Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  He reached behind him and pulled his small mobile radio from the leather holder on his belt. Just before he depressed the button, his neck snapped backward and his spine lurched with a painful blow from the rear. The flashlight hurtled out of his hand into the water below, and the radio dropped onto the wooden dock with a muffled thud.

  "What... what..." the policeman groaned, buckling to his knees.

  He twisted his head and saw the hobo standing above him, looking completely different from the boozy tramp he had chased from the dock. The man he saw now was as blankly efficient as a machine, avoiding the policeman's eyes as he yanked him to his feet.

  "No, please," the policeman began. But by then the knife in the hobo's hand was already singing upward.

  The officer gasped once, his eyes bulging in shock as the blade tore into the left side of his throat and sliced up to his right ear. His hands struck out, jerking wildly, as if they had been electrified. His feet skidded. A stream of bubbling blood hissed out from his neck, forming a cloud of vapor in the cold air as it shot forward in an arc. His head fell back on the hobo's shoulder.

  Silently, four black-clad men appeared on the deck of the black boat. The Kronen's engine roared to life. Keeping his head down to avoid the stream of blood, the hobo hoisted the body and heaved it into the gulf. The policeman's lifeless face, still bearing an expression of horrified surprise, shimmered near the surface for a moment.

  The boat was pulling out. The hobo kicked the policeman's radio into the water, ran back for his duffel, tossed it on deck, and leaped after it. He caught hold of a rail and pulled himself on board as the Kronen sped out of the harbor.

  His knife and the right side of his face were bathed in blood.

  The captain relinquished the wheel to a crewman, then turned and stared without expression at the blood- and sweat-soaked man who stood before him, as if trying to decide whether or not to allow his visitor to remain on board. His face, dark and windburned around intelligent eyes that seemed incapable of surprise, held traces of both contempt and amusement for the man with the duffel who waited silently for his verdict.

  "I'm only a smuggler, you know," the captain said finally, his English lilted with Scandinavian cadences. "Killing police is not part of our contract.”

  The man didn't answer. A heavy drop of perspiration rolled unnoticed down his face, streaking through the caked blood on his cheek. The muscles around his jaw were clenched tightly.

  "Ah," the captain said with disgust and jerked his thumb toward the cabin below.

  With a ragged sigh, the man hurried down the companionway.

  Below deck, he stood in the small main cabin, alone, rubbing his arms to ward off the sudden chill that always came over him after moments of great fear. With some surprise, he noticed that the knife he had used to kill the Finnish policeman, a Bundswehr combat model, was still clenched in his fist. He unclasped the hand with effort, and the Bundswehr clattered to the floor. Its outline was imprinted on his blood-encrusted palm. He stooped over to pick it up, rinsed it off under the saltwater tap of the sink, dried it carefully, and replaced it in his coat pocket.

  How long? he thought as he washed the brown film from his hands. He was forty-four years old, the oldest active field agent he knew. How many more border runs could he make before his nerve gave out completely? How much terror could a man stand in his life? He closed his eyes to the salt sting of the water as it ran over his face and head.

  He dried himself on a rag remnant of a towel and, still shivering, sat down at the cabin's rough plank table. From his duffel bag he removed a watertight plastic pouch, which he opened and emptied onto the table. He had already checked everything in the pouch three times, but the difference between three times and four times someday might be the difference between living and dying.

  He nodded silently as he checked the bag's contents in the dim light of the single oil lamp. There were two well-forged Finnish passports for a husband and wife. There was a Russian identity card with his own photograph on it and a set of Russian work papers. There was a fully loaded Swiss Hammerli eight-shot pistol. Inside a slim manila envelope was two thousand dollars in American money, an unimpressive amount of Russian rubles, and his American passport under his true name of Frank Riesling.

  Enough, perhaps, to get him into and out of Russia with his two illegal passengers. Certainly enough to get him killed if he was caught before he reached Moscow.

  But all this for a chess player?

  He thought momentarily of the dead policeman, and his hands trembled. He bolted from his place at the table and ran to the small ship's head in the rear of the cabin where he vomited into the stained, smelly toilet.

