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.”