Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller)

by Molly Cochran

  He sat up with a start. The pain was excruciating. The intravenous tubing in his arms stabbed him, and the ball of muscle inside his chest seemed about to burst. Monitors above his head squealed in protest. Their smooth waves peaked into jagged irregularity. Within seconds, a team of nurses was hovering nearby, forcing him back down in the bed, covering his face with a plastic oxygen mask.

  "Don't sit up like that," one of them barked in Russian. "Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me."

  With an effort, Starcher squeezed his eyes shut. The sweat on his forehead ran in thin streams down his temples.

  The medallion had done this to him. The touch of it had been enough to stop his heart. No one would ever believe him, but it was true. The coiled snake possessed the same power its owner had, the same electric quality Starcher had noticed when he'd first met the young man named Justin Gilead.

  Starcher remembered the day well because he had just gotten word that he was going to be reassigned back to Europe. For a year, since taking the bullet in Berlin, he had been working unwillingly as a trainer for new CIA recruits at the complex in Langley, Virginia. Nursemaiding a bunch of twenty-one-year-old Yalies was a long step down from the feverish excitement of cold war Europe, and he wanted to get back. It was 1970.

  There was a man at Langley then, not a recruit, but a prisoner. Langley always had its share of weirdos storming the doors and demanding to become spies for the U.S. government. Everyone from shopping bag ladies to seedy degenerates in their sixties, it seemed, had bought the James Bond myth of glamor and adventure in the espionage trade and wanted to be a part of it. These were almost invariably turned away at the first guard station, but the young man being held in isolation was not one of these.

  Gilead had come in three days before, without the knowledge of any of the security guards. This in itself was adequately alarming to have him questioned. Starcher, because of his long background in Europe, was told to talk to him. "Something s going on here," the operations chief told him, "so find out what's going on. I think the Russians sent this guy."

  "Not your usual way of infiltrating the enemy," Starcher said dryly and went to a guarded room where the intruder was being held.

  His first reaction to the young man was wonder at the man's ice blue eyes, and then surprise at his youth. He could not be older than his mid-twenties. His shirt was open; a golden snake amulet hung at his throat.

  "I've come to talk to you," Starcher said.

  "I'm used to it by now." The voice was soft but pitched deep. He spoke evenly, although he must have been tired of repeating his story to everyone who came to the room.

  "My name is Justin Gilead. I want to work for you people. I ask no salary. Someday I will want a favor."

  "What kind of favor?"

  "I can't tell you specifically. It won't be illegal; it'll just be a piece of information I need."

  "Can't tell me specifically or won't tell me?" Starcher asked.

  "Either way," young Gilead said. His accent was American, although he could produce neither passport nor identification.

  Starcher sat on a chair at the small desk in the room while Gilead stood with his back to him, looking out a barred window. The CIA man opened the folder he had brought with him and glanced at its contents.

  Justin Gilead was twenty-six. He had been born in New York City and spoke a dozen languages. He did not know how to drive a car. He had no living relatives. He said that his occupation was chess player. He had spent his childhood being raised by monks in India. As a reference, he gave the name of a professor at Columbia University in New York, Anna Tauber.

  Starcher talked to him for two hours, and Gilead neither changed his story nor betrayed by any slip of word or fact that he was anything other than what he pretended to be.

  He said that he was going to begin playing international chess. With that as a cover and an entree into various countries, he would be able to do a great deal of work for the CIA. He insisted that all he wanted in return was someday a favor—"a piece of information," he repeated.

  Starcher got up to leave the room, more confused than he was when he entered.

  "How long will I be staying here?" Gilead asked him.

  "I don't know."

  "You seem like a reasonable man, Mr. Starcher. Do you think I have any chance of getting my request granted to serve with you people?"

  "Honestly, I think you have two chances: slim and none."

  "I've come around to that way of thinking myself. I guess I'll be leaving here, then."

  "They might want you to stay."

  "What they might want and what I do are two different things," Gilead said. He smiled at Starcher, but it was a cold smile, without humor or mirth. A mouse might see a cat smile that way.

