The Eight: The Fire Part 8

And just how did he know that it was?

'So sorry, we seem to be here earlier than expected,' Basil's companion said as he peered into the luggage-and-coat-jammed entryway.

He had a warm gravelly voice and was much younger than Basil, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Pulling off his leather gloves, he tucked them beneath his arm and took my hand in both of his. His palms were firm and calloused from hard work.

'I'm your new neighbor, Galen March,' he introduced himself. 'I'm the person your mother convinced to buy Sky Ranch. And you must be Alexandra. I'm so glad Cat invited me today so I could meet you. She's told me a good deal about you.'

And nothing at all about you, I thought.

I thanked him briefly and headed back to help clear a path for the new arrivals.

Things just got stranger and stranger. I knew Sky Ranch well. Well enough to wonder why anyone would ever dream of buying it. It was the last and only private parcel in these parts. Over twenty thousand acres, with a price tag of at least fifteen million dollars, it spread across mountaintops between the reservations, national forest, and our family lands. But it was all bleak rock high above timberline, with no water and air so thin you couldn't raise herds or grow crops. The land had sat idle for so many decades that locals called it Ghost Ranch. The only buyers who could afford it today were those who could exploit it in other ways ski areas or mineral rights. And these wouldn't be the sort that my mother would ever welcome to her neighborhood, let alone to her birthday party.

Mr Galen March's story deserved investigation, but not right now. Since I couldn't postpone the inevitable forever, I invited Basil and Galen to enter. With the men in my wake, I elbowed my way through the mudroom past Vartan Azov and the doting Livingston ladies, grabbed up a few more valises for Key to stash beneath the billiard table, and went back inside to stir my pot of stew.

No sooner had I set foot inside than I was confronted by Lily.

'How do you know these people? Why are they here?' she hissed.

'They were invited,' I told her, mystified by her closed expression. 'Our neighbors, the Livingstons. I was only expecting their daughter, Sage you heard the message. They used to be social muckety-mucks back East, but they've lived out here for years. They own Redlands, their ranch just near here, on the Colorado Plateau.'

'They own a good deal more than that,' Lily informed me under her breath.

But Basil Livingston had just arrived to join us. I was about to introduce him when Basil surprisingly bowed over Lily's hand. When he stood, his distinguished face seemed also to have taken on a tight mask.

'h.e.l.lo, Basil,' said Lily. 'What brings you so far from London? As you see, Vartan and I had to leave rather suddenly ourselves. Oh, and tell me, were you able to continue the chess tournament after the dreadful death of your colleague, Taras Petrossian?'

A Closed Position.

A position with extensive interlocked p.a.w.n chains and little room for manuvre by the pieces. Most men will still be on the board and most of the pieces will be behind the p.a.w.ns creating a cramped position with few opportunities for exchanges.

Edward R. Brace, An Ill.u.s.trated Dictionary of Chess.

The sun sets early in the mountains. By the time we'd gotten the guests and luggage moved inside, a silvery glow was all that still sifted through the skylights above, casting the animal carvings overhead into sinister silhouettes.

Galen March seemed to be quite taken with Key the moment he met her. He offered to help and followed her around, pitching in as she turned on the lamps around the octagon, threw a fresh bedsheet over the billiard table, and drew up the stools and benches all around it.

Lily explained my mother's absence to the newcomers by claiming a family crisis, which, technically, it really was. She lied to the others, saying Cat had phoned with apologies and the wish that we'd enjoy ourselves in her absence.

Since we lacked the necessary number of winegla.s.ses, Vartan filled some teacups with vodka from the tray on the sideboard and some coffee cups with hearty red wine. A few sips seemed to loosen everyone up a bit.

Taking our seats around the table, it was clear we had too many players to sort things out a party of eight: Key and Lily and Vartan, the three Livingstons, myself and Galen March. With everyone looking a bit uneasy, we raised our cups and gla.s.ses in toast to our absent hostess.

The only thing we all appeared to have in common was my mother's invitation. But I knew well from my experiences in chess that appearances can be deceiving.

For instance, Basil Livingston had been unconvincingly vague with Lily about the role he'd so recently played at that chess tournament in London. He was just a silent partner, he said, a financier; he'd hardly even known the late tournament organizer, Taras Petrossian.

