Conspiracy (34 page)

His hopes were disappointed. The Spanish put on a “sag” defense that blocked access to the goal for the Americans. Though the younger team controlled the ball and made beautiful passing flurries and short runs, their attack became clogged before the ball could reach the goal.

Then disaster struck. A Spanish defender intercepted an American pass and in one motion slammed it downfield to Jorge Serrano, Spain’s swiftest and most flamboyant scorer. Serrano seemed to have smelled the play coming; he was already racing at full speed. He took control of the ball at midfield, well before the offside penalty line. There was no American near him as he drove headlong for the American goal. Only Keith Palermo stood between the Spaniard and a score.

Palermo had played a superb first half: nineteen saves against the brilliant Spanish offense. Now he came forward to meet the Spaniard’s charge, moving in his characteristic half-shuffling crouch, poised to spring the instant Serrano committed himself to a shot.

The Seville crowd who had cheered wildly for Palermo now screamed for Serrano to score against him. Palermo continued to advance from the goal as Serrano came closer. With every step he decreased the radius of Serrano’s possible scoring shots, but he also made himself more vulnerable: the nearer Keith was to the shot, the less time he had to react and stop it.

Ten yards separated the two men now, and Serrano was closing fast. Keith prepared to dive for the ball before the shot—the technique he’d used with success during the “shootout” endings of NASL games.

Serrano, however, knew Palermo’s style, and how to exploit it. Just as Keith set himself to dive forward, Serrano lofted the ball. A short, chip-shot of a kick, and the ball floated over Keith’s head, above his frantically clawing fingertips. As Keith tried to recover and reverse his direction, Serrano neatly sidestepped the American and caught up with the ball.

In front of the goal there was no one to challenge him. Serrano raised his fist in a gesture of triumph and then booted the ball in for the score.

Seated behind Wayne Taggart in the associate producer’s chair, Cindy Ling shook her head sadly. “Poor Keith,” she said. “They faked him right out of his jock.” .

Getting to his feet, Keith heard one hundred thousand fans cheering the score. He shook his head as he dug the ball out of the net and tossed it to the referee. “They won’t do that again,” he said to no one in particular.

Sharon, in the stands behind the American bench, called out, “Let’s go defense!” Her voice was lost in the crowd.

“So with frightening suddenness,” Bill Brautigam intoned from the TV announcer’s booth, “we see the danger inherent in coach Jerry Scott’s ‘score or nothing,’ all-out offensive strategy. With only nine minutes of play remaining, the Spanish team leads the United States by a goal that every second looms larger and larger.”

“A bold attack by an experienced master of the scoring arts,” the TV España announcer was saying. 

Raul grimaced and snapped off the set. He moved over to the terrace curtain and opened it several inches. Then he slid the glass door open, moved his tripod forward so that the muzzle of the rifle protruded into the open air, and began to take practice sightings on his various targets. A fortunate thing about trying to shoot the goalie, he thought, was that he didn’t move around as much as the others.

Coach Scott compromised by ordering one defender to hang back at midfield and try to head off more one-on-one scoring opportunities for Spain. Keith, waiting in the penalty area in front of the American goal, didn’t want the help. Stopping more Spanish goals now didn’t matter. Unless the U.S. could score the equalizer, none of their tactics, none of the possible Spanish tallies, would matter.

Keith stood in front of the goal for less than half a minute. Then he moved forward, leaving the goal behind him empty and unguarded. Benny Abrams, the American defender, looked up in astonishment when he saw Keith approaching. He grinned as Keith yelled, “Get up there and score some points!”

Then Abrams obediently trotted upfield.

Jerry Scott, on the American bench, clapped his hands. “Okay, guys!” he called out. “We’re gonna go for it!”

The first American goal came less than two minutes later. Three U.S. forwards drove simultaneously for the center of the penalty area; a U.S. defender, playing downfield, lobbed a pass into their general vicinity. One of the three Americans in the cluster of arms and legs booted the ball out to another U.S. defender, who kicked it into the net for the score.

The stands fell silent. Then they began to roar again, cheering for Spain to take the offensive. The Spanish responded by mounting an artfully constructed attack that culminated in a looping, high-arced shot that would have entered the goal beneath the crossbar had not Keith leaped high, stretched, and deflected it away.

