The Fire (9 page)

Here in this spot – a difficult four-day hike over treacherous terrain from the valley below – he knew he was well protected. But there was no hiding from the fact that something was amiss.

He rose from his makeshift bed for a better view. Away to the east, toward Mecca, he could make out the thin ribbon of red that ran across the horizon, portending the sun. But he did not yet have enough light to make out his surroundings. As he stood there in the silence atop the mesa, Charlot heard a sound – only meters away. First, a soft footstep on gravel, then the sound of human breathing.

He was terrified to make a false step, or even to move.

‘Al-Kalim – it is I,’ someone whispered – though there was no one within miles to hear.

Only one man would address him as Al-Kalim: the Seer. ‘Shahin!’ cried Charlot. He felt the strong, firm hands press his wrists – the hands of the man who’d always been mother and father, brother and guide.

‘But how have you found me?’ said Charlot. And why had Shahin risked his life to cross the seas and the desert? To come through this treacherous canyon by night? To arrive here before dawn? Whatever had brought him to this place must be urgent beyond imagining.

But more important:
Why hadn’t Charlot foreseen it?

The sun broke over the horizon, licking the rolling dunes in the distance with a warm pink glow. Shahin’s hands still firmly grasped Charlot’s in his own, as if he could not bear to let him go. After a long moment, he released Charlot and drew back his indigo veils.

In the rosy light, Charlot could see the craggy, hawklike features of Shahin for the first time. But what he saw in that face actually frightened him. In the twenty-nine years of his life, Charlot had never seen his mentor betray any emotion at all, under any circumstance, much less the emotion that Charlot could see written on Shahin’s face right now, which terrified him: pain.

Why could Charlot still not see inside?

But Shahin was struggling to speak: ‘My son…’ he began, nearly choking on the words.

Although Charlot had always thought of Shahin as his parent, this was the first time that the elder man had ever addressed him in this fashion.

‘Al-Kalim,’ Shahin continued, ‘I would never ask you to use that great gift that was bestowed upon you by Allah, your gift of the Vision, if this were not a matter of the gravest importance. A crisis has occurred that has driven me to cross
the sea from France. Something of great value may have fallen into evil hands, something I learned of only months ago…’

Charlot, with fear gripping his heart, understood that if Shahin had come for him here in the desert with such urgency, the crisis must be grave indeed. But Shahin’s next words were more shocking still.

‘It has to do with my son,’ he added.

‘Your…
son
?’ repeated Charlot, fearing that he’d not heard correctly.

‘Yes, I have a son. He is greatly beloved,’ Shahin told him. ‘And like you, he was chosen for a life that is not always ours to question. From his earliest years, he has been initiated into a secret order. His training was nearly complete – ahead of its time, for he is only fourteen years old. Six months ago, we received word that a crisis had occurred: My son had been sent upon an important mission by the highest shaikh – the
Pir
of his order – in an attempt to help avert this crisis. But it seems that the boy has never arrived at his destination.’

‘What was his mission? And what was his intended destination?’ Charlot asked – though he realized, in a state of panic, that this was the first time he’d ever had to ask such a question.
Why didn’t he already know the answer?

‘My son and a companion in this mission were bound for Venice,’ Shahin answered, though he was looking at Charlot strangely, as if the same question had just struck him, too:
How could Charlot not know?

‘We have reason to fear that my son, Kauri, and his companion were abducted.’ Shahin paused, then added, ‘I have learned that they had in their possession an important piece of the Montglane Service.’

[The King’s Indian Defense] is generally considered the most complex and most interesting of all the Indian Defenses… Theoretically, White ought to have the advantage because his position is freer. But Black’s position is solid and full of resource; a tenacious player can accomplish miracles with this defense.

– Fred Reinfeld,
Complete Book of Chess Openings

Black will…allow White to create a strong pawn centre and proceed to attack it. Other common features are Black’s attempts to open the black-squared long diagonal and a pawn storm by Black’s King-side pawns.