But Basil did seem to be on a first-name basis with both Lily and Vartan Azov. How well did he know them? How likely was it to have been mere coincidence that all four of them, including Rosemary, had been in Mayfair two weeks ago, on the very day that Taras Petrossian was killed?

'Do you enjoy chess?' Vartan was asking Sage Livingston, who'd seated herself as closely as possible beside him.

Sage shook her head and was about to reply when I jumped up and suggested that I start serving dinner. The thing was, no one in this group except Vartan and Lily knew about my life as the little queen of chess. Or why I'd quit.

I went around the makes.h.i.+ft dining table, dis.h.i.+ng up boiled potatoes, tiny peas, and the Boeuf Bourguignonne. I preferred this vantage point: Moving around the table, I could listen in and read the expressions of the others without focusing attention on myself.

Under the circ.u.mstances, this seemed an absolute necessity. After all, it was my mother herself who'd invited them all here today. This might be my only opportunity to observe these seven all together. And if even a part of Vartan's revelations were true, someone here might have played a part in my mother's disappearance, my father's death, or Taras Petrossian's murder.

'So you finance these chess tournaments?' Galen March commented to Basil across the table. 'An unusual hobby. You must like the game.'

Interesting choice of words, I thought, as I ladled up Basil's stew.

'Not really,' he said. 'This Petrossian chap arranged that tournament. I knew him through my venture capital firm, based in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. We finance all sorts of business ventures around the world. When the Berlin Wall fell, we helped former Iron Curtain folks entrepreneurs like Petrossian get on their feet. During glasnost, perestroika, he owned a chain of restaurants and clubs. Used chess as a publicity stunt, I think. When Putin's troops cracked down on capitalists oligarchs, they called them we helped him move his operation farther west. Simple as that.'

Basil took a bite of his Bourguignonne as I moved on to Sage's plate.

'So you mean,' Lily said drily, 'that it was really Petrossian's interest in Das Kapital, not in the Game, that got him killed?'

'The police said those rumors were quite ungrounded,' Basil shot back, ignoring her other implications. 'The official report said Petrossian died of heart failure. But you know the British press with their conspiracy theories,' he added, sipping his wine. 'They'll likely never stop questioning even Princess Diana's death.'

At the mention of the 'official report,' Vartan had slipped a guarded sideways glance at me. I didn't need to guess what he was thinking. I ladled some extra peas onto his plate and moved on to Lily, just as Galen March chimed in again.

'You say you're based in D.C.?' he asked Basil. 'Isn't that a pretty long commute to your job? Or from there to London or to Russia?'

Basil smiled with barely suppressed condescension. 'Some businesses run themselves. We often pa.s.s through D.C. en route from shopping or theater in London, and my wife, Rosemary, visits the capital quite often for her own undertakings but for myself, I prefer to stay here at Redlands where I can act like a rancher.'

The glamorous Rosemary Livingston rolled her eyes toward her husband, then smiled across at Galen March. 'You know what they say about the way to make a small fortune in ranching.' Galen looked stumped. She said, 'You start with a large one!'

Everyone laughed politely and turned to their meals and their neighbors as I took my place beside Key and helped myself to some chow. But I knew that what Rosemary had just mentioned was no joke. Basil Livingston's fortune not to mention his business clout were both legendary in these parts.

I should know plenty about it. Basil was essentially in the same field my parents had worked in, as well as Key: energy. The only difference? What they all studied and supported, Basil exploited.

The Livingstons' ranch at Redlands, for instance forty thousand acres of the Colorado Plateau wasn't just a range for grazing cattle and for entertaining CEOs and heads of state. Redlands also sat atop part of the world's largest known cache of industrial-grade uranium.

Then in D.C., not far from where I lived along the river, Basil kept a building jam-packed with his own K Street lobbyists. They'd pushed through the kind of legislation that infuriated my mother tax benefits for investors in Arctic oil futures and tax breaks for owners of gas-guzzling SUVs.

All the more reason to question not just the audience but the timing of Mother's invitation to us all here today an invitation, I reminded myself, that was sent out just about the same moment as the death in London of Basil's 'colleague,' Taras Petrossian, the very man who'd also arranged the tournament, ten years ago in Russia, where my father was killed.

