Conspiracy (42 page)

“What’s that got to do with us?” Rachel snapped back. “We’re on assignment.”

“Indeed.” Yuri smiled slightly, nodding. “And it must be a most important assignment, too, if you are required to miss the overtime that will decide the
futbol
championship of the world that you have come to this country to broadcast. So I shall not detain you for long.”

“What is it you want?” asked Dan.

“We are concerned that Katya may have hidden herself in one of the vehicles leaving the stadium. Possibly she is in yours, without your knowing it. I should like your permission to look inside.”

“Preposterous,” Rachel said firmly. “This truck is American property. You have neither the authority nor the right to make a search.”

Zadiev shrugged. He motioned to the guard, who once again lifted his submachine gun. This time, however, the gun was aimed at Rachel’s head.

“Then I regret,” Zadiev said, “that I shall have to make the search without your permission. Is the back of your van locked? If it is, please give me the keys. Otherwise I shall have the lock removed. With machine-gun fire.”

Dan shuddered. “Let me have the keys, will you, Walter?” he asked. Then he handed them over to Yuri.

“Stay in position,” Zadiev told the three guards in Russian. “If they try to crash through the gate, shoot the tires and then the engine.”

He went around to the back of the van, used his good hand to insert the key, and opened the rear panel.

He saw Katya Romanova, now dressed in a UBC uniform two sizes too large for her. Wide-eyed and pale, she was trembling in the arms of Anton Volnikov.

A passage from Romanova’s file came to Yuri’s memory. Volnikov, observers had noted, was Sergei Romanov’s drinking companion. He had often been seen entering and leaving the Romanovs’ apartment in Moscow. 

It was possible, Yuri thought, that the child Katya was carrying was not Nikolai Kormelin’s after all.

But that possibility could have no bearing on the course of action he had made up his mind to follow.

He nodded briefly to the young lovers. Giving a slight wave of his bandaged hand, he closed the door to the van and locked it.

At the front of the van, he spoke to the guard in Russian. “There are only two more Americans in there,” he said. “Let them through.”

As the guards moved to open the massive iron stadium gates, Zadiev turned to the two UBC newscasters. Now he spoke English. “Sorry to have inconvenienced you,” he said. “Have a safe journey home.”

Both Richards and Quinn stared at him, speechless.

“You do the same, man,” Walter J. said softly.

The gates were opening, the guards standing aside. Walter J. started the engine and put the van in gear.

“When you see Sharon Foster again,” Zadiev said to just before they drove away, “please give her my thanks for what she did this afternoon.”

They nodded a bit stiffly, still not certain that he really intended to let them go. Yuri returned the nod. 

He stood motionless as they passed the gates, his thoughts on the men in Dzerzhinsky Square who had left him and his brother here to die.

Then he ordered the guards to close the gates once more. “Maintain radio contact,” he told them. “Stop anyone else who tries to leave before the game is over.”

EPILOGUE

1

In a telephone booth outside the Madrid Airport, an ordinary-looking gray-haired man in a trench coat dropped a twenty-five
Peseta
piece into the slot and dialed the number of the police. In careful, rather academic Spanish he told the desk sergeant on duty that something of international importance could be found in rooms at the Palace Hotel registered to Rachel Quinn, an American with UBC.

Then he hung up the phone. The man known in America as Ross Cantrell and in Moscow as Pyotr Tavda felt some frustration as he walked out of the phone booth and into the International Terminal building. The cabdriver’s radio he had listened to on his taxi ride from Bernabeau Stadium had told him that his plan had failed. His own pocket TV set had told him that the tape had gone off as scheduled, for he had seen the TV Espana signal change to the UBC newsreel. 

All that had seemed to have miscued were the last few seconds of that tape, which had not been played. That would account for one grenade, the one in the stadium drainage system. The other two in the field-level cameras? Possibly they had been discovered during some last-minute security check that he had been unaware of. He was certain, however, that the woman who had called herself Molly was dead, along with Sharon Foster. That grenade had been programmed to detonate first, after only ten seconds of the tape had elapsed. 

