Conspiracy

by Dana Black

  DANA BLACK

  a WILTON PRESS book

  CONSPIRACY

  Copyright © 2012 by Dana Black

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WILTON PRESS

  Product Description

  A high-stakes, romantic thriller, set in June, 1982. Beautiful TV producer Sharon Foster is mingling with the stars and the high-rollers in Madrid for the final round of the World Cup Championship. So is the man she loves, US soccer goalie Keith Palermo. If they’re lucky, Keith and his US soccer team will do well in the tournament, and Sharon’s new American TV network will generate great ratings and revenues. If they’re luckier still, Sharon and Keith will consummate their love.

  But the lovers are about to be caught in a deadly conspiracy. Even now, in the remote hills of Utah, two American military guards lie brutally murdered. A crate of a lethal new nerve gas is missing and on its way to Madrid, carried by a tall, sandy-haired mercenary who will stop at nothing. Soon the eyes of the world will be on the great Madrid stadium, the cheering crowds, and an event so shocking that it could change the course of history.

  Sharon and Keith find their lives intertwined with a colorful cast of characters, each immersed in their own personal dramas and crises. A glamorous network newswoman struggles with her faithless British rock-star lover—and with her taste for cocaine. A pretty teenage Russian gymnast hopes to defect to the West, to save the life of the unborn child she secretly carries. A powerful Russian spy, a wealthy US businessman, and an ambitious TV director all struggle to stay ahead of their competitors and their enemies.

  But all their struggles may soon be over, for unless Sharon and Keith can discover and stop the World Cup conspiracy, the deadliest weapon in the world will be unleashed before a TV audience of billions—and America will be blamed.

  PART ONE

  June 13, 1982

  1

  In Madrid, the time was 6:30 p.m.

  Sharon Foster sat on the corner of her desk, alone in the small dimly-lighted office the Spanish government had provided. With growing impatience she dialed the Soviet press office for the third time.

  For the third time she heard the harsh electronic blare that the Spanish telephone system used as a busy signal.

  What is it with you people? she thought.

  Then the office door opened.

  In the doorway, Keith Palermo. Smiling at her. His dark eyes sparkled with his good humored, laid-back confidence.

  She felt a little reflex gasp, a combination of happiness and excitement. And surprise, too, because she hadn’t expected to see him until next week.

  Keith was the goalie of the USA soccer team, here in Spain for the World Cup soccer championships that UBC was covering. A UBC associate producer, Sharon had met him at a reception five months ago, and the two of them had dated several times since. But their schedules never seemed to allow enough time for the relationship to go where she hoped it would.

  She hung up the phone. “I can’t believe these Russians,” she said.

  Turning to Keith, she stole a quick glance at her reflection in the office window. She always dressed tastefully, this evening wearing a white silk blouse and a light blue wool cardigan over a dark blue wool skirt. Her light blonde hair, recently cut in the expensive salon she’d treated herself to three weeks ago in Manhattan, still looked freshly brushed.

  “That’s my greeting?” he said, coming closer. “Your opinion of the Russians?” His shoulders stretched the fabric of his black T-shirt, which clung to his lean, muscular frame, not too tightly, but enough for any woman to notice. Just as no woman would ignore the way his jeans hung in a perfect fit on his slim hips.

  She took his hand and felt herself drawn into his arms. Where she wanted to be.

  “Sorry,” she said. “We’re in a diplomatic wringer here. It’s great to see you!”

  He felt warm, and solid, and strong. His tousled black hair and firm jaw gave him the look of a fighter. Up close, Sharon could see scars around his eyes and chin, from past encounters on the soccer field.

  He said, “Why don’t you just go upstairs and yell at them?” The Russian press and government staff who traveled with the Soviet soccer team were here in the same office building, two flights up.

  He went on, “And then we can get out of here and find a secluded place with candlelight and wine.”

  “Great idea,” she said softly, about to kiss him.

  The phone rang.

  UBC reporter Rachel Quinn was on the line, her voice sharp with impatience. “Where the devil is Katya Romanova? The whole crew’s been waiting in the studio more than five minutes now!”

  2

  In Utah, it was 8:45 on a clear Rocky Mountain big-sky morning, and the sergeant was taking a new man out on his first igloo patrol. “Be back in time for lunch,” he said as they were getting into the vehicle. His wide mouth flashed a splay-toothed grin, as though he knew that at six-one and 258 pounds, he didn’t look like the kind who skipped very many meals.

  The new man, a corporal, just nodded agreeably and hunched his own six-feet-five to fit into the passenger’s seat, reaching for the door handle.

  “Don’t slam it.”

  The sergeant slid behind the wheel and rolled his window down two inches. “Okay.” He pulled his own door shut, slowly.