Then the Americans controlled the ball. Once more they went into their all-offense lineup. The crowd realized that the U.S. was playing not for a tie but for a win, and came to its feet. They were still standing when, with less than two minutes remaining, the high-density offense squeezed the ball past the Spanish goalie a second time. The Americans were suddenly in the lead, the momentum flowing their way. When action began on the field once more, they controlled the ball and streamed down the field yet another time.

Then the ball was stolen by the Spanish. The excited Americans were caught out of position as the ball sped downfield to the fleet-footed Serrano.

Keith saw it happening midway between the goal and the center of the field. Quickly he moved back within the penalty area, the space within which he could use his hands to stop or block the ball.

Raul had Keith in his sights every step of the way. He would shoot after Keith had made the save, he decided. The American deserved the chance to redeem himself from his earlier humiliation. Also, Raul knew that letting Keith win his victory would make his death more memorable. He would die a hero; the Americans would seem to have all the more reason to retaliate.

Keith was shuffling forward again, preparing to make a dive for the ball. Raul kept the crosshairs of his scope centered between Keith’s shoulder blades. If Keith missed the shot, Raul decided, he would go for a backup target. To kill Palermo after he had let in a crucial goal for Spain would be pointless. Raul wanted a clear act of Spanish hostility against America.

On the field, Keith knew Serrano would try the same move as before. His mind, clear and acute as it had been throughout all the World Cup matches, had weighed all the factors. Serrano would expect Keith to be looking for a change in strategy. He would want to humiliate the American a second time to put an added luster on the score. And most important, the loft shot was one Serrano could depend on. It came in too high to be blocked. If Serrano could time it properly, getting the kick off at the moment Keith started to dive for the ball, he was assured of the goal.

On the sidelines, Rachel Quinn departed from her usual professional role and called a director’s instruction to Nancy Harrington, who was operating the field-level camera. “Get in on Keith!” she yelled. “He’s the whole game now!”

Nancy obliged by panning from Serrano to Keith. He was on his toes, shuffling forward, hands outstretched like a wrestler’s.

Ten yards from Serrano, he leaned in for the dive. Serrano chipped the ball up the moment he saw Keith had committed himself.

His eye followed the arc of the ball as he prepared to sidestep Keith’s oncoming rush.

But Keith was moving away from him. He had planted his forward foot and then launched himself into a dizzying backward leap, soaring high into the air as though he had come off a trampoline. Twisting toward the goal, he hit the ground in a forward somersault just behind the ball. He rolled once, and there it was: the white-and-black sphere, bouncing, it seemed, with incredible slowness. He reached out, palmed it, tucked it away.

Momentarily confused by Keith’s acrobatics, Raul now regained Keith in his rifle sight and squeezed off a shot. The bullet’s flight was accurate. Keith, however, moved as Serrano charged into him. The bullet grazed Keith’s calf, making a gash roughly an inch wide and two inches long in Keith’s sock and breaking the skin beneath in a shallow wound. 

Serrano continued his rush, later claiming that he had been going for the ball and had been unable to check his speed. He plowed into Keith, the cleats of his shoes tearing at Keith’s legs, obscuring the cut made by Raul’s bullet.

Raul saw the collision. With the Spaniard so close to Keith, another shot there was out of the question. He could not wait for the two men to separate; there was too much risk in exposing his gun for more than a few seconds. He turned to his backup target. 

As he shot, Raul heard Eugene Groves’s bullet clink harmlessly off the dull yellow bricks to his right.

On the sidelines, Alec Conroy gasped in astonishment as Raul’s steel-jacketed slug tore into his belly. He bent double. “Rachel . . . Rachel . . .” he cried.

She turned and saw the back of Alec’s coat. In the white fabric was a darkening hole the size of her fist, where the bullet had come out. The stain widened as blood poured from the wound. She screamed and ran to him, at the same time calling for the Spanish medical attendants.

Raul had pulled back inside the curtain the moment he had seen the hit. He intended to leave the gun behind; it was of Spanish manufacture and would aid in the placement of blame. He turned away from the terrace and was on his way out when a 7.62—millimeter bullet crashed through the glass terrace door and caught him in the left leg. He stumbled and fell.

