I had those first glimmers that something might be terribly wrong. I tried to relax as I shoved some more crumpled paper under the nascent fires. But the timing of this unannounced soiree of Rodo's bothered me just a weekend away from my mother's in Colorado, a party that Rodo himself had actually known about, as I recalled from his voice mail.

'What exactly do you know about this party?' I asked Leda. 'Do you have any idea who these "dignitaries" might be?'

'I heard it might be some high-level muckety-mucks from the government. n.o.body knows for sure,' she said. She was hunkering down over her blades as she pa.s.sed me a few more sheets of crumpled paper. 'They made all the arrangements with Rodo himself, not the catering manager. They're throwing it on a night when the restaurant isn't even open. It's all very hush-hush. '

'Then how did you learn so much?' I asked.

'When he heard you'd left for the weekend, Rodo threw a real hissy fit that's the first I learned that he wanted you and you alone for tomorrow night,' Leda explained. 'But as for the boum, we all knew there was some private function cooking. The cellar's been reserved for two weeks-'

'Two weeks?' I interrupted.

I might be jumping to conclusions, but this seemed more than synchronicity. I couldn't help hearing Vartan's comment: You and I have too many coincidences in our lives. I was growing horribly certain that there was no such thing as a coincidence when it came to the way my life was running these past few days.

'But why would Rodo single me out for this shindig?' I asked Leda, who was kneeling beside me wadding newsprint. 'I mean, I'm hardly a seasoned caterer, just an apprentice chef. Has anything happened lately that might prompt this sudden interest in my career?'

Leda glanced up. Her next words confirmed my worst fears.

'Well, actually, there was a man who came by the restaurant a few times this weekend, looking for you.' she said. 'Maybe he has something to do with the gig tomorrow night.'

'What man?' I said, trying to quell that familiar adrenaline rush.

'He didn't give his name or leave a note,' Leda told me, getting to her feet and brushing off her hands on her shorts. 'He was pretty distinguished tall and elegant, with an expensive trenchcoat. But mysterious, too. He wore blue-tinted sungla.s.ses so you couldn't quite see his eyes.'

Terrific. This was the very last thing I needed a man of mystery. I tried to focus on Leda, but my eyes went all crooked. I was nearly reeling from four days' deprivation of food, of liquid, of sleep. Synchronicity, serendipity, and strangers be d.a.m.ned, I needed to get home. I needed to lie down in a bed.

'Where are you going?' Leda said as I stumbled toward the steps in a blur.

'We'll discuss it in the morning,' I managed to say, as I grabbed my jacket and backpack from the floor on my way out. 'The fires will be fine. Rodo will survive. The enigmatic stranger may return. And we who are about to die salute you.'

'Okay, I'll be here,' Leda said. 'And you take care.'

I headed up the steps on wobbly legs and staggered into the deserted alley. I glanced at my watch: it was almost two a.m. and not a creature was stirring; the narrow, brick-paved lane was dead as a tomb. It was so silent that you could hear the waters of the Potomac in the distance, lapping the trestles of Key Bridge.

At the end of the alley I turned the corner to my small slate terrace bordering the ca.n.a.l. I fumbled in my pack for the key to my front door, illuminated by the golden pink light of the single streetlamp marking the entrance to the shadowy path that descended into Francis Scott Key Park. The low iron bicycle railing surrounding the terrace was all that kept one from toppling over the side of the sheer rock retaining wall that dropped sixty feet to the motionless surface of the C & O Ca.n.a.l.

My cliffside dwelling provided an astonishing overlook across the vast expanse of the Potomac. People would kill for a view like this, and probably had in the past. But over the years, Rodo had refused to sell this weathered structure, due to its proximity to the Hearth. In exhaustion, I took a deep breath of the river and pulled out my key.

There were two doors, actually, separate entrances. The one at the left led to the main floor with its iron bars and shuttered windows, where Rodo kept important doc.u.ments and files for his flickering fireside empire. I unlocked the other the upstairs, where the slave laborer slept, always within handy availability to the fires.

As I was about to step inside, I b.u.mped my toe on something I hadn't noticed, lying there on the step. It was a clear plastic bag with the Washington Post inside. I'd never subscribed to the Post in my life, and there were no other residents in the alley it might belong to. I was about to dump the bag, paper and all, into the nearby city trash can, when under the limpid pink light of the streetlamp I noticed the yellow stickie that someone had attached with a handwritten note: 'See page A1.'

