Conspiracy (12 page)

As he spoke, Larry replayed last night’s conference in his memory. Wayne Taggart had picked up a cassette with an orange tag. “This one’s milksop,” he had said. “We should be using the one Dan has in his pocket.”

If the two cassettes had been mixed up, then Dan Richards had the cassette they needed.

And Dan Richards was in his hotel room here in downtown Madrid, miles away from the transmission studio.

“Never mind, Carlos,” he said. “Just carry on. My mistake.”

He replaced the telephone receiver, feeling defeated, thinking of all the additional problems they would have to face because of this one slip. Suddenly, where the pain of his indigestion had been, a hot iron seemed to be burning, moving upward along his left side to radiate out through the shoulder and down along his arm. Great droplets of sweat burst from the skin of his forehead. His face paled gray, and he had an absurd memory of the plastic bird feeder outside his Scarsdale kitchen window on the January Sunday morning when he had been on the phone with Cantrell the first time. A little round black-capped chickadee had been out there on the feeder looking for seed, and as Cantrell talked on and on, enthusiastic about the World Cup, Larry had thought to himself that he’d better go out there and fill the empty container because the morning was bitter cold. He hadn’t gotten around to it. For God’s sake, he thought wildly, I don’t deserve to die just because I didn’t feed the damn bird!

A few minutes later the phone in Larry’s hotel room rang again. Larry heard and tried to answer, but he could not move.

2

The intent way Ross Cantrell studied her reminded Sharon of her father years ago, on his infrequent visits home. Her father would look at his children one by one, as though he had not seen any of them since infancy, as though he hoped to discover a resemblance to his own face, if only he looked hard enough. 

Cantrell, seemed also to be searching for some sign of kinship. He leaned forward in his chair, his big weathered hands curved as though holding an invisible sphere above his desktop—or as though a little girl stood before him and he was about to tilt up her head gently so that she would look into his eyes. Those eyes, ice blue and twinkling with life and high spirits, would have charmed any little girl. They called him “the old man” because he owned the network, of course, and also because his leonine hair was snow white, but in reality Cantrell was scarcely into his fifties, and those eyes gave clear testimony that he expected to be around for many more years and to have just as good a time or better throwing his weight around. 

There had been rumors early on that Cantrell had done time in a federal prison for tax evasion or price-fixing or investment fraud, depending on who told the story, and that it was there that his luxuriant hair had gone snow white. But because of his lively blue eyes, Sharon had never believed any of that gossip. Those weren’t the eyes of a criminal or a broken man, she could tell; they had the zest and exuberance of someone who knows he can do what he really wants. He could build himself a glassed-in penthouse here on top of Bernabeau Stadium to watch the World Cup championship game; he could create a network to give him a field-level view of that game as well, through three separate cameras wired to the bank of monitors built into his wall cabinet.

He could bring in a playmate for late-night entertainment and send her home in his chauffeured Rolls.

“But what do you think would happen?” he asked as he leaned forward. “What’s your view of the big picture?”

Sharon realized that the hands were curved around an invisible globe—not just any sphere, but a world that he was holding up for her to examine with him. She felt momentarily intimidated; her life was not one of overarching purposes, but of many small details that she completed as professionally as possible while still maintaining a spark or two of friendship— the same as everyone else. She considered herself just an ordinary person with a job.

For a moment her memory clicked back to this morning, coming in to work in the mobile-unit van, when she had felt like one of the crew. Sam and Fat Max and Carol, the three cameramen now that Skinny Perry was gone, were in the back, putting on their UBC coveralls, throwing stories around, Sam and Max doing their best to embarrass Carol: “. . . so I bought the next time and said we ought to head on back to my room and she says what for and I tell her just the basics, some food and sex, and she gets this look in her big dark eyes like something out of The Arabian Nights and takes my hand and puts it under her dress!”

At the time Sharon had thought of Keith, also on his sleepy way to the stadium, but in a taxi. How warm he had been, waking her up with a kiss that morning.

