Conspiracy (17 page)

“Certainly I am not a prisoner!” Katya hoped she sounded sufficiently indignant. “As Tamara just told you, I am a free Soviet citizen!”

“So if I asked you to dinner tonight, and you wanted to go, we wouldn’t have to invite Tamara?”

“As it happens, I have other plans for dinner tonight, Mr. Richards, thank you very much,” she replied with an ingenuous smile. “But if we were to go out, I don’t think Tamara would say that was a situation that required a chaperone.”

If that were only true
, she thought,
I could leave tonight
.

Dan laughed. “I should hope not! But tell me this—let’s just have a little test for our viewers to see for themselves. Suppose I were to ask you right now—we’ve got time, it’s well within our schedule—right now, to come up to the press box with me and look down over the soccer field. Just you and me, and I’ll ask you some background questions about soccer and your brother. Would you be free to do that? Or would Tamara insist on coming along?”

She tried to sound suitably indignant. “Of course I’d be free to do that!”

He got to his feet. “Then let’s show everybody that you really are free to go. Keep the cameras on us, please, and we’ll just walk out of the studio and take the elevator up to the press box. Do we need to ask your permission to do that, Tamara?”

Tamara’s attempt to show casual unconcern failed miserably, but she went through with her speech. “Feel free, Mr. Richards, by all means. Though I don’t see why you think you must make such a production out of the matter. As I said, we are here only to assist the athletes. Katya obviously does not need my assistance to tell you about her brother, here in the studio, or upstairs in the press box.”

Katya hid her relief as they went out.

In the elevator she quickly told him the truth. She used the French word she remembered from her volume of Tolstoy. “I am
enceinte
, Mr. Richards. If my country finds out, they will force me to have an abortion. I have seen it happen before, with other girls on the team. I want my baby, Mr. Richards. Can you help me come to America right away?”

Listening on his personal office headset, Yuri Zadiev heard the door click open in the vacant press box at Bernabeau Stadium. A wise precaution, he thought, to have wired both the Americans’ studio and the press box when they had first arrived in Madrid.

Richards was speaking. “Maybe we’d be able to work something to get the father out, too. If you’d like to tell me who he is.”

“No.” Katya’s voice, the youthful firmness unmistakable. “I don’t want the father to know. He is in a . . . high position. It would be too risky for him to be contacted, let alone to try to get him to America.”

“Okay, I’ll certainly respect your wishes, Katya. It’s the safety of you and your baby that’s most important.” He paused and Zadiev sat up straight, his concentration now acute. Well, and wasn’t this interesting, indeed! Katya Romanova with a baby, the father in a high position!

“What we’ll do, I think,” Richards was saying, “is have you come back for another interview. We’ll have this one focus on gymnastics, and the next one we’ll concentrate on soccer. Maybe you’ll be prepared to show how it’s easy for a girl to learn soccer, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, I’ll make some preparations. Maybe we’ll get you out on the field with the cameras, and we can make our move from there. After today, I don’t think Tamara will insist on staying at your elbow, do you?”

Zadiev heard Richards’s laughter fading. Then the door clicked shut. He removed his earpiece and stared at it reflectively, musing. Most interesting! And potentially more interesting still, when he had learned the identity of the father.

But this was not the sort of information to be shared.

He rewound the tape that had been activated by the press box microphone’s hidden mechanism, and turned the knob that would erase it. Then he picked up the phone.

“Get me the file on Katya Romanova,” he said quietly. “From Moscow Center. Everything for the past six months.”

Later that evening he listened to Tamara as she made her report in his office. Zadiev told her she had acted well, that both she and Katya had upheld the proud heritage of the Soviet people in a difficult environment.

He had the dubious pleasure of seeing that bruiser of a woman beam with satisfaction.

8

When Katya was still at the UBC studio that Sunday, Alec Conroy was in room 702 of Madrid’s Ritz Hotel. He had let himself in with the key Helen Bates had given him on his previous visit—an afternoon that had paid off in what Alec considered to be one of the finest bedroom hours he had spent in years. Helen exuded even more sexuality in bed than she did in a cocktail dress. Unlike some married women, who seemed to become timid and hesitant when the moment of truth arrived, Helen had been eager, exciting, an inspiration to Alec’s prowess. She wasn’t just legs and breasts, either, as she might have seemed from her first appearance at the party; she knew things to do to him that brought the warmth of desire back quickly after the first time.

