Grandmaster (47 page)

They parked the car. As Justin got out, he felt the barrel of the KGB man's pistol pressed against the base of his spine.

"What am I doing here?" Justin asked in English.

"You're a spy, Gilead," the elder KGB man said. "We thought it would be instructive to give you a tour of this secret installation."

"Is this where you brought Starcher?" Gilead said suddenly.

"Starcher? We don't know any Starcher."

"My second," Justin said. "Where is he?"

"You ask far too many questions."

Then the man behind Justin pushed him forward with the barrel of his gun toward a door that the driver had just opened.

A single light went on inside the low building, and when he entered, Justin saw that a long corridor ran the length of the building. One side was flanked by offices, the other by a series of doors with inset windows. The doors were heavy, wooden, and reminded him of a butcher shop's freezer locker.

The men pushed Justin at gunpoint down the hallway. Was Starcher here? Justin doubted it now. At first, he had thought they would take him wherever they had taken Starcher, if they had him.

At the end of the corridor, Justin saw a large computer panel that covered an area five feet square. It was filled with gauges and dials, and as they came closer, he saw that the dials were calibrated to measure blood pressure and pulse rate. Probably it was hooked up to all these small chambers for whatever kind of animal tests they ran there to test poisons and gases.

The man who had been driving was standing before the last cubicle. As the other three men approached, he opened the door, and the two men on either side of him jabbed Justin with their guns and pushed him inside. The heavy door slammed behind him.

He looked around quickly, trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness, as an overhead light came on.

Justin was in a room nine feet long by six feet wide. The walls and floor and ceiling were of thin sheet metal. There were microphones placed where the front wall met the ceiling, and overhead was a small grate that covered an exhaust fan. Set into the metal wall was the heavy wooden door. The inside of the door was covered with metal, except for the glass viewing window into the chamber. There was no handle to open the door, and the hinges were recessed into the wood, inaccessible to his hands.

He went to the viewing window and saw the senior Russian at the control panel.

The Russian turned, and Justin heard his voice.

"You wondered what you're doing here," the man said in English. His voice crackled from a loudspeaker overhead in the small chamber. "You've come here to die."

"I want to see Zharkov," Justin yelled.

"No need to yell. I can hear you very well. Colonel Zharkov will not be coming tonight."

"Where is my friend? You're going to kill me anyway. Where is my friend?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know. That is Colonel Zharkov's business. You are ours."

"You can't do this to me. I'm an American citizen," Justin said.

"This has been done to many American citizens," the Russian said. "To many spies. Human research, after all, is the best kind."

For the first time, Justin noticed that there was a little slot, almost like a mail slot, in the metal over the doorway.

"Do you have a preference?" the Russian said. Justin looked through the window again. The agent had opened a cabinet and was looking at vials holding various colored capsules. "Something esoteric perhaps," the Russian continued. "Something that paralyzes the nervous system. You'll still be able to see and to think, but you won't be able to move. And then, finally, your eyes and brain will close down, too.

      “Or perhaps something painful. This one causes agonizing spasms. I'm told that some people jerk around so violently that they dislocate their own arms and legs." He looked over at Gilead's face, visible through the window, and smiled. "No, I suppose we'll stick to the proven methods. Cyanide should do it quite nicely."

Justin was testing the window. The glass was a half-inch thick, and there were two layers of it, separated by a quarter-inch of space, which was filled with a heavy steel grate.

The grate did not appear to be fastened just under the edges of the window, but deep inside the door frame instead.

He watched the Russian pour some liquid into a thin glass test tube and then drop in a dark-colored capsule. He quickly put a stopper in the test tube, then walked toward the door. His body covered the viewing window as he reached overhead. Justin moved away from the door, and then saw the slot over the door open and the test tube thrown through it into the small chamber.

It shattered as soon as it hit the metal floor. Instantly the small room was filled with the bitter nutty smell of cyanide. A visible cloud of gas rose from the floor and began to fill the chamber.

