Conspiracy (33 page)

Accordingly the Zaragosa apartments and the shopping center built to serve them attracted the middle class. Other apartments were built nearby. The area around Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium became a high-rise equivalent of an American suburb.

Because of its respectability and its convenient location, the Zaragosa seemed a fine place to live to Angel Prieto, when he was appointed chief stadium groundskeeper for Sanchez Pizjuan in 1967. Prieto moved into a tenth-floor, two-bedroom unit with a terrace that overlooked the field where he worked. 

He did his job well; the stadium prospered. In 1979, Sanchez Pizjuan received the distinction of being named the site of three matches in the 1982 World Cup. During the next three years Prieto and his men enjoyed a more generous budget than ever before. Their labors and those of the renovation crews made the stadium, in the words of one of Seville’s chief arbiters of taste, “the showcase of all Andalusia.” 

Prieto showed the newspaper clipping to his men with pride.

He was, however, unprepared for the honor that was to befall him when he received a phone call the day after Spain lost to Russia in Sanchez Pizjuan. For meritorious service rendered, Prieto and his family would be guests of the government during the third-place game. Prieto would be freed from his duties, of course, and his wife and their grown children would be given a block of seats only a few yards away from the Royal Box. They would be permitted to cheer Spain on to victory within the sight and hearing of King Juan Carlos himself!

Prieto could hardly believe his good fortune. Friday afternoon, the arrival of seven tickets, two more than he could use, filled him with patriotic fervor and moved his wife to tears. She immediately phoned two of her sisters.

Saturday at noon, four hours before game time, the entire Prieto family and two in-laws were in their seats. All were happily eating
albóndigas
, spicy meatballs, from the picnic basket Mrs. Prieto had prepared for the occasion. The Prietos greeted other arriving ticket holders with appropriately Sevillian reserve.

At three-thirty, Raul Coquias entered the Prieto apartment and set up his telescopic-sight-equipped rifle on a tripod behind the sliding glass doors that led to the terrace. When he pulled the curtains aside he could see the field quite plainly. He refrained from showing the rifle, however. As a security guard for the game, he knew that there were men below him in the parking lot assigned to watch the windows of all the buildings within shooting range of the stadium. Some of those men also had high-powered rifles and skilled eyes.

Raul turned on the TV set. In the unlikely event that someone in one of the other apartments would hear, he kept the volume very low.

Behind an open truck inside the Sanchez Pizjuan parking lot, Eugene Groves took the outstretched hand of a burly Spanish guard, planted his polished uniform boot on the tailgate, and hoisted himself up. He nodded his thanks to the other man, introduced himself as Raul Coquias from Madrid, and took Raul’s identity papers from his uniform pocket. The other man took a brief look and introduced himself in turn, also showing papers. Then he gave a broad wink and produced a transistor radio from his hip pocket.

Groves nodded as though he appreciated the man’s foresight. He unpacked his long-range hunting rifle from its well-padded case.

The excited voice of the Spanish sports announcer crackled over the air. Groves raised his weapon to his shoulder and scanned the surrounding buildings, periodically adjusting the focus of his telescopic sight.

The other guard did the same with his own gun. He did not notice Groves’s apparent interest in the tenth floor of the Zaragosa apartment building.

When Groves had the door behind one of the tenth-floor terraces sighted in, he settled back to wait. He did not like the prospect of killing the little guy, the partisan guard who had let him into the stadium in Madrid. 

Also, he was not certain that he could. The distance from the truck to which Raul had been assigned was roughly two hundred yards, and Groves had not shot long-range for more than five years. 

When he had voiced those reservations to Helen, she had shown that she was just as reasonable as she was good in bed—which was very, very good, by Groves’s standards. 

If Groves missed his shot, she had pointed out, he would have another opportunity later, at the Roman amphitheater, when Raul came to collect his payment. The fact that Groves took the shot would protect his credentials as a stadium rifleman. By eliminating Raul, Groves would silence a voice that might otherwise identify him. Also, Groves would be earning Raul’s share of the
Patrón’s
fee for the operation. 