And a simple relationship, for a change. Rachel Quinn was interesting, and a good friend, but Alec was beginning to find her possessiveness somewhat wearing. It was refreshing to find a woman who didn’t mind when he walked out, a woman whose lust wasn’t diminished by his immediate past or immediate future.

She had been savvy, too, about their exchanging hotel keys. He had learned that just this afternoon, when he had seen a man stopped in the hallway and asked to produce evidence that he was registered in the Ritz. That man didn’t have a key or a room receipt, and he had been asked to go downstairs to the desk to identify himself. Hotels in Madrid, especially the better ones, were taking stiff measures to guard their guests against international thieves and prostitutes who preyed on the many important people in town for the World Cup. The afternoon’s incident had been proof of what Helen had explained earlier: without each other’s keys, neither of them could be confident of passing through some random check by a house detective without some embarrassing questions or—worse—publicity. 

Alec’s fear of exposure and the unreasoning fright that police had always given him since his Birmingham childhood had made the event memorable. His hand had grasped instinctively for the key in his pocket, ready to flash it as a talisman against evil. Even as he clutched the comfortingly thick room tag, his palm had been wet with nervous perspiration. His breath came in shallow gasps. He looked guilty from ten feet away, and knew it, and the knowledge made him more nervous. How much worse, he thought, to go through the same ordeal as a woman. How much worse still to do it as the wife of a violent hulk like Bates! He was glad he had done the gentlemanly thing and given her his key. As she had pointed out, her husband would return to her room from the Costa del Sol, possibly between games, and so they would need to move the festivities to Alec’s room for a time.

Besides, it was a romantic notion. An exchange of keys, like an exchange of lovers’ vows. Alec liked romance almost as much as he enjoyed sex.

Here in room 702 he had enjoyed himself very much indeed. As Helen dozed beside him, naked, he lifted the sheet to survey her magnificent breasts. Gradually he felt himself becoming aroused yet another time. Kneeling, he took one of her nipples between his lips and began to moisten it with the tip of his tongue. His fingers smoothed the skin of her flanks, lazily gravitating toward the warm treasure-trove between her thighs.

She stirred. With an easy, almost casual movement she lifted the sheet over her head and his to make a lovers’ tent around them. Her hand caressed his belly as he knelt. When she reached for him, she found him hard.

In the carpeted hallway outside room 702, Rachel Quinn looked at Helen Bates’s doorway for the first time. Dark wood, probably as old as the hotel, varnished even darker, with old-fashioned brass numbers. The same dark wood, the same brass numbers were on all the other doors in the corridor, but the door to room 702 made Rachel shiver, as though she had found a snake on her bed. It should have been different, she thought, should have been at the end of a long, twisting and turning pathway, an ill-lit, musty, gloom-ridden chamber, a fifth-floor walkup in the Village with peeling paint, not out here opposite an elevator. She should have had more trouble tracking Alec to his lair.

Remembering the last few days, Rachel thought again how absurdly easy it had been. A guest list from the British Soccer Association showed room numbers of all who had attended the opening-game party. The Bateses were listed as occupying room 702. No one else in any of the other hotels had that number. Rachel remembered Helen Bates very clearly from the party: those big dark eyes and the little sideways glances she kept darting at Alec as he withdrew deeper and deeper into the mists of alcohol.

The next clue had been Helen’s refusal to be interviewed for the “Women in Waiting” profile Rachel was doing on the players’ wives for UBC. The others she’d asked—four, all with rooms at the Ritz on the seventh floor— had accepted immediately, pleased and excited at the prospect of being on an American network show. Helen had singled herself out, revealing to Rachel that she didn’t want to come close, or have her private life inspected even superficially. Then the final, unmistakable giveaway: the key in Alec’s pocket last night. 

