Conspiracy (39 page)

He folded the page with the red markers on it and handed it over to Sharon. “When you see me move,” he whispered, “hold your breath and run for the door. We’ve got to get down to the field and disconnect—”

“No talking!” Molly said sharply.

“Oh, come on, Molly,” Sharon said. “With only three minutes, you can’t really believe he’s coming back! He had other women! I saw one of them myself one night—”

The gaunt Russian woman refused to admit that she had been betrayed. “There is time,” she said stubbornly. “The camera grenades were not to be detonated until the final minute. I’m sure it is the same with the one here—”

Keith sprang. He was on her like a tiger, hands grasping for the black cylinder. With surprising quickness, the tall woman spun away, keeping the Cobor just out of his reach. Her long fingers swiftly worked the valve.

When she turned to face him, there was a gleam of triumph in her eyes. “I told you!” she cried, lifting the hissing cylinder up in front of her like a dreadful talisman. “I told you!”

“Sharon! Run!” Keith yelled the command and then went for the grenade. This time Molly offered no resistance. “Now you are too late,” she said, and handed him the cylinder.

Sharon’s legs felt immobile. She held her breath, knowing that was what Keith was doing too. In a moment Keith would have shut off the flow of poison gas, and then they would ran downstairs together—

But as Keith grasped the Cobor grenade and closed the valve, Molly struck. Her knee flashed upward from less than a yard away from him and caught Keith squarely in the pit of his stomach. The breath went out of him in a rush. Involuntarily he gasped, his face contorted with surprise and pain.

The Cobor entered his lungs.

“Pyotr will come back,” Molly said, defiant. “He’ll see what I’ve done and he’ll be proud—”

“Sharon! Hold your breath and run!” The desperation in Keith’s voice made Sharon tremble inside and galvanized her to move. She stumbled forward, too shaken to realize that she was wasting valuable seconds. All that she could think of was Keith.

He was holding Molly now, struggling to keep her away from Sharon.

Then the gas took effect.

In a fraction of a second, Molly suddenly doubled over as her muscles went into spasm. Her arms drew in at her sides. Her hands balled themselves into fists. As she dropped to the carpeted floor, her lips drew back from her teeth in a horrible rictus of death.

Keith shuddered. He turned to Sharon. His voice sounded quiet now, as though he had made his peace. “I love you,” he said, “but you must go before it’s too late. Or else what we’ve done will all be for nothing.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, knowing he was right. “Goodbye,” she whispered, and touched his cheek. Somehow she moved to open the door.

Just before she closed it again, she heard a gasp of pain and looked back.

He was kneeling on the carpet, bent double.

Mercifully, she could not see his face.

18

There were four gray-uniformed security guards at the opening to the field-level seats, blocking the entrance. All four had short-barreled machine guns. The sight of the squat, brutal weapons spurred Sharon on. Weakened, numb with the shock of Keith’s death, she fumbled in her jacket pocket for her ID card. The muzzles of two of the machine guns were trained on her as she approached. She held up her UBC card in her right hand and the folded diagram of the stadium in her left. In her mind, Keith’s voice echoed and reechoed.
Before it’s too late, before it’s too late!

Beyond the guards she could see the scoreboard clock framed by the entrance. Five minutes, thirty-five seconds left in the game.

Thirty-five seconds until the tape began broadcasting its murderous signal.

The urge to panic and run away flashed through her. She felt the impulse as though from a great distance, as though the terror dwelt in someone apart from her. Keith had died trying to stop the Cobor; his memory would never leave her. No matter what the cost, Sharon had to reach those grenades.

She eyed the nearest guard and forced steel into her voice. “
Habla inglis?
”

He shrugged and pointed to a fifth guard, inside the entrance. The man was watching the game.

“You!” Sharon cried. “Guard! Quickly! Pronto!”

The man turned and saw the others looking at Sharon. He came over. “Were you among the ones,” Sharon asked him, “who searched for the poison grenades?”

“No,” said the man, a red-faced youth with a mustache like Wayne Taggart’s. “But Pablo here—”

“You know about them, then?” Sharon cut him off. “Excuse me for interrupting, but this is most urgent. There are three more grenades on the field!”