And finally, after Madrid had fallen to the Cobor tomorrow evening, Groves would share a week’s lovemaking with Helen in any hideaway of his choosing. The prospect had filled Groves with sexual warmth, even though at the time Helen had proposed it, they had been side by side, naked in his bed, after he had spent himself.

Too bad, he thought, that he would have to double-cross Helen. A week with her would offer exquisite pleasures—but it would soon end. His goal was still to eliminate the
Patrón’s
control over him.

So Groves had his own plan. He would shoot to miss when Raul made his move. Tonight at the Roman ruins outside town, he would kill Helen before Raul arrived. Raul would be found at the scene of the murder when he came to get his payment. By then, Groves would have made his getaway. He already had the coins in his pocket for the toll call to the Madrid police, who would very much appreciate being told the locations of thirty-five Cobor grenades in Bernabeau Stadium.

He saw the terrace curtain move slightly.
Don’t worry, Raul, you hard-working little bugger,
he thought.
You’re not going to die.

2

At 4:47, forty-five minutes of playing time after the game began, plus two more for an injury to a Spanish midfielder, both teams trooped wearily into the tunnels that led to their respective locker rooms. 

Dan Richards, on the American side, chatted momentarily with American coach Jerry Scott about his plans to break the zero-to-zero tie. “Open the sidelines,” the coach said. He sounded hoarse from the effort of calling to his men for three-quarters of an hour. Otherwise he was quite composed. “Open up the sidelines, bring up the defense, flood their scoring zone. Nothing fancy. Just guts and hustle.”

A smile for the camera and he wheeled around, jogging after his players before Richards could ask whether that strategy might put too much of a burden on goalie Keith Palermo. Dan speculated on that possibility for the fans at home. 

His words and image, transformed into electronic impulses by the UBC camera and microphone, traveled through several hundred miles of telephone and TV cable to reach the monitors of the UBC studio van in Bernabeau Stadium, Madrid. 

Dan’s image appeared on three monitors on the studio control panel: Monitor Seven, the one connected to Max’s camera; the “on air” monitor, indicating that director Wayne Taggart had chosen to broadcast it to the viewers; and the “network” monitor, indicating that the signal had left the studio truck, entered the transmitter truck parked alongside, and was being sent to the satellite uplink station outside Madrid.

At that particular moment, Wayne Taggart was not concentrating on Dan Richards’s sideline analysis, however. He was arguing with Rachel Quinn, whose image appeared on the Camera Nine monitor, beaming images from the opposite sideline. Beside Rachel stood the snowy-blond former singer, Alec Conroy. 

Wayne thought Alec made a pretty good contrast to Rachel’s older, more sophisticated kind of beauty, but at the moment he had more important things to broadcast than esthetically balanced pairings. 

“I know I promised he could-have an interview,” Taggart said into his headset mike. “We’re short now, and I’ve got to work in the Romanova clip before the end of the half.” He spoke brightly, knowing that optimism was good for morale. “But tell you what, Rachel. You keep Alec right on tap there, okay? We’ll pick him up at the end of the game, don’t you worry.”

Before Rachel could reply, Wayne clicked off the connecting switch to her headset and opened the one to Bill Brautigam in the press box. As he spoke, he watched Dan Richards, mentally estimating the number of seconds left in Dan’s field-level summary of the American team’s second-half potential. “We’re gonna run the Romanova piece now,” he told Brautigam. “Stand by to acknowledge Richards and lead in. Ready, Able?” he called to Earvin, videotape operator for the Able slo-mo unit. “Five, four, three, two, roll Able, put up Able, go!”

Seated beside Taggart, Billy Leon, the technical director, flipped switches on his control panel. One “put up” the Able “feed” on the “on air” monitor and sent it out to America. The other switch sent out the audio signal from Bill Brautigam in Seville. In New York, where it was not quite noon, viewers saw the image of Katya Romanova floating through the air in a slow-motion replay of her famous triple-and-a-half flyaway dismount from the high bar. 

