Conspiracy (14 page)

Neither, now that he thought about it, was he about to underestimate the difficulties that lay before him. To a consortium of four banks, he owed more than seven million dollars; that was a fact. And Far-lite Sports Shoe Industries, on its last audit, had shown an estimated net worth of only $6.4 million; that was a fact, too. The difference between sustained success and possible ruin lay in the future, specifically in future American sales.

Looking back on company history over the twenty-one years since he had inherited his family’s small sneaker-manufacturing plant, he could see a pattern. “You had to grow or go,” he whispered to himself. They had called him “Fireplug” behind his back because of his small stature, but he had soon won his proper name. His epic decisions lived once more in his memory: the move to leather uppers; the direct-from-manufacturer deals to junior-high football teams; the changeover to synthetic components; the new assembly plant in North Woonsocket when international distribution had finally come.

“Grow or go,” he repeated. The crucial thing now was to expand sales of the Far-lite SoccerStar, attracting the millions of American kids now taking up the game. And to get those sales, Farber had to act now, this afternoon, and in a decisive manner.

A half hour later, Farber sat in the drab consulting room of Oscar Moreno, M.D., who had offices in a building near El Corte Ingles. Armed with an investigative report on Moreno, Fireball had just led up to a small service he wanted the doctor to perform the next day.

Moreno’s round face tightened, his eyes wary. “Nothing could persuade me to interfere with my tests,” he said flatly. “I have an obligation to my country and to IFFA, and that obligation must be carried out.”

Farber nodded that he understood. “We wouldn’t ask you to interfere with any tests, Doctor.”

“What service, then?”

“Far-lite is concerned with the selection of players for the tests, not with the tests themselves. We know the players are selected at random. The service you would perform would be to prevent one certain American player’s urine sample from being tested after the game.”

“Impossible,” Moreno said.

“To someone else, perhaps,” Farber smiled pleasantly. “But I believe the man who ministers so skillfully to the women at 2 Plaza de Caballos—”

“I know nothing of the place,” Moreno interrupted. But his round eyes were now narrowed and fearful.

“The money you receive from them,” Farber continued, “isn’t half of what I’m offering, but it helps with the rent, doesn’t it? Maybe you’d like to move to a more modern place too, someday, and maybe that money would help pay your way. You see, Far-lite doesn’t want you to be deprived of that income, any more than we’d want you to lose what we’re going to give you as our honorary consultant. We’d not want you to lose the small amount that IFFA pays you, either. Yet I’m afraid that if you don’t perform the service we’re asking, all three of those sources of income will be closed to you.”

Moreno covered his eyes, holding his forehead.

“If you’re trying to see a way out—”

“The drawings to select players for testing are conducted before two witnesses,” Moreno said heavily.

“Maybe you’re alone with the samples at some point?” Farber suggested, his tone helpful.

In the end he wore his man down. Coming out of the doctor’s office into the glare of the sun, Farber noticed that the glow of the cocaine had left him. He felt a slight headache and a sensitivity to light. It had been roughly fifty minutes since he had ingested his dose. He still felt brimful of confidence, and pleased at winning his encounter with the physician so conclusively.

Now, it was on to Seville. There, if things continued to go Farber’s way, Keith Palermo would become a superhero without ever suspecting why.

5

Someone was walking alongside the tracks, on the roadbed. Groves sat up a little, to have a look.

A searchlight beam hit him square in the face. “All right, you!” said a man in a snappish, no-nonsense voice. “Get the hell down from there!”

Fucko, he thought. Fucko, goddam, and son of a bitch. The engineer or the brakeman. Must have been checking the coupler on this end. I should have stayed down, or crawled behind the box. “I can’t see with that light in my eyes,” he said in as aggrieved a tone as he could muster. “And I’m supposed to stay here with this shipment. It should be on your dispatch order.”

“Got no dispatch order,” the voice said. “But I’ve got a thirty-eight special here in my hand and I’m telling you, mister, to get the hell down.”

Groves smiled into the light and duckwalked slowly forward, pulling the carton after him. “Look, no hard feelings,” he said, “and I’m sure as hell not going to argue with a gun, but you are mistaken. My name’s Austin and I’m monitoring this shipment until we get to the freight yards, for security reasons. I admit I did fall asleep until we got rolling, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that detail to Anaconda, but those are the facts. Maybe they told your engineer and not you that I’d be riding this car.”

