Kingmaker (21 page)

“That depends,” the boy said. He did not look up from his game. “Are you my ride out of here?”

“Assuming you want to go.”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.” The kid was wearing a blue-and-white-horizontally-striped shirt that was too big for him. The blue fused with the unnaturally pale hue of his eyes.

“Why did you enter the contest if you weren’t sure you wanted to leave?”

“I know I want to leave,” the kid said. “I just don’t know if I want to go with you.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with me?”

“You want to put me in some rich tight-ass boarding school in Boston with a bunch of arrogant pretentious pussies.”

Alexei frowned. “It’s actually an excellent school. It was extremely difficult to secure an opening.”

“Let someone else have it then. All I want is to get out of here.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Home.”

“Florian,” Alexei began, “you can’t go home. Your parents…” He broke off and took a moment to consider his next words. “They’re not in any position to take care of you right now. You know that, right?”

“They don’t have to take care of me,” the boy said. “I can take care of myself. I just want to go home.”

Alexei looked away and nodded. He drummed his fingers on the dark green plastic table. The boy’s hesitation was not something he had come prepared for since he could not imagine how anyone on Celebration Island wouldn’t seize the first opportunity to get as far away from it as possible. Florian was obviously not your average orphan, however. He either did not understand—or, more likely, did not accept—that he was powerless and largely without options. Alexei realized that he would need to make some kind of connection with Florian before the boy would accept his assistance.

“You know,” Alexei said, “I grew up in a place like this.”

“I doubt that,” the boy said. “You’re Russian. The closest thing to a tropical climate in Russia is the subtropical zone along the coast of the Black Sea.”

Alexei squinted at the boy. “I mean I grew up in an orphanage,” he said.

“What happened to your parents?”

“They were arrested.”

“By who?”

“By the Russian secret police.”

“What did they do?”

“They were accused of being what the government referred to as
foreign agents
.”

“I mean
specifically
what did they do?”

“Christ, you’re worse than the KGB,” Alexei said. “They tried to pass some extremely sensitive information on to the United States.”

“Information about what?”

“About something that the world thought was an accident, but actually wasn’t.”

“What?”

“The radioactive contamination of more than half a million people.”

“You’re talking about Chernobyl,” the boy said.

“That’s right.”

“Were your parents there?”

“Yes.”

“What happened after they were arrested?”

“They were sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia.”

“A uranium mine?”

“I don’t know. I never found out which one.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the boy said. “Either way, they probably died. In those kinds of places, you either get worked to death, or you die of malnutrition, exposure, or disease—usually dysentery. Either that, or they developed cancerous tumors as a result of radiation exposure.”

“Anyway,” Alexei said, “when I was about your age, someone came to the orphanage where I lived to take me away, too.”

“Who?”

“The Russian Federal Security Service. Basically the new KGB.”

“Why did they pick you?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Did they train you to be a spy?”

“They did.”

“What kind of spy?” The boy had put his tablet down and was now watching Alexei with unsettling intensity.

“A domestic spy,” Alexei told the boy. “In my opinion, the absolute worst kind.”

“You mean they wanted you to target your own people?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you?”

“For a while. Then I joined the Foreign Intelligence Service and left.”

“Where did you go?”

Alexei shrugged. “I went where I was needed.”

“Did you ever go back to Russia?”

“Eventually,” Alexei said. “I had some unfinished business I needed to take care of.”

“Like what?”

“That’s not important,” Alexei said. “What’s important is that I was a misused resource. I was exploited. I never had the opportunity to choose what I wanted to do with my life, or even to pick a side. Everything was chosen for me.”

Alexei found the impassivity with which the boy continued to watch him unnerving. “And now you’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen to me, right?”

“That’s right,” Alexei said. “Sooner or later, someone is going to realize who and what you are, Florian. They’ll do everything they can to corrupt and control you, and if they can’t—well, then their only option will be to contain you.”

“How do I know you’re not here to corrupt and control me?”

“I’m here to offer you the chance to take control of your own life. I’m giving you the opportunity to attend one of the best schools in the world, and to get to know some of the most powerful families in the country. Where you go from there will be entirely up to you.”

The boy watched Alexei for a moment, then turned to retrieve the backpack from the back of his chair. He unzipped the main pocket and slipped his tablet inside.

“If you want me to go with you,” the boy said, “you have to tell me why you did it.”

“What do you mean?” Alexei said. “Why I did what?”

“Why you informed on your own parents.”

Alexei squinted at the boy and watched him for a long moment. “What makes you say that?” he finally said.

“It wasn’t coincidence that the Russian government trained you to be a domestic spy. They picked you because you were so blindly loyal to the state that you were willing to turn on your own parents. And now, all these years later, you’re here to take me away just like they came to take you away, but you’re not doing it to save me.”

Alexei’s eyebrows went up. “Oh really? Then why am I doing it?”

“You’re doing it to save
yourself
, ” the boy said. “Just about everything you do is in some way related to redeeming yourself for what you did to your parents, isn’t it?”

Alexei leaned back and looked out through the trees toward the beach. “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said. It was unclear whether he was talking to himself or the boy. “Something is telling me to walk away right now and let you figure out your own way off this island.”

“I don’t think you can do that,” the boy said.

“Oh, really? And why is that?”

The boy zipped up his backpack and stood. “Because I think you need me more than I need you.”

Alexei and Florian sat at a small round table in the back corner of Algiers Coffee House. As was his tradition, Alexei positioned himself such that he could see both the front and back doors. The screens of both their laptops were detached and the two resulting tablets were placed together to form a single, seamless, holographic chessboard. Earlier, Alexei had bought them lunch at Cafe Sushi in Harvard Square, after which he offhandedly proposed some caffeine to offset the sake, and perhaps a friendly game of chess. The suggestion of a match was casual—almost an afterthought—and belied the fact that Alexei had been devoting at least an hour almost every day to studying opening moves, strategy, and theory in the weeks leading up to their meeting.