  As he sat again at the table and began scooping the contents back into the black plastic pouch, he knew he would have to try to sleep, despite his jangled nerves. He had not slept the night before, and the journey ahead was a long one.

  The Finnish fishing boat would take him to Hamina, near the Russian border. Then Saarinen, the captain, would send two of his three crewmen to take Riesling northward, overland, on a route that ran west of the Russian city of Vyborg.

  Directly north of Vyborg, they would leave him, and he would be on his own. The trip into Vyborg itself was going to be a bitch without sleep, he knew. On foot all the way, which was rough in October, even with the help of a corrupt old border patrol guard who averted his eyes in return for a healthy bribe and got to secretly stick it to his superiors for busting him from a posh posting in Leningrad to serve out his commission in the frozen provinces.

  If he managed to cross the border and if he managed to avoid the KGB agents on spy-catching duty in Vyborg, then he would have a train ride into Leningrad and an hour's flight to Moscow. The chess player, whose name was Kutsenko, and his wife were supposed to be ready to leave Moscow immediately. The three of them would go back the way Riesling had come. In Hamina, they would board Captain Saarinen's fishing boat and be on their way to Stockholm.

  All right, he thought. It had started out badly with the policeman, but it was manageable. Riesling had made the trip a dozen times.

  But never before, he thought bitterly, on such short notice. Never before without first getting advance approval from headquarters. Was he right to go? Was he right to chance it? Stubbornly, he pushed the questions out of his mind. Two hours to Hamina.

  He looked longingly at the small bunk across the cabin as Captain Saarinen entered, a grease-smudged bottle of Koskenkorva vodka in one hand. In his other hand was the remains of a large toothmarked makkoira sausage, and he gave off its fumes as well as those of the French Gitane cigarettes which he smoked constantly, insisting that the dark brown tobacco, unlike the "blonde" used in American cigarettes, was healthful for the human organism. Somehow, it seemed not to have done anything healthful for his chronic cough.

  As soon as Saarinen walked through the doorway, Riesling rose automatically, and his hand darted toward the pistol inside the plastic pouch. When he saw it was the captain, he peered past him toward the small companionway behind.

  "Sit down, sit down," Saarinen said with annoyance. "There's some trouble, but nothing to do with the business back on the wharf." He lit a blackened candle lamp on the table. The light cast huge shadows on the grease-spattered wall.

  "What, then?" Riesling asked coldly.

  Saarinen gestured to Riesling's empty chair with his chin and pulled a cracked mug from behind the sink. "You," the captain said, his dark eyes now twinkling like a satyr's. "I have brought you on this run for many months, yes? I do not even know your name, and yet I know you like a brother. And like a brother, I worry for you. Always nervous, always expecting the worst. That is your way, but you will drive yourself to sickness, my friend." He splashed some vodka into the mug and took a swig from the bottle himself.

  "You agreed to take me to Hamina," Riesling said stubbornly.

  Saarinen sighed. "Hamina, yes. But I do not think my men can take you to Vyborg."

  Riesli
ng reached into his coat and produced a thick envelope filled with currency. He slid it along the tabletop toward Saarinen. Wordlessly the captain hefted the envelope and stuffed it into his pocket. "Enough for Hamina," he said.

  "What trouble?" Riesling asked quietly.

  Saarinen poured a long draft into his mouth and exhaled noisily. "The Russians have doubled up on their Finnish border patrols," he said. "Your friend in Vyborg has been removed."

  "The old man at the guard station?"

  Saarinen nodded. "Shot."

  "What about you?"

  "The ship's running empty," Saarinen said. The Kronen had made a tidy fortune for Saarinen by illegally transporting food and small machinery to Russia and its satellite states. His three crewmen, all experienced smugglers, carried the goods into Soviet bloc countries and sold them at highly inflated prices on the black market. Only one of his band, Saarinen claimed, had ever been stopped by the authorities, and that man had been killed on the spot, leaving Saarinen's lucrative business to thrive undetected.

