Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller)

by Molly Cochran

  Justin said nothing. After a while, he looked up. "Tagore, everyone here seems to do something better than everybody else. What do you do at Rashimpur?"

  Tagore smiled. "We of Rashimpur are the poorest of all," he said. "For we are not the wisest of men, nor the holiest, nor the most powerful. We have only our strength and will to take before Brahma in offering, as Patanjali did."

  "Strength?"

  "I have told you of yoga. It is the discipline we practice here. With it, we try to bring our bodies into union with the forces of the universe. We are known only for this."

  "You're the strongest ones."

  "It is as nothing," Tagore said. "But Brahma needs men of physicality as well as those of spirituality."

  Justin smiled. "I think being strong is the best thing of all."

  They walked forward in silence. In the still hall, Justin felt Varja's eyes on him like molten lead. Clasping Tagore's hand, he made his way down the aisle to the base of the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms. Torches above Sadika's casket illuminated the treasures in his hands; the diamond and the snake amulet sparkled in the light.

  Tagore faced the crowd for several minutes. Justin wondered what the test would be. Then, without preamble, Tagore raised the boy's right hand with tremendous power and slashed it down the bark of the tree.

  The pain was almost unbearable. Justin felt the skin and flesh of his right palm scrape off. Too surprised to cry out, all he could do was gape at his bleeding hand and try to hold back the tears that sprang to his eyes.

  "Sadika!" Tagore commanded. "Is this the child?"

  Justin thought he was going to faint. A river of blood ran down his arm, staining the yellow robe he wore. The pain gave way to an electric throbbing that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

  Tagore picked a leaf from the tree and placed it in Justin's wounded hand. Then, causing the most excruciating pain Justin had ever felt, the teacher closed his mangled hand into a fist around the leaf.

  He began to shake. The pain was unendurable. He closed his eyes. And in the red darkness of his pain he saw the old man again, not dead and in his glass casket, but standing before him, holding out the two emblems of his office.

  There was a gasp from everyone in the hall as Tagore opened the boy's hand. Justin's head swam. There was no blood. When his fist opened, all that fell from it was a withered brown leaf. The hand was unmarked.

  Tagore raised the boy's hand high in the air. At that moment, the casket seemed to creak and move of its own accord.

  The sight set Justin's teeth chattering. For, as Tagore held his arm in the air, the body of the old leader crumbled to ash before them. In the midst of the powdery remains rested the diamond and the gold amulet bearing the figure of the coiled snake.

  "Hail, O Wearer of the Blue Hat," several voices called. Others took up the chant. "Hail, O Wearer of the Blue Hat."

  Tagore repeated the words as he lifted the diamond from the casket and placed it in Justin's hands. Then, to the accompaniment of the chant that filled the hall, he placed the sacred medallion of the coiled snake around the boy's neck.

  Justin felt the surge of power from the medallion like an electric shock that began near his heart and coursed wildly through every nerve and vein in his body. He fought for breath. Surely there was magic here, he thought, greater magic than he could ever control.

  "Do not fear it," Tagore whispered.

  Justin looked to Varja, the abbess of magic. Her green eyes were blazing, but she, too, bowed in respect to him.

  "Hail, O Wearer of the Blue Hat," she said. A small smile played at the corners of her mouth.

  Tagore began the procession out of the hall, keeping Justin in front of him. The medallion felt as if it were burning into his chest. The congregation filed outdoors to the rock shelf on which Rashimpur was built. Tagore knelt, and the others followed, even Varja in her misty jeweled crimson wraps. Alone, Justin walked to the edge of the precipice and stood facing the snow-capped Himalayas.

  He could breathe more easily now. So this was where the amulet was at peace, he thought. Beneath the blue sky, which was the blue hat of the gods.

  I will try to be worthy of you, he thought.

  He held up both arms to the sky. The huge diamond gave off the fire of a thousand suns. The gold medallion on his chest warmed him. He felt strong.

  Never will I betray you.

