Grandmaster (A Suspense and Espionage Thriller)

by Molly Cochran

  She didn't answer. He grabbed her wrist roughly. "I asked you what this was for." He thrust the funnel near her face.

  "It's for water," she said, avoiding his eyes. "Sometimes it's helpful if the prisoner..." She glanced at Zharkov. His gray, hooded eyes were wide with rage. He held her wrist so tightly that it shook. She spoke softly and quickly. "It helps if the prisoner is interrogated with a full bladder."

  With a sound like a wounded bull, he threw the funnel against the wall.

  Maria Lozovan backed away. "Comrade Colonel, I assure you there was no other way—"

  In a fury, he flung his arm out toward her, cracking the back of his hand against her face. She reeled backward, gasping. "Get out," he said.

  She crouched on the floor where she had fallen, her hand held to her face. "You're the one who's mad, not me," she hissed. "If you speak against me, the charges against you will be doubled. You've broken international law and acted without the knowledge of your superiors, and I can prove it. I've got proof that you came to my apartment, Zharkov, and proof of what you wanted, so you can't do a thing to me."

  He picked her up bodily and threw her face down against the stairs. "I told you to get out," he said.

  One of her front teeth was chipped. She pulled herself slowly up the stairs, sobbing. When she reached the top, she spat at him.

  Zharkov raised the pitcher of water to Corfus's lips. He began to untie the ropes around the prisoner's legs. The skin on them was rubbed raw. "Bitch," he said as he freed one leg. Corfus's toes were blue. Zharkov massaged the foot gently. "Can you feel this?"

  Corfus made a sound.

  "What?"

  "My eyes," he said in Russian.

  Zharkov dropped the foot. The man spoke Russian, as he suspected he would. He had understood the exchange between Zharkov and Maria Lozovan. Zharkov forced himself to look at the creature trussed in front of him, naked, disfigured, grotesque. In a pathetic gesture, Corfus dragged his free leg near the other to cover his privates.

  It was not supposed to happen this way, Zharkov thought with disgust. If Maria Lozovan had done what she had been told and nothing more, Zharkov would have questioned Corfus, learned what he needed to know, and a few days later Corfus would have wound up in a small Russian hospital, suffering from a severe case of alcoholic delirium. After being sobered up for a few days, he would be expelled by the Russians as persona non grata.

  Neat, simple, painless.

  But not this way. Not this brutal torture of the American spy. And he knew he shared some of the blame. He had expected that Lozovan would do only what she had been told to do. He should have considered that she would jump at the chance to practice the brutal, stupid, mindless sadism she had learned at all her KGB spy schools.

  Too late now. Corfus spoke Russian, and he had heard Zharkov's name, and now he could not go back to the Americans under any circumstances.

  He was a pawn, and sometimes pawns had to be sacrificed to win the game.

  Zharkov saw his hands near the man's leg, poised as if they were still holding the foot. They looked suddenly to him like killer's hands.

  "How—" He swallowed. The question had come to him so easily, despite the condition of his subject. He should untie the man first. At least his legs. At least put a blanket around him. At least let him piss into something besides his lap. "How do you know Justin Gilead?" he asked.

  "I'm cold."

  "His code name is the Grandmaster."

  "Please." He pressed his lips together and opened them. Strands of saliva showed. "I don't understand."

  "A CIA agent known to you gave you a medallion belonging to the Grandmaster. What do you know about this man?"

  "The medallion." His lips almost forced a smile. "Kiss of death." His face contorted. He sobbed.

  "What did he ... Listen to me." He tried to shout down Corfus's uncontrollable weeping, but the American wasn't paying attention. Lozovan had gone too far.

  "What are you doing with me?" Corfus screamed. "You're breaking the law of every country in the world! For what? I'm the fucking liaison officer, for Christ's sake. I can't mean anything to you. What do you maniacs want, Zharkov?"

  Zharkov slapped him across the face. Corfus's head reeled back. "Tell me about the Grandmaster."

  "I don't know him. I never met him. He was dead—"

  Zharkov slapped him again. "What do you know about the Grandmaster?"