– Edward R. Brace,
An Illustrated History of Chess

The silence was broken by the sound of splintering wood.

I glanced across the room from where I stood by the hearth and saw that Lily had disconnected Mother’s answering machine and pulled the spaghetti of wires from the drawer; they were splayed across the campaign desk. With Key and Vartan looking on, she was using the dagger-shaped letter
opener to pry the stuck drawer all the way out of the desk. From the sound of it, she was deconstructing the thing.

‘What are you doing?’ I said in alarm. ‘That desk is one hundred years old!’

‘I hate to destroy an authentic souvenir of British colonial warfare – it must mean so much to you,’ my aunt said. ‘However, your mother and I once found some objects of immeasurable value hidden in drawers that were jammed just like this one. She must have known something like this would set off a few bells for me.’ She went on hacking in frustration.

‘That campaign desk is awfully flimsy to keep anything of value,’ I pointed out. It was just a lightweight box with drawers, on collapsible legs or ‘horses’ – of the sort British officers hauled by pack mules on campaigns through treacherous mountain regions from the Khyber Pass to Kashmir. ‘Besides, for as long as I can recall, that drawer has always jammed.’

‘Time to unjam it, then,’ Lily insisted.

‘Amen to that,’ Key agreed, grabbing up the heavy stone paperweight lying on the desk and handing it to Lily. ‘You know what they say: “Better late than never.”’

Lily grasped the rock weight and swung it down onto the drawer with force. I could hear the soft wood splintering further, but she still couldn’t yank the drawer all the way out.

Zsa-Zsa, crazed by all the noise and excitement, was squeaking frantically and bouncing around everyone’s legs. She sounded something like a colony of rats going down at sea. I picked her up and tucked her under my arm, squishing her into temporary silence.

‘Permit me?’ Vartan offered Lily politely, taking the tools from her hands.

He stuck the letter opener between the desk and the side of the drawer and hammered it with the paperweight,
jimmying it until the soft wood cracked loose from the drawer’s base. Lily gave one good tug on the handle and the drawer was released.

Vartan held the damaged drawer in his hands and studied the sides and base, while Key knelt on the floor and stretched her arm back into the open hole as far as she could reach. She felt around inside.

‘There’s nothing there that I can touch,’ Key said, tipping back on her haunches. ‘But my arm won’t reach all the way to the back.’

‘Permit me,’ Vartan repeated, and he set down the drawer and squatted beside her, sliding his hand back into the open cavity of the desk. He seemed to take quite a long time feeling around. At last, he withdrew his arm and looked up at the three of us with no expression as we stood there expectantly.

‘I can’t find anything back there,’ Vartan said, standing up and brushing the dust from his sleeve.

Maybe it was my natural suspicion or just my jangled nerves, but I didn’t believe him. Lily was right. Something
could
be hidden there. After all, these desks might’ve had to be lightweight for transport – but they also had to be secure. For decades, they’d been used to carry battle plans and strategies, messages with secret codes from headquarters, field units, and spies.

I palmed off Zsa-Zsa to Lily once more and yanked open the other drawer of the campaign desk, rummaging around inside until I found the flashlight we always kept there. Brushing Key and Vartan to one side, I bent forward and swept the flashlight around, exploring inside the desk. But Vartan was correct: There was nothing in there at all. So what had made that drawer stick all these years?

I picked up the damaged drawer from the floor where Vartan had put it, and I looked it over myself. Though I saw nothing amiss, I shoved the answering machine and tools
aside and I set the drawer atop the desk, pulling out the other drawer to dump out its contents. Comparing the two side by side, it seemed that the rear panel of the damaged drawer was slightly higher than that of the other drawer.

I glanced at Lily, still holding the wriggling Zsa-Zsa. She nodded to me as if to confirm that she’d known all along. Then I turned to confront Vartan Azov.