He looked at Sharon and at the red markings on the paper she held before him. The other guard said something in Spanish.

“We’ve got to get out there and disconnect their detonators,” Sharon continued. “In less than four minutes they will explode and kill us all. Do you understand? In less than four minutes!”

The man’s eyes widened. He looked back at the field, and at the sixteen-foot chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire, that separated the spectators from the playing area. “I believe you,” he said, “but to climb that fence? Other guards have orders to shoot.” He spoke as though thinking aloud. “And there is no radio—”

“The Cobor has already killed Keith Palermo,” Sharon said. “You’ve got to think of a way to get me onto that field!”

“Palermo?” said the other guard. 

He pointed down the corridor.

The one who spoke English nodded. “The players’ entrance,” he told Sharon. “Come with me. And for both our sakes, I hope you find what you are speaking about!”

19

In his chair before the UBC control monitors, Wayne Taggart felt superbly in command. There was a lot of tension in doing another live broadcast only twenty-six hours after Seville, but he knew he was handling it beautifully. The shots were falling in place as he knew they would.

He’d written up the camera plan for the game last night and gone over it with the boys, and this evening it was paying off. They were giving him great shots. Terrific balance. He’d put up Camera Nine a little too often, maybe, but that was justified—how many times did you get the chance for a nice, clear closeup of Katya Romanova, watching her brother play? 

He had Max down on the field, shooting Katya whenever the play was at a lull. Great human interest. Especially for the fans at home who’d seen last night’s broadcast. Wayne just knew they’d be edging their chairs up closer to the living room set, each time he put up Katya’s face. Is she pregnant or isn’t she? they’d be asking each other. 

By God
, he thought,
this is one sports event they’re going to remember
. He smiled a little to himself as he called the camera shots for Billy to put up. Less than fifteen minutes remained now till the post-game wrapup would be over, and then they’d roll the credits. He’d been in the Chyron truck late last night, working them out on the teleprinter. The idiots in there had been planning to run “Produced and Directed by Wayne Taggart,” but he’d changed that in a hurry to “PRODUCED BY WAYNE TAGGART.” In big block letters. 

That phrase would hang on the screen for a full five seconds, and then, for another five, the folks at home would see “DIRECTED BY WAYNE TAGGART.” 

Much better impact, spreading it out that way.

Five minutes and ten seconds left in the game. “Prepare to roll Able,” he said, and started counting down. “Nine . . . eight . . . Baker and Charlie, get set to take from TV Espana. . . .” It was a pisser, he thought, having to interrupt, but the disclaimer message after the short five-minute clip ought to smooth down their feathers back home. He’d be taping the last five minutes of the game with both the Baker and Charlie units using the Spanish “feed”— double-covering in the event of a failure in one of the taping units—so nobody would miss a moment of the action. They’d just have to wait a little while. 

As he finished the countdown, it occurred to him that he might want to work this moment into the TV movie Ross Cantrell had promised to finance for him: a two-hour feature that would be produced by Wayne Taggart, directed by Wayne Taggart, and would star Wayne Taggart as the lead character, a TV sports director. 

Something to look forward to.

“. . . three . . . two . . . roll Able, Baker, Charlie,” he said crisply into his headset mike. “Put up Able.”

When Taggart’s command was executed, within milliseconds an unmistakable pattern of electronic impulses, generated by magnetized chromium dioxide granules, raced through the Able tape player in the UBC control truck, through several hundred feet of four-inch-thick shielded coaxial cable, to the UBC transmitter truck parked alongside in the stadium tunnel. 

A powerful Thomson CSF transmitter unit inside the truck amplified those electronic waves to an energy level of fifty kilowatts and sent them on their way, through additional miles of cable, to the uplink antenna building near Madrid International Airport.

Inside that building, the switching device Raul had installed days earlier “recognized” the pattern programmed into it by Helen Bates’s mini transmitter unit during the predawn hours. 

Two electronic switches clicked into place. A timing device began to run. For the next five minutes the switches would remain in position. One blocked the “feed” from the cable that brought the signal from TV Espana’s transmitter truck in Bernabeau Stadium. 

