Vartan seemed truly fascinated. But by the time the guide started regaling us with statistics on Old Faithful's burst ratios how a two-minute eruption of 120 feet meant a shorter interval of maybe fifty-five minutes till the next eruption, while a five-minute eruption averaging 123 feet meant an interval of maybe seventy-eight minutes to the next I could see people's eyes beginning to glaze over, and Key had gotten that hard, firm set around her mouth.

We jumped off the coach when we reached the Old Faithful Inn. There, Key picked up two snowmobiles that were marked as exclusively reserved for park rangers, as well as three pairs of lightweight snowshoes that could clamp onto our footgear in a pinch if we should break down.

She climbed onto one snowmobile with me just behind her, and Vartan climbed onto the other and followed us. As we headed north, you could hear our guide and the tourists counting loudly: 'Ten, nine, eight, seven, six...'

When we got to the top of the hill, Key pulled off the road for a minute and pointed behind us. Vartan pulled up beside us and looked back as Old Faithful blew his cork and shot steaming water more than a hundred feet into the stark winter sky.

'It explodes, even like this, in the cold?' he asked her in amazement.

'They're heated, many miles below the surface of the earth, to more than six hundred degrees,' said Key. 'By the time they get back up here again, they don't care what the weather's like. It's just a relief to get out-of-doors again.'

'What heats them?' said Vartan.

'Aye, there's the rub,' Key told him. 'We're sitting atop the biggest volcanic cauldron known to the world. It might shoot off and destroy the entire North American continent just about any millionth year now. We're not sure quite when she may blow. And she's not the only one we need to worry about.

'We used to think that Yellowstone Caldera was unique. But now we think it's possible that this cauldron may actually be connected across Idaho to Mount St Helen's and the Pacific region to that bigger circle of faults around the Pacific Rim, the Ring of Fire.'

Vartan looked at her for a moment. It may have been my imagination, but it was almost as if some silent understanding pa.s.sed between them, something they were debating whether to share with me.

But in the next instant, the look was gone.

We must have snowmobiled for more than thirty minutes when Key paused again and announced, 'We're going off-piste now. It's only a short distance, but we need both snowmobiles so we can put our friend and her gear behind.' She paused and added, 'If you see any curious grizzlies, turn off the noisy machine, lie down on the snow, and pretend like you're dead.'

Yeah. Right.

Key cut into a beautiful woodland, then steered alongside a steaming geyser field that tossed smoky silver into the skies. We sailed past the mudpots that we used to visit here when we were young. They bubbled like a witch's cauldron, popping and hissing with a sound that's impossible to replicate.

Down in the glen just below was one of the small warming shacks scattered through the woods. They usually serve coffee or hot chocolate for skiers and snowsh.o.e.rs, but this one was a bit off the beaten track.

Key pulled out her park ranger two-way radio, and said, 'Coming in, over.'

And I'll be d.a.m.ned if it wasn't my mother's voice that replied, over the walkie-talkie, 'What kept you so long?'

I hadn't seen my mother in five years.

And yet she looked exactly as she always had: like someone who has just taken a dip in a pool full of some magical elixir.

As someone, myself, who'd spent her own youth diving into nothing more challenging than a chess game, I suspect it had always been that primal energy of my mother's, the raw animal power she exuded, that had driven all the men in our lives completely ga-ga over her, and had always placed me, too, in a kind of awe whenever I was in her presence.

But now I was completely thrown for a loop. For the instant we entered the shack, my mother ignoring Vartan and Key threw her arms about me in an uncustomary display of emotion, enveloping me in the familiar scent of her hair, that mix of sandalwood and sage, and when she drew away there were actual tears in her eyes. After all I'd learned of my mother that I'd never known these past few days the lengths to which she'd gone to rescue not just that terrible chess set, but also my father and me I was ever more experiencing a kind of shock and awe at our being suddenly reunited.

'Thank G.o.d you're all right,' Mother said, embracing me again, more forcefully, as if she could hardly believe it.

'She won't be for very long,' said Key, 'unless we get this pony act on the road, zip-zip. Remember we've got a higher calling.'

Mother shook her head as if coming to her senses and let me go. Then turning to Vartan and Key, she embraced them both lightly. 'Thanks to you,' she said. 'I'm so relieved.'

We helped bring some satchels out of the shack, and Mother boarded the snowmobile behind Key. With a crinkly smile to me, she nodded toward Vartan who was powering up his own snowmobile. 'I'm glad you've come to see eye to eye,' she said.

I climbed on behind Vartan and we shot through the woods after Key.

When we were sure the coast was clear, we went back to the main road. In about half an hour we reached the western gate into Idaho, where the barrier was up to halt vehicular traffic into Targhee National Forest. Key stopped her snowmobile and dismounted, collecting Mother's bags.

'What's up?' I asked them both, as Vartan switched off our machine.

'We have a rendezvous with Fate,' Key commented. 'And she's driving an Aston Martin.'

Nothing could be more incongruous than Lily and Zsa-Zsa, ensconced in their fur lap rugs, waiting un.o.btrusively in that quarter-million-dollar Vanquish in the Targhee parking lot. Luckily, there were no observers around to see them. But how did they get here, with the forest shut down for winter? Key's sidekicks must include every park ranger on the planet, I thought.