So no one would be alive to link Ross Cantrell with the Soviet Union. It would also be some time before anyone who entered his office would be able to live, considering the amount of Cobor that was present in one grenade, and the rate at which the penthouse ventilation system dispersed it into the air above the stadium.

So even if someone had come into Cantrell’s office and found the evidence against him immediately, they would not have been able to spread the alarm.

Meanwhile, his call to the Madrid police would put the focus of attention on Rachel Quinn. That would be enough to create tomorrow’s headlines: TWO KILLED IN WORLD CUP BOMB ATTEMPT: AMERICAN TV STAR HELD.

Not the distinctive numbers Chelkar had asked for, but something at least.

Regardless, however, Cantrell was not overly anxious to label his mission a success; he had no reason to try to disguise the truth. Because of the sensitive nature of the assignment, Chelkar had explained, they were using the Izhevsk system. None but he and Helena were now alive to say that there had even been a mission in Madrid.

Carrying a small, ordinary-looking briefcase with makeup equipment inside, Cantrell walked toward the nearest men’s room. There, in one of the lavatory cubicles, he would alter his facial appearance to match the photograph on his passport.

Cantrell did not notice Helen Bates, who was seated among those waiting for incoming passengers. She was reading a Spanish movie tabloid and did not appear to notice Cantrell’s arrival.

2

“Aren’t you going to come to the embassy?” Dan Richards asked.

Rachel shook her head. She reached in front of him to open the door of the UBC mobile unit. “I’ll get out here at the hotel. I want to catch the last plane to Seville tonight.”

Outside her hotel room, Rachel hesitated. She remembered another carpeted hotel corridor, another polished door of darkened wood. When she had waited outside Helen Bates’s room on the seventh floor of the Ritz, Rachel had been prepared to expose Alec Conroy’s affair and then to abandon him. 

Now, by returning to the Seville hospital where Alec lay paralyzed, she would be making a commitment to help him.
I can always back out
, she told herself. 

But she knew that to raise Alec’s hopes and then leave him again would be a cruelty of which she was not capable. 

You really can’t win
, she thought. She would be getting him, not because of her attractiveness or personal charm, but because he needed someone who would help him. She thought of massaging his motionless legs and lifting them in the exercises that the doctor had said would keep up the muscle tone. She wondered if Alec would be able to sustain an erection. She pictured herself behind his wheelchair, getting out of a limousine to wheel him into a theater opening. 

You silly romantic broad
, she thought.
You’re letting Bill Brautigam broadcast the story at the stadium and giving Katya’s story to Dan Richards.

But she got out her key and opened the door to her room. At least, she thought, Alec wouldn’t be running out on her. Not until he had recovered, anyway.

After she had packed, she reached behind the bathroom medicine cabinet, removed the small plastic bag that held her cocaine, and tucked it away in her purse. More of the white crystals remained than she had expected; on this day, the last she had intended to remain away from New York, she had originally planned to have used up her supply, so that there would be no problems getting the drug past U.S. Customs officers. 

Yet here she was with enough to last through at least a full week of daily broadcasts. Or even two weeks, at the rate she had consumed the stimulant during recent days. Taking the drug, or not taking it, seemed to make less of a change in her performance lately. It was difficult to see the difference when she watched the broadcast tapes each night. 

She supposed her system was finally adapting; to get a real rush of energy she would need to increase the dosage.

Then she remembered Alec’s stash in the room next door. He would not be able to either use it or protect it against prying customs inspectors.

She went into his room. Using a dime from her change purse, she unscrewed the back of the amplifier to Alec’s guitar. From inside the speaker housing she withdrew a plastic-wrapped white egg of cocaine roughly the size of a golf ball. She tucked it into her handbag with her own supply of the drug and was about to replace the cover of the amplifier when she noticed something.

At the bottom of the speaker.

A dull.black cylinder.

A chill swept over her. For a moment she wondered if Alec could somehow have been part of the plan to detonate the bombs like this one, in the stadium. But her mind worked swiftly. Alec was the last person a group of ruthless professionals would trust with Cobor. He was too unstable. He talked too much when he had been drinking; saw too many people; was too conspicuous. 