The other switch replaced the TV Espana “feed” with the signal from UBC.

On the building rooftop, two huge parabolic antennae were already tracked in to the RCA SATCOM IV satellite that hovered in space, 22,300 miles above the equator. One of these two “uplink units” beamed its signal to the channel UBC had leased, which was then relayed to earth stations throughout the United States. 

The other rooftop antenna broadcast to the channel leased by TV Espana, which at that moment was being received by stations in every other nation of the world.

The moment Raul’s switching device was activated, both parabolic uplink antennae began to broadcast the UBC signal.

20

In Eames, Iowa, it was 12:30 p.m., Central Daylight Time. George Swanson, soccer coach at the Eames Senior High School, was one of the few who had stayed home from church services that Sunday morning to watch soccer. He sat in his favorite chair before the new big-screen color TV receiver he had bought for the occasion. Though he hated the Russians, George knew that if they won today’s game, the school board would probably increase the athletic budget. He was on the edge of his seat as the announcer’s voice came over the speaker. “They called these Russians unbeaten, untied, and unmerciful, but with just five minutes to play now, they’re—”

George blinked as the image of the green playing field and the players—the Soviets in white and red, the Argentinians in sky-blue and white—disappeared abruptly from his screen.

In Buenos Aires, where it was two-thirty in the afternoon, more than two million keyed-up Argentine viewers also blinked, puzzled at the image they now saw on their TV screens. A man was standing behind a speaker’s lectern on which was hung the golden seal of the United States State Department. 

“
Estados Unidos?
” growled millions more throughout Argentina and the other Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. What the hell was going on?

In Durban, South Africa, it was seven-thirty in the evening. When the voice of Elliott Strether carried into the living rooms of that seaport city, thousands of English-speaking residents, both whites and blacks, understood him. What the bloody hell? they asked each other. What was this effing Yank doing busting into their game this way with his talk of “unfortunate circumstances”?

In Moscow it was 9:30 p.m., and the millions of Soviet citizens who also saw Strether’s press conference were no less puzzled. Like the billions of other fans who had been watching the World Cup Final at that particular moment, the Muscovites could not think of a single good reason why an American official who spoke in a rather boring monotone ought to have suddenly replaced the Heroes of Soviet Sport on their TV sets. The more courageous among them got up, telephoned TV Moscow, and heard a busy signal from a switchboard now flooded with similar calls from surrounding localities. 

A few other Soviet viewers, convinced that the Americans had chosen to unleash an attack at a moment when the USSR’s defense forces were likely to have been distracted, rushed to find someone who understood English so they could learn which Soviet cities had been spared the nuclear holocaust. 

Still others, the majority of viewers, ascribed the change in their picture to an incompetent technician who had pushed the wrong button somewhere. They switched on their radios.

Nearly two billion viewers in other cities, towns, and villages around the world also turned to their radios. As they listened to the excitement in their announcer’s voice and continued to watch the dull performance of Elliott Strether, frustration at what they were missing began to build. In hundreds of different languages around the globe the same sentiment was expressed:
Get this goddamned American out of here!

North of Moscow, in separate
dachas
less than three miles apart from each other, two old men watched with neither surprise or frustration. 

One was Kuybyshev, Minister of Economics. Twelve months earlier he had accepted a certain plan of his Deputy Minister, Nikolai Kormelin. Reading the plan with alacrity, he had passed on to the KGB a request for an incident of some sort that would generate widespread anti-American sentiment throughout the world. 

The Minister had indulged a personal hunch that the KGB would choose the World Cup as a convenient forum because of its universal popularity. 

As Kuybyshev watched, he too switched on his radio. It had certainly been an exciting enough game thus far, and he did not want to miss the conclusion. He hoped that Kormelin had a good seat in the Madrid stadium and was enjoying himself, for if this televised interference was indeed the incident that the Soviet Petro-Economic Task Force would be able to use, the last few hours of leisure Nikolai would have for weeks—perhaps months—would be coming to an abrupt end. Tomorrow the whole ministry would buzz with activity as the protest was organized worldwide.