I switched on my house lights and stepped inside. Dropping my rucksack on the floor of the foyer, I yanked the newspaper from its plastic bag and pulled it open.

The headlines seemed to be screaming at me from across time and s.p.a.ce. I could hear the blood beating in my ears. I could hardly breathe.

April 7, 2003: TROOPS, TANKS ATTACK CENTRAL BAGHDAD...

We'd taken the city at six a.m., Iraqi time only hours ago, barely long enough to get the news into this paper. In my dazed stupor, I could hardly absorb the rest.

All I could hear was Lily Rad's voice haunting the recesses of my mind: It was never the game of chess that your mother feared, but another Game...the most dangerous Game imaginable...based on a rare and valuable chess set from Mesopotamia...

Why hadn't I seen it at once? Was I blind?

What event had happened two weeks ago? Two weeks ago when Taras Petrossian mysteriously died in London? Two weeks ago when my mother sent all those invitations to her birthday party?

Two weeks ago on the morning of March 20 U.S. troops had invaded Iraq. Birthplace of the Montglane Service. Two weeks ago was when the first move had been made. The Game had begun again.

PART TWO.

Nigredo.

You...must search into the causes of things, and endeavour to understand how the process of generation and resuscitation is accomplished by means of decomposition, and how all life is produced out of decay...it must perish and be putrefied; again, by the influence of the stars, which works through the elements, it is restored to life, and becomes once more a heavenly thing that has its habitation in the highest region of the firmament.

Basilius Valentinus, The Eighth Key.

The Return.

Suddenly I realized that I was no longer a prisoner, neither in body nor in soul; that I was not condemned to death... As I was falling asleep, two Latin words were running through my brain, for no apparent reason: magna mater. The next morning when I woke I realized what they meant... In ancient Rome candidates to the secret cult of magna mater had to pa.s.s through a bath of blood. If they survived, they would be born again.

Jacques Bergier, Le Matin des Magiciens.

It is only this initiatory death and resurrection that consecrates a shaman.

Mircea Eliade, Shamanism.

Dolena Geizerov, Duhlyikoh Vahstohk.

(Valley of Geysers, the Far East).

He felt as if he were rising from a great depth, floating toward the surface of a dark sea. A bottomless sea. His eyes were closed but he could sense the darkness beneath him. As he rose toward the light, the pressure on him seemed to increase, a pressure that made it difficult to breathe. With effort, he slid his hand to his chest. Against his skin was a soft piece of cloth, some sort of thin garment or cover with no weight at all.

Why couldn't he breathe?

If he focused on his breath, he found it came more easily, rhythmically. The sound of his own breathing was something strange and new, as if he hadn't ever heard it clearly before. He listened as the sound rose and fell in a soft, gentle cadence.

With his eyes still shut, in his mind's eye he could almost make out an image hovering near him: an image that seemed so important, if only he could grasp it. But he couldn't quite see it. It was all rather vague and blurry around the edges. He tried harder to see it: Perhaps it was a figurine of sorts. Yes, it was the carved figure of a woman, shimmering in a golden light. She was seated within a partially curtained pavilion. Was he the sculptor? Had he been the one to carve it? It seemed so important. If he could just pull the draperies aside with his mind, then he could see within. He could see the figure. But each time he tried to imagine this task, his head was flooded with a brilliant, blinding glare.

With extra effort he finally managed to open his eyelids and tried to focus upon his surroundings. He found himself in some kind of undifferentiated s.p.a.ce filled with a strange light, an incandescent glow flickering around him. Beyond, there were impenetrable deep brown shadows, and in the distance a sound that he couldn't identify, like rushing water.

Now he could see his own hand, which still rested upon his chest, faded like a fallen flower petal. It seemed unreal, as if it had moved here of its own accord, as if it were someone else's hand.

Where was he?

He tried to sit up, but found he was too weak even to attempt the effort. His throat was dry and scratchy; he couldn't swallow.

He heard voices whispering nearby, the voices of women.

'Water,' he tried to say. The word barely pa.s.sed his parched lips.

'Yah nyihpuhnyee mahyoo,' said one of the voices: I don't understand you.

But he had understood her.

'Kah Tohri Eechahs?' he asked the voice in the same tongue in which she'd addressed him, though he couldn't yet place what it was. What time is it?