In the parking lot below, the young guard in the truck with Groves shot two times more. Both shots were aimed for the hole in the window. Both bullets were accurate; they hit the fallen Raul. 

Now bleeding from a massive wound in the shoulder and another in his side, Raul dragged himself away. More bullets tore through the curtain, but they did not hit their target.

Dazed, rapidly going into shock, losing blood, Raul got to his feet. He took a few faltering steps toward the door and collapsed.

Realizing escape was now impossible, he struggled toward the Prietos’ telephone.

4

Cindy Ling had been watching the Camera Nine monitor. “Wesley,” she said into her headset mike, “roll that shot of Keith Palermo on Baker, would you?”

Taggart had put up Camera Seven, Dan Richards and the American team milling around in front of the entrance to the players’ tunnel. “Palermo’s limping,” he said over his headset mike to Dan. “Find out how badly he’s hurt.”

A few moments later he was interrupted by Cindy. “Wayne, look at this on the Baker monitor! Watch Palermo’s left leg!”

Wesley froze the image at the spot Cindy had seen during the first replay. “There,” she said. “Serrano hasn’t hit him yet, but already something’s making a mark on his leg. Something right out of the air.”

“The man’s been shot at! For God’s sake!” Taggart opened the switch to Bill Brautigam’s headset in the Seville TV booth. “Watch your monitor, Bill,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “Have we got something for you!”

Lying on the trainer’s examining table, Keith listened to the whoops of joy coming from the locker room outside. He smiled. You couldn’t very well go around screaming, “We’re number three!” but the victory felt good all the same. He winced as Bill McGafferty, the trainer, cleaned the dirt from the abrasions of his bare legs.

The door to the trainer’s room opened. Jack “Fireball” Farber came in. When he asked McGafferty for a minute’s private talk with “his boy,” the old trainer obliged him. “Gonna let this spray dry before I put on the dressings,” he said to Keith. “Be back in a minute.”

“Terrific, Keith,” Farber said after the trainer had gone. “You were just the best.”

Keith thanked him and waited. It was true that Farber meant a substantial amount of extra income to him, but Keith really didn’t have much to say to the man.

“ ’Spect you’re feeling kinda tired about now,” Farber said. “Probably like you’ve felt after all the other games over here.”

Keith nodded.

“Well,” Farber said, “there’s a bunch of reporters outside. If you want to be feeling up to par again real quick, just drink this.”

From behind his back he held out a paper cup of Gatorade. “Swallow this down and you’ll feel just as peppery as you did out on the field in the second half. And you want to know why?”

Keith stared as he took the paper cup.

“I fixed it up with the medical people,” Farber went on proudly. “So the tests wouldn’t show. And I put it into your drink at halftime, every one of your games. Wanted you to have a little somethin’ extra going for you out there—something even better than Far-Lites.” He chuckled a little at his own joke.

Keith held the towel over his middle and sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“Simple,” Farber said with a smile. “Cocaine. Some right in that cup there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Go ahead and drink it if you don’t believe me. You’ll see.”

Keith realized Farber was telling the truth. The man had risked getting Keith disqualified, risked having the American victories disallowed, tainted Keith’s own personal memories of some of the best games he had ever played—and he was boasting about it!

“You meddling bastard,” Keith said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Get out of my sight.”

“Aw, hey, now—” Farber started to protest. Keith threw the cup of Gatorade and caught him in the center of his chest.

The green liquid soaked into Farber’s shirt and tie and trickled down his legs.

McGafferty opened the door.

“I just wanted you to know who your friends are,” Farber said unhappily as he left the room.

Ross Cantrell glared at the speakerphone on his desktop as he berated the American State Department flunky, Elliott Strether. “Dammit, I don’t care whether you’ve had a policy meeting! I want you to tell the American people what their government thinks! Fifteen million Americans saw our boy get shot at right there in the stadium, and another American citizen is in critical condition, and it was a Spanish gun! I’m gonna have to put something on the air for tonight’s prime-time broadcast, and I don’t want Uncle Sam to be conspicuous by his absence. You see what I mean?”