Grandmaster Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.
    He dumped the ZIL at Kiev station and boarded a crowded metro car ripe with the odors of tabaka and shashlik. He had made it to Moscow. For the first time in days, he began to feel some semblance of safety.
    All for a goddamned chess player, he thought, easing into the luxury of a vacant seat. A hell of a way for a good field man to go, over a two-bit defector who wasn't even in Intelligence.
    Yet that was how they did go, he knew. An overheard word, a chance sighting, and death blew its whistle and sent you to the bench. No fanfare. No trial by twelve good men and true. Just a bullet in the back while you weren't looking.
    He was sweating. From his pocket he pulled out a handkerchief and gasped audibly. The gold medallion was dangling from its chain in the folds of the cloth. He stuffed it quickly back into his pocket and rose, pretending not to notice the stares of the other passengers around him.
    He worked his way toward the front of the train. Starcher was going to have to get the chess player out of Russia. Riesling was through. The trip from Finland into Russia had been rough. Trying to go out the same way, with the added baggage of a chess player and a woman, would be suicide. The border was just too tightly sealed. He wasn't taking anyone back through Finland again, ever.
    He had three things on his mind. Tell the chess player the deal was off for the time being. Then get to Starcher. And get rid of the medallion , he thought, near panic. It was doing something to him, almost as if it had a power of its own that was too strong to harness. Christ, why had it come to him?
    Perhaps because he owed a debt. It had been ... how long, eight years? Riesling had been sent into East Berlin to pick up a defector, but it had been a setup. When he went to meet the defector, there was no defector. Only the KGB waiting for him.
    He had gotten out of the trap but, with a shoulder dislocated and a knee injured, had been able to flee only to the third floor of an industrial storage loft in a seamy commercial corner of the city. The KGB had followed and had ringed the building with men. That they hadn't rushed the building was clear indication that they wanted him alive, perhaps as a prime exhibit in some showy for-Western-consumption spy trial. There was no way out, and Riesling had carefully checked his revolver, placed his extra shells on the floor in front of him, and sat down to wait. One bullet would be for him.
    He passed out from the pain.
    Then someone was shaking him.
    He struggled to open his eyes and then to focus them. The first thing he-saw was a golden coiled snake close to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The coiled snake was on a medallion. It hung around the neck of a young man with piercing sky blue eyes.
    Riesling had tried to speak, but the man had clapped a hand over his mouth.
    "Don't talk," he whispered. "We're getting out of here."
    "Who are you?" Riesling said.
    "I work for Starcher," the young man said.
    "I don't know if I can move," Riesling had said. "My shoulder's separated, and my leg's messed up."
    "We'll manage."
    As the man helped him to his feet, Riesling saw that a section of the corrugated steel wall of the storage loft had been ripped open, as if by a giant can opener. A tear, shaped like the pupil of a cat's eye, four feet long and a foot wide, allowed moonlight to seep into the loft.
    Riesling’s rescuer led him to the hole in the steel, slid through himself, and then reached back for the American agent. "Put your good arm around my neck and hold on," he whispered.
    Riesling followed the man, threw his right arm around him, and then they were moving down the side of the building, three stories down into a narrow alley, closed off at both ends, that separated the loft building from the tenement next door.
    When they reached the ground, the young man helped Riesling to the tenement building and they went inside. Before the door closed behind them, though, Riesling