Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller)

by Molly Cochran

  Mike Corfus bent over the rumpled cablegram, squinting as he followed Starcher's decoding markings. His bulky appearance belied Corfus's sharp intelligence. The son of Russian immigrants who'd settled on New York's seamy Lower East Side, he had worked his way through Yale and had graduated summa cum laude right into the CIA, without any of the usual family connections.

  He had been in Moscow only a month, serving as Starcher's eyes and legs. Where Starcher, locked up by his visibility, could only conjecture about what the Soviets were doing, Corfus could go out on the street and find out. He was Starcher's deputy in dealing with field agents like Riesling.

  Corfus's immediate predecessor had died a suicide, hanged in his home. It was the sort of "suicide" the KGB specialized in for annoying diplomatic personnel. Corfus welcomed the risk. He was fluent in Russian, was as tough as a commando, hated the Communists, and Starcher trusted him.

  "I don't understand the message," Corfus said honestly.

  "It's very simple," Starcher said. "Riesling left a message at one of our drops in Leningrad. He's got a lead on two big Russians who want to defect, and he's on his way here to set it up. Saarinen brought him in."

  "Who's Saarinen?"

  "Some degenerate Finnish fishing captain whom Riesling always uses. But the message says that Riesling's got some big news for me."

  "Hold on," Corfus said. "Two defectors. What two defectors?"

  "I don't know. I queried Helsinki, but they didn't even know Riesling took off on this run. He went without authorization."

  "Great," Corfus said sarcastically. "He's got big news for you. What news? Did he say?"

  Starcher shook his head. "I think this is going to be the last run for Riesling. He's losing his judgment."

  He reached for one of the thick Havana cigars he kept on his desk, debated whether or not to heed his doctor's orders, and the doctor lost. He bit the end off the cigar, spitting it out with guilty satisfaction.

  Corfus said, "I don't know how the hell he got through the Finnish border. The KGB is crawling up there."

  "That's what I'm afraid of," Starcher said. "Maybe he picked up a tail and knows about it. Maybe that's why he left this message so vague, just in case it got into the wrong hands."

  "So we wait?" Corfus said.

  "We wait," Starcher said as he lit the long black cigar.

  As Corfus sprawled on the leather banquette alongside the large desk, he said, "I don't understand about Finland anyway. Why did the Russkies pack the border? They own Finland."

  "They own Cuba, too," Starcher said, "and they're sending people in there, too." He blew out a thin stream of white smoke. Cuba was what he didn't understand. Finland was a perennial escape route for Russian defectors. The KGB could always make a case for beefing up personnel there, particularly with a new premier to impress.

  But Cuba? Cuba was totally in Russia's pocket. Yet the island had been getting a slow buildup of KGB agents and troops, and despite Fidel Castro's loud complaints, the new men were neither withdrawn nor explained.

  "There's no pattern," Corfus said. "That's what's confusing."

  "Oh, there's a pattern," Starcher said. "There's always a pattern. Nichevo." He sighed. It was the only explanation, and it frightened him.

  "Nichevo?" Corfus smiled, surprised. "It means 'nothing. Who cares?' It means a lot of things."

  "I know. A joke of Joseph Stalin's," Starcher said. He walked over to the window and looked down at the snow-covered street. Beneath a street lamp stood a man, shivering in the cold, surrounded by new snow. He had not moved from his spot in hours.

  Starcher laughed bitterly. "Another hero of the cold war," he said, staring at the little man below. But he felt the same twinge of envy he had felt every day since he had been posted in Moscow, consigned to stare out at the world beyond the goldfish bowl that was the embassy.

  Starcher missed the field work. He had left his aristocratic southern roots to do battle in three bloody wars and every filthy secret skirmish in between. This world, peopled with misfits—from the shivering little man on the pavement below to the secret masters who pulled the invisible strings that set earthshaking events in motion—this was the world he had chosen to live in, to die in. He had never married, never spawned the offspring from his family's ancient and promising gene pool. Because the work came first. Not the Company—the work.