  "What do you think?" Harry Kael asked Starcher after he came out of the isolation room. Kael was chief of security at the time.

  Starcher shook his head. "I don't know what to think. I don't think he's a Russian agent, if that's what you mean. If the Russians wanted to plant somebody in here, they would have prepared him. They wouldn't have just had him march in."

  "I never trusted chess players," Kael said. "Every one of them I ever see in the papers has got a sneaky, devious, pinched little face." Kael's face was as open as a Boston saloon at high noon.

  "Is he a chess player, then?" Starcher asked.

  "That part checks out. There actually was a Justin Gilead, a kid who was born in New York when this guy says he was. He was a chess player. A child whatchamacallit."

  "Prodigy?" Starcher suggested.

  "Right. His old man was some kind of hotshot writer or something. Got murdered in Paris in '54. Went by the name of Leviathan. The boy was with him when he bought it. Police assumed the kid got hit, too, although they never found the body. Made all the papers."

  "I remember now. The boy was a chess genius."

  "A master at the age of ten. You play chess?"

  "No," Starcher said.

  "It's a tough game. Maybe that's what pinches their faces. You play for years, maybe you get a little better. Then once in a while a kid like that one comes along. Takes all the marbles before he's out of diapers. Master at ten, that's nothing to sneeze at. I just wish I knew what he was up to."

  "Maybe he's telling the truth," Starcher said.

  "Come on, Andy. There's nobody like who this guy says he is."

  "Have you checked out the college professor?"

  "Who? Oh, her. Wrote her a letter. She doesn't have a phone. Didn't get an answer yet. Let's face it. This kid's a spy or a nut. We can't use him either way.”

  "I didn't think nuttiness was a drawback in our kind of work," Starcher said, and both men laughed.

  Starcher thought that, back in the old days of the OSS, a man of Gilead's apparent intelligence and abilities wouldn't have been pigeonholed as a lunatic without first checking his background with some thoroughness. But then, you took chances in the old days. You looked for the exceptional man, not the one whose graph matched the standard agent's profile. Starcher thought that maybe age was making him sentimental. Even in the old days, Gilead's story would have been hard to swallow. Which was exactly why he wanted it to be true.

  The next day Gilead was gone from the isolation room.

  "I can't understand it," Kael told the men who had assembled in the empty chamber. Two guards on duty all night, no tools inside, the window's not broken ..." He pointed to the small glass block high up on the wall.

  "He must have gotten out through the heating duct, but he couldn't have breathed in there. Ten to one he's dead in the system somewhere," Kael said with a disgusted sigh. "I'll call in a cleanup crew."

  The crew found nothing but dust clumps. Justin Gilead had vanished.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Starcher had two weeks to kill before he was due to report to his new post in Paris, and decided to spend the time in New York City. But the theater and the opera seemed flat and boring to him; his thoughts wandered too often
to the strange young man, Justin Gilead.

  The decade of the seventies, Starcher felt, would see deep changes in the way America and Russia faced each other in the world. In the generation since the end of World War II, the two superpowers had squared off like street gangs in a tire-iron fight, scrapping for every advantage, every inch of turf. But now the national borders were set; spheres of influence had been long since established. The spy business would become less confrontational and more subtle; the battles of the next generation would not be overtly for space and power, but more often to win the minds of men and women. It would require a different kind of spy operation, and perhaps a different kind of spy.

  One afternoon, he took a taxicab to Columbia University and found the office of Professor Anna Tauber, who taught Eastern religions at the university's Department of Asian Studies.

  "Ah, yes. My friendly neighborhood CIA," Dr. Tauber said amiably from behind a desk crowded with papers, books, bits of discarded sandwiches, moldering tea bags, and unopened mail. "I read your letter. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to answer it yet."

  "I didn't write the letter, so I don't know what's in it," Starcher admitted.

  "The usual bullying government pap. Wanted to know about Justin. Turn over any records on him, blah, blah." She pursed her lips and emitted a sound that clearly expressed her views of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What'd you say your name was?"

  "Starcher. Andrew Starcher."

  "You're southern. Any relation to the Virginia horse-trading Starchers?"