  Never.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Alexander Zharkov sat alone in his Moscow apartment. Like his office, the apartment was spare and ugly, even though it was situated in one of the best buildings in the city and was spacious enough to house two families of six.

  A pair of leaded glass doors, now sealed shut, stood beside the armchair where he sat holding a file on Justin Gilead. But unlike the file in his office, this one was thick, bulging with papers. Its cover was red instead of the official green that signified a closed file.

  The only light in the room came from an old brass floor lamp behind Zharkov's chair. At the other end of the room, near the doorway to the master bedroom, stood a small dining table with two straight chairs.

  Beside it was another table, smaller, on which a magnificent teak and walnut chess board was set up, with a game in progress. Stacked neatly on the floor under the chess table were two piles of bound copies of Shakmatni, the official Soviet chess journal.

  There was only one chair at the chess board, stationed behind the black pieces, because in this solitary game at home, Zharkov always took the black side. This gave white, who traditionally moved first, a slight advantage, and Zharkov had conceded that advantage to his invisible opponent.

  The game had begun slowly, with white's pieces opening elegantly, following well-defined lines like a beautiful solo dance.

  But after the first dozen moves, white had deviated from the well-known opening "book" and moved other pieces into play in novel and interesting positions. The solo had turned into an ensemble ballet.

  Zharkov's black pieces had joined the ballet and begun attacking almost at once. For a while, white's position seemed untenable and an early resignation inevitable. But slowly, white had consolidated his position, stood off Zharkov's onslaught, as piece after piece vanished from both sides in a series of equal trades.

  The black and white dance continued, and the unbelievable had happened. White's king had moved, starting to march inexorably to the center of the board to join the contest. It was unthinkable. The king was at once both the most valuable piece in the game, whose capture ended the contest, and the weakest, most vulnerable, and hardest to defend.

  Zharkov knew this opponent did not play a game of pawns, but to burst into the open with his king was impossible. Unless it signaled the beginning of an elaborate, deeply thought attacking scheme. Or did it mean merely that the invisible white opponent had lost his nerve and offered himself up for confrontation and quick slaughter?

  For the first time since he had opened the red folder, seeing in his mind not its contents but the board across the room, Zharkov looked up. Rain was pelting against the glass doors. The room seemed suddenly dark. And there was a knocking at the big walnut door leading out of the apartment. It was delicate but insistent, as if whoever was behind it had been knocking for some time, although Zharkov hadn't heard anything in his concentration over the chess pieces.

  He got up and opened the door. The face on the other side warmed him unexpectedly, as it always did.

  Katarina Velanova was not a beauty in the classic sense, but her face held the subtle charm of the most complex chess. The quick, intelligent eyes of the woman never failed to fascinate him, shifting with a blink into dark, exotic pools and then brightening just as quickly into the simple joy of a schoolgirl.

  She was drenched, her red cotton scarf dark with rain. Beads of water stood out on the clear pale skin—the only thing about her that was perfect—running down the long, sensitive nose and into the corners of her mobile mouth, which never seemed to smile the same way twice. She was t
all, nearly as tall as Zharkov, and her eyes met his without the slightest hesitation. Wordlessly she placed both her hands behind Zharkov's head and kissed him. It was a perfunctory greeting, but the sudden touch of her full lips on his shot a quiver of excitement through him as she stepped briskly into the kitchen to set a kettle of water to boil.

  She was that rarest of beings, a woman for whom passion was as natural as breathing. And yet Katarina was not a sensualist.

  When he had first seen her at work at the KGB, Katarina's face had worn the stern, humorless expression expected of KGB researchers. Her coworkers, who spent their days looking through published information for the benefit of the thousands of Soviet agents who manned the largest espionage apparatus in the world, were mostly female, but they were not regarded as women.

  They were automatons, office tools dressed in shapeless sweaters, their fingertips covered by rubber thimbles. They moved like whispers through the enormous KGB complex on Dzerzhinski Square and the modern eight-story building on the outskirts of Moscow that housed the First Chief Directorate for Foreign Affairs.