But now Sharon wasn’t with Keith, or back in the truck, she was here, where the radiophone message had insisted she come straight away before she talked with anyone else. And Cantrell had told her about the mix-up with the tapes, as though it were only a small point to be considered in the larger vision of Russian actions; as though the UBC programming ought to reflect what was going on and be changed to meet any new challenges.

Sharon looked out through the wall of glass behind Cantrell, across the green turf of the stadium playing field five stories below, across the red tile rooftops and yellow brick apartment buildings of Madrid, at the mountains beyond, trying to think global. I can’t do it, she was tempted to say. Even if I had your money and power, Ross Cantrell, I probably wouldn’t even want to set the overall policy for “Sesame Street.” But she heard herself saying something different.

“The worst possible scenario? OK, let’s say our team takes three humiliating losses and goes home. The whole world snickers at the clumsy Americans. The Soviets go on to win big. Suddenly American is un-cool, Levis and Cokes are out. The dollar starts to drop on the money markets. This time, jacking up the interest rates doesn’t help. So the Arabs and the rest of OPEC make the big change. They dump the dollar and go to the petro-ruble, the move the Russians have been pushing them to make, and suddenly if you want to buy foreign oil, you need Soviet rubles to do it, not U.S. greenbacks.”

Cantrell’s hands patted the desktop as though he were beginning a bongo-drum performance. Impatient hands. And no wonder, Sharon thought. The chain of events she had described had been in the editorial columns for months now, and even in Dan Richards’s documentary last night. “But what then, Sharon?” he was saying. “Look beyond that now, and what happens?”

She remembered her economics. “The classic inflationary syndrome,” she said. “Suddenly there are four hundred billion dollars that the world no longer needs to use to buy oil from OPEC. People outside the U.S. who’ve been holding all those dollars just to buy oil start to dump them. They buy petro-rubles. The value of the dollar on the money market drops even further.”

His fingers drummed on the desktop again.

“Okay, and after that,” she went on, “after that, if we’re talking the worst possible scenario, the Third World countries who are into America for another five hundred billion or so in loans start adding up the numbers, and decide that rubles are a better deal than American money. So they happily default on their American debts and happily sign up for loans from the Soviets, who’ve been working on them to do just that for years. American banks lose a horrendous bundle, Uncle Sam looks like even more of a patsy to the rest of the world, and the value of the dollar goes under the table altogether. It costs me a year’s pay to buy one bottle of French perfume, and if I want a Toyota, I’d better have my own trust fund.”

“Okay.” He leaned forward, jabbing the air with his finger the way a man taps another on the chest to emphasize a point. “Okay so far. Now here’s the question they haven’t been asking in the papers, and the one that’s really important: What happens next?”

“I’m not sure I follow you. You mean what do the Russians do, after they’ve backed us into a corner?”

“Nope. I mean what do we do?”

“I don’t know, let me think a minute.” She was half puzzled by Cantrell’s insistence and half caught up in the questions, in the fascination of what would happen if all those disasters to America’s international economic influence were to occur. “I guess,” she said, “we’d have no one to turn to but ourselves.”

He was smiling as though she were the star pupil at the end of the spelling bee. “And so?”

“So we’d have to buy American, for one thing. We couldn’t afford to import much. We might not want to buy oil with Soviet money, so possibly we’d finally cut down our oil imports; we’d open up the Alaskan fields to their full potential and maybe drill on more federal lands, and we’d push ahead full speed on coal and solar and nuclear because we wouldn’t have a choice anymore. We’d have to get fuel somewhere, and our own backyard would be the only place we could afford to go.”

“What about food?”

She was into it now, thinking out loud, thinking what might be plain wool-gathering nonsense, but what the hell, it was fun to be asked your opinion about the big things once in a while, and Cantrell certainly seemed interested in hers. “We’d still have enough food, certainly plenty of the essentials, even if we weren’t importing New Zealand kumquats in the winter and truffles from the Vienna woods or wherever they come from. And if the Third World countries weren’t paying their debts, we might not be sending them our wheat and corn and soy protein. Possibly, if we were mad enough at what the Russians had done to us, we wouldn’t be trading with them, either. Even if they were running the oil show by then, and even if we do have long-term food-supply contracts with them again, I think we’d be inclined to leave the Russians out.”