  It was a perversion, he supposed, as sick and senseless as the urge to molest small children. To be in love with secrecy, to relish fear, was more than simple patriotism. A man of Starcher's age ought to have outgrown it, he knew. Most agents burned out quickly and looked forward to working behind a desk.

  Riesling, for instance. The man had been a good agent, cautious, experienced, and smart, but his nerve was giving out. During the past few months, Riesling had acquired small mannerisms—grinding his teeth, taking fits of shivering chills—that worried Starcher. And now Riesling's judgment was going, too.

  God, he'd love to replace Riesling himself. That'd give a laugh to the administrators at Langley. A sixty-six-year-old man ... No, he thought, sighing. He belonged right where he was. Standing in a glass house for every first-year KGB agent in Moscow to see. The grand old spymaster, directing the movement of others, while he himself remained helpless, rooted, respectable, impotent.

  "I just never thought I'd be the one who was being watched," he said quietly.

  "Beg your pardon?" Corfus said.

  His voice snapped Starcher back to reality.

  "Never mind," he said, drawing the draperies.

  "Is Nichevo a branch of the KGB?" Corfus asked.

  "No. Nichevo’s not a branch of anything anymore, except maybe Stalin's ghost. It started out as one, though. Small work. Blackmailing diplomats with prostitutes, paying ex-CIA men to write exposes of the Company, convincing the state to pump hormones into Soviet athletes, minor things to make the West look bad."

  "Kind of a Department of Dirty Tricks," Corfus said with a smile. He had always liked the old man.

  "You could say that. After Stalin bullied his way into becoming a Russian legend, though, he didn't want to be associated with the lowlife antics of the group anymore, so he put his nephew in charge." He blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling. "The story goes that when the nephew asked Stalin about the name of the organization he was going to run, Stalin answered, 'Who cares?' and sent him away. Nichevo?"

  Corfus laughed. "Doesn't sound too dangerous to me."

  "Ah," Starcher said, holding up a bony finger. "But the nephew turned out to be sharper than Stalin expected. He kept the group small, but over the years he replaced Stalin's thugs with a half-dozen of the best brains in Russia and the satellite states. He chose them himself, from the universities, the military, even from the civil service, but never from Intelligence, never from the KGB. From what I've been able to dig up, he worked with the Soviet spy apparatus, but he distrusted the bastards like poison."

  He coughed, and his face registered pain. Cigars had been forbidden to him since a bullet in East Berlin pierced his left lung. That had been Starcher's last field assignment. A field career ended honorably, according to the boys at headquarters. It was small consolation for the constant pain that signaled the end of his life's work.

  "Sit down," Corfus said, as he stepped over to Starcher to lead him to the leather banquette.

  Starcher pushed him aside. "Don't patronize me," he said acidly. "I'm not the doddering old fool I look like." Corfus backed off, and, feeling guilty, Starcher harrumphed and sat down anyway. "At any rate, he found these men and women and gave them a chance to grow with Nichevo, dirty tricks and all, while the organization grew. By the time Khrushchev got booted out of office, Nichevo was in charge of planning big stuff. The invasion of neutral countries, the infiltration of propagandists into every undeveloped nation receiving aid from the United States, Soviet subs in enemy waters, the buildup of military bases hidden in a hundred obscure spots around the world, you name it." He spread his arms.


  "Where is he now, this nephew of Stalin's?"

  "His name was Zharkov. He died four, five years ago. Bleeding ulcers."

  Corfus looked up. "Oh. Well, then ..."

  "He had a son during the war," Starcher said, making circles with his cigar in the ashtray. "A very bright boy, brains right off the charts. Alexander Zharkov. Graduated with top honors from Moscow University, made full colonel in the army when he was thirty. Zharkov trained him himself since childhood. Rumor has it that the boy started attending the Nichevo directorate meetings as soon as he was out of short pants. Zharkov wasn't taking any chances about who was going to succeed him. Alexander lived and breathed Nichevo until he joined the army and was sent out on military patrol. He was in Poland when his father died. He came back to head up Nichevo."

