I knew what this was. It was called the Drunkard's Curse being told, when you're well into your cups, that you must try not to imagine a purple elephant. Even though you've never seen a purple elephant in your life, you'll never be able to drive the imaginary b.u.g.g.e.r from your brain.

But as a chess player, I was a master of memory and perception. And I knew that once you've actually seen something, as opposed to imagining it like the two-second flash of a midgame chess position, or the twelve-second one of Vartan Azov's pectorals then there the image will remain, deposited for eternity in your mental vault. Once seen, it's ineradicable, and try as you may you can never blot it out.

I wanted to kick myself for being a horse's behind.

This Azov fellow: One week ago I wanted to beat him, or beat him up, or destroy him a healthy, aggressive stance that's saved many a chess player from ruin. But I knew that whatever was between him and me was going to be more than just a duel to the death.

I knew Vartan had been right, back in Colorado, when he'd said that there were too many coincidences in our two lives and that we ought to join forces. But was it really coincidence? After all, if Key was right, it had been my mother who'd gone through all that 'loop-de-loop' in the first place, to put him and me together.

I was standing here at the brink of an abyss, not knowing whom I could trust my mother, my uncle, my boss, my aunt, even my best friend. Then why should I, or would I, ever trust Vartan Azov?

But I did.

I knew now that Vartan Azov was flesh and blood. And not just because he'd failed to keep his sweater on.

He wanted something from me, something that I'd seen or something I knew, perhaps without even yet realizing, myself, that I knew it. That's why all the chat about Ukraine and colors and symbols and amber waves of grain And then, all at once, I did know. It all fit together completely.

I turned over my shoulder to where Vartan sat in the backseat. He was looking at me with those fathomless dark purple eyes with the flame ignited at their depths.

And all at once, I knew that he knew exactly what I knew.

'Taras Petrossian was more than some typical Russian oligarch and chess devotee, wasn't he?' I said. 'He owned a string of chi-chi restaurants, just like Sutalde here in D.C. He was financed by Basil. He had his hand in every pie. And he left it all to you.'

From the corner of my eye I saw Key's mouth twitch slightly, but she didn't try to stop me. She just kept on driving.

'Yes he did,' said Vartan, still looking at me with that intense expression, as if I were a p.a.w.n on his board. 'At least, all but one thing.'

'I know what that thing was,' I told him.

I'd racked my mind from the moment I'd stood with Nim on the bridge that night. But hard as I tried to visualize the scenario, there was simply no way I could invent that his mother Tatiana could have gotten back into the courtyard, got inside the treasury much less into my pocket to extract the card with the firebird, after my father was killed that day.

But whoever did have that card and sent it to Nim, which by his own testimony he had forwarded to my mother, had also sent something else in the same packet.

'The chessboard,' I said. 'Whoever sent it to my uncle must have been there that day at Zagorsk. It had to be Taras Petrossian. That's why they killed him.'

'No, Xie,' said Vartan. 'I sent the chessboard drawing and that card to your uncle myself just as your mother asked me to do.'

He studied me for a moment, as if unsure whether to proceed.

At last, he said, 'My stepfather was killed when he sent her the Black Queen.'

The Flight.

Flight/Flying. Transcendence; the release of the spirit from the limitations of matter; the release of the spirit of the dead...access to a superhuman state. The ability of sages to fly or "travel on the wind" symbolizes spiritual release and omnipresence.

J. C. Cooper, An Ill.u.s.trated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols.

'Please try to pay attention,' Key admonished me, as we crossed the tarmac from the tiny air depot to board our waiting plane. 'As our teachers in school used to say, "Some of the information we're about to give you today will be appearing on your exam."'

A critical download of data might come in handy right now, but I wasn't about to prompt it by asking more questions. After this morning's jumble of conflicting reports and information, I'd finally learned to shut up, listen, and keep my opinions to myself.

As we clambered into the plane with the duffel bags from the car, I noticed that I'd never before seen this plane of Key's, a vintage, single-engine Bonanza. I knew that when it came to planes she'd always liked antiques. But her tastes in general had run to rough-and-ready bush planes that could remain airborne at 50 mph.

'New trophy?' I said, once we three were buckled up and we'd begun taxiing.

'Nope,' she told me. 'The plague of Washington, D.C.: truncated runways. Wherever you land in these parts, you're always trying to put down atop the proverbial postage stamp. This baby's a loaner heavier, with less float than a high-winged plane, so we can land much shorter. It's fuel-injected though very fast so we'll get there in no time at all.'

