two squares lit up: the one Nursultan was standing on, and the one below the white rook. But that made no sense. Nursultan couldn’t make that move.

  Nursultan had stopped beaming. Patrese knew how furious he’d be: this great event to showcase the breakthrough that was making the Kazan Group richer by the second, and the damn computer had crashed when they were barely out of the opening.

  Nursultan stepped toward the edge of his square, to get off the board and sort all this out himself – and then he jumped back with a yelp, as though he’d been scalded.

  Electric shock, Patrese thought.

  Nursultan tried to step off the square again, and again received a shock, a little more forceful this time. A third time, visible to everyone now. The moment any part of him left the square, there it was: the shock.

  ‘Misha!’ Nursultan shouted. ‘What happen?’

  The white rook was retreating: not back down the line from where it had come, but toward its black counterpart in the corner, so that it was still attacking Nursultan. The man in the rook struggled with the controls.

  ‘It’s not … I can’t get it to work!’ he said. ‘Damn thing.’ He wrenched hard again, but to no avail. ‘Got a mind of its own.’

  A figure of speech? Patrese thought. Or more literal than that? Unzicker could have put some sort of electronic bomb in the program, he guessed, perhaps Kwasi too, but wasn’t the whole point of Misha that …?

  ‘Turn it off!’ Nursultan shouted. ‘Turn whole thing off! Start again!’

  The squares between Nursultan and the rook now began to light up, one by one. Patrese was vaguely aware that everyone had fallen silent: the crowd, the other pieces, Misha. Even Misha. Especially Misha.

  The engine in the white rook began to rumble, slow and deep, now getting higher and louder; and with a jolt it took off, gathering speed at a frightening rate as it careered toward Nursultan.

  Patrese cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Jump!’ he shouted. ‘Jump!’

  About the Author

  Daniel Blake is the pseudonym of award-winning novelist and screenwriter Boris Starling. White Death is his seventh book, and he also created the BBC1 franchise Messiah, which ran for five series. He lives in Dorset with his wife and children.

  Praise for Daniel Blake:

  ‘City of Sins starts with a tsunami and ends with a hurricane, and nothing in between slows it down. A smart, scary, and relentless storm overtaking a city held hostage by greed and disaster.’

  – ANDREW GROSS, Sunday Times bestselling

  author of The Blue Zone and 15 Seconds

  ‘Stunning. A Chinatown for the 21st century’

  – CHARLES CUMMING, New York Times

  bestselling author of The Trinity Six

  ‘Hugely entertaining’

  – SEAN BLACK, author of the Ryan Lock series

  ‘Daniel Blake makes New Orleans the setting for a story that’s as hot, steamy and shot through with voodoo madness as the city itself. As the victims of a ritualistic serial killer mount up, City of Sins is not just a first-rate crime thriller, but also an impassioned, powerfully evocative attack on social injustice, racial prejudice and the unfettered power of the rich. Highly recommended!’

  – TOM CAIN, author of The Accident Man and Dictator.

  By the same author

  AS DANIEL BLAKE

  Soul Murder

  City of Sins

  AS BORIS STARLING

  Messiah

  Storm

  Visibility

  Vodka

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Harper

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  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012

  Copyright © Daniel Blake 2012

  Daniel Blake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Source ISBN: 9780007384488

  Ebook Edition © December 2012 ISBN: 9780007465118

  Version 1

  FIRST EDITION

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