Conspiracy (37 page)

Ross Cantrell leaned back in his chair and leveled his gaze at Joaquin. “I’ve got a question for the security chief,” he said. “Those canisters—those thirty that were found. They got past your men. If we know how that was done and find who brought them in, we ought to be able to find out how many were placed in the stadium.”

“One guard is missing,” said Joaquin. “A Basque.” He pronounced the word with distaste. “A man who was hired against my wishes.” 

He looked at the other Spanish authorities briefly before going on, and all in the room realized that Luis Joaquin was fighting for his job. 

Valera, who had decided to ask for Joaquin’s resignation the next morning, nodded at Joaquin as though his point had been taken.

Joaquin continued, “Whatever the implications of your statement, Senõr Cantrell, for it does not appear to be a question, I have the utmost confidence in the remainder of my men.”

“We are talking of six missing gas canisters,” said Cejas, the Argentine security man. “But there are many other ways to disrupt a
futbol
championship. A small low-flying plane could make a suicide dive. Shells could be lobbed in from twenty-five or even fifty kilometers away. It seems to me that one can never assume absolute security for any event such as this. We can only do our best with what we have. I, for one, propose to arm myself with whatever the American colonel recommends to neutralize one of those gas bombs, and spend the game on the bench with my team.”

“And I with mine,” said Yuri Zadiev. His voice betrayed none of his inner turmoil, for he knew that he must appear to have no more serious misgivings about the coming game than any of the others in the room.

Nonetheless his mind raced, wondering if he ought to attempt to persuade the others to stop the game after all. It seemed abundantly plain that the American-made Cobor grenades were the trigger for the worldwide anti-American protest that Kormelin had spoken of. 

Yet the implications of that fact for Yuri Zadiev were frightening indeed. He had not been told. He, like his brother and the Russian football team— and like Kormelin himself, for that matter—would have died in Bernabeau Stadium with the others if those American canisters had gone off. 

Whoever had conceived the plan, Yuri thought grimly, had of course not been able to count on having the Soviet team there in the stadium for the championship. Kormelin had been sent as an emissary; possibly he was intended to die, to convince the world that the Soviet Union could not have been involved. 

And now, with the
futbol
team and other Russians like Katya Romanova destroyed too, the world would be that much more convinced of Soviet innocence. And that much more sympathetic to the Soviet tragedy.

From the climate of the meeting, Yuri judged that the game would proceed as scheduled. It was possible, he thought, that KGB Moscow might feel some irritation at Yuri’s role in finding the thirty canisters, but certainly that irritation would have to remain concealed. According to the instructions he had been given, Yuri had carried out his duty in rather brilliant fashion. To tell him otherwise would be to suggest that he ought to have played an active role in his own death and that of twenty-five Heroes of Soviet Sport—a suggestion that not even the KGB would be prepared to make on an official basis.

What troubled Yuri were those missing six canisters. He knew KGB liquidation techniques too well to think that a job as important as this one would have been set up without the usual decoy-and-fall-back measures. The idea was always to let the victim discover a decoy to raise his confidence, and then spring the primary trap—with the fall-back trap ready in the event that the victim caught on to his danger in time to take evasive measures. 

The pattern of events thus far had fallen disturbingly close to a standard KGB operation. The shooting yesterday in Seville and the demands made to the American TV personnel—those would be the decoy. The thirty canisters— those would be the “A” trap. 

And the six remaining, if indeed those six canisters had been brought into Spain—those would make an admirable fall-back. As the American colonel had said, one single canister would be enough to kill all those present in the stadium. The TV cameras alone would continue to function, bringing the massacre into the homes of the entire world.

But how could Yuri Zadiev tell all that to the others here in this room? The impossibility of his position was now doubly clear to him. He realized that if he did think of another pretext on which to delay the game, and managed to convince the others to go along, the postponement would simply give those who had hidden the thirty canisters an opportunity to create still another fall-back operation.

Making up his mind, he managed an ironic smile for the group. “Our teams are even now warming up on the field. If we try to turn those one hundred twenty thousand ticket holders out of their seats at this point, I think we might have yet another security problem on our hands.”