Nor did I inquire where there was. Not that I lacked curiosity, but after that little foray of ours just now on the back roads, it seemed clear enough that, though Key and Vartan might both be draftees on my mother's team, Key still didn't trust him enough to open up and reveal everything she knew.

And I confess, after that bombsh.e.l.l of Vartan's about the Black Queen, the chessboard, and that placard from Zagorsk, I was awaiting a few elaborations myself. So, bereft of options, I decided to follow the flow.

The Bonanza smelled like old leather and damp dog fur. I wondered where she'd dug this relic up. Key revved the engines; the plane vibrated and shuddered down the runway as if thinking over whether it could really make it; but at the last possible moment it got some loft and suddenly took to the skies with surprising ease. Once we'd attained our alt.i.tude, and we were clear of heavy sky traffic, Key flipped a few switches and turned to Vartan and me. 'Let's let Otto do the driving, shall we, while we continue our little chat?' Otto was bush plane lingo for 'Otto-pilot.'

I turned to Vartan. 'You have our complete attention,' I informed him sweetly. 'If I'm not mistaken, when we left off in our last episode, your stepfather Taras Petrossian was just embracing the Black Queen.'

'I'd like to explain everything that you both want to know,' Vartan a.s.sured us, 'but you must understand it will be a very long story, going back ten years or more. There's no way to say it simply.'

'That's okay,' Key told him. 'What with fuel stops and all, we've got at least twelve hours ahead of us to hear it.'

We both stared at her. 'That's arriving in no time?' I protested.

'I'm a student of Einstein.' She shrugged.

'Well, relatively speaking,' I said, 'where are we relatively going, then?'

'Jackson Hole, Wyoming,' she told me, 'to pick up your mom.'

Jackson, as the crow flies, was twenty-two hundred miles away. And since airplanes aren't crows, as Key had pointed out, they can't just stop and refuel at the nearest cornfield.

I couldn't believe this.

Last I had heard, my mother had been headed at least metaphorically from the Virgin Islands to Washington, D.C. What in G.o.d's name was she doing at Jackson Hole? Was she still all right? And which zany was it who'd decided we had to take over half a day to fly there in this obsolete rattletrap?

I was wondering, in desperation, why I hadn't thought to bring my parachute or whether I could bail out at some remote refueling spot and hitch a ride home when Key interrupted these dire thoughts.

'Divide and conquer, that's what it was all about,' she said, by way of minimal explanation. 'Your mom may not be much of a chess player, babe, but Cat Velis sure knows how to read the handwriting on the wall. Do you have any idea just how long this Game has been under way, how much disruption it caused, before she finally blew the whistle?'

'Whistle?' I said, trying to hang on despite this seeming change of direction.

It was Vartan who intervened. 'What Nokomis says is correct,' he told me. 'Your mother has perhaps understood something important, something absolutely critical, that no one else ever before had thought of in twelve hundred years.'

Now I was listening.

'It's...I don't know exactly how to say it,' Vartan continued. 'In all these centuries, as it seems, your mother actually may have been the very first in this Game who has understood the true, the real underlying intention, of the Creator-'

'The Creator?' I practically shrieked. Where on earth was this going?

'Vartan means the creator of the chess set,' said Key with enormous disdain. 'His name was al-Jabir ibn Hayyan remember?'

Sure. I got that.

'And exactly what was Mr Hayyan's "true underlying intention"?' I managed to choke out. 'I mean, of course, according to this theory of my mother's you're both so fond of?'

They looked at me for a very long, drawn-out minute, during which time I could feel the waves of air beneath our wings; I could hear the throb of the single engine humming in hypnotic cadence.

They both seemed to be coming to some unspoken decision.

It was Vartan who broke the ice. 'Your mother saw that maybe, all along, the Game has been an illusion. That maybe there is no Game-'

'Wait,' I cut in. 'You're saying that people have been getting killed all this time have been drafted, or have actually volunteered to jump into a Game where they knew that they might be killed just for an illusion?'

'People die for illusions every day,' said Key, our unremitting philosophe.

'But how could so many people think they're involved in some dangerous Game all this time,' I said, 'if it doesn't exist?'

'Oh, it exists,' Vartan a.s.sured me. 'We are all in it. Everyone always has been. And the stakes are very high, just as Lily Rad told us. But that's not what your mother found out.'

I was still waiting.

'What your mother discovered,' said Key, 'is that this "Game" may be a ruse that leads us entirely in the wrong direction. As long as we're players, we're still inside the box; we're victims of our own myopia; we're black-and-white enemies battling on a board of our own making. We can't see the Big Picture.'

