Grandmaster (54 page)

And she belonged to Zharkov.

Fate had tricked him before, but this final cheat was more than he could bear.

"He was the one you were saved for," he said bitterly.

A sob escaped from her, as sudden as the snap of a thread. "I was made to hate you." She flung the gun away with distaste. "Patanjali, I was not saved," she cried. "I was dead. I am dead still."

Zharkov ran across the plateau and picked up the pistol where Katarina had thrown it.

"No!" she screamed, and an instant before Zharkov pulled the trigger, she leaped at Justin, enveloping his body with her own.

The bullet took her in the back. Her body muffled the sound of the shot, but bits of flesh and a fine spray of blood spattered into the air, as visible in the bright moonlight as warm breath on a cold night. Katarina's widespread hands slid down Justin's legs as she slipped bonelessly to the ground. She landed huddled at his feet, the gaping red hole in her shirt widening with bright blood.

Justin and Zharkov both stared at the crumpled figure for a moment, stunned. Then, with an animal roar from deep inside his throat, Justin sprang at Zharkov, knocking the gun from the Russian's hand. Zharkov turned to flee, but Justin grabbed him by the shoulder.

As if Zharkov were a child, the Grandmaster lifted him over his head, walked to the edge of the cliff, and hurled him over.

Zharkov screamed as he fell. The scream ended in a heavy, wet thud as his body hit the hard-packed damp sand a hundred feet below.

Justin ran back to Katarina and knelt beside her. Gently he lifted her to cradle her in his arms. Her eyes were open, but not yet glazed with death. She coughed, and a spurt of blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. A drop of water fell and mingled with the blood. Justin wiped it away, realizing only then that he was touching his own tears.

She struggled to speak, but her breathing was raspy and choking. "... always loved you," she said softly. Her eyes melting into Justin's, she smiled. "But they made me forget."

It was the apology of a small girl, the little girl Varja and Zharkov had not permitted her to remember, the young girl Justin had loved.

"I always loved you, too, Duma," Justin answered. "And I never forgot."

He lifted her in his arms to hold her against his chest. She coughed again, spraying him with her blood. Then she sighed, long and ragged, and her head dropped forward as if she were trying to hide from the world inside Justin's arms, and he knew she was dead.

Starcher groaned again.

With a start, Justin laid Katarina's body aside and went to him. He had nearly forgotten the old man. Starcher's shirt was soaked with blood. Without medical attention, he would die, too.

Justin looked over the cliff edge and saw the Kutsenkos sitting in the inflatable rubber boat with Saarinen. The Finn was moving back and forth, parallel with the shoreline twenty yards away, obviously deliberating whether to flee or stay.

Duma was dead. Nothing could change that now. But Starcher was alive. And he could live. One death Zharkov could not claim.

Justin called down, "We're coming. Starcher's hurt."

Easily, he lifted the CIA man and placed him across his shoulders, then started down the knotted rope, moving as swiftly and smoothly as if he were walking down a stairway.

When his feet touched sand, he ran toward the water. Saarinen had pulled the boat in close to shore and was wading ashore to help Justin. Together, they put Starcher into the small boat.

The CIA man looked up and saw Justin next to him.

"Stay with me," he said weakly.

"I will, Starcher. I will."

The Grandmaster jumped onto the bow of the rubber boat as Saarinen turned up the throttle on the electric motor and aimed it out to his waiting boat. The new
Kronen
was just a black speck far out in the water.

Justin looked back toward shore. On the sand, he saw the crumpled lump that was Zharkov's body.

The Black King had fallen at last. As he turned back to look toward Saarinen's boat his eyes caught something else, perhaps fifty yards away. But the moon again moved behind a cloud and the night darkened, and though he strained to see, the vision was gone. He was not sure what it had been. Bats, perhaps, coming to pick at Zharkov's eyes.

Five minutes later they were on Saarinen's boat, running without lights, full speed toward Miami. Starcher was on the cot in the cabin. Justin knelt by his side as Dr. Kutsenko cleaned his wound.