And though he still couldn't make out forms or faces in the flickering half-light, he could see the slender female hand that descended to gently rest over his own hand, where it still lay upon his chest. Then her voice, a different voice from the first a familiar voice spoke just beside his ear. It was low and liquid and soothing as a lullaby.

'My son,' she said. 'At last you have returned.'

The Chef.

But men, whether savage or civilized, must eat. Alexandre Dumas, Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine To know how to eat is to know enough.

Basque saying.

Washington, D.C.

April 7, 2003.

At 10:30 on Monday morning i was maneuvering rodo's Volkswagen Touareg through the misty drizzle of rain, up River Road, headed for Kenwood just north of the District and my boss's palatial villa, Euskal Herria 'the Basque Land.'

I was the designated driver to make sure the raw vittles arrived intact. Per Rodo's commands left on my house phone, I'd already picked up the iced crustaceans from Cannon Seafood in Georgetown and the fresh veggies from Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. They'd be washed, sc.r.a.ped, chopped, diced, minced, shredded, mandolined, or mouli'd under Rodo's private supervision by his own resident staff of culinary sous-slaves, in preparation for tonight's 'hush-hush' dinner at Sutalde.

But though I'd managed to get some sleep and Leda had delivered some fresh hearth-brewed coffee to my doorstep this morning, my nerves were still so raw it took every effort just to be sure that I arrived intact.

As I drove up the slick, winding road with windshield wipers slapping against the blur of water, beside me on the pa.s.senger seat I grabbed a handful of gooseberries from the small wooden box I'd filched, intended for tonight's fixings, and I popped them into my mouth, washed down by some of Leda's syrupy java. My first fresh food in days. I realized it was also the first time in four days I'd been left alone to think, and I had plenty of food for thought.

The one thought I couldn't stop going over and over in my mind was, as Key might say: Too many cooks spoil the broth. I knew that this bouillabaisse of unlikely coincidences and conflicting clues contained too many potentially lethal ingredients to allow easy digestion. And there were too many folks dishing up more by sleight of hand.

For instance, if the Livingstons and Aunt Lily were all acquainted with Taras Petrossian, the organizer of that last chess tourney where my father was killed, why had no one at dinner including Vartan Azov deigned to mention the detail they all surely must have known: that this same chap they'd left recently deceased in London was Vartan's stepfather?

And if everyone who'd been involved in the past had been endangered or even killed including Lily's family and my own why would she spill the beans about this Game in front of Vartan and Nokomis Key? Did Lily think they were players, too? And what about the Livingston family and Galen March, who'd all been invited to my mother's, as well? Just how dangerous were they?

But regardless of who the players were or what the Game was, I now realized that there were a few captured pieces of the puzzle I was holding in my hand only. In chess we refer to this as 'material advantage.'

First, as far as I knew, I was the only person except my late father who'd discovered that there might be not just one, but two Black Queens of the Montglane Service. And second, other than the mystery person who'd left that Washington Post on my doorstep, I might also be the only one who'd connected that jeweled chess set created in Baghdad twelve hundred years ago with events unfolding there right now or any of it with that other dangerous Game.

But when it came to the Game, I now knew one thing beyond doubt: Lily was mistaken back in Colorado when she'd said we needed a master plan. By my lights it was too early in the Game for strategy. Not when we were still in the opening moves 'the Defense' as Lily herself had said.

In any chess game, though you need a wide-angle view of the board the big picture, a long-range strategy as the game progresses, the landscape will quickly change. To keep your balance, to be able to land on your feet, you must never let the long view distract your attention from those immediate threats always lurking nearby, those close encounters in an ever-shifting sea, with dangerous actions and defensive or aggressive counteractions lapping about you at every side. These require tactics.

This was the part of the game I knew best. This was the part of the game I loved: the part where everything was still potential, where elements like surprise and risk would pay off.

As I swung the Touareg through the big stone gates of Kenwood, I knew exactly where that kind of danger might lie closest at this very moment, where those tactical maneuvers might soon come in handy: less than three hundred yards away up the hill at villa Euskal Herria.

I'd forgotten until I entered Kenwood that this week was the Cherry Blossom Festival in D.C., where each year hundreds of thousands of tourists packed the National Mall to snap photos of the reflecting pool with its mirror images of j.a.panese cherry trees.

