White Death (43 page)

The problem, as Kieseritsky knew full well, was that there are two elements to successfully resolving a hostage situation: neutralizing the perpetrator and rescuing the victims. SWAT teams and their ilk are very good at the first, but sometimes they’re not so good at the second.

Let us storm the place, Blackburne said to Kieseritsky. We’ll use the thick walls to our advantage: no one inside will be able to hear us coming. We’ll scale the walls up to the top, where there’s a railing and a walkway round the glass dome that houses the light itself. We’ll cut away a pane of that glass and come down into the lighthouse that way: absolutely silent till we get to where Kwasi’s holding Patrese and Inessa, and then we’ll use stun guns and flash grenades to disorientate them all, take Kwasi captive and free his hostages.

Kieseritsky demurred. Let’s wait a bit longer. Sieges can last twenty-four hours, sometimes more. Patrese knows Kwasi. Let him do his stuff. We’ve no way of knowing what’s going on inside there.

That’s just the point, Blackburne replied. We don’t know what’s going on in there. For all we know, Kwasi could have killed the both of them by now. Kwasi’s refused to talk to anyone but Patrese, and now Patrese’s in there with him, we’ve lost our only link with the inside. We have to do something.

More time, Kieseritsky repeated.

How much more time?

An hour. We’ve heard nothing in an hour, then …

Then we’ll go in.

No, she said. Then we’ll reconsider.

Kwasi was famous for playing the Sicilian Defense as black, but he surprised Inessa – and Misha too, perhaps, if anyone could ever tell – by choosing instead to play the Pirc, where black yields initial control of the center and tries to attack white from the flanks. Even if Patrese had begun to understand the unfathomably complex grandmaster logic behind the moves, he still couldn’t have seen much beyond one simple, grotesque fact.

The pieces that Kwasi was moving on the board in front of him, and indeed the board itself, had once been people. People whose deaths Patrese had tried to avenge: people whose names and lives had haunted him for a month, and people whose names he’d never known and would probably never get to know.

Whatever happened, someone was going to die.

Kwasi had removed the signet ring from Patrese’s finger and placed it on the white king’s square, and then done the same with his own ring and the black king’s square. An early exchange of bishops – the white one having Darrell Showalter’s head, now the size of an orange – saw the white queen high up the board, out on a flank.

First Kwasi and then Misha castled. The pair of white
knights clustered ahead of the pawns protecting the white
king, Patrese’s ring; the black knights bookended the black queen, as though she had an arm round each of their shoulders. A
black pawn bustled into the center, followed by his mate. A
white knight went up one flank; the remaining white bishop darted to the other, training his sights down a long diagonal.

Misha thought for twenty minutes before its next move.

‘Queen to d4,’ it announced, and Inessa gasped.

‘What?’ Patrese said. ‘What?’

Kwasi came over and moved Misha’s queen to d4. His eyes glittered: excitement, for sure, and perhaps apprehension too.

Patrese looked at the chessboard graphic on Misha’s screen: considerations of taste aside, it was easier to see what was going on there than on Kwasi’s board.

The white queen could be taken. Misha was offering a queen sacrifice.

Kwasi stared at the board, and then into space. His body quivered.

It wasn’t a mistake, that was for sure. It was about as shocking a move as could ever have been played at this level, but it wasn’t a mistake. Kwasi had three ways to take the queen, and they all led into dizzying complications, possibilities sprouting like spring leaves at every turn.

‘Oh,’ Kwasi said, ‘that is magnificent!’ He was looking at Misha’s screen: talking to the chip within, perhaps. ‘I bet if we run the position through a normal engine now, it’ll say I’m winning, right? But that … That’s a move I’d be proud to make. I need to think. I need to really, really think.’

Patrese looked at Inessa. Inessa was studying the board, shaking her head.

‘This is way too deep for me,’ she said. ‘Way too deep.’

She shook her head again, and as she did so the hairpin lost the last of its grip and dropped to the floor.

Blackburne came over to Kieseritsky again.

They had to go in now, he reiterated. There was nothing for a negotiator to do, as Kwasi was making no demands, so there was no chance of spinning this out via endless dialogue. If Kieseritsky didn’t agree, he was prepared to take it higher, even to the White House if need be. There was nothing to be gained from staying put, and everything to be gained from going in.