The girls had exited the car to greet us, while Key began loading Mother's bags into the back. Zsa-Zsa, reaching out from Lily's arms, gave me a big wet kiss. I wiped it off on my sleeve. Lily went over to embrace my mother.

'I was so worried,' Lily said. 'I'd been waiting at that ghastly motel, with no word in days. But everything appears to have gone all right so far at least we're all present and accounted for.' She turned to Key. 'So when will we all get going?'

'And where will we "all get going"?' I asked her.

I seemed to have remained the only one in the dark.

'I'm not sure you really want to know,' Key informed me, 'but I'll tell you anyway. As I said, this hasn't been easy to orchestrate, but we've got it all mapped. We worked out the plan as much as we could, once we were alone in Denver. Then Vartan and I flew back East to round you up. So right now, we three will return to Jackson Hole as if we'd just been out snowmobiling, and we'll have a good dinner there tonight. We'll crash at my place and catch the first flight out in the morning. Your mom and Lily will drive. They'll meet us at the other end. I'm afraid that the closest rendezvous spot we could all agree on was Anchorage-'

'Anchorage!?' I cried. 'I thought we were going to find my father. Do you mean to tell me he's in Alaska?'

Key gave me that look. 'I mentioned that you might prefer not to know,' she said. 'But no, that's not where we're going. That's where Cat and Lily will pick your father up on our return. In fact, for security purposes, your mother and I are the only ones who know precisely where your father is and in my case, only because I'm the one who had to figure out how to get him back from there.'

I waited for her other shoe to drop. But it was my mother who dropped it.

'As to where there is,' said Cat, 'I believe that the region is generally known as the Ring of Fire.'

Ring of Fire.

Nothing so resembles a living creature as fire does.

Plutarch.

The [alchemical] operation begins with fire and ends with fire.

Ibn Bishrun.

The fire which enlightens is the fire which consumes.

Henri-Frederic Amiel.

All things change to fire and fire, exhausted, falls back into all things.

Herac.l.i.tus.

'Alaska's Aleutian Trench,' Key told us, sometime between the appetizer and the soup course. 'It divides the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. It was once a part of Russia, back in Catherine the Great's day. It's called the Ring of Fire because it boasts the largest collection of active volcanoes in the world. I'm on a first-name basis with most of them Pavlof, Shishaldin, Pogromini, Tulik, Korovin, Tanaga, Kanaga, Kiska there's even a new young caldera that I discovered myself, which I'm trying to get dubbed "Modern Millie."'

And she added, 'These are a big part of my dissertation that I'm doing on calorimetry James Clerk Maxwell, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, The a.n.a.lytic Theory of Heat, and all of that. But as you know, what has always interested me most is observing the behavior of heat under extreme pressure.'

I tried not to notice when Vartan glanced quickly up at me, then back at his soup. But I couldn't help wonder if, on the plane, he'd also felt that electric current surge beween us when he touched me. I confess, it was pretty hard for me to forget.

We'd taken this small private dining room here at the Inn at the Hole, where Key knew the management. This enabled us, she explained, to stuff ourselves at leisure while still retaining the seclusion we needed to speak of what tomorrow would bring. And tomorrow already sounded like a doozy, starting off with the charter flight to Seattle and Anchorage that Key told us she'd arranged for us at dawn.

'But you said that my father's not in Alaska,' I reminded her. 'So what does this Ring of Fire have to do with the place where we're actually going?'

'It's the Yellow Brick Road,' she told me. 'I'll explain once our grub's been served.'

Key and Vartan had agreed to share the crispy, whole roast duck, large enough for two, stuffed with foie gras, a specialty of the house, while I opted for prime rib, the one dish that Rodo never prepared at Sutalde.

As our courses rolled on, though, from soup to salad, I couldn't help thinking about all that I'd left locked up back in that hotel suite in Georgetown my uncle Slava, my boss, and probably any hope that I might once have had of a future career.

Well, tomorrow was another day, as Ms. Scarlett Key O'Hara would indubitably say at such a moment and, even had I wanted to, there wasn't much I could do about all that now, when I found myself relegated to the role of a lowly p.a.w.n-in-the-dark, shoved into center board by Key and Cat, that unlikely pairing of Queens.

I could scarcely wait.

Once we felt we'd made a good dent in our meals, we ordered a bottle of Poire William and a lemon souffle to go with it. That would keep the waiters occupied for a good twenty or thirty minutes, we reasoned, waiting around for our egg whites to rise.

As soon as we were sure we were alone, Key said to me, 'As you know, your mom has tried to keep you out of the loop as long as she could, for your own safety on the theory that ignorance is bliss.

'But she has now empowered me to tell both of you everything that I know about what's happened, about where we're headed tomorrow, as well as what we will have signed on board to do once we get there. After my story, if anyone wants to bail out, please feel free to do so. But I don't think it's likely that you will. This involves us all in ways that have even surprised me, as you'll see.'

