It wasn’t long before the obvious thought struck him:
Cooper must have drugged me.
But he didn’t care. Jeff’s whole body felt warm, as if a glow of contentment and well-being were heating him from within. He had no idea how much time had passed since he was last awake—since the beating—but whatever Cooper had given him felt great. The strange thing was that Jeff felt none of the mental fog usually associated with morphine or other opiate-based painkillers. His body might have been lulled into a false sense of security, but his mind was clear. Perhaps, he wondered, adrenaline was keeping him focused? Very obviously he was still in danger. Other than his hunch about Tracy, Jeff still had no idea why he was here or what Daniel Cooper wanted with him.
“Chess?” Cooper repeated. “Do you play? Oh, never mind, it’s a rhetorical question. I know you do.” His earlier anger seemed to have dissipated to the point where he sounded positively cheerful. “Let’s play. I’m white, so I’ll go first.”
Jeff heard the sounds of a board being set up, of wooden pieces being set down gently in their respective battle lines. He barely knew how to play chess, hadn’t played since his teens, in fact. But he sensed this would be a bad time to admit as much. Something told him Cooper wasn’t likely to go for a hand of poker instead, or to whip out the Monopoly board.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” Jeff asked.
“Of course not,” said Cooper. “I never forget things.”
Jeff said, “I can’t see. Or move my hands. How am I supposed to play chess if I can’t see the board or touch the pieces?”
Cooper seemed amused by the question. “With your mind, Mr. Stevens. I’ll tell you my moves and you tell me yours. Then I’ll move your pieces for you. It’ll be just like on the QE2. The game you rigged between Melnikov and Negulesco. Remember?”
Jeff would never forget it. It was the first scam he and Tracy had pulled off together and it had worked like a charm. The two grand masters had sat in separate rooms and unwittingly copied each other’s moves. Jeff had run a book on the match for fellow passengers and cleaned up. The question was, how did Daniel Cooper know about it?
“How much did you make on that fraud, out of interest?”
Jeff’s voice was hoarse. “Around a hundred thousand dollars, I believe.”
“Between you?”
“Each.”
“Your idea or Tracy’s?”
“Mine. But I couldn’t have done it without her. She was magnificent. Tracy was always magnificent.”
Cooper said nothing, but Jeff could feel his jealousy in the air between them like a living, malevolent thing, a hovering falcon poised to strike. On the one hand, it seemed crazy to keep provoking a man who was obviously totally crazy and who already wished him dead. On the other, Tracy was Cooper’s one weakness. If Jeff could get him to reveal more about himself and his obsession with Tracy, maybe he could use that information to figure out a way out of here . . .
It was worth a shot.
“C4 to C5.” Cooper scraped his piece across the board. “Your move.”
Jeff hesitated. How did it work again? The horizontal rows had numbers and the vertical ones had letters? Or was it the other way around.
“I said YOUR MOVE!” Cooper shouted.
“Okay, okay. I wanna move my knight. That’s N, isn’t it? . . . er . . . Nd5.”
“Hmm.” Cooper seemed unimpressed. “Predictable.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” said Jeff.
“Don’t be sorry. Be better. This might be your last game. You want to leave a good impression, don’t you?”
Jeff ignored the threat. Instead he focused on keeping his captor engaged.
“I guess no one could accuse you of being predictable, could they, Daniel?”
“Don’t call me by my first name.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so, that’s why not.”
“You don’t like your name?”
Cooper muttered under his breath. “He used to call me that. Zimmer.”
Jeff registered the loathing in his voice.
“Zimmer?”
“Fred Zimmer. He was disgusting. A lech, like you. Bxd5. Say good-bye to your knight.”
More clattering on the chessboard. Jeff tried to picture the pieces but it was so hard to focus.
“G5 to E5.” He tried to draw Cooper back into the conversation. “How did you know him?”
“He was our neighbor,” said Cooper. “He used to come over to our house and defile my mother.”
