Conspiracy (22 page)

Instead, Dan told her about Katya Romanova. Of the love she felt for her unborn child. Of her determination to escape to America, where she could have her baby. Of the cruel reprisals that were brought to bear on Soviet defectors who were caught, and of Katya’s resolve to risk the attempt in any case. “I’m her only hope,” Dan said. “If I can’t get her out of that stadium and over to the American embassy, she’s through.”

Sharon looked thoughtful. “Do you think she’s really pregnant?”

Dan seemed surprised by the question. “She sounded sincere as hell, Sharon, really. And come to think of it, her face had kind of a heavy look around the eyes. I’d have to say yes.”

“Do you think she’ll tell about UBC helping her to get out? I don’t want any more complaints from the State Department about our meddling. There’s this officious little guy named Strether who’s been driving me crazy with phone calls.”

“She’ll keep it quiet. I’m telling you, the kid’s serious. She’s going to refuse to put on leotards ever again if they make her have an abortion, and that’ll land her in the gulag for sure.”

“Okay. Last question. Do you have a way to get her out?”

He nodded and told her his plan.

Later, people would say that going along with the method Dan outlined was another of Sharon’s mistakes.

14

While Alec Conroy and the representatives of world media searched Madrid for Helen Bates, the lady herself sat at a green felt casino table some three hundred miles to the south. The Puerto Banus, the most chic gaming house in Marbella, that most chic of Spain’s Costa del Sol beach resort towns, offered its well-heeled clientele all the traditional ways of redistributing their wealth to the house and its employees. 

Helen preferred the dice table. When asked why, she generally replied that she enjoyed watching the dice players more, because one saw more in a person when he or she was throwing dice, wasn’t that so? The physical movement, she would say, stimulated one more than simply watching them pick up their cards or put down their chips.

To herself, though, Helen acknowledged that she preferred the dice because it gave people more opportunity to watch her. She took pleasure in their looks as she bent forward to retrieve the dice, and then again as she bent forward to throw. When she leaned over the table in that way, the low-cut dresses she wore revealed her splendid breasts right down to the nipples. Men and women alike would try not to stare, and generally they would not succeed. She counted a throw of the dice a success if the others at the table had not seen the number she threw until the croupier made the call.

This evening she was enjoying herself. There was a good crowd at her table. Many of them were long-term summer residents, not just
futbol
tourists in for the World Cup.

Today had been the last of the games held in the Malaga stadium, a half hour’s drive east along the coast. Helen was glad that the games there were over. Now the crowds would flow north to Barcelona and Madrid for the second-phase games, and the resort would be less mobbed. It was pleasant, she thought, that the mishap Alec Conroy had encountered with the TV people had made it necessary for her to come here nearly a week ahead of schedule. And pleasanter still that she would not have to endure the lovemaking of Derek Bates any longer. That inconvenience was now set firmly in her past. Here, under a different name, her hair now blond in the event that photographs of Helen Bates began to appear in the newspapers, she would not be recognized.

She bent to retrieve a pack of American cigarettes from her handbag on the floor beside her stool, and caught one of the scantily clad cocktail waitresses looking at her. Helen’s eyes flickered with interest. She had not had a woman in weeks, and this one was an appealingly dark-eyed young Andalusian.

She motioned the girl to bring the tray of drinks that the casino’s management provided free of charge and urged on those who were winning. The girl came directly. Her eyes were held by Helen’s steady gaze. She stood at Helen’s side, holding her tray a trifle self-consciously, while Helen appraised her. “Turn around,” said Helen after a moment. “I want to see your uniform.”

The girl moved obediently, slowly, her cheeks reddening but with the hint of a smile at one corner of her mouth. When the girl’s back was turned, Helen looked carefully over her shoulder and down the front of her uniform to see if the girl’s nipples were erect. They were.

Helen walked with the girl a few steps away from the felt-covered green table until they were out of the crowd. “It’s smoky in here,” she said in Spanish. “When did you come to work tonight?”