‘It seems there’s a secret compartment here,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I noticed it earlier. But I thought it best that I should not mention it.’ His voice was still polite, but his cold smile had returned – a smile like a warning.

‘Not
mention
it?’ I said, in disbelief.

‘As you’ve said yourself, that drawer has been – do you say,
stuck
? – for a very long time. We’ve no idea what is hidden there,’ he said, adding with irony, ‘maybe something valuable – like battle plans left from the Crimean War.’

This wasn’t entirely implausible, since my father had actually grown up in the Soviet Crimea – but it was highly unlikely. It wasn’t even his desk. And though I was as nervous as anyone about looking inside that secret compartment, I’d had about enough of Mr Vartan Azov’s high-handed logic and steely glances. I turned on my heel and headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Vartan’s voice shot after me like a bullet.

‘To get a hacksaw,’ I tossed over my shoulder, and kept on moving. After all, I reasoned, I could hardly deploy Lily’s rock-smashing technique. Even if the contents had nothing to do with Mother, there might be something fragile or valuable tucked away in that panel.

But Vartan had crossed the room, swiftly and silently, and was suddenly there beside me, his hand on my arm, propelling me toward the door right into the mudroom. Inside the cloistering closet he slammed the inner doors shut and leaned against them, blocking any exit.

We were jammed there together in the tiny space between the food locker and the coat hooks that were laden with enough fur and down-stuffed parkas, I could feel the static electricity plastering my hair to the wall. But before I could protest this preemption, Vartan had grasped me by both arms. He spoke quickly, under his breath so no one outside could hear.

‘Alexandra, you must listen to me, this is extremely important,’ he said. ‘I know things you need to know. Crucial things. We must speak –
right now
– before you go about opening any more cupboards or drawers around here.’

‘We have nothing to talk about,’ I snapped, with a bitterness that surprised me. I extracted myself from his grasp. ‘I don’t know what on earth you’re doing here – why Mother would even invite you—’

‘But
I
know why she asked me,’ Vartan interrupted. ‘Though I never spoke with her, she didn’t have to say it. She needed information – and so do you. I was the only other person
there
on that day, who may be able to provide it.’

I didn’t have to ask what he meant by
there
– or what the day in question was. But this hardly prepared me for what came next.

‘Xie,’ he said, ‘don’t you understand? We must speak about your father’s murder.’

I felt as if I’d been socked in the stomach; for a moment my wind was gone. No one had called me Xie – my father’s preferred nickname for me, short for Alexie – in the ten years since my chess-playing youth. Hearing it now, coupled with
Your father’s murder,
made me feel completely disarmed.

Here it was again, that thing we never spoke about, the thing I never thought of. But my suppressed past had managed to penetrate the crushing, suffocating space of the mudroom and was staring me in the face with that horrid Ukrainian sangfroid. As customary, I retreated into complete denial.

‘His murder?’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief – as if that would somehow clear the air. ‘But the Russian authorities maintained at the time that my father’s death was an accident, that the guard on that roof shot him in error, believing that someone was absconding with something valuable from the treasury.’

Vartan Azov had suddenly turned his dark eyes upon me with attentiveness. That strange purple gleam was burning from within, like a flame being blown alive.

‘Perhaps your father
was
escaping the treasury with something of great value,’ he said slowly, as if he’d just spotted a hidden move, an oblique opening he’d previously overlooked. ‘Perhaps your father was leaving with something whose value he himself might have only just grasped at that moment. But whatever did happen on that day, Alexandra, it is certain to me that your mother would never have asked me to come all this distance just now – to this remote spot, along with you and Lily Rad – unless she believed, as I do, that your father’s death ten years ago must be directly related to the assassination of Taras Petrossian, just two weeks ago, in London.’

‘Taras Petrossian!’ I cried aloud, though Vartan silenced me with a swift glance toward the inner doors.