13

The meeting broke up some five minutes later. Wayne Taggart was first out of the room, scrambling to reach his seat at the studio monitor panel before the game began. 

Sharon walked out with Ross Cantrell. “I’m going up to my cubicle,” she told him. “I want to take another look at some plans of the stadium.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” said Cantrell. “But why don’t you use the ones in my office instead? That way, if you don’t find anything, you can watch the game—and if you do, you’ll have my communications setup to work with, instead of one little desktop phone.”

Besides that, Sharon thought, Cantrell’s office was closer to the press box where she was to meet Keith. 

She walked across the Paseo de la Castellana with Ross Cantrell. There was no traffic; the parking lots had been fdled and the area for two blocks around had been sealed off by Luis Joaquin’s security men. Only those with tickets were allowed to cross the barricades. 

At two of the corners of the stadium wall, Sharon could see large green radio trucks of the Spanish Army, their deep-dish transmitting antennas positioned to blanket the stadium area. As Joaquin had told the committee minutes earlier, the trucks would jam all radio frequencies, so that no signals could reach any detonators that the security search might have overlooked. Until the game was over, the only broadcast frequencies that would be coming out of Bernabeau Stadium would be those of the American and Spanish TV networks. And those would be coming out through underground transmission cables.

“I still wish we weren’t going to interrupt our coverage to broadcast that tape,” Sharon said. They were walking through the east gate, showing their UBC photo identity cards to a succession of three security guards, each of whom scrutinized both their cards and their faces. “It galls me, giving in like that.”

“You think it’s past-posting?” Cantrell asked. “Mafia gamblers and all that stuff Taggart was talking about?”

She said no, not with the UBC broadcast going only to the U.S.A. “I just can’t see how any kind of gambling syndicate would want to bother with a game between Argentina and Russia.”

They were inside the stadium’s outer corridor now, approaching the locked stainless-steel doors of Cantrell’s private elevator. Cantrell turned the key and asked Sharon what she meant.

The doors slid open. Sharon stepped inside and Cantrell followed. 

“Let’s face it,” she said. “There aren’t that many Americans who’d bet on a game between those two countries. If America was still in the running, I could see it; then there’d be a lot of money on this game back home. But not now. And the thing is, we’ve all known that America was out of the championships ever since Argentina beat us last Wednesday. I looked at our overnight ratings after that game; they were straight down the tubes. I just don’t think there’s going to be that much American money at stake.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Cantrell. 

They were at the top now, at the level of Cantrell’s glass-enclosed penthouse, five stories above the ground and eight stories above the sunken playing field. The door to Cantrell’s office was directly across the narrow corridor, but he opened the adjoining door instead, the one marked “Reception Area.” He motioned Sharon to enter.

Molly was at the receptionist’s desk. Tall and lanky, she turned around from the breathtaking view of the playing field that the reception area’s enormous glass wall provided. “Hello, Mr. C.” Her rawboned features brightened with a smile for her boss.

“Molly’s my receptionist today,” Cantrell said. “I want her close at hand in case we have to do any fancy telephonin’. And even if we don’t, she still deserves a good view of the game after all the work she’s put in at the switchboard. Right, Molly?” 

He grinned at her and held the connecting door to his office open for Sharon.

Sharon walked into Cantrell’s spacious, glass-enclosed domain. She looked around, already wondering where he had put his copy of the stadium plans.

“Hold all calls till I tell you,” Cantrell added to Molly. “Sharon and I have some last-minute research to do.” 

He closed the door quietly behind Sharon.

It was then that Sharon saw what lay on Cantrell’s desk.

Before she could turn around, Cantrell chopped his big hand in one sudden, brutal motion across the back of her neck.

Sharon crumpled to the carpet, unconscious.

14

Seventy feet below the penthouse level, a military band and honor guard began the solemnly inspiring chords of “Gimn Sovetskogo Soyuza,” the Soviet National Anthem. The Soviet starting eleven stood to attention in a crisp line that stretched across the field. On the Soviet bench, their teammates stood equally proud. To a man, they sang the words. Not many Soviet citizens were in the stands to join them, and in the huge, otherwise silent arena their voices sounded lonely.

