Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller)

by Molly Cochran

  Wait a minute, he thought, trying to organize his confused thoughts. Gilead was alive. Riesling had said so.

  But that couldn't be true. He had seen the burial pictures himself, courtesy of Nichevo.

  Starcher lay there in the dark, remembering. Outside, he could hear the rough voices of nurses speaking Russian in the hospital corridor.

  Justin Gilead. But his death hadn't been the CIA's fault. It had been Starcher's. His fault... his responsibility that Gilead had died so young.

  It was May of 1980. Alexander Zharkov had been head of Nichevo for one year. Starcher had met Gilead in a shabby apartment on the Bahnhofstrasse in West Berlin. There had been little communication between them in the past three months, a fact for which Starcher was grateful. Gilead had been run too often, too hard by the CIA. By now, his life was constantly in danger. Starcher knew all that, but he also knew he owed Gilead this assignment.

  "You're going into Poland," Starcher said without preliminaries. There was no point in offering Gilead a drink or engaging in casual conversation with the man. Gilead was as asocial as an automaton and seemed to find vaguely distasteful any activity or avenue of thought not related to his work or to chess. It was, Starcher thought at the time, as if Gilead were driven by a personal demon that helped him to endure the Agency's cavalier treatment of his life.

  "You'll travel to Gorlitz in southern West Germany tonight. It's only a few miles from there to the Polish border."

  "What's the border like?" Justin asked.

  "Mountains," Starcher said with some embarrassment. "Three hundred miles of them."

  "The entire southern border," Justin said.

  "That's right," Starcher said. "Let me tell you what's happening. Since the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia, there's been a big underground movement there. They hide, they wait, they disrupt, and then they hide again. A couple of months ago, a third of the Czech government was ousted on orders of the Soviet Central Committee."

  "What's that got to do with Poland?" Gilead asked. "You said I was going to Poland."

  "I'm coming to that. There's a movement growing now in Poland, mostly among the laboring groups. With the food shortages, a rebellion's a real possibility. They're talking about it openly up in Gdansk in the North. Now what's happening is that some Czechs are making it across the Carpathian Mountains into Poland, and they're trying to spread the word in the cultural centers like Krakow and Warsaw that if the two countries unite, they can kick the Russians out."

  "And the Russians?" Gilead asked. "Do they take this seriously?"

  "They've sent troops and tanks. We don't know how many, and the men we send in there just don't come back. That's your job. Travel through the Carpathians, estimate the troops, what kind of hardware they've got and so on."

  Justin looked at him steadily. They both knew that Gilead had never received that kind of training and probably could not bring back much information about Soviet weapons in the area.

  "I'm not qualified," Justin said.

  "I know that, Justin. You've got every right to turn down this assignment. But you asked if the Russians are taking this seriously. I know that Alexander Zharkov himself is in the area now. Nichevo's there. That's how seriously the Russians are taking it."

  "I'll go," Gilead said immediately. "I can live in the mountains, and I speak Polish."

  "Good luck," Starcher said. "And good hunting."

  Starcher lay in the dark of the hospital room, his open eyes fixed on the gray ceiling. Justin Gilead went to Poland for one specific purpose; to find Zharkov. And in the crudest of ironies, he found him. Zharkov's face, in fact, was probably the last sight the Grandmaster saw before he died.

  Riesling said Justin Gilead was still alive. How could that be? He had seen the pictures. The Grandmaster was dead.

  If he was alive, where would he be? What would he be doing? Why hadn't he come forward, at least to spit in Starcher's eye for conning him into doing a job he was utterly unprepared to perform?

  Oh, what did it matter anymore? Starcher thought. Nichevo, as the Russians were so fond of saying. Who cares? What can anyone do? Why bother? Nothing would ever remove the stain of guilt from Starcher's past. All Starcher remembered now was that he had never spoken with Gilead the way he'd wanted to, had never laughed with him or tried to comfort him in his deep and inexplicable sorrow. In the end, he'd helped to kill him.

  He sighed, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

  Nichevo.