This bomb was a plant.

Later, Rachel would question Alec Conroy and learn that Helen Bates had never returned Alec’s room key. 

This evening, however, she spent no more time in speculation. She put the Cobor grenade into her handbag. Then she picked up the heavy black bedside telephone receiver and dialed the extension for the bell captain. She and Mr. Conroy would be checking out immediately, she said. Someone should be sent up to pack the suitcases and get them to the airport for tonight’s flight to Seville.

She locked both doors and went out to the service elevator, carrying her purse. 

Getting on when the elevator arrived, she pressed the lowest button on the control panel and rode down to the sub-basement. The doors opened, revealing a dark, dirty corridor with bare concrete floors, dingy soot-covered walls, and a maze of asbestos-covered pipes overhead. The air was stiflingly hot and smelled of garbage and machine exhaust.

Not far down the corridor she found what she was looking for. Beside two greasy carts bearing empty waste cans was a wide metal chute, stained and reeking of garbage. 

A sign above the chute warned in Spanish that only paper and other combustibles were to be deposited.

She pulled the brass handle and the chute opened. From inside she heard the clanking roar of machinery, saw the glare of distant flame.

As she flung the grenade down the chute, her thoughts were on Yuri Zadiev and the torch that had burned his hand. 

Perhaps, she thought, she might travel to Moscow to interview Yuri about his heroism. The attention of a Western journalist, she knew, would add to his status and further offset some of the blame he would be certain to take when it became known that Katya Romanova had slipped through his fingers.

As an afterthought, almost without realizing what she was doing, she took out the two plastic bags of cocaine and dropped them into the chute as well. 

A second later she regretted the move and lunged to get them back. It was too late. 

Hell
, she thought,
eight hundred dollars, maybe more, gone up in smoke
. As she walked back to the elevator, she consoled herself with the thought that she could always get more in New York if she needed it.

Shortly afterward, the thirty-fifth Cobor grenade ruptured under the intense heat of the Palace Hotel incinerator. The lethal fumes entered the air inside the refractory oven, at a temperature of thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Within moments, the Cobor burned into a harmless mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapor that rose through the antipollution scrubbers of the hotel smokestack and into the twilight air of Madrid.

Coming out of the hotel lobby, Rachel Quinn immediately saw Walter J. in the mobile van. Parked at the curb, he was waiting to take her to the airport. 

As she got in, she noticed a small black police car arriving at the hotel entrance with four uniformed officers squeezed inside. Walter J. was telling her of the reception he and Dan Richards had been given at the American embassy when they arrived with the two Russians, however, and the Spanish radio announcer was describing the closing minutes of the overtime period at Bernabeau. 

Rachel was soon distracted. 

She did not think of the police until the next day at the Seville airport, when an officer politely asked if he might inspect the contents of her purse.

3

At Madrid International Airport, radio coverage of the World Cup Championship had replaced the Muzak coming from the metal ceiling speakers. The man who had been Ross Cantrell heard the score as he entered the Aeroflot waiting room. Four to two in favor of Argentina, one minute remaining. He grimaced. 

His face appeared ten years older than before and much heavier, that of a rather lumpish Soviet bureaucrat nearing retirement. 

Other men in the waiting room resembled him, even to their Western-style suits and shoes. They waited patiently for the jeep-drawn trailer van that would carry them from the terminal building to the Tupolev jet now being maneuvered into position on a distant runway.

Cantrell began to relax as he walked to an empty seat facing the glass window-wall. He was still under Spanish jurisdiction, true, but the waiting area was, to all intents and purposes, Soviet territory. He was practically home. 

He thought of the briefcase he had left in the trash can of the airport washroom, of the makeup that had served its purpose; of the thirty-sixth Cobor grenade, the empty one, that he had left in the briefcase after deciding a bluff of some kind would not be necessary. And there had been no subsequent challenges, no suspicious glances—only polite nods from inspection personnel glad to be on duty now, before the rush began when the game ended.