A summary of Bernard Werber’s "The Queen’s Gambit"

The reader unfolds a long-standing secret duel between two remarkable women with opposing pathologies: Nicole O’Connor’s pathological craving for being among others versus Monica McIntyre’s physical hatred of the presence of others. Their imagined feud transforms the global historical catastrophes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries into personal moves at a chessboard. The novel was written in 2022 in France; the impetus for the conception was a conversation the writer had with a paralyzed friend who nearly died in a stampede at a Paris metro station, as well as sociological theories of mass behavior. The work is not part of a series and exists as a standalone novel.

Childhood grievances and a debut in Reykjavik

Australian Nicole is terrified of being alone. At eleven, she unlocks cages and releases six hundred and forty laboratory mice into the hallways of a Melbourne boarding school, watching her classmates panic. Her father, Rupert, who made his fortune breeding merino sheep and financed communists, approves of this move. He introduces his daughter to the theory of collective flock intelligence and teaches her chess, teaching her to win by forming a cohesive line of cheap pawns. To test this hypothesis, the girl tosses a pink stuffed rabbit into the sea: her beloved collie, Mao, leaps off a cliff, followed without hesitation by two hundred sheep, who leap and crash on the rocks.

At the same time, in New York, her peer Monica suffocates on the subway from someone else’s breath and the smell of chewing gum. Defending a classmate, the girl sprays foam from a fire extinguisher at the bullies, and after losing the school election, she cuts off her rival Priscilla’s hair with a penknife. Her mother, Jessica, introduces her to chess. The girl quickly masters an assertive style, attacking opponents with her only strong piece — the queen.

In 1972, the teenagers meet in Reykjavik at the junior championship, held concurrently with the historic match between Spassky and Fischer. Nicole slowly advances a wall of pawns. Monica, physically exhausted from the heat and the proximity of spectators, is checkmated. During a handshake, the loser tackles the Australian to the floor and grabs her throat, nearly suffocating her. Doctors manage to revive the victim, and the attacker is taken away for a psychiatric examination.

London tragedy and prison walls

By the age of eighteen, both students have experienced personal dramas. Nicole becomes pregnant with twins after an Aboriginal tribal ritual, secretly aborts the fetuses, drowns her sorrows in whiskey, and drives her jilted fiancé to the brink of death. After overcoming her binges at a sobriety club, she flies to London for the Commonwealth Tournament. Monica escapes from an Indian ashram to escape her obsessive mentor, Shanti, tries mountaineering in the Pocono Mountains, and ends up in the same London hotel, the Southampton.

The American breaks the pawn chain with a sacrifice of two knights and takes revenge. Enraged by the loss, Nicole goes to a phone booth and calls Scotland Yard, claiming, on behalf of the IRA, that there’s a bomb in the hall where the Prime Minister’s daughter is sitting. The frantic crowd rushes to the only exit. The pressure reaches seven bodies per square meter. Jessica is trampled to death, and Monica is hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. Emerging with an urn of ashes, she vows revenge.

In 1985, Nicole is reading sociology in Belfast and planning operations for the Northern Irish underground under the leadership of Ryan Murphy. At Heysel Stadium in Brussels, she exploits the rage of drunken football fans: while the dividing bars collapse and thirty-nine spectators die, her accomplice strangles an embedded British counterintelligence agent. Monica, in a stadium box with MI5 chief Sophie Wellington, is unable to save her colleague.

The American soon strikes back. She seduces Murphy on a forest path and lures him to a provincial hotel. The photos she sends arouse blind jealousy in Nicole: bursting into the room with a revolver, the Australian pulls the trigger. A blank shot disguises a British marksman’s shot from an ambush, the ringleader falls dead, and Nicole is hidden in the maximum security wing of Long Kesh Prison. There, she is subjected to sensory deprivation in a white, color- and sound-deprived cell.

The torture of solitude continues until a guard bribed by Rupert blows the locks on five blocks. Amid a prison riot and fire, Nicole slides down a rope from the guard tower. On the runway of Belfast Airfield, the fugitive is met by her father in a red limousine. Pursuing the fugitives, Sophie and Monica are caught in the crossfire of Rupert’s machine gun. Sophie dies instantly, but Monica takes cover under the car and pierces her rival’s father’s heart with a single bullet. The daughter manages to escape in a private jet.

Mountains of Afghanistan and ruins of skyscrapers

Having fled to the Soviet Union, Nicole was recruited by the Lubyanka secret service. In 1986, she coordinated the cordoning off of the contaminated city of Pripyat and was then assigned to the Panjshir Gorge. There, a hunt for American portable anti-aircraft missiles unfolded. Meanwhile, Monica personally delivered missiles to the fighters of field commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Spotting the caravan, Nicole throws a squad of Pashtuns into battle and personally pursues the enemy on a light Tula army motorcycle. A bullet wounds the American in the thigh, but she manages to fire back, leaving a deep furrow in her pursuer’s cheekbone. Monica disappears into the mujahideen mines, throwing a handful of sand in the Australian’s face. The ensuing gangrene forces Kabul surgeons to amputate Monica’s leg, replacing the bone with a titanium pin.

Nicole contacts Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden’s fanatics. On September 9, 2001, suicide bombers posing as television journalists detonate explosives hidden in a video camera, killing Massoud. Two days later, hijacked airliners crash into the World Trade Center towers. Monica manages to warn the generals in Washington about the imminent third strike, but is met with only ridicule. She runs out to the parking lot seconds before the third plane crashes through the wall of the West Wing of the Pentagon.

Mecca and the finale in a Scottish castle

In the fall of 2015, Nicole, a general in the secret service, oversees the Iranian nuclear program. During negotiations in Jeddah, physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh negotiates equipment deliveries and then heads to Mecca. An American woman intercepts the signal from a radio beacon in the scientist’s shoe and, with the help of Saudi security, blocks the oncoming flow of pilgrims on the Jamarat Bridge. More than two thousand worshippers die in a monstrous stampede.

The scientist suffers broken ribs, but the Australian pulls him through a gap in the parapet. Monica catches up with her enemies in the courtyard of the overcrowded Mina Al-Wadi Hospital. The rivals grapple with each other right on the pavement among stretchers, and Monica plunges the neck of a broken bottle into Nicole’s right eye.

By 2045, eighty-five-year-old Monica has retired to a restored stone castle near Inveraray, Scotland. She keeps two dozen cats, runs a subsistence farm, and writes spy novels under the assumed name Kate Phoenix.

On a stormy December night, there’s a knock at the door. A one-eyed, gray-haired Nicole, wearing a wet raincoat, appears on the threshold. Terminally ill with cancer, she brings a bottle of whiskey and confesses to slipping an odorless, tasteless poison into the second serving. The only vial of the life-saving medicine lies on the table. The women arrange their lead-weighted pieces for the final duel. Monica takes the familiar black pieces, preparing to attack with her queen. Nicole advances her king’s pawn. She discreetly flips a switch on her eye patch: a hidden lens broadcasts the position to the global network, where thirteen thousand connected users collectively choose the ideal move via satellite. The countdown of the chess clock begins.