  It had been five years before. Zharkov had just become head of Nichevo and had been in Ostrakov's office to review some manpower estimates on Allied and Western troop movements in Scandinavia.

  The KGB man had issued a curt order over the intercom for some files to be brought into the office. Katarina Velanova carried them in. Her eyes boldly met Zharkov's. She smiled at him without embarrassment and nodded before leaving the room.

  As soon as he began looking through them, Zharkov realized the files were unusual, because instead of merely reciting facts and statistics and numbers, they offered various conclusions about the Western motives for moving troops, and gave these conclusions a numerical weighting, ranging from most probable to least probable.

  "Who prepared these files?" Zharkov asked.

  "That bitch who brought them in. And this is the end of it for her," Ostrakov said. "She has no authority to draw conclusions."

  "Maybe not the authority, but she has the mind for it," Zharkov said. "A mind of value."

  Ostrakov had smiled lewdly and said, "Not a bad little ass, either." When Zharkov looked at him coldly, Ostrakov had said, "Don't play gentleman with me. She's spread that ass all over Dzerzhinski Square. I don't think there's a janitor in this building who hasn't been between her legs."

  "I want her to work for me," Zharkov said.

  "She's yours. I was going to fire her anyway. What Nichevo does is none of my affair."

  Thank God, Zharkov thought. Kremlin policy did not allow for the existence of God, but as far as Zharkov was concerned, something special had to account for Ostrakov's not being able to stick his hands into Nichevo's business.

  Katarina Velanova appeared in his office early the following week. It was dinnertime, and the Nichevo building was empty except for the handful of around-the-clock staffers who maintained security and watched the reports that were teletyped into headquarters.

  "Comrade Velanova reporting for duty, Comrade Colonel," she had said briskly after being ushered into his office. But why was she smiling? he wondered. It was a knowing smile, as if she were privy to information he did not have.

  "Do you like Colonel Ostrakov?" Zharkov said suddenly.

  "I think the man is an imbecile," she answered without hesitation.

  "And yet you have slept with him?"

  "Who told you that?"

  "I have been told that you have slept with everybody. Even with cleaning men."

  "I have also slept with cleaning women," she said evenly. "Some of them have been of value. Ostrakov is not."

  What kind of woman is this? he wondered. How could she speak to him this way? What guarantee did she have that he would not tell Ostrakov, so that by tomorrow she would have a one-way ticket to Siberia?

  "You do not remember me, do you?" she asked. It was a simple question. Her eyes were frank, without a trace of coyness or seduction.

  He tried to keep his voice flat and uninterested. "Have we met?"

  "Long ago. You were meant to forget."

  The woman exasperated him more by the minute. "Was it in Russia?"

  "No," she answered, dismissing the subject. "I will be here first thing in the morning, Comrade Colonel, to begin my duties. But first I thought you might like to have this." Her eyes twinkling with subdued amusement, she handed him a thick folder.

  It took him a moment to concentrate on the sheaf of papers. But by the third page, he could feel his breath coming in short, febrile gusts. Every word of the report—more than sixty pages—was about Justin Gilead. Nothing had been omitted. The names and addresses of Gilead's childhood guardians were included, as well as a listing of all the tournaments and matches he had played in and a complete record of all his games.

  "How..." Zharkov began, but he lost the thought. He was absorbed in Katarina's sketches of Gilead's career with the CIA and her inspired guesses about what Gilead had managed to do for the United States while touring the world as an international grandmaster. There were neat hypotheses about his presence in Berlin in 1974, in Cuba during the peak of Castro's romance with the Soviet Union, in the Philippines in the late 1970s.

  The information in the dossier had been gleaned from hundreds of sources, most of them obscure reports by field agents now long vanished. Compiling all the data had been a monumental task.

  "Why?" he asked finally, laying down the folder. Outside, darkness was falling on the city, and the now powerful light from his desk lamp cast long planes of shadow over Katarina's face.