The lovemaking had been evidence, too—or rather, the lack of intensity in Alec’s lovemaking had been evidence, coupled with the increased drinking in the late evenings when Rachel came home to him. But finding the key to 702 at the Ritz! She supposed he hadn’t expected her to search his pants; he had, after all, gone to the trouble of hanging them in his closet, a rare burst of tidiness for Alec. But still, finding that key, Rachel had felt hot shame and anger flush her cheeks. Alec was flaunting his infidelity, not caring for her any longer, not sparing her pride.

She had felt like waking him right at that moment, slapping his face as he slept, and then thrusting the key under his nose, but she had held back. For one thing, there was a slender chance that she was wrong, that Helen Bates had given Alec the key to her room, but that Alec had not yet met her there. An absurd hope for a fading woman to cling to, Rachel had thought, but a hope nonetheless. She would wait for indisputably final proof before she took action.

That morning, as they took their Sunday rolls and jam and coffee in the hotel breakfast room, Rachel had mentioned that she would be filming a documentary that afternoon until around half past seven, and caught the flicker of thought in Alec’s eyes. She had left the hotel at four, saying goodbye to Alec, and then put on a hat he had not seen before, taken a cab, and waited inside it in the line outside the entrance for all of fifteen minutes. He had not even glanced at the taxis, just walked across the Plaza de Cortes, his white coat and white-gold hair stark in the afternoon sunlight. She had paid her driver, maintaining, as he did, a studied indifference throughout, and followed Alec at a distance of about two hundred yards until he disappeared inside the entrance to the Ritz.

Then she had phoned up Walter J. and Fat Max and told them to bring the mobile van around to the Ritz service entrance.

To get the cameras in required a brief discussion with the hotel porter on duty, and a hundred dollars’ worth of Spanish pesetas. To get the cameras up to the seventh floor was more of a problem. It called for the consent of the head porter and the weekend manager, the signed statements of three of the women who had given their permission to be interviewed, and another two hundred fifty dollars’ worth of pesetas. It was ten past six when Rachel finally obtained all the necessary blessings and permissions from the Ritz staff and management— enough time, Rachel knew, for most lovers to have come and gone away. But Alec was different. And Helen Bates, who was eager enough for Alec to give him her key, would likely not be satisfied with anything like a brief dalliance. Rachel had told Alec to meet her for dinner at nine. She felt certain he would use the intervening time to its fullest.

Now, in the quiet seventh-floor corridor, Rachel was looking at the last piece of evidence. Hanging from the knurled brass doorknob of room 702 was the tastefully small, red-lettered card that read, “
No Molestar
,” and in the event that a potential intruder did not read Spanish, “Do Not Disturb” was printed beneath in English, French, and German.

Flaunting it, Rachel thought again, her heart quickening as she readied herself for action. Advertising their affair for the world. Well, Helen Bates would see what it was really like to flaunt. Here was one on-camera performance that Rachel would need no cocaine to get up for—an ironic fact, she thought as she took the elevator back down to the lobby. The action that could separate her from Alec and his cocaine would be the first where she no longer needed the drug. 

Not that she had any intention of quitting, however. She had checked her supply only this morning, and reaffirmed that she had more than enough to last out the month-long tournament. After that time she would simply reestablish her old connection back in New York.

Crossing the lobby, Rachel found herself no longer impressed or inspired by its high ceilings with the gilded scrollwork, by the gilded Florentine furnishings, by the valuable eighteenth-century oil paintings and tapestries and medieval armor on display around her. She had a job to do; nothing else mattered. She had come into Spain feeling the land’s enchantment and tradition as she had always done before, but now all that seemed an ineffective substitute for what she was about to lose. No, she reminded herself: for what she had already lost. There was no point in pretending any longer. Alec was no longer hers.

Her UBC men were with the camera near the service entrance. Both had on their white UBC coveralls, which had the desired effect of diminishing the personal impact of a two-hundred pound, beet-faced German and a lanky, Afro-topped American. People she filmed saw the uniforms and not the faces, and so they felt less self-conscious than they would have if they’d been before a live audience.