  "And you think he's behind the men moving into Cuba?"

  "It's got the signs. No explanation and no apparent reason. It's got Zharkov's stamp all over it."

  "Would he be behind Finland?" Corfus asked.

  Starcher stubbed out his cigar with some viciousness. "That I don't know. I don't think so." He looked at his watch. "It's almost six," he said. "I want you to take up a watch."

  "Sure," Corfus said, rising. "Here?"

  "No, I'll stay here. Riesling will contact me if everything's clear. But if there's trouble, his fallback is always at the Samarkand Hotel. I can't be seen with him, of course. Bad policy."

  Corfus smiled. "I understand."

  "You've met him?"

  "Once. I know his face."

  "Good. If he shows up at the Samarkand, he's hot, understand?"

  Corfus nodded.

  "You'll have to move quickly. Get him to the safe house on Ohkotney as soon as you can. I'll wait here for your call."

  "What if he doesn't come?" Corfus asked.

  "Wait till nine o'clock at the bar—that's the most visible area—then order dinner. It'll give him a little more time in case he needs it. I'll page you at the Samarkand if he contacts me first."

  Corfus hesitated by the door. "And if he doesn't get in touch with either of us?"

  But Starcher wasn't listening. He was back at the window, peering out through the drapes at the small man standing, shivering, in the snow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At six o'clock, Riesling was still two hours outside Moscow. He had stolen one car in Leningrad, then switched autos at Kalinin, hotwiring an old ZIL parked on a busy street.

  Punchy. He hadn't slept for days. That was it. The dead policeman in Helsinki, the harrowing sojourn through the Russian border, the long drive from Leningrad. All of it had exhausted him.

  And the medallion. He felt for it in his pocket. Even its touch was frightening, ominous. It weighted him with the same feeling he used to get on the football field at school, the dull ache when he was running for the ball during a critical point in the game. As the ball soared overhead, he knew— by the wind, by the awkwardness of his legs, his balance imperceptibly off, by some despairing cry within—that he wasn't going to catch the pass. It was during those moments, as if he had some special insight, beyond reason or the connotation of words, that he knew he was going to lose.

  "Just get to Starcher," he said aloud, letting go of the medallion in his pocket.

  He searched his rearview mirror. Clean, no gray Fiat. All right. He'd lost the car, with its lone occupant wearing a white stocking cap, somewhere in Kalinin. More likely, he'd never been followed in the first place. In all probability, the man in the stocking cap was an ordinary Russian, a factory worker, a telephone man, just someone driving into Moscow with no more sense of Riesling's identity than the man in the moon.

  He shook his head to clear it. When you begin to suspect everyone, when the stink of treachery permeated every corner of your world, you were finished. The suspicion would break you. It distracted you. In time, it killed you.

  "Burnout," he muttered. No one was following him. He'd just spent too long on the job.

  Once he reached Moscow, he would ask Starcher to recommend an immediate transfer. To anywhere. And a leave. He would go to Monte Carlo or the Aegean and drink himself stuporous and find a woman. And let all the men in all the white stocking caps go back to all their jobs at all the docks and factories or wherever they all worked, and to hell with them. No more. Not for him.

  He dumped the ZIL at Kiev station and boarded a crowded metro car ripe with the odors of tabaka and shashlik. He had made it to Moscow. For the first time in days, he began to feel some semblance of safety.

  All for a goddamned chess player, he thought, easing into the luxury of a vacant seat. A hell of a way for a good field man to go, over a two-bit defector who wasn't even in Intelligence.

  Yet that was how they did go, he knew. An overheard word, a chance sighting, and death blew its whistle and sent you to the bench. No fanfare. No trial by twelve good men and true. Just a bullet in the back while you weren't looking.

  He was sweating. From his pocket he pulled out a handkerchief and gasped audibly. The gold medallion was dangling from its chain in the folds of the cloth. He stuffed it quickly back into his pocket and rose, pretending not to notice the stares of the other passengers around him.