Justin moved to the far corner of the cell and sat down, facing the wall. He wrapped his arms around his knees and huddled forward.

The three Russians crowded together to look through the window. The gas was filling the chamber now, clouding it, and Justin's body was growing harder to see.

Then, as they watched, Justin's hands came free from his legs, and he pitched backward, lying still on the floor, face up. The three Russians looked at one another and nodded.

 

"
W
e'll wait a few minutes and then call Zharkov,"
their leader said.

Justin remembered. He was back in Rashimpur, twelve years old again, and Tagore had not been happy.

The old man had reached into the water near the shore of the sacred lake, grabbed Justin's neck, and yanked him, sputtering and gagging, ashore.

"Breathing is all," Tagore said. "If you breathe not, you live not."

"It's hard to think about breathing right when you're drowning," Justin had complained, and Tagore had mumbled something to the effect that some boys were untrainable.

That night, Justin slept in the small grotto that had been carved for him out of the rock of the mountain.

He woke when an unfamiliar smell curled into his nostrils. He sat bolt upright on the thin fiber mat that covered the hard stone floor. Smoke. His sleeping chamber was filling with smoke. He looked around. A large stone had been rolled in front of the chamber entrance, and the smoke was pouring in from under one side of it.

The young Justin jumped to his feet and ran to the stone. He began shouting: "Fire! Help me! Fire! Help! Help!" But no help came. He tried to roll the stone away, but his strength was not enough to move it. The smoke poured in.

He moved to a far corner and watched as the smoke slowly filled his sleeping chamber. It was wood smoke, bitter and acrid, and it filled his lungs and made him cough.

A wood fire. There was no loose wood inside Rashimpur. Someone had brought wood and set that fire outside his chamber, then had rolled the rock into place. Someone was trying to kill him.

And that someone was going to succeed. He coughed again. Tears streamed down his face as his eyes flooded with water.

He was going to die. He could not get out.

There was no escape.

He remembered Tagore's words of another day: "Escape into yourself. There is always room there for you. Escape into yourself."

The young Justin lay down on the floor. For the first time, he knew that his life depended on the skills that Tagore had been teaching him, and he curled up in a fetal position, closed his eyes, and concentrated on a black spot somewhere inside his mind. The spot grew nearer, growing larger, and when it filled his mind, he created a white spot in the center of it. And then the white spot moved closer until it, too, filled his mind. And in the center of the white spot, he created a dark spot.

He did not think about the smoke. He thought of nothing except his breathing. An inch at a time he felt his body slowing down. His mind still worked; his senses still functioned; but the body was drifting away from him. Was this death?

Or was it what Tagore had been teaching?

He sensed that he was out of his own body, floating in the air above it, looking down on the strange, frightened young boy. His body was safe there, he knew. And above it all soared his mind, watching, realizing that there was only smoke, but no fire; if he did not breathe in poisons, he would live. Justin would survive.

His mind had separated from his body and willed the body now to go into deep rest. Justin let it go wherever it chose.

And then he felt no more. He breathed no more.

Yet in the morning he woke. There was no smoke in the cell. The large rock that covered the entrance had been moved away.

Tagore appeared in the entranceway.

"How did you sleep, young Patanjali?" he asked.

Justin thought for a moment, then said, "Very well, Tagore."

He thought he saw the old man smile before he turned away to lead Justin to breakfast and then the day's lessons.

The spirit floats and the body rests. Breathing is all. Escape into yourself.

Justin lay still in the small chamber, as still as death as the poison swirled about him.

 

Z
harkov slept.

He had made love to Katarina many times before, but never had it been so wild, so impassioned, so careeningly breathtaking as it had been tonight. It was as if the impending death of the Grandmaster had caused her body to celebrate, to break loose from some bond, however fragile it had been, and open herself to him fully for the very first time.

Zharkov woke as soon as the telephone rang.