“I’m the engineer.”

Groves shrugged. “Maybe they told your brakeman, then. I wasn’t in on that part of it, all I did was show up and get aboard after a full day’s work and fall asleep.”

“Got no brakeman. Now get down from there.”

“Look,” said Groves. “At least let me show you my ID. I’ll take out my wallet from my hip pocket with two fingers, and if I take out anything else, you can feel free to blow my head off, but at least let me prove to you that I’m the man I say I am, okay?”

The light was still in Groves’s eyes, but they had begun to adjust, and he could see the outlines of a tall, moon-faced man in an engineer’s cap, holding a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. Groves was about a foot away from the end of the car; the man was about a foot back from the edge. At least, Groves thought, the moon-faced engineer was working alone.

“Take it out slow and easy, then,” said the engineer, and shifted the light to hold it underneath his gun arm.

“Slow as you like,” said Groves. He lifted the wallet out with his left hand, and with his right he felt around inside the Cobor carton. By the time he had passed the wallet over to the engineer’s warily outstretched fingers, Groves had found a wing nut, taken a deep breath, and loosened it. Five seconds later he had tightened the nut again and was feeling every whisper of the breeze that came between the pipes and over the carton, every molecule of moving air that blew the Cobor away past Groves and into the engineer’s face.

“Barry Austin, is it?” the engineer asked.

“Mmm,” said Groves, holding his breath.

And then Groves realized that if the engineer had convulsions from the gas with his finger on the trigger of that .38, the area was about to become very unsafe. Groves would have to do more than hold his breath. “Could you point that gun in the air or something?” he asked, the appeal quavering because of his lack of wind.

The moon-faced man’s eyes flicked up at the sudden timidity in Groves’s voice. Thinking his prisoner might be about to crack, he leveled his weapon at Groves’s groin. “Shaddup,” he growled, and went back to studying the cards in Austin’s wallet.

Groves felt the tingle of fear at the base of his genitals. How long had it taken with the other one? He couldn’t remember, and cursed himself for more carelessness. He had no idea whether the Cobor around him had dissipated by now; still less did he know about whether Moon-Face had breathed in enough to work. Each second seemed inexorably long. He had no idea by now how much time had elapsed since he had released the gas, but he knew he could not hold his breath much longer.

“There’s a wanted alert at the station for a man of your description,” Moon-Face said. “You know that? What color are your eyes?”

Christ, he’s immune, Groves thought. Or maybe he’s too big, maybe with guys his size it takes longer to work. Maybe he wasn’t breathing when the gas blew by him. He tried to remember whether Austin’s eyes were blue like his own, and couldn’t. But he knew he couldn’t answer that question out loud. He couldn’t waste the air. So he pointed his finger to his eyes, spreading the lids apart, inviting Moon-Face to look closer.

At first he thought Moon-Face was imitating him as he leaned forward, the way his eyes started to bulge. Then Groves saw, knew it was a convulsion starting, and it flashed through his mind that the .38 would ventilate his crotch unless he got moving. His instinct for self-preservation took over and he jumped for it, up as high as he could and away, upwind, trying to leap between the stacks of copper tubing, over the Cobor, a sudden, springing, unreasoning dive.

Later he wished he hadn’t moved at all, because the muscle spasm that shook the moon-faced engineer moved outward from the central nervous system, so that the man’s arms snapped up before his fingers jerked the trigger of the .38. The bullet caught Groves in the fleshy part of the upper arm and passed through. 

If only I’d stayed put
, Groves repeated to himself again and again. He bandaged himself with the first-aid kit he found in the switching engine’s cab, repeating that same idea, as though it were a lesson he ought to learn tonight. Maybe his subconscious was trying to tell him something, he thought. A few minutes later, when he was back on the darkened railroad bed beside the engineer’s body, wondering what to do next, he found himself saying
Stay put
again. But he still didn’t understand why. The engineer’s words came back too: a wanted alert for a man of your description. And he couldn’t disguise himself in the engineer’s clothes; they were too big for him.

Then he had an idea.

A short while later he had the engineer’s body safely parked among some weeds along the spur, far enough back from the switch so that it wouldn’t be noticeable until daylight. Groves leaned his head and elbow out of the cab window, looking down the track with his hand on the throttle.