"He's going to be all right," she said. "The bullet passed right through."

"His heart?" Justin asked softly.

"It seems to be all right," she said.

Saarinen had put the boat on automatic pilot and entered the cabin.

"I should charge you bastards double for this," he roared. He had a bottle of Finlandia vodka in his hand. "Shooting, fooling around, making me wait. Are you trying to make an old man of me? Making me crazy. I'm steaming toward Cuba and what am I hearing on the radio? That somebody tried to kill Fidel Castro, and it's probably the work of the crazy imperialist Yankees. Is that what I have on my boat now? Assassins?"

"We saved Castro's life," Justin said simply.

Saarinen paused, then roared again. "Well, aren't you the idiot? They're blaming it on you people anyway."

Justin saw Starcher's eyes open. The CIA man was smiling faintly. "It's all right," Starcher said softly.

"So what'd we accomplish?" Justin said.

Starcher spoke softly. "Sure, they can blame it on us. But they'll figure out the truth, Justin. And when they do... you watch. Castro will start being a lot nicer to the United States. Maybe we made a friend for America, Justin."

"Be quiet and rest," Dr. Kutsenko said. "Is there anything you want?"

Starcher grinned. "Yes. A cigar."

 

J
ustin stood on the rear deck of the boat
. Cuba was far astern now, out of sight, but he kept looking in that direction.

He thought of Duma lying dead on the top of the cliff.

Hers was the most crushing death of all. Everything he had ever loved had died at Zharkov's hands. She had thought him Patanjali, but he was not Patanjali. Justin Gilead was a fake, a fraud who had learned some physical tricks, enough to keep him alive while others died.

But no more.

Zharkov was dead; the Prince of Death was no more. And Justin would soon join him in death.

But he wished he had had time to go over to Zharkov's body and wring its neck. He wanted to feel the last pulse of Zharkov's life under his fingers and to feel it vanish through his hands.

But enough. Zharkov was dead. The game was over.

He remembered the dark lump that had been Zharkov, lying on the sand as their little boat moved away from the shore. And he remembered the other thing he had seen. He tried to focus his concentration and his memory, to try to make the picture come clear in his mind. It was like a chess position; if he allowed himself to flow into his memory, to
become
his memory, the picture would come clear, unbidden, into his mind.

He stared up blankly toward the bright moon and let his eyes drift out of focus. Slowly, fuzzily, the thing he had seen in the water began to take shape, to form, to become visible.

And then the full picture burst into his mind like a skyrocket, going off, flaring into color, forcing him to blink and turn away.

In that brief glimpse under the moonlight, he had seen not bats, but men.

Four men, dark, crouched, running, their faces painted black.

Varja's men.

Coming for the Prince of Death.

Was it over? Would it ever be over?

He lowered his face to his arms.

The Grandmaster wept.

BOOK SIX

 

 

The Resignation

 

 

T
ime to die.

Justin huddled in the hollow of snow he had dug for himself. It was night in the mountains near Amne Xachim, and so cold that his spittle froze and cracked in midair.

He had been waiting for death most of his life. From his youth, when he lost Duma, to the massacre of the monks at Rashimpur, to the razing of the Polish village where a woman who had cared for him had died in his place, he had longed for the final release of death.

There had been times when he could actually feel its proximity, roaring and mighty, its bloody jaws agape. At other times, death taunted him from a distance, smiling slyly at his fear. But it was always present, always waiting, always offering up its cold, irresistible promise to him.

But each time he had reached out to embrace it, death had skittered away like a coy girl. He had died for the first time at Rashimpur. It had been death's first joke. It had taken him through the pain of dying only to send him back to suffer the pain of living. And he had died again, in Poland. That, too, had been a trick.

But now was the third time, the third death. And this death would be the true one, because he would inflict it himself.

First Zharkov, then Justin Gilead. Once he was certain that the Prince of Death was finally, truly destroyed, the Grandmaster could at last be free.

It was time.