  Corfus sighed, his breath ragged, his shoulders shaking. "Fucking maniacs," he sobbed.

  "What did the agent Frank Riesling tell you?"

  "Riesling?" Corfus grew still. "The medallion."

  "Justin Gilead's medallion," Zharkov said.

  "Is that what you killed him for?"

  Zharkov slapped him again. A thin stream of blood trickled out the side of Corfus's mouth. "What did Riesling say?"

  Corfus was silent. Zharkov took his Tokarev from his shoulder holster and held it to Corfus's temple. "What did he say?" His voice was a whisper.

  "He said the Grandmaster was alive."

  Zharkov swallowed. "Where?"

  "I don't know."

  Zharkov pressed the revolver hard against the man's head. Corfus leaned back, his lips blubbering.

  "I told you, I don't know! You're going to kill me anyway." Mucus streamed from his nose. He tried to wipe his face on his shoulder. "Cuba. Maybe Cuba."

  "Cuba?" Zharkov pulled the gun away. "In the chess tournament?"

  Corfus nodded wearily.

  Chess! Of course it would be chess. The plan was working. Ivan Kutsenko, the Russian chess master, would be the pawn to draw the white king out. "What is the recognition code?"

  "It'll change."

  "What is the code?"

  "Go fuck yourself."

  Zharkov kicked the chair across the room. Corfus landed on his face, his legs splayed out beneath the chair.

  "I asked you what the code is!" Zharkov shouted.

  "In Havana ..." A small pool of blood was forming on the floor under Corfus's nose. Zharkov strained to hear him. "In Havana... I can't remember."

  Zharkov kicked him in the stomach. Corfus retched, skittering along the cement floor with the chair on his back like a crab's shell. Its metal legs clanged when they struck the cinder-block corner.

  "The code, Mr. Corfus," Zharkov said quietly.

  "The sun. In Havana, the sun is hot." Corfus tried to raise himself up. His elbows, poised in push-up position, trembled violently, then collapsed.

  Zharkov stared at the inert form for several minutes, then held the Tokarev out at arm's length and prepared to fire.

  "My eyes," Corfus breathed. "My eyes hurt so much."

  Zharkov dropped the gun at his side. "It'll be easier if I don't remove the bandage," he said softly.

  "I want to see you."

  What accounts for the bravery of weak men at the moment of death? Zharkov wondered. Would he, when his time came, be as strong as this young man whose sole reason for dying was that his life was inconvenient for one man?

  Zharkov righted the chair and pulled the thick adhesive tape off Corfus's eyes. The eyelids were raw and blistered. On the floor were two small pads of cotton. Zharkov picked them up and sniffed them. They had been soaked in some sort of solution.

  "Warts," Corfus said.

  "What?"

  "She told me the stuff on the bandage was used to take off warts." He laughed, but tears were running down his face. His eyes, swollen slabs of flesh around two narrow slits, squinted to get a better look at Zharkov. "You know, I never knew you existed until last week."

  Zharkov nodded curtly, his jaw clenched.

  "Why are you doing this?" Corfus whispered.

  Zharkov stared at the man. How could he explain? Who among the mass of mortal men would understand the workings of a world far beyond their ken?

  "Because the golden snake must be killed," he said quietly. Something— Corfus's pitiful condition, perhaps, or a vestigial connection with humankind, long discarded—
impelled Zharkov to touch the man's savaged face.

  Corfus wept silently.

  He thinks I'm mad, Zharkov thought. He doesn't understand. He can't.

  Zharkov stepped behind the fat man and backed off a few paces. He raised the Tokarev slowly, with the formality of an execution. Corfus swallowed hard. He turned as much as he could manage in this, the hour of his death, to face his killer.

  For a moment, their eyes met and locked. Each saw nothing but sadness in the other's. Then, shaking violently, Corfus turned his head away, and Zharkov fired.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  He took the body to a ravine in the woods. As a boy, Zharkov had been cautioned against going near it. "In the snow, you could lie there until you died, and no one would find you," his father had said. It was a deep, narrow chasm, damp with rotting leaves in summer, deceptively shallow-looking when filled with winter's snow. He dropped Corfus into it, and the body sank. Only an arm and the sole of Corfus's foot showed.