Taras Petrossian was the rich entrepreneur and business mogul who, ten years ago, had organized our Russian chess tourney! He’d been there, that day at Zagorsk. I knew very little more than this about the man. But at this moment Vartan Azov – arrogant bastard or no – suddenly had my full attention.

‘How was Petrossian killed?’ I wanted to know. ‘And why? And what was he doing in London?’

‘He was organizing a big chess exhibition there, with grandmasters from every country,’ Vartan said, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he’d assumed I would already know that.

‘Petrossian fled to England several years ago with plenty of money, when the corrupt capitalist oligarchy he’d created in Russia was seized, along with that of many others, by the Russian state. But he hadn’t completely escaped, as he might have imagined. Just two weeks ago, Petrossian was found dead in his bed, in his posh hotel suite in Mayfair. It’s believed he was poisoned, a tried-and-true Russian methodology. Petrossian had often spoken out against the
Siloviki.
But the arm of that brotherhood has a very long reach for those whom they wish to silence—’

When I seemed confused by the term, Vartan added, ‘In Russian, it means something like “The Power Guys.” The group who replaced the KGB just after the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, they’re called the FSB – the Federal Security Bureau. Their members and methods remain the same; only the name has changed. They are far more powerful than the KGB ever was – a State unto themselves, with no outside controls. These Siloviki, I believe, were responsible for your father’s murder – after all, the guard who shot him was surely in their employ.’

What he was suggesting seemed crazy: KGB gunmen with poison up their sleeves. But I could feel that awful chill of recognition begin to creep into my spine again. It
had
been Taras Petrossian, as I now recalled, who’d relocated that last game of ours outside of Moscow, to Zagorsk. If he’d now been assassinated, it might give more credence to my mother’s fears all these years. Not to mention her disappearance, and the clues she’d left that pointed to that last game. Perhaps she had been right in her suspicions all along. As Key might say, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.’

But there was something more that I needed to know, something that didn’t make sense.

‘What did you mean a moment ago,’ I asked Vartan, ‘when you said that my father might have been “escaping the
treasury with something of value” – which only he might understand?’ Vartan smiled enigmatically, as if I’d just passed some important esoteric test.

‘It didn’t occur to me myself,’ he admitted, ‘until you mentioned the “official” explanation of your father’s death. I think it likely that your father
was
leaving the building that morning with something of enormous value, something that others could only intuit might be in his possession, but which they could not
see.
’ When I looked mystified, he added: ‘I suspect he was leaving the building that morning with
information.
’

‘Information?’ I objected. ‘What sort of information could possibly be so valuable that someone would want to kill him?’

‘Whatever it was,’ he told me, ‘it must have been something which apparently he could not be permitted to pass along to anyone.’

‘Even assuming my father
did
get information about something as dangerous as you’re suggesting, how could he possibly have discovered it so quickly there at the Zagorsk treasury? As you yourself know, we were only inside that building for a few brief minutes,’ I pointed out. ‘And during that entire time,
my father spoke to no one who could have given him such information.’

‘Perhaps
he
spoke to no one,’ he agreed. ‘But someone
did
speak to
him.
’

An image of that morning, which I’d so long suppressed, had begun to form in my mind.
My father had left me for a moment, that morning at the treasury. He’d crossed the room to look inside a large glass case. And then someone went over and joined him there –

‘
You
spoke to my father!’ I cried.

This time, Vartan didn’t try to silence me. He merely nodded in confirmation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went and stood beside your father as he was looking into a large display case. Inside that glass case, he and I saw a golden chess piece covered with jewels. I told him it had just been newly rediscovered in the cellars of the Hermitage at Petersburg, along with Schliemann’s treasures of Troy. It was said that the piece had once belonged to Charlemagne and perhaps to Catherine the Great. I explained to your father that it had been brought to Zagorsk and put on display for this last game. It was just at that moment when your father suddenly turned away, he took you by the hand, and you both left that place.’