But the little-known cherry trees in Kenwood had apparently been discovered only by the j.a.panese. Hundreds of j.a.panese tourists were already here, moving like wraiths through the rain beneath dark umbrellas along the gra.s.sy, winding creek. I drove uphill beside them through the astonishing cathedral of black-branched cherry trees, so old and gnarled that they seemed to have been planted a hundred years ago.

At the top of the hill, when I rolled down the window at Rodo's private gates to punch in my intercom code, mist swirled into the car like damp smoke. It was permeated with a heady aroma of cherry blossoms that made me a little dizzy.

Through the fog beyond the high iron gates I could see acres of Rodo's beloved xapata, the Basque trees that yield abundant black cherries for Saint John's Day each June. And beyond in the mist, floating above the sea of cherry trees in frothy magenta bloom, lay the sprawling villa Euskal Herria with its Mediterranean tiled roof and vast terraces. Its shutters painted a brilliant rouge Basque, the color of cow's blood, and the flamingo-pink stucco walls dripping with vermillion bougainvillea, it was all like something from a Fauve painting. Indeed, everything about Euskal Herria had always seemed illusory and strange especially here so close to Washington, D.C. It seemed to have been dropped from the skies of Biarritz instead.

When the gates swung open, I drove around the circle drive to the back side of the house where the kitchens, with their wall of French windows, were located. On a clear day, from the enormous tiled terrace, you could see the entire valley beyond. Rodo's silver-haired concierge, Eremon, was already awaiting me there with his crew to unload the car half a dozen muscular lads all clad in black, with bandannas and txapelas, dark berets: the Basque brigade. While Eremon helped me down from the Touareg, they wordlessly set to their task of unloading boxes of fresh produce, eggs, and iced seafood.

I always found it interesting that Rodo who'd grown up like a wild goat on the Pyrenees pa.s.ses; whose family crest included a tree, a sheep, and some pigs; who still raked fires for a living and composted his own crops today maintained a lifestyle involving multiple villas, a permanent staff of servants, and a full-time concierge.

The answer was simple: They were all Basques so they weren't really employees, they were brothers.

According to Rodo, Basques were brothers regardless of what language they spoke French, Spanish, or Euskera, the Basque tongue. And regardless of where they came from one of the four Basque provinces belonging to Spain or one of the three that are part of France they think of the Basque regions as a single country.

As if to reinforce this important point, just above the French windows a favorite, if private, Basque maxim had been set in hand-painted tiles into the stucco wall: EUSKERA MATHEMATICS.

4 + 3 = 1.

Eremon and I entered the enormous kitchen through the wall of French windows and the brigade started efficiently unloading the crates across the room.

We found Rodo, his back to us, his compact, muscular body bent with intensity over the stove, stirring something with a big wooden spoon. Rodo's long dark hair, normally brushed up from his neck like a horse's mane to tumble over his collar, was today pulled back into a ponytail with his customary red beret instead of a chef's toque, to keep it from the food. He was dressed in his usual whites slacks, open-throat shirt, and espadrilles tied with long ribbons about the ankles a costume usually worn on festive occasions with the bright red neck kerchief and waist sash. This morning it was covered with a big white butcher's ap.r.o.n.

Rodo did not turn when we entered. He was breaking a large bar of bitter Bayonnais chocolate into pieces and dropping them into the double boiler as he stirred. I a.s.sumed this meant that tonight we'd taste his specialty, a version of Txapel Euskadi: Beret Basque, a cake he filled with dark liquid chocolate and cherries preserved in liquor. My mouth was watering already.

Without looking up from his task, Rodo muttered, 'So! The neskato geldo returns from dancing Jota all night with the prince!' His favorite little cinder girl, he was calling me. 'Quelle surprise! Back to the kitchen to rake the ashes! Ha!'

'It wasn't exactly a Jota I was dancing out there,' I a.s.sured him, Jota being one of those ebullient Basque dances Rodo loved so much, with high kicks, everyone arms akimbo, leaping off the floor. 'I almost got snowed in, in the middle of nowhere. I had to drive through a blizzard to get here in time to help with this unannounced boum of yours tonight. I might have been killed! You're the one who ought to be grateful!'

I was fuming, but there was method in my fulminations. When it came to dealing with Rodo, I knew from experience that one had to fight fire with fire. And whoever tossed the first match into the fat usually came out on top.

But maybe not this time.

Rodo had dropped his spoon in the chocolate pot and turned to Eremon and me. His stormy black brows were drawn together like a brewing thundercloud as he waved his hand frenetically in the air.