  The snow was coming down heavily; within an hour the body would be completely buried. Zharkov searched for some sticks and threw them on top to conceal the exposed limbs. It looked like a grave. It looked like Poland, he thought, except for the snow. Like Poland, with another grave....

  Stop it, he told himself, forcing his gaze away from the ditch with its grisly buried treasure. He would have to leave, return to Moscow, allow the snow to do its work, see Katarina. He ached for her.

  He walked slowly to his car, through the snowy, dense woods. He never wanted to see the place again. He would sell it.

  But the body....

  And there was Lozovan. She had fled, frightened of Zharkov s unaccustomed anger, but when she returned home and stared in her many mirrors and saw the tooth Zharkov had broken and remembered how he had called her a whore and worse, that fright would turn to anger and to a passion for revenge. He would have to deal with Lozovan.

  Another to die.

  He veered the car off to the side of the road and skidded to a stop. He pressed the palms of his hands against his face.

  Why was this so different? He had killed before. He was a soldier, and in the line of duty he had ordered the massacre of hundreds. With Nichevo, he had set plans in motion that would kill people by the thousands, and he had never felt any remorse. The monks at Rashimpur had fallen beneath the bullets of his patrol like so many dominoes. He had felt nothing then, when the yellow robes of the identical little brown men had burst with red smears. Even when the burned hall of the monastery had quietly filled with his own dead, he had feared only that he might not escape, might not live to fulfill his destiny.

  As he had fled down the steep slope of Amne Xachim, he had felt the throbbing humiliation of the coiled snake burned into his flesh, but he had also felt the exhilaration of being alive.

  Death was for enemies, not for him.

  So why now? Why did he feel so sorrowful for having killed Corfus?

  Because, he realized, it had not been Justin Gilead against whose head he had placed the muzzle of his pistol. Corfus was only a pawn. Zharkov needed the white king.

  Oh, Katarina. He needed her. He would go to Katarina and use her body to squeeze the filth out of his.

  In Moscow, he parked his car five blocks from Katarina's home and walked. She was still awake, dressed in a bathrobe. An ashtray spilling over with cigarette butts sat on the table beside the telephone.

  "Where have you been?" she asked frantically. "What's going on?"

  "What's happened?" he asked.

  "Ostrakov. About a half-hour ago. He came here. What have you done?" Her face was pained. She picked a cigarette from a pack, and as she lit it, she saw her hand tremble.

  He nodded. So Lozovan had already contacted Ostrakov, and the KGB general had instantly come looking for Zharkov. He must feel that he was playing a very strong hand, if he had had the nerve to come to Katarina's house looking for the Nichevo chief.

  "He knows, Alyosha. He knows everything about us. There was a tape..." Her face crumpled. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her fingers still holding the trembling cigarette.

  "What tape?" Zharkov said. His voice was flat, expressionless.

  "In the bedroom. He showed me." She waved vaguely toward the wall.

  There was a hole beside Katarina's bed where the forced-air register had been. "The landlord sent a man to replaster the ceiling about a month ago. I had to go to work, so I let him stay here after I left. I never thought—"

  Zharkov kicked fiercely at the hole. "That swine," he snarled.

  "Why are they doing this?" Katarina asked softly. Her eyes were red, and her short hair stuck out in comical peaks. She looked too young to smoke. "Are you in trouble?"

  "No. It's Ostrakov who's in trouble. I am finished tolerating his stupidity and his arrogance."

  "I was frightened," she said softly, "but somehow I knew that. I knew you would be all right."

  As he turned to her, she was snuffing out her cigarette. He reached for her and pulled her onto the bed, still conscious of their violated privacy. He gently removed her clothes. The touch of her, her smell, faint and sweet, filled him up and enveloped him. She smelled as she had when he had first met her, those many years ago. So many years...

  Rashimpur had been destroyed. The monks were dead. Only Justin Gilead had escaped, and Zharkov—alone, weary, the burn throbbing on the skin of his throat—had begun the long journey home. He was not sure of the direction he would take among the endless snow-covered peaks and bottomless chasms of the highest mountain range on earth, and he hadn't brought many provisions with him.