  Riesling, like Saarinen, entered and left the Soviet Union frequently for illicit purposes, but the goods he smuggled were people. Scientists, scholars, the occasional military defector—people who would never be permitted to leave Russia alive—had been guided by Riesling to the West. It was this mutuality of purpose that had brought the American agent and the Finnish criminal sailor together in a symbiotic no-questions-asked relationship that had lasted for the better part of two years.

  "Is Vyborg the only place with reinforcements?" Riesling asked, trying to hold down a rising panic.

  "Everywhere. All the border entries except in the far north. And that's useless. It has already been snowing heavily for weeks everywhere north of Kuhmo."

  Riesling swallowed. "Why?"

  The captain shrugged his meaty shoulders. "There's a new premier in Russia, and I expect the KGB is trying to make an impression so he doesn't fry their asses." He shrugged again. "It'll wear off before long."

  "Christ," Riesling said under his breath.

  "Even the run to Hamina is a danger now. Gogland is crawling with secret police. You'll see when we pass."

  Riesling rose and went to the small porthole on the starboard side of the cabin. Gogland Island, a Russian outpost square in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, was not yet visible in the foggy dawn light.

  "They won't stop us," Saarinen explained reassuringly, cutting a thick slice off the sausage with his pocketknife. "The Kronen is a fishing vessel registered in Helsinki. We are permitted in these waters." He stuffed the meat into his mouth and chewed noisily. "If not for you, there would be nothing extraordinary about this trip at all. We would have passed Gogland in any case."

  He washed the meat down with a long drink of the Koskenkorva. "But Hamina is too far for an ordinary fishing boat from Helsinki. This time, we will blame the sea for taking us so far off course or the drunkenness of the captain," he said with a laugh. "But we will not make this trip again. Not until the Russians have decided once again that losing a few of their countrymen to the West is not worth the effort at the borders, eh?"

  Riesling looked at him sharply. How much did the man know?

  "Take it easy," Saarinen said. "I would have to be blind not to notice that the passengers with you on the return route were all Russians. The boots, the clothing. Even their breath is Russian. Don't insult my intelligence."

  He took another drink and wiped the spillings from his chin on his sleeve. "Anyway, I don't care. I have not led a blameless life myself. But the difference between us, my friend, is that I have no government behind me, as you do."

  He waved away Riesling's objections before they could begin. "I do not believe that you are transporting Russians out of Russia for your own enjoyment. So if the KGB catches you, they question you, a little torture, perhaps ..." He shrugged expressively. "In the end, they trade you for one of their own spies. Not so bad, eh? But if they catch Saarinen, he hangs. So peace, yes?" He held up the bottle in salute.

  Riesling drank thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving the Finn. Saarinen smiled. "Well, we're only young once. My men will take you as near to Vyborg as possible—in Finland, that is."

  Well, at least that was something, Riesling thought.

  But not much. It meant he was apparently going to be deposited near a heavily guarded Russian border station and left to his own devices for getting into the Soviet Union and out again with the premier Russian chess champion and his wife.

  "Unless you want us to turn around and go back," Saarinen said, as if reading the American's mind. "As far as the dock authorities are concerned, the Kronen has been at sea since yesterday. You won't be linked with that unfortunate policeman." He paused. "You didn't have to kill him, you know."

  "Yes, I did," Riesling said flatly. "He saw the name of your docked boat, which has supposedly been out to sea since yesterday, and he was radioing his headquarters. A word from him and you might have trouble ... I might have trouble."

  "If you say so," Saarinen said, but Riesling was not listening. Why the hell hadn't he been warned about the border buildup? Were they going to wait until he got caught? The CIA had its head up its ass again. Maybe he should wait. Let that damned chess-playing Kutsenko get out of Russia later, some other way.

  No. He couldn't abort now. Kutsenko wasn't just a chess player; he was the champion of the world. His defection would make the Russians crazy. No. Riesling would go into Moscow and from there, play it by ear.

  If he could get into Moscow. The Finnish border buildup might mean that his cover had been blown. His mind raced, juggling all the possibilities.

