White Death (42 page)

They couldn’t therefore take chances. Hostage negotiation was all about time. In any hostage situation, there are two moments of maximum danger to the victim: at the start, at the moment of being snatched, and at the end, during a rescue attempt. The hallmarks of these moments are adrenalin, speed and confusion, three things a negotiator hates. The longer, the slower, the less emotional, the better.

Could Patrese take in some kind of transmission device? Again, no. Kwasi would search him for one, he’d said as much. In any case, the lighthouse walls would be several feet thick. There was no way they could guarantee a line of transmission through that.

To all intents and purposes, therefore, Patrese would be on his own once he was in there. He’d have to talk Kwasi into a position of compromise, and try and establish some lines of communication with the outside world.

And if he couldn’t? Well, there’d be three people in there: and if things didn’t work out, at least one of them would be dead.

This is how the situation will end, Anna Levin had told him. Card XVI. The Tower. The card Anna feared the most, the one that comes right after the Devil card, the bad omen, the one they leave out when they play tarot games in Europe. The Tower is bad. Chaos. Impact. Downfall. Failure. Ruin. Catastrophe. You want to know how bad it is? she’d asked. It’s the only card that’s better inverted. That way, you land on your feet.

It was about fifty yards from Kieseritsky’s makeshift command post to the front door of the lighthouse, and it felt like the longest walk of Patrese’s life. The cops moved aside to let him past, giving him a wider berth than he felt was strictly necessary. Perhaps they were afraid that his madness was contagious. For those about to die, and all that.

He knew there were TV cameras on him too, and through them half the nation would be watching: but he forced himself not to think about that. In fact, the only way to deal with the enormity, the bravery, the stupidity of what he was doing was to dissociate, to pretend it was happening to someone else. He didn’t have to try too hard: there were moments in that short, endless walk where he really did feel the old cliché, that he was outside his own body looking in. When he reached out to knock on the door, his arm seemed incredibly long: a hallucination; a bad trip.

Kwasi’s voice came through the thick wood. ‘I’m going to open it just enough to let you in. I’m armed, of course. Just get inside. Don’t try anything dumb. You got?’

‘I got.’

Patrese’s cellphone rang, sudden and loud enough to make him jump. He checked the screen. Unknown number: not Kwasi. He pressed the red button and let it go straight through to voicemail.

There was a metallic clacking as Kwasi unlocked the door. A brief chink of light on the lintel, a foul smell that Patrese may have imagined. There was no one else within ten yards of him. He felt like Armstrong or Aldrin at Tranquility Base, about to cross over into an alien world from which they knew they might never come back.

He stepped inside.

‘This is a message for Agent Franco Patrese. My name is Wilson Pessoa, and I’m with the Criminal Justice Information Services division of the Bureau. The fingerprint on the cadaver of Darrell Showalter? We got a match for you, one of the prints that just came in the system the past couple of days. That print belongs to a lady named Inessa Baikal.’

Kwasi slammed the door shut behind Patrese, locked it, threw him up against the wall and frisked him with quick hands, all over, balls and ass included: no cultural
sensibilities
or airport protocol here. When he was happy, he spun Patrese round and pushed him towards the stairs.

‘Up.’

Patrese climbed. The stairs led past a kitchen – ‘Keep going’ – and into an open-plan living area, circular like the building. Inessa was sitting in front of a large table. Kwasi pushed Patrese down opposite her, pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and cuffed Patrese’s good wrist – the one that didn’t have a plaster cast on it, the one that Kwasi hadn’t broken – to one of the table legs.

Inessa gestured slightly with her head toward the table, wanting him to see what was on it. He hadn’t really looked at it yet, as his first focus had been on her.

There were a couple of dozen objects there, two or three feet tall. Patrese’s first thought was that they were candles or some sort of ornaments, but when he looked closer he saw their shape: tall, thin stems with something bulbous on top. The surface of the table itself was neither flat nor uniform: it alternated between dark and light squares, their texture slightly uneven.

The squares were the patches of skin that Kwasi had taken from his victims; that was clear enough. It took Patrese a little longer to work out what the stems of the objects on the squares were: bones, he saw, so thick that they could only have been bones from the severed arms. And the bulbous things on top of the stems: well, they were so horrendous that Patrese had to clamp his teeth against the rising bile.