  On the fourth day, he realized that he was hopelessly lost.

  On the sixth day, he ran out of food. He tried to forage for something to eat, but there was little he could be certain was edible among the sparse vegetation. He filled his belly with water, and afterward with snow. Winter came early in the mountains.

  At night, when the cold rush of wind froze him to his bones, he would huddle in his inadequate clothing, shivering until he slept. When he awoke, his toes would be blue and numb. His fingers would barely move. He forced himself to walk, even though he had no idea where he was. More than once he had cursed and then wept at the sight of a familiar boulder or patch of scrub grass, because he knew he had spent the last of his energy traveling in a circle.

  On the twelfth day, he began to hallucinate. Crouching behind a dry bush for a moment's rest, his arms wrapped around himself for warmth, he thought he saw faces. Black-painted faces belonging to men in strange garb. They skulked in the darkness, these phantoms, their eyes glowing occasionally from a ray of moonlight.

  But unlike phantoms, he could hear them, too. They were not like the silent monks of Rashimpur who walked like wisps of air. These were men who ran awkwardly like other men, who stood and watched the dying soldier and then hastened away from him in his need.

  So real did they appear that Zharkov called out to them for help. He scrambled to his feet and tried to chase after one of the elusive shadows, but they seemed to dodge him deliberately.

  "Help me," he screamed. "Can't you see I'll die here?"

  He thought he heard a faint laugh.

  Exhausted, he leaned against a boulder and slid to the ground, his feet splayed beneath him.

  Around him was silence. So he had been alone, after all, he thought. There had never been a horde of painted men. It was cold. He tugged at his cuffs to cover his bare hands. The fabric sprung from his fingers; he was too weak to close them. He rested there, against the rock, until he no longer felt the wind or the cold.

  At least it would be an easy death, he told himself.

  He closed his eyes and allowed himself to sleep, knowing he would not awaken. But before he slept, he thought once again that he heard the coarse laughter of men behind him.

  Zharkov was wrong. He did awaken. He awakened screaming.

  He was bound and tied on a table in a filthy pit. Surrounding him were the grease-smeared men of h
is nightmare delusion. But these men were real. Swarming around him like curious dogs, they poked and prodded Zharkov with dirty hands while they shouted to one another in a strange guttural language he did not understand.

  He surmised from the seeping water and mildew on the walls lit by primitive stone oil lamps that he was underground. There were no windows, and the stench of crowded male bodies was oppressive. On the wall opposite was a huge fireplace in which the parts of some large animal were roasting. As the fat dripped, sizzling, from the shanks of meat into the flames, Zharkov realized that he had been aching with hunger for days.

  Had these strange men rescued him? Would they feed him?

  Or was he there for another purpose?

  The meat, he thought with a rising panic. Could they be cannibals? Why else would they keep him tied and strapped?

  One of the men walked toward him with a knife. Zharkov screamed again. The man looked startled for a moment, then looked at his knife and at Zharkov again, and laughed. The others joined him, showing gaping mouths filled with rotten teeth as the man teased Zharkov with the blade. But when the laughter died down, the man merely cut the ropes binding Zharkov s hands and feet.

  Zharkov stared at his wrists for a moment. He was being set free! But for what? He was too weak from hunger to survive outside any longer. He tried to pull himself into a sitting position, but even that was too much effort.

  The man who had cut his bonds grunted and gestured with his chin for Zharkov to move. Zharkov shook his head in fatigue and desperation.

  The man raised his leg and kicked Zharkov off the table.

  He landed on a bare earth floor crawling with cockroaches. Slapping them away in disgust, he finally wobbled to his feet. Then one of the men tossed something his way. It was greasy and burning hot and, Zharkov realized after the initial shock of catching it, aromatic. It was a shank of meat.

  Zharkov dug into it savagely, tearing off slabs with his teeth, feeling the warm, oily juice pouring down his chin. It was delicious. He thought he could never get enough, until the heavy lump in his stomach churned sickeningly. He turned aside and vomited. The cockroaches covered the spill in a swarm.