  As if reading his thoughts, the dark Finn smiled and pulled out a deck of cards. "To Hamina?" he asked, shuffling.

  Riesling nodded. At least playing cards would break the tension he felt. He placed a twenty dollar bill on the table. Saarinen, he knew, gambled only with American dollars.

  "Very well, my friend," Saarinen said, digging through his pockets. With a slap, he brought forth a heap of crushed Gitanes, a dirty handkerchief, several matchbooks, a wad of soiled, sea-dampened bills, an assortment of coins of various currencies, and a lumpen piece of yellow metal on a chain.

  Riesling gasped involuntarily at the sight of the necklace.

  "All my worldly possessions," Saarinen said. He straightened out one of the cigarettes and lit it, spitting the loose tobacco onto his lap, then began sifting through the bills with stubby fingers. "I do not wish to lose the money you gave me for this trip at cards. With this new fire under the Russians' arses, I will probably need it." He patted his coat over where he had placed Riesling's envelope and laughed. "But of course, if it is an interesting game ..."

  "May I?" Riesling asked, picking up the gold necklace. It seemed hot to his touch, and with a small exhalation of air, he dropped it back onto the table, where it glinted dully. The chain held a circle medallion the size of an American quarter. The gold was speckled with grime embedded in a thousand small craters. In the center was the figure of a coiled snake with a small droplet of imperfectly poured gold at the base. Riesling's hands shook as he stared at it, unable to tear his gaze away from the ornament. It seemed to glow, and the spot where it had touched Riesling's flesh felt marked somehow, as if he had been stabbed and the shock of it had sent a sudden shot of fear into the pit of his stomach.

  "It is a strange thing, that," Saarinen said quietly. "I felt it, too. Almost a power it had. I nearly threw it away." He laughed quickly. "But who throws real gold away, eh? And the snake may be an antique. I thought I would hold it until I get to Stockholm and see what it's worth."

  Riesling's heart was thudding. He had seen the medallion before. It had hung then around the neck of a man now dead, a man with extraordinary power, a man who had once saved Riesling's life.

  "Where did you get this?" His words came out in a hoarse whisper.

  Saarinen tossed a crumpled twenty into the center of the table and dealt the cards. "Podhale. Near the Tatra M
ountains, in Poland."

  Riesling looked up, his face drained of color. "Where in the Podhale?"

  "A village about twenty kilometers north of Zakopane. I forget the name. Cards?"

  Riesling picked up his hand slowly. "When?" he asked.

  "What? Do you want cards or not?"

  The American forced his attention back to the cards and discarded two. "When did you pick it up? The medallion."

  "Oh, that." Saarinen laughed as he tossed down a card and dealt more from the deck. "I don't know. Two months. Maybe three." The long ash from his cigarette dropped onto his shoulder and rolled in an untidy trail down the front of his jacket. He sheared off another slice of sausage and offered the rest to Riesling, who shook his head.

  "There's a story," the captain said, belching. "Some fool runs up to me as I'm driving out of the village in a donkey cart. Of course, I was ready to shoot the bastard—it was dead night and me without any papers and my pockets full of cash—but he didn't act like any kind of military type. Arms flapping, checking behind him every other second. So I figured a family man who'd stolen something in the village for a little food money. I had to laugh." He took another swallow and gestured to his partner to get on with the game.

  Riesling breathed deeply. "He stole it from a grave, didn't he?"

  The captain cocked his head and looked at him, curious. "How did you know about the grave?"

  Riesling shook his head. A grave robber. Of course. There wasn't any other explanation. Even the Grandmaster didn't rise from beneath six feet of earth. He had seen the records himself, the photographs the Russians had gloatingly sent. Death was death, the final victor. For all the Grandmaster's miracles, he couldn't stand up to death.

  He threw in another ten dollars. "I knew the man it belonged to," he said simply. "He was killed outside of Zakopane. In the Podhale. He wore that medallion when he was buried. That was four years ago."

  Saarinen smiled. "But it couldn't be the same medal," he said indulgently.