Grandmaster by Molly Cochran Read Free Book Online

crowd, wore a white stocking cap, his features blunt and menacing. The other was smaller and bareheaded. He took aim.
    Corfus caught sight of Riesling as the wounded man struggled to his feet, then lurched a few feet away from him toward the other exit. His throat closed in pity. In less than a second, he knew, the man was going to die in front of his eyes.
    The bullet caught the spy square in the back, and Riesling arched convulsively and flipped sideways in midair, his shattered arm flinging outward in a spray of blood.
    The next moments were pure madness. Riesling's hand clawed at the floor. Somehow he was managing, in the extreme of suffering, to move toward a cluster of terrified, shrieking onlookers plastered against the wall. The bareheaded man fired again at Riesling. His body jerked upward and then fell forward with a thump.
    Corfus backed away. His stomach wrenched. The man in the stocking cap was standing in firing position again, impervious to the screams of the people in the lobby.
    And he was aiming directly at Corfus.
    In the next second, a woman, sobbing in panic, lunged in front of Corfus. The bullet took her in the head, exploding it like a melon.
    The brutal act was accentuated by a flash of white light.
    The photographer, scurrying toward the main doors with his prized camera, suddenly fell backward, a gaping hole torn in the right side of his throat.
    It had all happened in a span of seconds. The stampede for the exits began, and Corfus went with the crowd. Outside, a swarm of onlookers had already begun to collect. He didn't see the gunmen leave. He looked back once. All he saw were the splayed bodies of Riesling, the woman with half a head, and the German photographer.
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    S tarcher said nothing for several minutes. He just sat at his desk, the light from the lamp forming a pool of yellow light over the haphazard items that Corfus had placed there. Slowly Starcher shifted the objects around to form two neat double lines.
    He picked up the three passports in the upper left corner and leafed through them. The American passport was Riesling's. The other two were Finnish and had evidently been stolen or were still in the process of preparation, since the stamped photographs of the subjects were missing. They belonged, ostensibly, to a Rickard and Mirja Trojloi. The other items on the desk were Riesling's Russian working papers and identity card and a manila envelope containing some six thousand rubles and several hundred dollars in American bills.
    He set them down again. "He gave you all of this?" he asked, gesturing to the collection of papers and oddments.
    Corfus nodded. "He emptied his pockets and stuffed everything into my hands."
    Starcher squeezed his eyes shut. His headache was back. "Were you spotted?"
    Corfus snorted. "Damn right. The bastard had a gun pointed dead at me."
    "What happened?"
    Corfus lowered his eyes. "Someone—a woman—got in the way." Starcher looked up at the ceiling. "It got pretty bad, Andy."
    Starcher nodded, expressionless. An incidental murder. Riesling had tried to save Corfus's life by pulling the gunfire away from him. "What did Riesling say? Try to remember the exact words."
    "I don't think he was lucid," Corfus said. "He didn't make a lot of sense."
    "Go ahead."
    "He said something about Havana, first. The sugar crop or something. Really, it didn't seem to mean anything."
    "What did he say exactly?" Starcher pressed.
    "All right, all right. He said, 'In Havana, the sun is hot, but it's good for the sugar crop.' That's what he said. Exactly."
    Starcher sat back. "Havana?" he whispered. Riesling only traveled between Finland and the Soviet Union. What was in Havana?
    "I told you it didn't make sense."
    "Are you sure about Havana?" Starcher said slowly. "Could it have been Hamina? They sound alike."
    "It was Havana," Corfus said stubbornly. "Anyway, they don't grow sugar in Finland."
    Starcher exhaled. "What else? Was that all?"
    "No. He said something else when