  BOOK FOUR

  THE GRANDMASTER

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  POLAND, 1980

  Justin Gilead crouched in a narrow mountain path. Fruit trees were in blossom, showering their fragrant petals in blizzards of color. In the distant valley, a small village with its central wooden church looked as if it had been preserved, intact, since medieval times. Ahead of him, the bodies of five men hung by their necks from a line of tall spruce trees.

  They were all young, their clothes ragged. One was covered with blood: He had been shot before he was hanged. Nearby, a group of Russian soldiers sat talking beside a modern army tank. They were passing around a bottle of vodka, apparently oblivious to the swinging bodies.

  Gilead had seen much the same sight many times over the past 150 miles. He had followed the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains on foot, watching the young Czechs as they made their way over the treacherous, waterlogged passes into Poland. Sometimes he helped them to safety in the tiny, welcoming villages of the goral highlands on their way toward Krakow and Warsaw, but more often he just watched them go the way these five had gone. The Russian patrol of the mountain border was scant, but effective enough to handle the few Czechs brave or crazy enough to cross over. Tanks were stationed every five miles or so, with jeeps running constantly between the postings. Along the length of the newly reinforced border were hanged bodies, some of them women, some so young they had not reached their full height. They waited in warning for those who would try to follow them, their bulging eyes open to the high spring wind. Gilead thought bitterly that the Russians were always predictable. Faced with a crisis, they always reverted to barbarism as a response.

  A jeep buzzed in the distance, growing louder. It was coming from the village, loaded with embroidered blankets and food. It was a common enough sight these days. The soldiers stayed near the forest at the base of the mountains while their CO ventured into the villages to take supplies and liquor for his men and interrogate the residents about any foreigners who might have passed through on their way north.

  The goral were mountain people. They cared little for politics. They didn't participate in counterrevolutions. They disliked strangers. But they were still Poles, and Poles were not Russians. When someone broke a law, the goral did not denounce the offender to state authorities. More likely, they sent him to the village pastor for a public beating, to which the villagers would bring food and musical instruments. After the whipping, if the lawbreaker was one of their own, he would be forgiven and invited to join the festivities. If he was a stranger, he would be expelled in a shower of stones before the feast began. But no goral would volunteer any information about criminals to the Russians, no matter how serious the crime.

  Occasionally, the border guards found Czech troublemakers hiding in goral homes. When this occurred, the entire village was razed to the ground. Word traveled fast in the mountain villages; no strangers had been found for several weeks. Even when Justin, with his fluent Polish, ventured into the villages, he was treated with suspicious silence.

  He kept to the forest. Although the soil in the region was poor for farming, there was plenty of food among the dense trees. He lived on tender new spruce shoots, on sorrel, thistle, and nettle. It felt good to be outdoors again, after the years of sitting in tight little rooms staring at chess pieces. He was still marking time, waiting for a message he hoped would soon come, but here, at least, he could breathe clean air. Sometimes he could aid the Czech travelers, finding food for them and directing them pas
t the Russian troops. They often asked him to work for them against the Russians by poisoning the water supplies in the tanks, but he refused. He had killed enough.

  At night, he would search for the dead left behind by the Russians and bury them. Then, pressing the gold coiled snake medallion to his chest, he would pray, as he had prayed every night since he left Rashimpur, for the sign from Tagore.

  It is not time, the old man had said. Everything in Justin's life had been destroyed, and still it was not time. He had let Zharkov, the Prince of Death, escape, and until he found him again, Justin knew, all the deaths at Rashimpur would have been for nothing. He waited only for the sign, but there was no sign. Tagore was as dead as the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms, the tree that Tagore had sworn nothing could kill.

  He had been dreaming again. The dreams had stopped after the destruction of the monastery, but now, in the forest, the recurring dream of being buried alive had returned. It was always the same: Justin lay in a grave, hearing the birds sing overhead, unable to cry out as clods of earth fell upon him, suffocating him. And nearby, so near that Justin could feel the man's energy, stood Zharkov, watching.