  "That's my clan," he said with a smile.

  "Met some of them when I worked on Johnson's Human Rights Commission. Big family. Nice. You must be the black sheep."

  She spoke without a trace of humor. Starcher couldn't help liking her, with her steel-wool hair and rubbery lips and old-fashioned two-toned glasses that left red welts on the bridge of her nose. "I'm afraid so," he said. "My family was very disappointed when I didn't grow up to be a plantation boss."

  "Well, you're here on business, and I've got a class in forty minutes, so start talking. Hold it." She slammed two fungus-encrusted coffee cups on the desk in front of him. "Go rinse these out at the water fountain down the hall." With surprising agility, she swiveled her chair around and plugged in a plastic teapot sitting on the windowsill. Starcher noticed that there was a small tear in her dress just below the armpit. "The water'll be hot by the time you get back."

  He obeyed. When he returned, Dr. Tauber had tossed over a fresh tea bag and a copy of Alan Watts's The Way of Zen for him to use as a coaster. "All right. What do you want to know?" Suddenly her face broke into a wide smile. "That's a hell of a thing to ask the CIA, isn't it?"

  "Before we go any further," Starcher said, "I ought to tell you that I'm not here for the CIA. The CIA's forgotten about Justin Gilead."

  "And you haven't?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Starcher faltered a moment. "He's kind of hard to forget."

  "He is that, isn't he?" Dr. Tauber said with a grin. "Will you be able to use him in your work?"

  "I don't know. Maybe. The world's changing."

  "That's CIA double-talk. Tell me the truth. You folks think he's some kind of foreign spy or something."

  "I don't," Starcher said, but she ignored his answer.

  "I told him you would." She banged her fist down on the desk, causing a pile of mimeographed papers to cascade off the side. "He wouldn't believe me. These kids all have stars up their asses. Oh, they have their little protests, but underneath it all, they think old Uncle Sam's on their side."

  "I believe the same thing, Dr. Tauber."

  "Bullshit. Right now, at this moment, you're probably thinking I'm a Red, too."

  Starcher blinked. She had read his mind.

  "Well, I'm not. I've voted in every election since I was twenty-one years old. I've served under three presidents in one capacity or another." She lowered her eyes. "And I lost both my sons in the damn war."

  "I'm sorry," Starcher said.

  "It's past," Dr. Tauber said quietly. "While Mama was marching and picketing and talking at antiwar dinners, her two kids were getting poured into plastic bags. They believed." There was a long silence. "And Justin believes, too." Her features softened. "So how do you stop the young from believing there's a difference between the good guys and the bad guys?"

  "You don't," Starcher said, sipping his tea. He knew Tauber was no Soviet sympathizer. She was just an old lady who'd had to bury her children. "Mr. Gilead claims that you're the only person he knows in this country."

  "Could be," she said without surprise. "He sure didn't know anyone when I met him."

  "Where was that, Dr. Tauber?"

  "At the boat. I've got this ratty old houseboat at the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin. Call it Rood's Tour."

  "You play chess?"

  "Got a nineteen hundred rating," she said proudly. "That ranks me near expert. Which doesn't mean doodly-squat, since master's the only rank that counts in serious chess, and that begins at twenty-two hundred. Anyway, Justin. I was out on deck one Saturday this past summer, playing against myself. I remember I was setting up a Sicilian defense... a dragon variation. Well, never mind that; you're not interested. And I see this skinny kid dressed in rags about four sizes too small for him. Italian."

  "Gilead?" Starcher asked.

  "No, Starcher, not him. The clothes. He said he bought them from one of the crew on an Italian steamer he bought passage on. Illegal, of course. Didn't have a passport. Hell, he didn't even have a wallet." She laughed.

  "What kind of currency did he have on him?" Starcher asked.

  She sat back silently, studying him. "All right. He wouldn't have gone to you people if he'd had anything to hide. He had a pocketful of diamonds."

  "Diamonds?"

  "You heard me. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I was saying, I was playing against myself, and kind of absorbed in the play, when I noticed Justin standing on the pier. I asked him what the hell he wanted. And you know what he said?" She laughed uproariously. "He said, 'I want you to move the bishop to king four.'"