Max, the UBC field-level cameraman near the Soviet bench, was impressed by Katya Romanova. Katya also stood at attention, between what appeared to be one of the coaches and another woman about twice her size. Katya’s eyes were fixed on the Soviet flag, her chin tilted up.

When Max used his zoom lens to get a closer look, he saw tears glistening in Katya’s eyes as she sang.

15

The first thing Sharon saw when she awoke was the Cobor grenade on Cantrell’s desk. The black canister looked exactly like the one in the office of the Minister of Culture except for one difference: the small black box that Dr. Ferguson had called a radio triggering device was attached to its top.

The next thing she saw was Ross Cantrell. He was sitting on the corner of his desk, hands clasped casually over one knee, looking out through the wall of glass, down to the field of play below. 

She became aware of a voice coming from the bank of TV monitors behind Cantrell: Bill Brautigam’s voice, giving the play-by-play commentary. “Just two minutes remaining in the first half,” Brautigam was saying, “and the score remains deadlocked at one to one.”

She tried to move, but her arms and legs met painful resistance. She looked down and saw that her wrists, arms, shoulders, ankles, and legs were tightly bound to Cantrell’s desk chair with two-inch-wide strips of adhesive tape. Her feet could not reach the floor, so her movements could not budge the chair. 

God, I’m wrapped up like a mummy
, she thought, and tried to scream, but her mouth had been taped shut.

Cantrell’s ice-blue eyes were on her. “You took some time coming awake,” he said. “I was beginning to think we wouldn’t need restraining tapes. Probably you were fatigued from your past few days and needed some time to rest.”

Sharon stared at him, amazed. A transformation seemed to have occurred in Ross Cantrell. The man who had brought her up to this office, who last week had sat in the chair to which she was now bound and talked to her of the future— that man was gone. This man sitting on the corner of the desk had none of Cantrell’s flamboyance, none of the aggressively confident exuberance of the oil tycoon. It was as though the Texan’s personality had left the body and a new spirit had come in: that of a modest, quiet, businesslike sort who was prepared to blend into the crowd. The man here in the room with Sharon was as colorless as his speech—the accent of which, Sharon realized, was no longer a Texas drawl.

“You’re looking at the thirty-first Cobor grenade,” Cantrell was saying. “Contrary to the opinion of that gentleman from the U.S. Air Force, all thirty-six did come to Spain. One came in empty, and two others with their gas somewhat depleted, but thirty-four were put into place here in Bernabeau. Three of the others”—he gestured out at the emerald-green turf far below them—“are down there. In another forty minutes they will go off, one by one.”

He paused. “You might have realized where they were, if you’d looked at your plan of the stadium again and spoke with Mr. Joaquin about where he has not yet searched. That’s why you’re here now.” His look was oddly sympathetic. “I haven’t much time, but considering how deeply you’ve become involved, I shall give you a brief explanation.”

“Take this tape off me!” Sharon cried, but her words were meaningless noises. 

Cantrell watched her for a moment, as though ascertaining whether she was still able to understand him. Then he glanced at his watch, nodded at Sharon, and gestured in the direction of the three TV monitors built into the cabinet along the wall.

“The point,” he said, “was never simply to kill people. Deaths here have no purpose unless they are linked firmly in the minds of the world with the United States. So we decided not to make an imitation of the American Cobor grenades, even though we could easily have done so. We decided instead to arrange a theft. And with their penchant for truth-telling, the Americans have admitted that the grenades are theirs—as you heard this afternoon.”

Sharon twisted her wrists, trying to stretch the adhesive tape so she could get some slack and work her hand free. But she could not move. The tape had been wound too many times, and too tightly.

“Just before the gas is triggered,” Cantrell went on, “a simple switching device I’ve arranged will activate and the TV Espana antenna will no longer broadcast the signal from the Spanish control room. Instead, a different signal will be substituted: the signal from UBC. Billions throughout the world will see that newsreel clip from last night, and hear that State Department official affirm how America “will not stand idly by.” Then the broadcast from the stadium will resume, and the world will see the Cobor taking effect.”