They heard Bill Brautigam’s voice, thanking Dan Richards for his analysis and for the interview they were about to see with another world-class athlete, the sister of the Soviet star who would play in the championship game tomorrow afternoon, starting at noon on these same stations. Dan Richards had taped this interview a few days ago, Bill went on, and coming up right after that would be some startiing new information about Katya, so stay tuned, everybody.

3

Inside the American locker room, the players were subdued, gathering strength for the second half. They sat on benches in front of their lockers. Some talked quietly, some not at all. The trainer and his assistant made the rounds of them, checking tape, cleats, knee supports, old injuries and new. The coach drifted from player to player in the same quiet fashion, outlining his strategy for the second half and telling each man what would be expected of him. Fragments drifted between the lockers: “. . . get organized . . . run ’em . . . on all the time. . .”

Sitting on the bench in front of his own locker, Keith Palermo reflected on how ordinary the advice seemed. This was the team’s last game, the highest a United States eleven had ever gone in fifty-two years of World Cup competition, and the talk might have come from any high school coach in America. He guessed that reflected well on the prospects of American soccer for the future, and on the soundness of a coaching strategy that stuck to the basics. 

“Coach Scott’s a good man,” he said to “Fireball” Farber, who was in the locker room as usual.

“Just the best,” said Farber. He handed Keith one of the two paper cups of Gatorade he was carrying, sat down beside him, and drank.

The short reel of Romanova tape on the Able slo-mo deck was nearing its end. The image was that of Katya on the soccer field, jogging across the green turf with upbeat music in the background. “We hope this isn’t all you see of Katya,” Bill Brautigam intoned in a voice-over. “But late last night UBC learned of a startling new development in the career of this most enchanting of athletes. From a reliable source we have information that Katya Romanova is now carrying the child of a prominent Soviet official and wants to defect to the United States. Tomorrow we expect to have more on this story, so be sure to stay tuned to these same UBC stations.”

Adjacent to the TV announcers’ booth at Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium, the press box had been renovated and expanded to accommodate the world’s journalists. Among the modern additions were clusters of ceiling-hung TV monitors. Four monitors overhung the long rows of seats and writing space where more than a hundred reporters sat over their notepads and typewriters; two more dangled like chandeliers in the two press lounges where food and drinks were offered. At all seats, miniaturized earphones were built into the armrests and could be plugged into jacks for either Spanish or English TV commentary. The English-commentary hookup led to the UBC microphone.

Bill Brautigam’s informational tidbit on Katya was picked up by reporters from Glasgow, Trinidad, Israel, and fourteen other nations who happened to be listening at the time. All but the man from Glasgow made notes to place followup calls to check the story.

Inside the Prieto apartment, the television that Raul watched carried the TV España coverage of the game. Raul did not see Katya Romanova. The Spanish were running one-minute profile documentaries on each of the Spanish eleven, followed by a recap of the action from the first half. Raul felt disgusted at the one-sided coverage. Even though the Spanish network provided the “feed” for the world audience outside America, there was almost exclusive focus on the Spanish players. 

This jingoistic approach, while it offended Raul’s sense of propriety, nonetheless made it easier for him to prepare himself psychologically for his task. Once again, Spain was showing her blind hauteur, the arrogance that Raul burned to strike back against. The halftime coverage seemed to him symbolic of what he was fighting. He only wished that he had a Spanish target to shoot this afternoon instead of an American. Three bullets in the nose.

Raul consoled himself with the knowledge that by provoking a quarrel between Spain and America, he was doing Spain far more harm than depriving her of one soccer player. And while Spain grew weak from that quarrel, Raul’s Basque region would grow stronger by comparison. Soon, independence from both Spain and America might be possible. The Basques might one day become just as ennobled a people as their neighbors to the north, the French.

During the second half, Raul found himself becoming involved in the game. He wanted the Americans to win, not simply because of his personal dislike of the Spanish, but also as a tactical advantage. If the Americans came out ahead, the death of the star American goalie would be more likely to be interpreted as Spanish revenge. Then what happened in Madrid tomorrow would be seen as American retaliation.

When the Americans moved their defensemen upfield and pressed the attack, Raul sat forward on the Prietos’ couch, hoping for a score.