Heads. Miniature, shrunken heads.

Kwasi hadn’t been playing chess.

He’d been collecting.

A chessboard, and pieces. He’d had quite the collection back in his Bleecker Street condo, all those themed sets of
Star Wars
and baseball players and historical figures and all. But he’d always been missing one: the ultimate chess set for the ultimate player.

A human chess set.

It wasn’t finished, of course. Kwasi had twenty-four pieces, and there should have been thirty-two: forty-eight squares where there should have been sixty-four. And, Patrese thought, Kwasi must have known he wasn’t going to finish it now, whatever happened in here over the next few hours.

Inessa got up. Patrese saw that she wasn’t cuffed.

No
, he thought.
No
.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Thoughts tumbled in Patrese’s head like acrobats.

The first time he’d run out here with Inessa, and she’d covered her surprise when he’d pointed out the lighthouse.

The knight’s tour puzzle, which she’d solved just a few moments too late for them to catch Kwasi.

She said she’d seen chess as a fairy tale, and here she was in a castle.

The mini-breakdown she’d admitted to, when she’d shaved her head. Chess and madness, she’d said; and Patrese had thought of Kwasi, but of course Inessa had meant herself too.

All the help she’d given Patrese on the case, but how much had amounted to anything concrete? It had been Tartu who’d realized that Kwasi was playing himself. Inessa had talked a lot, given them a lot of information, but nothing crucial, nothing that had really made a difference. Catja, the CBS reporter, had even asked how Inessa had helped; and Patrese had been too busy giving a nice answer to stop, think and give a true one.

Starkweather and Fulgate. Brady and Hindley. Fred and Rose West.

‘But you can’t have,’ he said suddenly.

‘Can’t have what?’

‘Killed them. You had alibis.’

‘I didn’t kill them. I helped …’ – she glanced at Kwasi, who nodded:
Go on
– ‘I helped Kwasi the night before Hallowe’en. He was arguing with Regina. He rang me and asked me to come over. We’d started seeing each other again, but secretly, so as not to piss her off, but she must have found out. I said I was out with somebody: Darrell, it was. Not a romantic thing, God no. We’d met at a Russian literature seminar’ – Patrese remembered all the Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys in Showalter’s room – ‘and he’d asked me out to dinner. Doesn’t matter that you’re out with him, Kwasi said. Just come, now. I told Darrell I had to go, and he badgered me as to why, so eventually I told him, and quick as a flash he said he’d come too, he was such a fan of Kwasi’s, and as a religious man he felt he could help mediate between mother and son, and I just said sure, whatever, I just wanted to get there. I figured Darrell could go do something else when we got here if it all got too hectic. I wasn’t really thinking straight, to be honest. So we got here, big argument, Regina calling me a bitch, saying I wanted to steal her boy away from her, and Darrell tried to calm things down but he wasn’t having any effect, so eventually the three of us – me, Kwasi and Regina – went for a drive to sort it out, and Darrell said he’d stay here and try to get some sleep, and I said sure, we’d drive back to Cambridge later that night or first thing Sunday so he’d be back in time for church. So he got his head down, while off I went with Kwasi and Regina, and we got to the Green, and we got out of the car and started walking because I thought the cold night air would cool tempers off a bit, and Regina was still nagging away at Kwasi, and suddenly he snapped, killed her right there. And I was like, oh my God, what have you done? And then Kwasi took the head and the arm and the skin, and it was like I was watching a horror movie. We got back in the car, and he told me I couldn’t do anything or go to the cops or anything as I’d be an accessory. On the way back to the lighthouse, he told me all about the vagrants, and he knew I hated people like that ever since one killed my mom back in Russia, and what he was doing with the chess set, and how the black queen was dead and I was the white queen and we’d live together forever as black king and white queen just as soon as this was done, and it’s weird, Franco, but the way he said it, it all kinda made sense, you know? And then we were back at the lighthouse and suddenly I remembered Darrell was still there, and Kwasi realized this fitted perfectly with the bishop thing, and he knew we couldn’t leave Darrell alive anyway because he’d go to the cops the moment he heard Regina had been found, and in any case if there were two bodies there then it would draw attention away from either one of them in particular, if you know what I mean, and then … He killed Darrell. I didn’t. I helped move Darrell when we got back to the Green with his body, but I didn’t kill him, or any of the others. But Kwasi said I had to go get myself involved with the investigation, get close to you, run interference, steer you away if ever you got too close. And once you realized it was just Kwasi, and once it was clear you were closing in, better to draw you in here on our own terms than anything else.’