A 'ruse' that killed my father, I thought.

But aloud, I asked, 'So what exactly is this "Big Picture"?'

Key smiled. 'The Original Instructions,' she said.

My life just seemed filled to br.i.m.m.i.n.g with new discoveries.

The first of these and in terms of priorities, perhaps the most urgently in need of addressing was that we were now flying the first leg of a two-thousand-mile journey in a plane that had no bathroom.

This topic came up rather casually when Key broke out the trail mix and electrolyte drinks to provide sustenance for our trip. She cautioned us not to eat or imbibe too much, though, before approaching our first pit stop near Dubuque, wherever that was.

I'll spare the details only to mention that the logistics seemed to require either the exacting continence that such small-plane pilots are trained for, or else the highly cautious deployment of an empty pickle jar. Since there wasn't even a broom closet on this barge where one might find a shred of privacy, I opted, perforce, for the former, and declined the refreshments.

My second discovery, fortunately, was to prove a bit more rewarding.

It was Vartan's revelation of the real role that had been played by the late Taras Petrossian in this most dangerous, if illusory, Game.

'Taras Petrossian, the man who became my stepfather, was descended from Armenian ancestors who were situated in Krym for generations, and like all Armenians, in the Black Sea region since ancient times,' Vartan told us. He added, with a wry smile, 'When the USSR fell to pieces ten years ago, this placed my stepfather in an unusual and interesting position at least, from a chess player's point of view.

'To understand what I mean, you must know a bit of the background of the land I am speaking of: Krym is not only the birthplace of Alexandra's father, but this peninsula, almost an island, and the surrounding world, is also a place of many legends. I think it is no accident that a large part of the story I am about to tell you focuses on this location on the Black Sea.'

The Second Grandmaster's Tale Over the centuries, Krym has changed rulers many times. In the Middle Ages, it was the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, and the Ottoman Turks ruled it as well. By the fifteenth century Krym had become the largest slave-trading center on the Black Sea. It did not pa.s.s into Russian hands until Potemkin captured it for Catherine the Great, during the Russo-Turkish Wars. Then, in the mid-1800s during the Crimean War, it was fought over by Russia, still trying to dismantle the Turkish Empire, versus the British and French all players in the 'Great Game,' as it was called. In the following century, Krym was occupied and depopulated by one power or another, through the two world wars. It wasn't until 1954 that Khrushchev, then Soviet premier, put Krym under the control of Ukraine which still creates problems today.

Ukrainians can never forget how Stalin created the famine in the thirties, to starve them by the millions, and then killed hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, descendants of Genghis, shipping them to exile in Uzbekistan. Ukrainians dislike Russia, and the Russian majority in Krym dislikes being part of Ukraine.

But no one much liked the Armenians. Though they were among the earliest Christians from the time of Eusebius their ancient churches still exist, mostly boarded up, along the Black Sea coast they were outsiders to all. In more modern times, they often sided with Russia or Greece against the Islamic Turks, which led to many ma.s.sacres over the past one hundred years. But during such purges, their brand of Christianity was often left unprotected, even by the Russian, Greek, and Roman churches resulting in Armenian flight from the region.

But this flight this diaspora, the Greek word for 'scattering the seeds' had actually begun in ancient times, and plays a most critical role in our tale.

It was this aspect of ancient history that would soon prove of great value to Taras Petrossian, as well as to others, as I shall explain: The Minni were among the oldest of cultures, early traders who occupied the vast Armenian plateau for thousands of years. The mountainous land drops off toward the north to the Black Sea, and in the south it descends to the Mesopotamian lowlands, where the Minni had moved with ease, over the millennia, down the Tigris and Euphrates into the heart of Babylon, Sumer, and Baghdad.

Three 'modern' empires eventually seized this vast plateau land and divided it among themselves. These were the kingdoms of the tsar of Russia, the sultan of Turkey, and the shah of Iran. They met at the center, where rises the seventeen-thousand-foot-high obsidian volcano, Mount Ararat Koh-i-Noh, the 'Mountain of Noah' the resting place of the Ark, a sacred spot at the very heart of the ancient world, the crossroads from east to west, from north to south.

Taras Petrossian knew this history very well. And he perceived how a powerful ancient legacy might again be invoked to attain even more enormous powers in modern times.