  The jeep drove up to the soldiers, who quickly hid the bottle of vodka. If the officer in the jeep had been their regular commander, they might have offered him a drink. But not this officer, not this colonel. Rumor had it that he was some high muck-a-muck from Moscow and the man solely in charge of preventing Czech incursions into Poland. The soldiers didn't know him, and they did not trust him.

  The colonel, his hat perched squarely on his head, got out and motioned to the others to unload the supplies. Standing apart from the men, he looked for a long moment at the hanging bodies.

  "Cut them down," he ordered finally. "They've served their purpose." He turned away and took off his hat, and in that instant, Justin froze.

  Zharkov.

  The Prince of Death had returned.

  Justin rose shakily. "Zharkov," he called. Then, louder, "Zharkov!"

  All five soldiers looked up. "It came from up there," one of them said. But Zharkov did not move, did not speak. He scanned the forest like a machine, his gaze shifting slowly from one side to the other. Finally, his Tokarev drawn, he moved cautiously up the hill. "Follow me," he ordered his men.

  Zharkov moved through the woods as if drawn by a magnet. Justin stayed ahead of him, tantalizing him with sound, moving swiftly and without disturbing the forest floor when the soldiers came too close.

  It was almost delicious. One more murder and Justin could at last prepare himself for death. Zharkov had for so long been the only thing Justin had to live for. With Zharkov's last breath, the circle of karma would be almost complete. Afterward, it would require only Justin's own suicide. That would be all the penance Justin could give Tagore.

  "Do you remember Rashimpur?" Justin hissed. "I told you we would meet again."

  A volley of machine-gun fire splattered off some rocks above Justin. A shower of earth trickled down the side of the mountain.

  Justin climbed higher, out of the woods, to where the vegetation was sparse and the earth slippery with loose shale. His feet skidded, sending up a cloud of dust.

  "There he is!" someone called. There was another burst of gunfire, striking very near. Justin darted upward, throwing himself behind a cluster of large rocks. The bullets pinged off them. Above him, a ledge of shale trembled.

  "Hold your fire," Zharkov shouted. The gunfire stopped. "Who are you?"

  "The Wearer of the Blue Hat. The one you failed to kill during the massacre of Rashimpur." Justin stood up in full view of the soldiers. "Will you fight me now? Alone? Or will you use your dogs on me again?"

  "You have no weapon," Zharkov called. "Come down peaceably, and you won't be hurt."

  Justin laughed coldly. "Is that what you told those five men in the forest?"

  Zharkov moved closer. "I will fight you alone," he said.

  "Without your gun."

  Zharkov's hooded reptilian eyes met those of his soldiers. He tossed the Tokarev to the ground. "Lead. I will follow."

  After a moment, Justin nodded. Then he turned and ran up the mountainside.

  "Now," Zharkov shouted, dropping to the ground. The soldiers opened fire.

  Justin groaned as a bullet caught him in the right calf. As he fell, the ledge of slate above him toppled, raining rock.

  "It's going to go, Colonel," one of the soldiers shouted.

  "Clear out!" Zharkov yelled, shielding his head from the falling shale as he snatched up his pistol and crawled toward Justin.

  "Colonel!"

  "I said clear out." He skidded and slipped up the melting hillside to where Justin lay, his trouser leg soaked with blood. "You swine," Zharkov whispered, and yanked Justin up by his collar. The young man's eyes opened groggily. "You ask if I remember Rashimpur." He raised Justin as high as he could, then sent him crashing to the ground with a shriek of pain. "I remember. You gave me something that would never let me forget you.”

  He clasped the medallion around Justin's neck, ready to yank it off. The touch of it was terrifying, electric. He released it, cursing. "Bljad!"

  Zharkov got to his feet and stood over Justin as the young American groaned. He pointed the Tokarev at Gilead's head. "Your time has come," he said coldly, "Grandmaster." The name dripped with contempt.

  But even as he began to squeeze the trigger, the mountain rumbled like thunder. Huge chunks of earth crashed around the two men. A rock fell and struck Zharkov's right arm, knocking loose the pistol and shattering his elbow.