Just like Casey Jones,
he thought. The engineer’s cap covered his sandy hair. The left arm hurt like hell from the bullet hole, but Groves had sprayed it with the Bactine in the kit and plugged it up with surgical gauze and bound it with adhesive tape, so he didn’t think he was in any danger. No bloodstains showed on the blue jacket of Austin’s suit, and the hole was negligible. The only second thoughts he had were about leaving the gun in the engineer’s hand. At the time he had been too much on edge to pry the fingers loose. Also, he’d been anxious to get moving before someone who might have heard the shot came over to investigate.

It surprised him how easy the switching engine was to run, even with the headlamp turned off. The maze of knobs and dials and gauges meant nothing to him, but he had the throttle and the brake located perfectly well, and that was all he needed for a short hop like this. There was even an unexpected bonus in the cab: the engineer’s tan leatherette suitcase. Evidently he’d been going to make the run to Portland, or to somewhere else that would keep him away overnight, because inside the suitcase Groves found pajamas, toothpaste, a shaving kit, and a change of clothes, along with several girlie magazines.

Plenty of room inside for thirty-six Cobor cylinders.

Groves kept the engine’s speed below fifteen miles per hour, and continued until he was about a hundred yards away from the lights of the freight yard. Other tracks were converging up there; he could see rails off to the left, and there were boxcars silhouetted against the shadowy buildings up ahead.

Groves hit the brake. It worked. His two-car train stopped well away from the edge of the lights. No one in the freight yard saw him.

While the train was stopped, Groves carefully swung the leatherette suitcase filled with Cobor down from the cab and placed it gently on its side away from the railroad ties.

Then he moved the throttle into reverse.

As the train began to back away down the tracks, moving south toward the Anaconda plant, Groves jumped. He landed neatly beside the suitcase.

He adjusted his cap, picked up the suitcase in his right hand, and set of northward for the freightyard. He arrived just as the echo of frantic airhorn blasts sounded mournfully from a far-off diesel freight whose engineer had spotted the switching engine Groves had abandoned. The unmanned engine was now coming toward the freight train on a collision course.

In the freight yard, Groves swung the Cobor suitcase up to the platform of a caboose and climbed aboard.

A metallic shriek from far to the south echoed across the tracks, mingling with the throb of diesels nearby. Then a louder noise reached his ear: a deep, protracted grinding and cracking, the reverberation of repeated impacts. And finally there came a dull, muffled ka-crump as a fuel tank ruptured and exploded.

Also aware of these sounds, but with a schedule to adhere to, was the engineer of the train on whose caboose Groves now stood. That engineer sounded his air horn twice and then proceeded to take his train north, out of the city.

Groves rode unchallenged in the caboose fifty miles north to Ogden, where he thought it prudent to change trains. Using the engineer’s ID and lifetime pass, he boarded a Union Pacific passenger train eastbound for Chicago. 

That afternoon, however, after four hundred-odd miles of clattering rails, Groves’s arm was beginning to cause him severe pain. He left the Union Pacific in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he discarded the engineer’s hat and wallet in a street trash container, purchased first-aid spray and sterilized gauze and adhesive tape in a drugstore, using the engineer’s remaining cash, and then doctored his wound in a lavatory stall of the Cheyenne Bus Terminal men’s room.

Then he spent twenty-two dollars of Barry Austin’s cash on a one-way Trailways ticket to Cincinnati, and caught the bus that night just as it was leaving. Rather than entrusting the Cobor to the driver and the baggage compartment, he carried the suitcase on board with him.

6

Keith Palermo jumped for the ball. He had moved left, anticipating the shot from Tovak, the Czech forward, but Tovak had passed, not shot, and it had been Rasopul, coming on behind him, who had slammed a line drive straight for the right corner of the goal. So Keith knew he was out of position to make the save, but still he jumped, reversing his direction even as he saw Rasopul’s kicking leg begin its arc. He was unaware of the moves as he made them: two quick steps and then the leap, watched by nearly two billion viewers, who saw his leg muscles strain prodigiously on the takeoff, cords and sinews visible through the skin of his thighs like an anatomy chart. He was unaware of TV cameras at that moment, unaware of the exact distance he had to travel in flight— nearly two-thirds of the twenty-four feet between goal ends— and not concerned with his landing, though he was now in midair. His body stretched out parallel to the ground some four feet below, leaving him vulnerable to cracked ribs or pelvis if an impact occurred.