  He worked his way toward the front of the train. Starcher was going to have to get the chess player out of Russia. Riesling was through. The trip from Finland into Russia had been rough. Trying to go out the same way, with the added baggage of a chess player and a woman, would be suicide. The border was just too tightly sealed. He wasn't taking anyone back through Finland again, ever.

  He had three things on his mind. Tell the chess player the deal was off for the time being. Then get to Starcher. And get rid of the medallion, he thought, near panic. It was doing something to him, almost as if it had a power of its own that was too strong to harness. Christ, why had it come to him?

  Perhaps because he owed a debt. It had been ... how long, eight years? Riesling had been sent into East Berlin to pick up a defector, but it had been a setup. When he went to meet the defector, there was no defector. Only the KGB waiting for him.

  He had gotten out of the trap but, with a shoulder dislocated and a knee injured, had been able to flee only to the third floor of an industrial storage loft in a seamy commercial corner of the city. The KGB had followed and had ringed the building with men. That they hadn't rushed the building was clear indication that they wanted him alive, perhaps as a prime exhibit in some showy for-Western-consumption spy trial. There was no way out, and Riesling had carefully checked his revolver, placed his extra shells on the floor in front of him, and sat down to wait. One bullet would be for him.

  He passed out from the pain.

  Then someone was shaking him.

  He struggled to open his eyes and then to focus them. The first thing he-saw was a golden coiled snake close to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The coiled snake was on a medallion. It hung around the neck of a young man with piercing sky blue eyes.

  Riesling had tried to speak, but the man had clapped a hand over his mouth.

  "Don't talk," he whispered. "We're getting out of here."

  "Who are you?" Riesling said.

  "I work for Starcher," the young man said.

  "I don't know if I can move," Riesling had said. "My shoulder's separated, and my leg's messed up."

  "We'll manage."

  As the man helped him to his feet, Riesling saw that a section of the corrugated steel wall of the storage loft had been ripped open, as if by a giant can opener. A tear, shaped like the pupil of a cat's eye, four feet long and a foot wide, allowed moonlight to seep into the loft.

  Riesling’s rescuer led him to the hole in the steel, slid through himself, and then reached back for the American agent. "Put your good arm around my neck and hold on," he whispered.

  Riesling followed the man, threw his right arm around him, and then they were moving down the side of the building, three stories down into a narrow alley, closed off at both ends, that sep
arated the loft building from the tenement next door.

  When they reached the ground, the young man helped Riesling to the tenement building and they went inside. Before the door closed behind them, though, Riesling looked back. He had thought there was a rope hanging from the ugly gash of ripped steel in the loft building. But there was no rope. How had they climbed down the smooth steel side of a building? He could not ask.

  They traveled silently through the cellars of a half-dozen buildings before exiting onto a street.

  "Sorry, but you're going to have to get into the trunk," the stranger said as they approached a battered old Ford sedan. Riesling shrugged. As the trunk lid closed on him, the last thing he saw was the coiled snake medallion around the young man's neck.

  The pain knocked him out, and he did not know how long he was unconscious. When the trunk was opened again, two Americans in dark clothes helped him out and into a boat that moved him across the river and into the free sector of Berlin.

  The young man who had helped him was gone. Riesling never saw him again. And months later when he asked Starcher who he was, Starcher said simply, "He works for me sometimes."

  "How did he get me out?"

  "I don't know," Starcher said. "He does those things."

  “Who is he?” Riesling asked.

  Starcher gave him a faintly amused look. As if he would reveal the identity of one of his field agents to another. “Some people call him Grandmaster,” was all he would say.

  Riesling came back to the present as he heard the train conductor's voice crackle over the loudspeaker in his car. He felt as if he were choking, and when the metro stopped at Mayakovsky Square, he roughly shoved his way through the passengers in front of him to get outside to the open air.

  The chess player, Ivan Kutsenko, was waiting in the dirty little cafe off Gorky Street. His rubber-galoshed feet were crossed at the ankles, and he twirled his hat in his hands as he glanced in continuous rotation at the four corners of the room.