"Ola,"
he said softly.

"He is dead," the KGB agent said.

"Are you sure?"

"He has been there breathing cyanide fumes for three hours. He is dead."

Zharkov hunched over the telephone, shielding his voice from Katarina. "Make sure. I want you to put bullets in his brain. In his heart. Then take the body out into the woods and bury it. And bring me the medal he wears."

"As you wish, Comrade Colonel."

Zharkov replaced the telephone, took a cigarette from the end table, and lit it. He lay smoking in the dark. Over, he thought. It was all over.

 

T
he KGB agent hung up the telephone
and said to the two other men, "Zharkov must think this one is Superman."

"Why?"

"He wants us to put bullets in his brain and heart. To make sure he's dead, he says. Dead! Lenin couldn't live through that."

The small agent who had been driving the car shrugged. "If that's what Zharkov wants, I don't think it's wise to disobey him. What should we do with the body?"

"He says take it out and bury it in the woods."

"Digging. I hate digging."

"Stop complaining. Dig here or dig in Siberia on the railway."

The chief agent looked at the control panel, and found a string of twelve toggle switches in the upper right corner. He pressed the one for number twelve, and the faint whirring of a fan sounded.

"We'll have to clean the gas out first," he said. "Then we'll get rid of this Superman, once and for all."

 

S
tarcher woke. He could see the sky
. It would soon be dawn.

He had hoped that a night's rest would help him to think more clearly, but he could still see no solution to his predicament. Zharkov had not come, and there was just no way Starcher could get out of his floating prison. Even if he killed the tall Russian who looked like a Cuban, what would he do then? He was surrounded by Russian navy boats, and there were two small patrol vessels anchored near the cabin cruiser. If he tried to escape, he would be overtaken by the Russian patrols, and if he tried to shoot his way out, they'd probably blow him out of the water. He was outnumbered and outgunned. There wasn't anything to do but wait for a chance.

 

B
reathing is all.

Oxygen was returning to his system. The poison that had surrounded him like a mist had gone. His mind was alert, his body ready.

But he did not move. He lay deathly silent, his body curled in a fetal position. He waited.

He heard the door to the chamber open.

"Well, I might as well shoot him now," a voice said in Russian.

"Your ass," another Russian voice answered. "Get blood all over my suit? You put holes in him and he leaks. Forget it. First we carry him to the woods.
Then
we shoot him."

"All right. That makes sense."

"Of course, it does. That is why the great Zharkov of the great Socialist Republic has put me in charge of you two idiots."

"It doesn't make that much sense."

The three men came into the room.

"This smells awful. You sure I'm not going to die in here?"

"Only from the neck down. You've been dead from the neck up ever since I've known you."

"I wasn't the one who wanted to start the body leaking."

"Shut up and carry."

Two men hoisted Justin Gilead by his legs and under his shoulders.

"He's light," one said.

"Not so light that just us two are carrying him. What the hell are
you
doing?"

"Somebody has to hold the doors for you," the KGB leader said.

"From each according to his abilities..." the first man said.

 

B
reathing is all.
He heard the words again.

He felt himself being lifted and then carried from the room. He had never lost consciousness.

He had closed down his body's internal systems without eliminating his awareness of his surroundings. Science said that the brain needed oxygen to live, to think, to work, but Tagore had shown him that the brain was the most efficient cannibal. Close down the rest of the body's systems. Muscles that did not move needed no oxygen; stomachs that did not digest could stay, suspended, for hours or days, without oxygen. And from all those unused body organs, the brain sucked away every last molecule of oxygen to keep itself alive. Because without his brain, man was less than man, and might as well be dead.

This Tagore had taught him, and he had taught him the way to return from trance, without a telltale twitch or jerk of the muscles, without a giveaway groan, without the languorous stretching of a cat. One moment he seemed unconscious; the next he was fully alert, but to an observer, no difference was detectable… until the Grandmaster chose to move.