Jasper Knight was an American chess master and Soviet spy killed in 1979 by then-ICA operative Erich Soders.
In HITMAN™, an actor portrays Knight during a reconstructed training exercise that serves as a final exam for Agent 47's induction into the agency.
Background[]
Knight was a world-famous chess master who murdered the Soviet ambassador to the US. The ambassador was planning to defect to the West, and Knight, a Soviet spy working under order from the KGB, ingeniously poisoned the ambassador with ricin-coated chess pieces during a private match.
Knight then fled to communist Cuba, awaiting safe conduct across the Iron Curtain. When Langley discovered what had transpired, they hired the International Contract Agency to eliminate Knight.
The assassin, ICA's training director Erich Soders during his active years, caught up with Knight at a remote airfield in communist Cuba where he was meeting his KGB contact and assassinated him.
― Target Intel
Appearance[]
- The Final Test (portrayed by actor)
- Overachievers (mentioned)
- Another Life (mentioned in Target Intel for Janus)
- The Ark Society (mentioned during Last Honors mission story)
- The Farewell (mentioned by Diana while talking to Tamara Vidal)
Gallery[]
Jasper's Jet Ejector Seat Kill
Trivia[]
- If the player disguises as the KGB Officer and gets Knight to follow Agent 47 into the communications room to contact his superiors, he will use the agent designation "Blind Tailor", a reference to Tommy Clemenza (Tommy the Tailor) from Hitman: Absolution.
- It is possible Knight was loosely inspired by real life Cold War-era chess masters Viktor Korchnoi and Lev Alburt, who both defected from the USSR. Another possible inspiration is American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer; Knight's irritable demeanor and lavish demands upon his hosts are reminiscent of Fischer's erratic personality.
- His name is most likely inspired by the name of the music composer for the first four hitman games, Jesper Kyd
- In HITMAN ™ 2, if Knight is eliminated by tampering with the ejection seat, Diana will say that she hopes that the actor's parachute will deploy properly. This is a retcon of the original version of the mission from the previous game, where the surrounding actors’ reactions imply that Knight’s actor was actually killed by the ejection seat launch.
- In HITMAN™ 2, Janus' intel briefing states that he arranged for Knight's assassination through his moles in the CIA to cover up activity surrounding one of Janus' spy schools in the United States.
- Dialogue between Tamara Vidal and Diana Burnwood in HITMAN™ III confirms that 47 passed his test using the rigged ejector seat, and a different conversation between Diana and Erich Soders in the short story Overachievers confirms that this was the authentic way that Soders completed the original hit.