  The Russian looked skyward and saw the rocks coming down toward them. He swore again, stepped forward, and kicked Justin's injured leg. More rocks hit near them. Zharkov turned and fled.

  He ran, fell, then rolled down the moving earth. One of the soldiers came out of safety to help him. When Zharkov reached the base of the mountain, he turned and saw Justin's arms shoot upward, as if to ward off the avalanche. One wrist snapped backward under the weight of a flying rock. Then, with a terrible din, the whole side of the mountain seemed to slide off, enveloping the soldiers in choking dust.

  Zharkov stood watching, the lapels of his coat pulled over his face so that he could breathe, until the mountain settled. The others stood with him, exchanging glances among one another. The eyes of their commander were fixed on the earth-covered spot where the strange young man had lain.

  One of the soldiers spoke. "Shall I take the jeep for reconnaissance, sir?"

  "Stay where you are." Zharkov climbed to the place where Justin Gilead had been, and shifted the earth around with his feet. "Dig him out."

  "But..." The soldiers looked at him incredulously. "We have no tools."

  "Get some from the village. Use your hands, damn you!"

  It took hours to dig the body out of the deep rubble. "Get a doctor," Zharkov said.

  While the envoy was gone, Zharkov took a camera from the tank and snapped pictures of Gilead from all directions.

  "Is he important, sir?" one of the soldiers asked.

  "Only to me," Zharkov said.

  The doctor, a frightened old man, looked at the body and then at Zharkov. "But he's dead," he said quietly.

  "Check, fool. Be sure."

  The doctor knelt down, placing an ancient stethoscope in his ears. He frowned, listened, checked the body's reflexes, pulled open the eyelids, listened again to Justin's chest.

  "He's dead," he said. "When did the"—he stumbled over the word— "accident occur?"

  "More than three hours ago. He was buried under the rock."

  "Ah." The doctor put his few instruments away. "Quite dead, I'm afraid. No one could live without air for that length of time." He looked around sheepishly. "I'm sorry ..."

  Zharkov waved him away. The old man stumbled through the forest, walking nearly a half-mile out of his way to avoid passing the five hanged bodies.

  Zharkov prodded the body with his toe. "It was easy to kill you, after all," he said softly. "She had told me
it would be difficult, but you were easy.”

  "Sir?"

  Zharkov looked at the soldier sharply. "Dig a grave. Bury him here."

  "But—"

  "That's an order!" Zharkov snapped.

  "Sir, he's wearing some kind of necklace. It looks like real gold."

  "Leave it," Zharkov said. "I want it to die with him. Take photographs of the corpse after it's in the ground. Then we'll move on."

  The grave was dug. Two soldiers grabbed Gilead's body as if it were an old carpet, ready to toss him into the hole.

  "With care," Zharkov barked.

  "He won't mind, sir. Dead men rarely do," one of the soldiers said with a querulous attempt at a smile. It slithered off his face at a glance from Zharkov.

  "You swine," he croaked. "You cannot even recognize a god in your filthy presence."

  In the late afternoon sun, the birds overhead sang violently. It was a song heard long ago, in a child's dream.

  The water. Dark water. Swirling yellow robes of drowned men. Can't breathe, can't breathe ...

  Justin came to consciousness in panic. Water again, suffocation ... Was he back at Rashimpur? Had the nightmare never ended? For a moment, he saw the future: He would emerge from the dark water of the lake, bind his wounds, go to the monastery. He would find the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms burned, the monks dead. He would kill for the first time and for the second, would wallow in an orgy of death, and meet its prince.

  But what surrounded him was not water. From a slight motion of his fingers, he could feel something damp and gritty. Earth. He had been buried alive. The dream had been complete.

  The Prince of Death had triumphed.

  There was nothing to do now. His body had automatically slowed itself to keep him alive, just as it had before. But before, he had had a reason to bring himself back to life. There was no Rashimpur anymore, no precious home. Even Tagore, whom he had thought would live forever, was dead. Justin stilled the panic of death inside him, and prepared to die.