She ran her hands through her hair. One of her hairpins tumbled down a cascade of hair and came to rest right at the end, hanging off like a freestyle climber.

‘You ready?’ Kwasi said.

‘Ready for what?’

‘Ready for the game.’

‘The game?’

‘Sure. Such a beautiful set, we’ve got to play with it, no?’

‘But …’

‘I know it’s not finished. But we can improvise. The remaining squares are marked out there, on the table. I just haven’t been able to fill them in yet. And I already have the other pieces we need.’ He reached into a small canvas bag and brought out six: a white queen – Inessa’s face was unreadable – a white bishop, two black bishops, a white knight and a black rook.

‘What about the kings?’ Patrese asked.

Kwasi smiled, as though he’d wanted Patrese to ask that question all along. ‘The kings are right here, Franco.’

I should have known, Patrese thought: I should have realized all along.

‘That’s right,’ Kwasi said. ‘You and me. We’re the kings.’

They weren’t going to play one-on-one, of course; that would
be no contest. Patrese would have Misha on his side. Misha
would play white, with Patrese as the white king, and
Kwasi
would be the black king. That was how confident
Kwasi was,
that he’d give Misha the advantage of first move.

What were they playing for? Patrese asked.

Well, Kwasi said, wasn’t that obvious too?

If Kwasi won, Patrese would die. If Misha won. Kwasi would die. If it was a draw, they’d play another game, and if need be another and another, till they got a result. If Kwasi won, he’d tell the cops that he’d abducted Inessa unilaterally and that she’d had nothing to do with any of it. If Patrese won, he could tell them exactly what Inessa’s role had really been. That was how much Inessa backed Kwasi to win: she was trusting her freedom, if not exactly her life, to him.

You’re really prepared to kill yourself? Patrese asked.

Sure, Kwasi said. If my chess isn’t good enough, then sure. If it is, then I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. Either way, everyone will remember me. Steinitz said he played chess with God, gave God pawn odds, and still won. Medieval paintings showed young champions playing chess with the devil for the souls of mankind. This was no different. Kwasi against Misha, Kwasi against Patrese; and at stake was life itself, the life that had become chess, the chess that had become life, the machine that had become animate. Unzicker and Kwasi were the guardians of Misha, and Unzicker was dead. Patrese had killed him. Now Patrese would have the chance to see greatness on both sides: Misha, and Misha’s co-creator. Patrese had killed Unzicker, but he couldn’t kill Misha.

Kwasi said all this as though it was the most reasonable thing in the world. That was true insanity, Patrese thought: not to rant and rave, but to accept the madness as totally normal, to talk about playing chess with God as one would talk about the weather.

Kwasi bustled around, setting everything up. On a small table next to the larger chessboard sat Misha itself, an apparently ordinary computer with a chessboard graphic on the screen. Kwasi explained that Misha had voice-recognition software installed, so all Kwasi had to do was shout out his moves. Misha would make the move on its ‘board’ and, after suitable calculation time, speak its reply and make that move too, and so on. Kwasi would move the pieces around on the macabre board. Misha also had a chess clock running in the top corner of the screen.

There was a long work surface against the far wall. Kwasi made sure that everything was arranged to his satisfaction: knives, cooking pots, fretsaws, sand, buckets, detergent, Nappy-San, gravers, sandpaper, salt, battery acid, bran flakes, baking soda, all laid out as though on some TV cookery show.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s play.’

Outside, the SWAT team leader – Blackburne, he was called – was in Kieseritsky’s ear, as she’d known he would be. The SWAT guys always want to go in. It’s what they train for, it’s what they enjoy: a lot of them say privately that the thrill of a successful mission is better than sex. To them, a hostage situation by its nature involves force – the hostage-taker is always holding his victims against their will – and the only way to deal with force is more force. Cut off the building’s power supply, blast it with white noise, go in there like avenging angels and finish it off.