“At eight,” said the girl, also in Spanish. Then she added, “I get off at one-thirty.”

“Come out the front entrance. I’ll be in a red Citroen.”

The girl blinked, impressed with the name of a car few in Spain could afford, and still fewer Spanish waitresses. “Will you be driving?”

Helen smiled slightly at the question. “Yes, and I’ll be alone too. You needn’t concern yourself.” 

Later, she thought, she would see how the girl reacted to bringing a man in and making it a threesome.

“One-thirty, then,” said the girl softly, and would have hurried away if Helen had not reminded her that she had not yet selected her drink. She chose champagne, and let her fingers softly touch the girl’s as she took the offered glass.

Returning to the table, Helen felt excited and curiously benevolent. She supposed it was because the girl had been the one to make the first overture, looking at her that way. Possibly it might also be that she intended to see that the girl had as good a time as she herself did.

She sipped champagne and saw that it was her turn to throw. Feeling the eyes on her, she bent down for the dice and sent them skittering into the corner with a flick of her wrist. Six days of this, she thought, would not be at all difficult to take. Especially since she had a beachfront house all to herself.

Thursday afternoon, of course, the Thin One would arrive and Helen would have to work again. But for six more nights, it promised to be a most enjoyable little holiday.

PART THREE

July 2-9

1

At 1:00 a.m. there was no moon over the Mediterranean. 

To Groves, though, the night sky seemed alive with stars by the millions, their pale blue-white fires casting a shimmering iridescence over the moving waves, touching the shifting dark peaks with silver, deepening the troughs in shadow. From the pilot’s deck of the
Benghazi
he studied the surface of the sea carefully, making long sweeps with his high-powered Zeiss binoculars. The coastal waters were empty, right up to the jetty rocks framing the curves of the beach inlets. No other ships. 

For the two weeks prior to his trip to America, Groves had studied the same stretch of water after midnight with these same binoculars, only at that time the directions had been reversed; he had been on land, on the terrace of his beachfront house, looking out to sea. Those two weeks of patient nightly observation had taught him what he needed to know about the government vessels that patrolled for smugglers. For two Thursday nights in succession, one boat had appeared coming east from Malaga at twelve-thirty; another had come from the west about two hours later.

Groves focused the Zeiss optics on the floodlit facade of the Andalusia Plaza. The hotel was visible without the glasses, for it was a Versailles-like mammoth of a resort, set regally back nearly half a mile from the shoreline. A paved walkway wide enough to accommodate two small trucks extended from the pretentious circular fountain in the center of the hotel’s even more pretentious central courtyard, down to the wide semicircle of beach reserved for guests. For those who preferred not to walk, Groves knew, golf carts were diverted from the hotel’s two eighteen-hole courses and driven shuttle-fashion by attendants during daylight hours and for an hour after sunset. 

The carts were gone now; the road was empty.

Groves moved his field of vision from the hotel walkway less than fifty feet to his own house. One of a row, it sat in quiet elegance, shaded by orange and acacia trees. It had reminded Groves, when he first saw it, of a Manhattan brownstone in the East Sixties that would have sold for a half million the year Groves had found it necessary to leave America. The Marbella house, with its terrace, two bedrooms, kitchen, view of the water, and all the rest, had run Groves only a hundred and eighty-five thousand. When he sold it, as he intended to do within the next week. Groves expected to double that figure, the way real-estate prices had gone up.

Tonight his house had a single light in the top-floor window—the signal that the landing could proceed. They had kept the house open, making it appear that he had never left. If he was spotted wading ashore, he could simply leave the grenades in the water unseen and say he had been out for a swim. 

That had been a point of theirs when they had fingered him for the job. “You’re right on the water,” the Thin One had said. “You’re the only one in Europe with a place right on the water, and we need to bring the shipment into a European country.” 

Groves had seen through the smokescreen well enough. Someone like the
Patrón
would have no trouble finding another beach house in Europe. It was Spain they needed to bring the Cobor to. And the only thing going on in Spain, Groves repeated to himself for probably the thousandth time during this eleven-day voyage, was the World Cup.