Kieseritsky thought for a moment. She’d listened to Patrese, and now he was incommunicado, status unknown. Fat lot of good that had done her. She’d sat on her hands already on his request, but he was no longer around to force his opinion on her.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘In you go.’

Kwasi paced the room in an exquisite agony of calculation. He clasped his hands to his head, he squatted in the corner, he went up close to the computer and peered at the screen as though he could somehow look inside Misha’s brain.

When neither Kwasi nor Inessa were looking, Patrese stretched out his leg, put his foot over the hairpin on the floor, and began to drag it back towards him.

‘What are you
doing
?’ Kwasi barked.

‘Just stretching,’ Patrese blurted.

Kwasi looked at him with surprise, as though he’d forgotten Patrese was there. He hadn’t been talking to Patrese; he’d been talking to himself, warning himself not to make a certain move because he’d seen the trap at the end of it. Better to see the trap a moment before you played the move than a moment after.

He shook his head and turned away again.

Patrese waited until Inessa too had stopped looking at him. Then he bent down, closed his fingers round the hairpin, tucked it into his palm as best he could – it wasn’t easy with the plaster cast – and straightened up again.

‘Knight d5,’ Kwasi said suddenly.

He’d turned down the sacrifice.

Blackburne gathered all the TV reporters together, off-camera. They were about to assault the lighthouse, he explained, and they didn’t know whether Kwasi had a television inside. If he did, and he was watching the coverage, they couldn’t possibly risk him seeing the SWAT guys coming up the outside of the building.

No way, the reporters said. You guys mount an assault – one of the most dramatic bits of TV imaginable – and we’re not allowed to film it? No way. Absolutely no way. NFW.

You can film it, Blackburne said, you just can’t
transmit
it, not till we’re done. It’ll be over in ten minutes. After that, after we’ve got the hostages out and dealt with Kwasi, you can show it round the clock for all I care. But not now, not live. If you all stick to that, none of y’all will get a march on anyone else.

OK, they said. That’s a deal.

The SWAT boys fanned out round the back of the tower, as far from the main door as possible. They had dynamic climbing ropes with grappling hooks on the end, and these hooks were wrapped in hardened rubber to eliminate the telltale clang of metal on metal. The tower was too high for the ropes to be thrown to the top, so instead they used miniature, low-powered rocket launchers that sent the ropes spiraling into the sky. Aimed properly – and these guys were SWAT, so of course they aimed properly – the hooks fastened first time on the railing round the top of the lighthouse.

They didn’t know how strong the railing was, so they went up one at a time to minimize the amount of stress on it. Each man was carrying a child’s weight worth of equipment, but they still went up the ropes fast enough to draw gasps from some of the reporters. At the top, one of them brought out a laser glass cutter – the glass on the lighthouse housing would inevitably be tempered glass, which is resistant to traditional manual glass cutters – and scored a circle wide enough for a man to pass through. Two other men lifted the scored circle clean away from the window.

They were in.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

In every sport, there are a handful of contests that resonate through the ages. Chess is no exception: aficionados still talk in awestruck wonder of Bobby Fischer’s 1956 game against Donald Byrne, or Kasparov’s titanic struggle against Veselin Topalov in 1999. This game, Kwasi against Misha, was every bit the equal of those. No one had ever played for such high stakes – for life and death, literally – and the quality of the play matched the gravity of the prize. It was almost as though Misha too knew what was at stake.

Misha’s forces looked disjointed, but suddenly his pieces were coming from everywhere, weaving mating nets – multiple pieces closing in on the king – with geometric deftness. Kwasi’s own pieces stepped and ducked. He moved his king out into the eye of Misha’s attack, knowing more by intuition than rational thought that the only way to survive was to put his king – put himself – into ever greater danger, and trust that there would always be an escape, no matter how hard it seemed to find.

Misha thrust; Kwasi parried. A break down the left, some counterplay from Kwasi, and now it was Misha scrambling to cover back. Regroup, recoil. The game of dead pieces was alive: the energy pulsed through the room, stresses curving through space, vortices whirling over the magnetic field of the squares.