Key pushed her salad plate away and put the duck platter closer to Vartan. Then plucking up her slender gla.s.s of Verdicchio, she began her tale.

The White Queen's Tale Ten years ago, when Alexandra's father was shot in Russia, when he was believed by all to be dead, Cat realized something had happened almost worse than losing her husband: that although she'd been sure all these years that the Game had been ended for good and all, another round must now have begun.

But how could that be?

The pieces had been buried, and only Alexander Solarin knew their locations. The players from the last round, thirty years earlier, had all retired from the playing field, or else they were dead.

So who could have begun it? Unfortunately, she didn't need to wait long to find out.

After the 'tragic death' at Zagorsk, the U.S. emba.s.sy had arranged for little Alexandra to be escorted from Moscow back to America under diplomatic protection, and they also made arrangements to transfer her father's remains on the same plane.

The coffin, of course, was empty.

The Russian who was a.s.sisting in this coordination, as we now know, was Taras Petrossian. Coordinating on behalf of the American emba.s.sy was a reclusive millionaire. His name was Galen March.

As soon as Alexandra was home safely with her mother in New York, Galen contacted Cat on his own. When they met, he told her at once that he was involved in the Game, which had indeed begun again with the death of her husband and that he himself had brought an important message for Cat's ears only. But she must agree not to stop him until he had communicated all that he'd come to say.

To this, Cat agreed, for his words supported her own earlier suspicions about the Game.

Galen minced no words. He revealed to Cat that Solarin was not dead, but had been so badly injured that for the moment it appeared he might as well be.

In the pandemonium following the shooting at Zagorsk, Solarin's ravaged body, comatose and losing blood, was privately removed from the site through the cooperation of the same man who had organized the chess tournament, Taras Petrossian. And it was given into the custody of the woman who'd actually orchestrated the event from behind the scenes: Alexander Solarin's mother, Tatiana.

Cat was naturally in shock at hearing all this. She demanded that Galen immediately reveal how he'd come to know such things. How had Solarin's mother managed to survive, when her own sons believed her long dead? Cat insisted on learning where her husband had been taken. She wanted to go to Russia and find Solarin at once, regardless how grave the danger.

'I will agree to all this, and I shall help you even a great deal more,' Galen March a.s.sured her. 'But first, as you agreed yourself, you must hear the rest of what I've come to tell you.'

Tatiana Solarin, Galen went on, had for decades awaited a chance to contact her long-lost son indeed, even from the very moment that the prior Game had ended, when, as Lily told us, Minnie simply walked off and disappeared from the board, leaving Cat holding the pieces, along with the bag.

But though a fresh start was now possible, Tatiana knew she needed to create a complex strategy in order to bring her grandmaster son back into Russia, as she must, and back into the Game. She sought a way to unite herself not only with Solarin, but with his wife, Cat, who was now the Black Queen. This was part of her larger strategy.

But Tatiana's first opportunity came only when the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated. At that time an event occurred of a sort that she'd scarcely thought to imagine: Alexander Solarin's young daughter Alexandra had grown to become a major chess contender. If he would not come to Russia for himself, he would surely come for her.

Galen March pledged himself to help Tatiana any way he could in this mission in a very real sense, she was chosen for it and for a most critical reason.

Tatiana herself was now the new White Queen.

'This was actually Alexandra's grandmother?' said Vartan in amazement.

But Key merely nodded, for our souffle had just arrived.

After all had been set up, and the waiters had taken Key's card for l'addition and departed, she cut into the souffle and was just about to answer Vartan.

But first, I had one or two questions of my own.

'How could Tatiana be the White Queen when Galen told me that you are and you even agreed with him? Who is this guy Galen, anyway? You're telling me he's been playing footsie with my mother for more than ten years and I didn't know about it? Please come clean.'

'I've had a little time to pick Galen March's brains myself by now,' Key told me. 'It would seem he's been a behind-the-scenes player for quite a while. When I put his story together with what your mom had already told me, it all made sense.

'But let me finish with New York. As soon as Galen had revealed this scenario to Cat, she knew that you, her little daughter, might be in danger, too. And she knew exactly who from certainly not from your own grandmother, babe and even from where. Somebody was buying up tons of land near your ancestral home in Four Corners-'

'The Botany Club,' I said, and Key merely nodded.

Now it all made sense.

Why we'd moved to Colorado in the first place.

Why she'd convinced Nim to buy the ranch next door under Galen's name.

Why Mother's party, with all those specific players, had had to take place right there, at the Octagon.

What it meant.

The chessboard is the key.

My G.o.d.

'Rosemary Livingston was the White Queen,' I said, 'but she betrayed her own team for personal revenge. She arranged to have my father shot at Zagorsk when she knew the White Team planned to meet with him there. She wanted to get even with my mother over her father El-Marad's death. So they must have...fired her somehow and replaced her with Tatiana. And now with you. She still doesn't know it. That's why she and her cronies were trying so hard to find out whether I was the new White Queen!'

Key smiled a bitter little smile of acknowledgment. 'Now you're cookin' with gas, my friend,' she said. 'But there's a whole lot more you need to know about the players. For instance, you asked about Galen.