“And what would happen after a few years?”

She thought. “Well, we’d either sink or swim. If we were swimming, we’d be energy self-sufficient, not in the twenty years they’re always talking about, but in only a couple. We’d have paid a big price—probably we’d have lost a lot of our overseas capital and probably we wouldn’t have as many different kinds of pet food and breakfast cereals and cookies in our supermarket shelves, but we’d be standing on our own feet. Russia and the others would look at our food surpluses and want to be more friendly. And if all the high-technology equipment we’ve been selling them had worn-out parts that needed American-made replacements, they’d be lining up to buy American again. So the dollar would start going up.”

He sat back in his chair and put his tooled-leather boots up on the corner of his desk and leveled his eyes at her. “You want to know why I hired you, Sharon?”

“Will you tell the truth?”

He laughed. “We Texans tend to get a little grandiose now and again,” he said. “Play the big daddy, that kind of thing. You always seemed like the daughter I never had, right from the first day we talked. You’ve got my faith in America, you know that? Now remember, you did all the talking in here. I didn’t put any words in your mouth, and yet you came away telling me that even if the very worst was to happen, America would eventually come through and come out on top. I’ll be frank with you, Sharon, I think of my company as my own family. I’ve said that more than once, and I want my family here at UBC to share that kind of attitude, that kind of confidence. Do you understand?”

She found herself oddly touched, and at the same time confused. Cantrell’s big, leathery face with all its sun-lined wholesomeness looking at her as though she were his hope for the future, when just yesterday he’d been talking doomsday about the UBC sponsors’ demands for ratings. That was free enterprise too, wasn’t it? The American way? Sink or swim in the profit-and-loss seas of red and black ink?

“I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Are you saying we ought to talk to the rest of the staff about America?”

“I watched that broadcast of yours last night—early this morning, to be accurate—and something hit me.” He had his hands clasped behind his head and was leaning back, looking at the ceiling. It was negative programming, he said; that show last night was trying to scare folks to death about the big bad Russkies. Now what was the point of worrying people, if even after the worst could happen here, the U.S.A. would still come out ahead? As he speculated, one of the monitors in the wall to Sharon’s right flickered on, showing a field-level angle on three Americans in practice soccer uniforms doing stretching exercises. That would be the new man, Sharon thought. Skinny Perry’s replacement. He would be waiting for her instructions so they could get his tryout over with.

Sharon suddenly felt impatient with this discussion, even if Cantrell did own the network. “You want us to change our programming viewpoint, is that what you’re saying, Mr. Cantrell?”

“Don’t you think that’s warranted, in view of what you’ve said?”

“Not if we’re talking about ratings too. It’s always the bad news that makes people take notice, not the good news. Do you think they’d have gotten up at midnight to hear Paul Revere say the British were leaving?”

He chuckled. “But we don’t have to call this news, you see? We can present the coverage as entertainment. Make people feel good about America, that’s the thing!”

There was an earnestness in his voice, but a hesitancy too, as if he understood that his idea might sound laughable to seasoned newsmen and network executives. It’s his network, Sharon thought. Maybe he doesn’t think he can hang on to it very long; maybe this is the one chance he sees to spread his kind of patriotism across the country. She felt a surge of sympathy. Like most TV people, Sharon had no love for the steady stream of alarming events that poured from the wire service teletype. Maybe Cantrell’s idea ought to at least have a trial run. “If you want us to cheer up the show, I’ll be glad to go along,” she said.

He smiled and nodded and stood up, folding his arms across his chest. Two more things to tell her, he said.

One: Larry Noble had suffered a heart attack that morning and was now in Madrid’s Angels of Mercy Hospital.

Two: Sharon Foster was now the producer. “In charge of the whole shootin’ match,” he said, the blue eyes on her with that same look of family pride, and then quickly darting away to the stack of unopened letters and telegrams on his desk.