  "Because you alone, of everyone in this nation of fools, know who Justin Gilead is," she said softly.

  He snapped to instant attention. "Who are you?" he rasped.

  The woman seemed to stand up taller. She said, "I will be here first thing in the morning, Comrade Colonel."

  Without waiting to be dismissed, she turned and crossed the bare floor toward the open doorway.

  "Stop," he said softly.

  She turned. Their eyes met. Justin Gilead was important, and she knew it as well as he did. Of the nearly three-quarters of a million people who worked for the Soviet security machine, she was the only person besides himself who had seen that. Katarina's was indeed a mind of value.

  He stared into her face beneath the fringe of her short, dark hair, taking in the enigmatic somberness of the brown eyes, the crooked long nose which, he was sure, reddened quickly in the cold. It was, in its way, rather a wonderful face. Looking into it, he lost track of time and thought. He wondered where he might have seen it before.

  As if sharing the blank, electrifying buzz inside his mind, Katarina closed the door leading to the empty outer offices. She did not move from her place, and her eyes never left Zharkov's. Instead, she unbuttoned the white military-style blouse she wore and tossed it on the floor. Her exposed breasts were pale and rounded, and their nipples already stood erect.

  Zharkov could not react. What she was doing was unthinkable, the grossest manifestation of decadence. Her behavior should have cost her her job, perhaps even earned her a stint in the city jail.

  She stood staring at him. She made no move to entice him with movements of her body or sultry glances, but stood straight, her shoulders squared, as if for inspection. Her face changed in front of his eyes a dozen times or more. She looked by turns childlike and womanly, defiant, ashamed, easeful, tense. But she never broke the electricity with a single word, never gave him any encouragement after her brazen and inexplicable display. Zharkov could easily see her as a Committee informant. Forced by Ostrakov, perhaps, to present the Grandmaster's dossier to him.

  No, he thought. Not Ostrakov. He could never have thought to assemble the folder. She had done it for someone else in the KGB, then. Or for herself. For the power women think they have over men by virtue of their sexuality.

  She waited. Zharkov rose and walked over to her slowly. He could smell the warmth of her, her womanliness beneath the scrubbed cleanliness of harsh, s
trong soap.

  When he came to her, it was not so much an act of lust as a huge leap of faith. He wanted to trust her, to take her as something that belonged by right to him; at the same time he hated her for filling him with fear and apprehension. Coming up in front of her in two long strides, he lifted her straight skirt upward with a jerk, and tore her silky underpants from her as if they were made of paper.

  She closed her eyes. Zharkov cupped his hands around her breasts, feeling the hot smoothness of her skin. Katarina's legs buckled at the knees. The place between them was wet and ready. He took her standing up, his hands clasped around the flesh of her buttocks, where the strong muscles pulsed and pumped and shivered with a wild, animal urgency.

  She trembled once and then again, and he sensed himself reaching climax, but at the instant when he was ready to spend, he felt the muscles inside her body impossibly closing down on the shaft of his manhood, squeezing him, cutting off the flow.

  For an instant, he experienced something akin to pain, and then she relaxed her muscles and he began thrusting into her again. But when again he was about to spend, she again tightened around him, making it impossible.

  And he remembered. He leaned back from her so he could see her face.

  She was smiling.

  "Now you remember me," she said softly, then leaned forward and pressed the wet tip of her tongue into his ear.

  "She sent you."

  "Yes," she said. "I am to be here with you. To help you."

  He felt her muscles go soft, and he knew that this time she would permit him to reach his climax, and he carried her upright, her legs locked around his back, over to the sofa in his office and lay down atop her and plunged into her over and over again with a furious passion that bordered on the sadistic.

  Finally, he exploded in one giant thrust, and the two of them lay still, unmoving, the silence in the office broken only by their heavy breathing.

  Afterward, there were no words of love, no soft caresses. She got dressed as if she were alone in the room, then walked out. Neither of them said goodbye.