Inessa was rapt. She had never seen anything like this. One moment, it seemed certain that Misha would win and Kwasi die; the next, that Kwasi would win and Patrese die. Perhaps they’d slug each other to a standstill and then start all over again. But more than anything, she wanted to know how this would end; not just this situation, but this game. It was like watching Mozart compose a symphony for you and you alone.

And while Kwasi was distracted, Patrese was working on using Inessa’s hairpin. In normal circumstances, he could have done it all inside a minute; but the plaster cast made it many times more difficult, and he still had to be careful of Kwasi or Inessa seeing, because this might be his last, best chance, so it was worth taking any amount of time to get it right.

Keeping his hands beneath the table, he first pulled the plastic covering off the hairpin. Then he bent the end that he’d just uncovered and put it in the keyhole of the cuff. Took it out again and bent it the other way, to make a dogleg. Put the pin back in the keyhole, pointed it toward the cuff’s direction of travel, and pressed hard.

The cuff clicked open.

Kwasi looked sharply at Patrese. Both Patrese’s hands were under the table.

Another noise, this time from upstairs. Kwasi looked up. Maybe nothing. He looked back at Patrese again.

Patrese pressed his knee against the table leg, just under the cuff, so it wouldn’t fall and hit the floor when he took his hand out. Otherwise, he stayed totally still.

Kwasi was too far away for Patrese to do anything, even once he got his hand free. Kwasi had a gun. There were several possible weapons on the work surface by the far wall – knives, saws, battery acid – but Patrese would never make it there in time.

‘Rook takes b7, check,’ Kwasi said suddenly.

Another noise from upstairs. No, Patrese thought, they surely wouldn’t be sending in the SWAT team so early; but if they were, then he could help them by …

‘That’s a mistake,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Kwasi.

‘Rook takes b7. It’s a mistake.’

‘The fuck do you know? You trying to put me off? Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’

‘Even I can see it’s a mistake! You’ve lost.’

‘Shut up!’

Patrese was shouting too now, and he fancied he could hear running feet coming down the stairs, so he shouted louder to mask the sound and distract Kwasi. Kwasi rushed toward him, gun out and face wild. Patrese wrenched his hand from the cuff and was up and out of his chair, arm coming up and round to knock Kwasi’s hand as he fired. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to deflect Kwasi’s aim a fraction and send the bullet whistling into the wall rather than between Patrese’s eyes.

Patrese put his knee into Kwasi’s stomach with all the force and anger he could muster. Kwasi doubled over, but he still had the gun. Patrese grabbed one of the vile human pieces and whipped whichever luckless person’s humerus it was across Kwasi’s face, and now Kwasi was up and scrambling and shooting again, once, twice, Patrese sprawling across the floor toward the work surface, grabbing for a knife and the battery acid, and Kwasi had his arm round Inessa’s neck and his gun pressing her hair against her temple, and the first SWAT guy came barreling into the room and shot Kwasi right there, right where he stood, and another SWAT guy was yelling at Patrese to put the knife and the acid down right now, and Inessa was half sobbing and half laughing, and it was all over, as simple and brutal as that.

Two SWAT guys went over to Kwasi to check that he was dead. Another pulled Patrese upright and asked if he was OK. The room was full of SWAT guys now, like giant insects with all their pouches and webbing. The first guy in there, the one who’d shot Kwasi, tucked his head into his collar. ‘Target eliminated. Hostages safe. Coming out the front, one minute.’

There was a sudden silence, shockingly loud after all the gunfire and noise.

‘Bishop takes b7,’ said Misha.

Patrese liked to go away after big cases, no matter how they’d been resolved. After the case of the Human Torch in Pittsburgh, he’d gone to Thailand; after running down a particularly nasty killer in New Orleans, he’d gone to South America and traveled the entire length of Chile, top to bottom.

Now he’d come to Kazan. It was at Nursultan’s invitation, so it felt slightly like a busman’s holiday, but he was going on to Moscow and St Petersburg afterwards, so that would count as proper vacation. And in any case, it had seemed churlish to refuse. Kwasi was dead, Inessa was awaiting trial, and Nursultan had managed to retrieve all the Misha material, miraculously undamaged in the storming of the lighthouse (though no one had told him how close a SWAT guy had come to putting a bullet through the computer when Misha had spoken at the end of the raid). This was Nursultan’s way of saying thank you.