“We’re dead on target,” he said to the swarthy Libyan captain beside him. “You’ve done well.”

The man nodded.

“You can cut the engines,” said Groves. “This is the spot.”

The man nodded again, but gave no order into the microphone that projected up from among the glowing dials on his instrument board. For a moment Groves felt apprehension, but then he realized what the man was waiting for. He dug down inside the black wetsuit he was wearing and pulled out his money clip, handing two thousand dollars over to the captain.

The man’s face showed no expression as he counted the money. When he was done, he folded the bills again and put them into his pocket. The blankness in his eyes made Groves wonder if he knew about the Cobor. 

“I shall forget that you have been here,” he said, his gaze resting on Groves for only a brief instant, as though he had even now dismissed Groves from his memory. Then he pressed a button on his instrument board and spoke Arabic into the microphone. Groves heard no clanking of gears or change in the throbbing of the engines, but when he looked starboard again, the lights along the shoreline were no longer moving.

“You have five minutes,” the captain said.

They lowered his gear with him in his motorized raft on the starboard side, away from land and possible witnesses who might wonder what had prompted a six-hundred-foot tanker to stop so close to shore. Groves took the raft a hundred yards farther out to sea before coming in toward land, to be certain he was clear of the suction and the wake churned by the tanker’s giant propellers.

When Groves was safely over the side and the winch cables had been raised, the Libyan captain removed a small radio transmitter-receiver from the locker in the pilot’s cabin. He extended the antenna. He did not touch the frequency dials; the transmission frequency had been preset. 

Looking at the shoreline, he spoke one word into the microphone: “Cargo.” Without waiting for a reply, he collapsed the antenna and put the transmission unit back into the locker. Sold on the black market, the unit would bring only an additional two hundred dollars, so he would keep it. Possibly it would be an intriguing toy for his grandson.

On the darkened terrace of Eugene Groves’s beach house, the man Groves knew as the Thin One collapsed the antenna of a similar transmitter-receiver. “He’s coming,” he said to a figure in the shadows inside the house. “Is your weapon ready?”

As Groves watched the great shadowy bulk of the ship’s keel glide past, his raft bobbed up and down on the waves and he felt the vast emptiness of the dark sea around him, a void that could swallow his raft and ten thousand others without taking notice of the fact. 

Groves ignored the feeling.

He had trained himself well on the eleven-day voyage, eating, resting, getting good exercise on the ship’s capacious deck, the size of one and a half football fields. He felt fit and trim now, ready to make his delivery and put the
Patrón
out of operation.

He put the rubber mouthpiece from his tank into his mouth and bit down on it, hard. On the off-chance that the wake might swamp his raft, or that a shore patrol vessel had come into view while the tanker blocked his vision, Groves wanted to be prepared to hit the water quickly. 

He wasn’t worried about the Cobor; the grenades, all but one, were safely stowed in a rubberized canvas seaman’s bag with a flotation collar and homing device. If he had to scuttle the raft, he could tow the sack easily enough; the buoyancy of the flotation collar was adjustable so that he could keep the Cobor just below the surface. He had been a good swimmer all his life and had trained with the scuba gear for two years here in Marbella, simply for the sport. Soon, he reflected, he would be able to enjoy that sport, and others, as a free man.

He rode out the first swells of the tanker’s wake, using the raft’s clip-on rudder. When he was certain he had time, he took out his mouthpiece. The next wave from the tanker washed over the raft and chilled his groin with seawater. 

He spat into his facemask and used some of the water to rinse it. Then he splashed more onto his face, letting it sting his eyes. He leaned over the bulging gunwale of the raft and deliberately scooped his cupped hand into a dark wave as it rolled by, splashing the water under his arm onto his wetsuit the way he would if he were wading at the beach and was about to plunge under on a day when the water was cold. The change in temperature did not hurt his arm. The wound had been treated by the ship’s doctor and had nearly healed. He dug the blade of his paddle into the next wave and began to propel himself toward shore.