Taras was young only in his thirties, handsome, intelligent, and ambitious when, in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, bringing his sweeping policies of glasnost and perestroika like two strong breaths of fresh air. They would soon build into a gust that was strong enough to blow away, like dry leaves before a wind, the rotted and crumbling infrastructure of an aging politburo, along with its decrepit ideas and outworn plans.

The USSR swiftly collapsed into dust but with no new structure to replace it.

Into this void stepped those who had plans of their own, and who often came professionally well situated or already equipped with the ill-gotten funds to carry these out. Gangsters and black marketeers provided prepaid 'protection'; impoverished government officials and bankrupted scientists sold trade secrets and weapons-grade materials; the Chechen mafia created the final master blow, in 1992, by defrauding the Bank of Russia of over $325 million.

And there was also another cla.s.s of opportunists: those nouveau-oligarch entrepreneurs like Taras Petrossian.

Taras Petrossian married my mother when I was nine years old. I had already long made news in the chess tournament arena: WIDOW OF BRAVE RUSSIAN VETERAN REARS PRECOCIOUS CHILD CHESS PRODIGY that sort of thing.

Petrossian, through funds obtained from his silent partner, Basil Livingston, had established his chain of fashionable restaurants and exclusive clubs around Russia. My stepfather well understood the desperate appet.i.te of Russians for more than food for a glimpse of real luxury after so many bleak decades of Soviet rule and he understood how to market to those appet.i.tes. He never contradicted those, for instance, who chose to imagine that he himself was descended from that long line of food purveyors to the tsars, and he always made certain that all of his clubs kept icers of their famous caviar at each table.

The themes of these venues were cleverly designed to evoke places where the Armenians had originated or to which they had migrated over the centuries. In St Petersburg, for example, he opened a costly champagne and wine club that served cuisine from California's Central Valley. In Moscow, the Golden Fleece restaurant served Greek fare, replete with goatskins of retsina, which evoked foods that Jason and the Argonauts might have consumed while crossing the Black Sea from Colchis to Tomis.

But the most sought-after of all these places was the exclusive private Moscow club its costly membership available by invitation only called Baghdaddy's. This club alone would have provided Taras Petrossian the resources that he swiftly expended to secure for me, his young stepson, the best chess tutors and trainers money could buy.

This enabled him, as well, to sponsor many tournaments from his own pocket. He did so for reasons that shall soon become clear as I continue.

Baghdaddy's was more than a posh club. It featured Middle Eastern cuisine in an exotic, Orientalist setting of copper trays, camel saddles, and samovars with a rare chessboard placed beside each divan. At the entrance, a large portrait of the great caliph Harun al-Rashid greeted guests, with this maxim inscribed beneath: Baghdad, one thousand years ago, the birthplace of compet.i.tive chess.

For it is known among devotees of chess history that it was this ill.u.s.trious Abbasid caliph, al-Rashid a man who, as it's reputed, could play two simultaneous games of chess blindfolded who turned the game of chess into an example par excellence of warfare training, thus removing it from the realm of gambling or divination and enhancing its stature within the strictures of the Qur'an against those kinds of things.

The most interesting aspect of this particular club of my stepfather's was his private collection of rare chess pieces he'd gathered from all over the world, which were set into lighted alcoves around the walls. Taras Petrossian let it be known that he was always in the market for more of these, to add to his collection, and that regardless of the cost, he remained always willing to outbid his compet.i.tors in the antiquities market.

There was, of course, one chess set in whose pieces he would have been most especially interested. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the imminent incursion of American troops into Baghdad all of these events coming within just a ten-year period anyone needing a quick infusion of funds and in a position to lay hands on something to barter might have been only too willing to part with a piece of the Montglane Service.

When the government crackdown on private profiteers began, my stepfather quickly disposed of his businesses and fled Russia for London. But it is apparent that when it came to the chess set, he and perhaps his silent partner still maintained their same mission. Perhaps they were about to close in on that very objective.

For I believe that just prior to two weeks ago, when Taras Petrossian was killed in London, something they sought had been removed from Baghdad.

When Vartan finished his story, Key shook her head and smiled.

'I'm afraid I really underestimated you, mister,' she told him with a warm pat on his arm. 'What a childhood! Raised by a guy who seems to have been so self-obsessed and unscrupulous that he may even have married your mother just in order to get his hands on you. You provided the pa.s.sport for his nefarious mission, to become chess guru to the stars!'

I was sure Vartan would make swift objection to such a long-range potshot, fired by a woman who, after all, hardly knew him and had never met Petrossian. Instead, he merely smiled back at her and said, 'It seems I've underestimated you, too.'