  "Yes?" Starcher asked impatiently.

  "Well, it opened up a whole new defense. I could follow it for five or six moves, but then I lost the line, so I told him to play it out with me. He beat me in twelve moves. Never saw a strategy like that in my life. I knew then I'd found a genius."

  "About the diamonds, Dr. Tauber..."

  "I don't know where he got them. I didn't ask. All I knew was that he was hungry and dirty, and the best damn chess player I ever met. We played four more games, and then I gave him a sandwich. He took all the lunch meat out of it; I remember that. Ate the bread. Then I let him take a shower and bunk on the boat overnight. I half expected to find my radio gone with him the next day, but he was still there. He tried to give me a diamond, but I wouldn't take it. Hell, I said, I ought to pay you for showing me that defense."

  Starcher glanced at his watch. He wanted the woman to take her time with her story, to remember everything she could, but her forty minutes was running out. "He said nothing about the diamonds?"

  "I told you, I didn't ask," she said vehemently. "Oh, hell. I did ask."

  Starcher waited.

  "He didn't steal them, I'd bet my life on that. You see ... How much has he told you about himself?"

  "He told a rather bizarre story about living in the Himalayas," Starcher said flatly.

  "Then you know," she said with some relief. "That's true."

  Starcher stared at her.

  "The region around Amne Xachim near the Tibetan border has been of interest to scholars for centuries because of the Patanjali legend." She looked up. "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  Starcher said he didn't. She glanced around, annoyed. "Then how do you expect to know anything about him? What time is it?"

  "Three forty-five."

  "I've got to get to my class." She raised herself out of the chair w
ith some effort and lumbered over to the three bookcases that lined three walls of her office, picking out an armload of books. "You'd better read fast," she said, thrusting the books toward Starcher. "I want those back by tonight." She gave him the address of her apartment on West Eighty-Sixth Street. "Now, out. You can read in the library."

  Starcher read until his eyes were bleary, comprehending next to nothing about the strange customs and religions in the ancient lands that came to be known as India, Nepal, Burma, and Tibet. He had nearly decided that Anna Tauber was a well-meaning but shaggy-minded academic when he turned a page and saw a drawing of the revered medallion bearing the image of the coiled snake, owned by the monks of Rashimpur and prized as the most sacred amulet of the sect.

  "The drawing is based on verbal testimony," the text explained. "No contemporary Westerner has ever seen the medallion or, for that matter, Rashimpur itself. All that is known about the monastery is that it stands somewhere in the vicinity of Amne Xachim, a mountain that is held to be sacred by both Brahmans and Buddhists."

  Was the golden medallion the same one he had seen around the neck of the young man in the isolation room at Langley? Of course not, Starcher told himself. A cheap imitation purchased at a flea market in Katmandu. Or New York City, for that matter.

  The text went on: According to legend, the high priest of the Rashimpur sect is the direct reincarnation of Patanjali (and thence Brahma) himself, and is selected at the moment of his birth by his predecessor. At the time of the priest's death, the monks of Rashimpur set out to find the successor according to the directions of their dying leader.

  "There is evidence that the leaders chosen often hail from far distant lands, and themselves have no knowledge of their place in the ancient rites until their arrival at the monastery. In 1653, a twenty-one-year-old Swiss clerk named Karl Behrmann disappeared from his native village of Dorhoffbatten, leaving his young wife and two sons. Sixty years later, when Behrmann lay on his deathbed, he composed a letter to his sons outlining his strange adventure on the other side of the world. Although Behrmann did not disclose the location of the monastery, he described its 'golden wonders and immortal delights,' including a tree that grew in the center of the edifice with neither light nor water. In the letter, which was preserved by the Behrmann family until 1879, when it was destroyed by fire, Behrmann admonished his then-elderly sons 'not to mourn my absence nor hold my memory in bitterness, for I was called to fulfill a destiny so removed from the ken of mortal men that none but the past keepers of the medallion and the Eye of Rashimpur can know my heart.'