He lifted himself out of the sheltering womb of snow and continued walking. By dawn he was making his way over the ice-blown steppes with their hidden caves. He stopped short as he passed the cave where long ago, before he had grown to need the sweet, sick lust of death, he had once loved a girl.

Why did it have to be this way?
The freezing air burned his lungs. Why? Why were Varja's women murdered? Why did Rashimpur have to burn? Why had Yva Pradziad been killed in the burned village in Poland? Why had he found Duma again, after a lifetime of longing for her, only to lose her a second time?

He had no answers. Perhaps his life had been no more than a monumental game of chess that he had played badly. Perhaps things would have been quite different if he had not been born Patanjali, reincarnation of the spirit of Brahma—or, more accurately, if Tagore and the other monks at Rashimpur had not believed him to be Patanjali.

That was the most bitter aspect of Justin's whole terrible existence; it had been based on a lie. He was not Patanjali; of that he was certain. Brahma would not have permitted his spirit to live in a man who had failed so often, and so miserably.

But the monks had been innocents. They believed in magic. Now they were dead. Nearly everyone who had ever befriended Justin Gilead had been destroyed. And Rashimpur, created by the hand of Brahma the Creator himself in the beginning of the world, was burned to ash.

He would visit Rashimpur—the rubble that remained of it—one last time. After he found Zharkov and killed him. After the Prince of Death and the evil legacy that spawned him were eliminated forever, he would go back. To the ashes of the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms, to the spirits of his dead brothers, to the place where Tagore's precious blood had spilled. He would go back and join them all one last time.

His spirit would not rest with theirs, because the monks of Rashimpur were holy men, and Justin, in his way, had become as wicked as the man he sought to kill. But he could die where the holy men had died. Perhaps he would find peace in the final moments of his life. If he did, he would go gladly to damnation.

In the distance he could see the shimmering copper dome of Varja's palace. In the cold morning light, it shone like fire.

Everything I have ever loved has been destroyed by fire, he thought.

And so he knew what he would do to Varja's palace when he reached it.

 

H
e went no closer.
Instead, he combed the area for scrub grass laid beneath the snow and for the brittle little bushes that had grown in summer and now lay brown and dry in the cold. When he had gathered enough, he bound the tinder with rope woven from the grass and dragged the bundle in a large circle toward the garden entrance to the palace.

The garden was bare and snow-covered now. Inside it, Justin stood for a moment and swallowed back the tears of remembrance for the girl who had seen herself for the first time in his eyes. But there was no time for tears anymore. Duma was gone. Tagore. Yva, the holy men of Rashimpur... all gone. He would have to put his regret aside, because it was his last day on earth, and it was going to end, not in tears, but in fire.

From his pocket he took two pieces of stone—one flint, one iron pyrite. They were firestones that he carried to warm him on his journey, but now they would serve a much greater function. He knelt down with the stones and a handful of kindling and struck the stones together.

A small spark flew. He struck again, trying to shelter the stones and kindling from the wind, but the kindling would not catch. Even in the freezing cold, sweat poured down Justin's face. Why wouldn't they work? Throughout his long journey to the mountains, the firestones had never failed.

Then he heard it. A deep, soft laugh, neither masculine nor feminine. He looked up and gasped. A small, bald, gnomelike creature stood in front of him in a place where a moment ago had been only air.

Justin clutched the firestones tightly. The little person who had walked so silently that he'd seemed to materialize out of nowhere pulled a long leather thong from out of his robe.

Justin threw the firestones. He aimed for the gnome's head, but the creature's movements were so fast they were almost a blur. Before Justin's eyes could follow the gnome's changing positions, the strip of leather cracked through the air, winding with a slap around Justin's chest and arms.

As he landed, Justin heard a snap and knew that one of his ribs was broken. In his pain, his only thought was of the strange little being who had bested him so easily. How could he move so fast? Justin hadn't seen speed like that since his early days at Rashimpur.

A monk,
Justin realized with sudden certainty. The little man had once been a holy man, as well trained as he himself had been.

The monk drew nearer. "You are from Rashimpur," he said, his face expressionless.