Checkmate

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The name on a book’s cover rarely tells the whole story of its birth. Many thanks to the following for their energy and input. Couldn’t have done it without you…

Julie, who was with me every step of the way. As always.

The steadfast Tom Colgan and all of the good folks at Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Vanessa, for her dedication and creativity.

Michael, for the vision and the opportunity.

In retrospect, he would find it an astonishing way to start a war.

But then again, he didn’t start this war.

The meeting, and the information it had subsequently revealed, came to him purely by chance. Synchronicity, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had called it. A confluence of seemingly unrelated events that have meaning — albeit hidden to all but the most discerning. It was a sophisticated concept, especially for a Western mind, Kuan-Yin Zhao thought.

Of course, there were corollaries in his own life. Xiangqi, one of his passions, was an exercise in manipulated synchronicity. At its heart, the mastery of Xiangqi, and its lesser cousin, chess, was nothing more than recognizing the patterns your opponent was trying to hide, and creating patterns your opponent will fail to see until too late. Great Xiangqi players never move a single piece. On the board, it may be a pao moving five squares, but in the mind of a master, it is the pao’s move, combined with the myriad moves available to his opponent, combined with a countermove, and so on until victory or defeat.

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