I looked around the table at Mother's invitees: Sage Livingston chatting up Vartan Azov, Galen March attentively listening to Key, Rosemary Livingston whispering an aside to her hubby, and Lily Rad feeding bits of Bourguignonne to Zsa-Zsa, who sat in her lap.

If Lily was right and there was a larger Game going on, a dangerous Game, I still couldn't tell the p.a.w.ns from the pieces. The scenario around this table seemed to me more like a patch-work of blindfold matches against unknown opponents, all of them making covered moves. I knew it was time to start cutting away some of the underbrush for a new line of perspective. And I suddenly thought I knew just where to start.

There was only one individual, of all those who were seated at this table of eight, whom my mother had not invited here today. I'd invited her myself as Mother had surely known I would. She'd been my best and only friend since the age of twelve. Pun inevitable, I realized that she alone might provide the missing key to this whole dilemma.

I was twelve years old. My father was dead.

I'd been yanked out of school in New York by my mother, at Christmas break, and deposited in another school in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado far away from anyone or anything I'd ever known.

I'd been forbidden to play or even to mention chess.

On my first day at my new school, a perky blonde with a ponytail came up to me in the hallway.

'You're new here,' she said. Then, in a manner suggesting that everything depended on my reply, she added, 'At the school where you went before, were you popular?'

In all my twelve years at school, in all my world travel for chess compet.i.tions I'd never been asked that question. I wasn't sure how to reply.

'I don't know,' I told my interrogator. 'What do you mean by popular?'

For a moment she looked as stumped by my question as I'd been by hers.

'Popular means,' she finally said, 'that other children want you to like them. They copy what you do or what you wear, and they do what you tell them to because they want to join your group.'

'You mean, my team?' I said, confused.

Then I bit my tongue. I wasn't to mention chess.

But I'd been competing since the age of six. I had no group, and the only team I knew were my adult coaches like my father or the 'seconds' who helped replay my games. In hindsight, if I'd ever bothered to ask other students at my public school in midtown Manhattan, they'd likely have viewed me as the quintessential nerd.

'Your team? You play sports, then. You look like you're used to winning. So you must have been popular. I'm Sage Livingston. I'm the most popular girl in this school. You can be my new friend.'

This hallway encounter with Sage was to prove a high point of our relations.h.i.+p, which would quickly run downhill. The catalyst for that swift decline was my unexpected friends.h.i.+p with Nokomis Key.

While Sage was bouncing around with pom-poms or a tennis racket, Key was teaching me how to ride an Appaloosa bareback and showing me when the fields of neve, summer snow, were ready for us to glissade down occupations that my mother approved of more than she did my attending Sage's elite Denver 'do's' at the Cherry Creek Country Club.

Sage's father, Basil, might be as rich as Croesus. Her mother, Rosemary, might be atop every social register from Denver to D.C. But the one aspiration that had always eluded Sage was her hope of heaven: a card-carrying members.h.i.+p in the DAR Daughters of the American Revolution those women who claimed descent from heroes of the American Revolution. Their headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., including Const.i.tution Hall, took up a city block within spitting distance of the White House. In the century or more since their founding, they'd held more social clout in Was.h.i.+ngton than Mayflower descendants or any other elitist heritage group.

And that was the real rub, that is, what rubbed Sage Livingston's fur the wrong way when it came to Nokomis Key. While Key worked her way through school at odd jobs in hotels and resorts from chambermaid to park ranger whenever Rosemary and Sage went to Was.h.i.+ngton, as they often did, they were always listed in the society pages as cochairs for benefits and fund-raisers for a number of noted public inst.i.tutions.

But Key was herself a public inst.i.tution though one that, arguably, very few knew of in these parts. Key's mother was descended from a long line of Algonquin and Iroquois tribes going back to Powhatan the real 'First Americans.' But her father was descended from one of Was.h.i.+ngton's most famous first families: that of the author of our national anthem, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' Mr Francis Scott Key.

Unlike the Livingston ladies, if Key ever dropped into our nation's capital, the DAR would roll out the proverbial red rug straight across that bridge and right into the tiny park that both bore her famous ancestor's name, a bridge and a park that, coincidentally, would land you right at my own front door.

Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

I don't know how it flashed into my mind just at that moment. It wasn't only the 'Key connection,' but the whole plethora: Basil's business intrigues 'inside the Beltway,' Rosemary's social aspirations, Sage's genealogical obsession, and my own lengthy residence there under orders of my uncle Slava himself, according to Lily, a key player in the Game. It was all too suspicious.

But if Mother wanted to focus my attention on D.C., why did she invite us all to Colorado? Were the two somehow connected? There was only one place I could think of to find out.

I'd naturally a.s.sumed, given my mother's impoverished capabilities with puzzles, that each of her encrypted clues would lead to something concrete, like that placard from Russia or the game tucked inside the piano.

But maybe my first a.s.sumption had been wrong.

Excusing myself, I got up from the table and went over to the hearth to rotate a few embers. As I stirred the fire with the poker, I slipped a hand in my pocket and touched the Black Queen and the bits of paper still tucked in there.

I already knew from some of our discoveries the chess piece, the cardboard, the ancient chess map and from what I'd learned about them, that there were two Black Queens and a larger Game going on: a dangerous Game.

In my mind I went over everything I'd discovered since this morning: The bogus phone number with two missing digits.

The puzzle that led me to the game in the piano.

The missing Black Queen exchanged for the eight ball in the billiard rack.

The message hidden in the Queen that came from my game in Russia.

The ancient chessboard drawing we'd found stashed in Mother's desk.

This all seemed clear and straightforward, just like my mother herself. But I was positive beyond doubt that they had to hold the key to something more And then, of course, I got it.

Oh lord, how could I have been so stupid? Hadn't I cut my baby teeth on puzzles like these? I wanted to scream and stomp and tear my hair, which might have been improvident in the circ.u.mstance, with that table of diners seated across the room.

But wasn't that the very first puzzle I'd had to solve, before I could even gain access to the house? The missing digits of that 'phone number' 64?

Not only was 64 the number of squares on a chessboard, but it was also the last code to the combination of the lockbox where mother had hidden the key to our lodge.

The chessboard provides the key!

Like the Red Sea parting, at last I felt I could see down that long, long file into the very heart of the Game. And if that first message held more than one level of meaning, so would the others, I was sure.

Just as I was sure, despite Mother's seemingly paradoxical choice of invitees, that we were all somehow connected.

But connected how? I needed to figure this out, and now, while the players were all still seated around the table.

I slipped to the far side of the hearth where I would be partly concealed by the copper hood, and I extracted from my pocket the only one of the messages that was written in my mother's own hand. It read: WAs.h.i.+NGTON.

LUXURY CAR.

VIRGIN ISLES.

ELVIS LIVES.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.

Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., was definitely at the top of the list. So maybe, just as the chessboard had provided the key to our house, this code would give the key to the rest. I racked my brain and then squeezed a little harder, but with Luxury Cars and Virgin Isles I could come up with nothing. I knew that the first three clues DC-LX-VI added up to 666, the Number of the Beast. So I took a fresh look at the bigger picture, starting with the next step. Bingo.

ELVIS LIVES.

There were just two other anagrams you could create from Velis, my mother's name: these were evils and veils. The Book of Revelation or Apocalypse, where the Beast appears, is where Saint John reveals what will happen at the end of the world. And from my word-mongering childhood, I knew that it also derives from something very similar to those two spellings of Mother's name apocalypse, apokalyptein, meaning 'extract from the cover.' Or revelation, re-valare, meaning 'remove the veil.'

As for the last line As Above, So Below that was the clincher. And if I was right, it had little to do with that chess game hidden in the piano. That was just a ruse to shock me into paying attention as it certainly had.

In fact, it was clear that if I hadn't been so quick to jump to conclusions about Mother's ability to form puzzles, I might have seen it at once. Indeed, this would explain why Mother invited us here to Colorado in the first place to a spot called Four Corners, high in the Rocky Mountains, at the very heart of the four mountains that mark the original Navajo corners of the birthplace of the world. A cosmic chessboard, if ever there was one.

The entire message, all parts taken together, would read:.