Defile. He likes that word.
“Fred Zimmer and your mother were lovers?”
“It was disgusting. Afterward he would pass me in the hall as if nothing had happened. ‘Hey, Daniel, how are you?’ ‘You wanna go to a game, Daniel?’ Zimmer turned my mother into a whore. But I brought down the Lord’s vengeance on him. On both of them.”
“What did you do?”
“I did the Lord’s will. I spilled the blood of the lamb. That was the first covenant. Ra5.”
“You killed Fred Zimmer? How?”
“Are you deaf? I said ‘the lamb.’ The lamb! Zimmer wasn’t the lamb. He was a wolf. Your move.”
Jeff tried to wade through Cooper’s deranged logic. It was like trying to swim through molasses with your arms tied behind your back. If the neighbor was the wolf . . .
“Your mother. She was the lamb?”
“I loved her so much.” Cooper started to cry. “But just as Abraham had to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, so I too was called by God to bring the lamb to the altar.”
“God had nothing to do with it,” Jeff said bluntly. “You murdered your own mother, Daniel. No wonder you’re so screwed up.”
“DON’T CALL ME DANIEL! I told you already.”
“You were jealous of her boyfriend, so you killed her, and then, what? Got got rid of him too, I suppose?”
Cooper was crying softly to himself.
“Jesus,” Jeff exhaled. He didn’t know what he’d expected exactly, but certainly not this. Not only was Daniel Cooper insane, but he’d been insane for a very, very long time.
“I am the instrument of the Lord.”
“Like hell you are. You’re a psychopath.”
“I am a vessel!” Cooper was growing hysterical. “The blood of the lamb will be shed for you, and for all men, so that sins may be forgiven. That’s what the Lord said. So that sins may be forgiven. ‘Do this in memory of me.’ ”
“Do what? Murder your own mother?”
“You don’t understand! My mother had to atone. To sacrifice. Just as I have had to sacrifice, to earn Tracy’s love. If Tracy had come to me in the beginning, like she should have, all of this could have been avoided.”
“Oh, so now you’re blaming Tracy? That’s not very gallant of you, Daniel.”
The chess game was apparently over. But Jeff had a strong feeling he was playing for his life. Provoking Cooper was a risky strategy, but right now it was all he had.
“Just now you said it was your mother and Zimmer who turned you into a killer. So which is it? Who’s to blame?”
“NO! STOP TALKING! My mother was perfect!”
“I thought you said she was a whore?”
“Tracy’s the whore,” Cooper muttered darkly. “Tracy tempted me, like Eve in the garden. Because of her sins, and mine, many lambs have been sacrificed. But now the price has been paid. Well, almost paid. It’s time for the new covenant. One last sacrifice . . .”
Many lambs? Did that mean many murders? If Cooper really had killed his mother—if it wasn’t one of his sick, fantasy projections—what else could he be capable of?
He continued rambling.
“I did the Lord’s will. I obeyed, but it was awful. Awful. So much blood! Just like with my mother. You don’t know what I went through. But then, you see, there was so much sin with these women.”
“What women?” Jeff asked quietly
Cooper didn’t seem to hear the question.
“So much sin. So much recompense to be made. I thought it would go on forever. But the Lord in His mercy had other plans. He brought Tracy back to me, you see.” He paused then, and after a few seconds seemed to regain his composure. When he spoke again, he sounded totally calm. “That’s why we’re here, Mr. Stevens, you and me. Playing our last game. The time has come. The Lord has demanded a new covenant. A new lamb must suffer death, death on a cross. Only then can Eden be restored.”
A new lamb? A new covenant? Death on a cross? For a moment there Jeff had felt as if he had Cooper on the ropes, emotionally. But now he was losing him.
“Once the new covenant has been made, Tracy and I can at last be married. Our sins will be forgiven. We will walk hand in hand, pure and clean in the light of the Lord.”
“You want to marry Tracy?”