Florian advanced his knight by dipping his finger into the projected white horse at e4, then touching the empty square at c5. Alexei was up by one piece, but he was finding himself in an increasingly defensive position. He selected his own knight at d5, but repeated the gesture to cancel the move. Florian was controlling both the seventh and eighth ranks with his rooks, and Alexei’s king was pinned down.

Alexei studied the board for another minute, then spoke without looking up. “It’s already over, isn’t it?”

“It will be in three moves.”

Alexei shook his head. “
Dammit
,” he hissed. He opened the menu on his side of the board, and with poorly concealed irritation, confirmed that he wished to resign.

Florian sipped his espresso. “Good match.”

“You were toying with me, weren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say
toying
,” Florian offered. “Perhaps
humoring
.”

Alexei studied the young man across from him. He wore a blue-and-pale-yellow-hooded rugby jersey that Alexei suspected had been hand-picked for its potential to complement the long blond hair Florian frequently pinned behind his ears and the almost unnatural azure of his eyes. As the boy’s benefactor, Alexei was doing his very best to be a graceful loser—to take pride in Florian’s achievements rather than indulge in the resentment of never having beaten him. He hadn’t actually expected to win, after all, but in Alexei’s experience, the anticipation of failure seldom made its realization any easier. Rather, all it did was shift the blame from your opponent to yourself, where it had to be gradually and insufferably internalized instead of objectified and simply ignored.

“I’m curious,” Alexei said. He leaned back and sipped his tea. “How consistently can you beat a computer?”

“No idea,” Florian admitted. “Never tried.”

Alexei gave Florian an incredulous look. “You’re telling me you’ve never played against a chess program?”

“Nope,” Florian said, “and I never intend to. Frankly, I don’t see the point.”

“The point is to improve your game, isn’t it?”

“Do you play against Emma?”

“Frequently.”

“Has it made your game better?”

“Absolutely. I’ve advanced several ranks.”

“Several ranks as defined by Emma or whatever chess program she’s running, right?”

Alexei thought for a moment. “I guess so.”

“So you’ve gotten better at playing chess against a machine, but have you gotten any better at playing against a human?”

“I don’t know. You’re the only one I play against semi-regularly. You tell me.”

“OK,” Florian said. “Your understanding of the game has definitely improved, but since I’ve known you, you haven’t actually become a fundamentally better player.”

Alexei leaned forward and crossed his arms on the table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that chess isn’t like golf or bowling. It’s not a game you play against yourself while your opponents all play against themselves, and at the end, you add up your scores and see who happened to make the fewest mistakes that day. Chess isn’t even necessarily about always playing the strongest possible game. Fundamentally, it’s about one thing and one thing only:
playing your opponent
.”

“What’s the difference? If you play a strong game of chess, doesn’t that inherently weaken your opponent?”

“Think about it in terms of music,” Florian said. “Would you rather listen to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov performed by humans on actual, acoustic, handcrafted instruments, or by machines through some kind of digital audio synthesis?”

“Humans, of course.”

“Why?”

“Because machines don’t play with emotion.”

“Right. Or, put another way, machines are too perfect. For you, music isn’t about technically flawless execution, but rather about things like interpretation, transformation, and performance. For me, chess isn’t about always making the theoretically best move; it’s about making the move that I know will exploit a weakness in my opponent, or confuse him, or insult him, or give him a false sense of confidence. The rules and theories of chess are just the score I’m playing; the instrument on which I actually perform is my opponent.”

Alexei drummed his fingertips against his mug. “Is that how you feel when you play against me?”

“Of course. That’s the only way I know how to play.”

“Give me an example.”

Florian finished his espresso and placed the tiny cup on its saucer. “You were up by a piece for most of the game, right? You played a technically strong match, and you felt pretty good going into the endgame. But you were never actually expecting to win, so as soon as you started to think that you might actually have a chance, you panicked. The only thing worse than losing a match is losing a match that you should have won, so you started playing overly defensively, which made it easy for me
to position my rooks. You could have beaten me, but instead you allowed yourself to be put in one of the worst possible positions.”

“Are you saying you actually let me get ahead by a piece as part of your strategy?”

“Yup. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You wanted to beat me so badly that I knew the best way to disrupt your game was to make you think you might actually win. By the way, the sweetest victories are those in which your opponent defeats himself.”

Alexei squinted at the young man across from him. “I never knew this about you.”

“Why would you?” the young man said. There was sudden contempt in his tone. “How would you know anything at all about me, for that matter?”

Alexei gave Florian a bewildered and somewhat aggravated look. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Forget it.”

“No, if you have something to say to me, then say it.”

“All I’m saying is that just because you pay for my education, keep my bank account topped off, and take me out for sushi whenever you happen to be in town doesn’t make you my father.”

“I never said that it did.” Alexei leaned back from the table to regard Florian from a greater distance. “Of course, it wouldn’t kill you to show a little appreciation now and then for everything I’ve given you instead of always acting like a sullen little prick.”

“Grateful for what? It’s just money to you. You’ve never given me a single thing you’ll ever miss. You’ve never even let me stay with you. Everyone else got to live in the big mysterious mansion while I got sent off to boarding school three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”

Alexei jabbed at the air over the table with his finger. “I gave you something that nobody else in the world would have
ever
given you. I gave you a
chance
. I might not be your father, but I’ve done more for you than he
ever
could have.”