  “Sealers?” The corporal glanced around the vehicle’s interior, his brown eyes wide. The bill of his uniform cap was polished, and the sergeant noticed with approval that the barber had shaved the hair around his ears right down to the bare scalp. His papers said he was from Kentucky.

  “Sealers. Hurts your eardrums unless you crack the window.” The sergeant started the engine. He decided the corporal reminded him of a tackle he had gone up against playing high school ball—a real animal on the field, but shy when it came to conversation. That was okay with the sergeant, because he liked to do the talking on a patrol. He knew he could keep his eyes open while he ran his mouth, but some guys couldn’t.

  And when you were on igloo patrol, it was look-sharp, be-sharp time.

  “How much air we got?”

  “About two hours, for two men.” The sergeant flicked a dashboard switch connected to the tanks under the vehicle’s seats, and then flicked it back to “off.” Then he added, “If we don’t breathe too hard.”

  The corporal nodded again and squinted into the sun’s glare, trying to see up the access road. The igloos were five hundred feet apart from each other, in a mile-long arc, strung out along a paved service road half a mile away. None of the igloos was very big and none threw much of a shadow. At this time of day the round silhouettes blended in with the mountains that rose up nearly a hundred miles west across the flat plateau. The mountains still had snow on top and sparkled in the sun.

  “How far do you think we’d have to drive to get clear?” the corporal asked.

  The corporal looked boyish and sincere, and that made the sergeant feel kind of uncomfortable, because it reminded him that he wasn’t getting any younger. His own face had gone puffy with excess weight. Some nights he worried that the weight might be slowing him down. You didn’t want to slow down out here if you ever expected to get promoted or transferred to a better assignment. Tooele Army Depot, Utah, was not the worst, not by any means, but the sergeant and his wife had both grown up in San Francisco. They were hoping for a transfer to a post that had more than a two-room school, a one-room PX, and great sunsets.

  He explained to the corporal that it depended on what kind of an accident they had. If only one of the two-hund
red-pound bombs cracked, they’d need to drive a little over three miles before the outside air would be safe to breathe. Provided the wind didn’t change and carry the stuff right along with them. Sarin gas, called “weteye” or “GB,” tended to clump together and hang in a cloud. The newer stuff, Cobor, was more volatile, so it spread out farther and faster.

  Besides the dispersement factor, Cobor was better than Sarin in two other ways. It penetrated through the lungs, but not through the skin, so it was easier to handle. Also, Cobor needed only one-ten-thousandth of the concentration of Sarin to kill a man. Roughly three parts in two billion. The gas triggered a sustained convulsion along all the nerve pathways, including those to the diaphragm and lungs.

  “If you’ve had the antitoxin,” the sergeant went on, “you go into a coma till the medics find you. If you haven’t, you die strangling for air.” He tugged at his collar as though to illustrate. “You’ll see the film. They used monkeys. Pathetic as hell.”

  “Where do they keep the new stuff?”

  The sergeant indicated the center of the service road, the farthest point out in the arc. “Seven, Eight, and Nine. The grenade canisters in Seven and Nine, and about half the artillery shells in Eight. Enough to kill everything alive on the West Coast if the winds are right.”

  “Three parts in two billion,” the corporal said. “Shee-it.”

  “One Cobor grenade takes out a city block. If all of them in Unit Seven went, I figure we’d have to drive this thing just about up to Canada before we could open the windows. So we try to work careful, you know what I mean?”

  The corporal nodded and didn’t say anything more until they were up on the service road.

  3

  “I think the Russians are stalling us,” Sharon said, talking to Rachel Quinn.

  Keith loved the way her blue eyes flashed and her delicate, fine-boned features set with determination. From the day he had met Sharon, his instincts had told him not to let her get away. He hoped they would have some time together here in Madrid, before the team got on the bus for Seville and their first game of the tournament.

  As Sharon continued on the phone, Keith crossed the tiny office to the window and looked out over Madrid. The summer sun was low in the sky, tinging the rooftops with gold and shadows. To his right, across the busy six-lane Paseo de la Castellana, stood the imposing oval shape of Bernabeau Stadium.

  At the top of the stadium, the sunlight glittered on the glass walls of a newly-built office penthouse, giving the enclosure the look of a small jewel set in an absurdly massive ring. On the penthouse was an illuminated sign with the logo of UBC, the network Sharon worked for.

  Keith wondered how it would feel to be playing in Bernabeau for the championship. He had been in league championships before, of course, both in America and in Europe, but the World Cup would be another thing altogether.

  The feeling would be awesome, he thought. He knew five men who had played in World Cup finals, three from Holland and two from West Germany, and not one of them had been able to treat the experience lightly. “You’re in there and you think you’ll go deaf with all the screaming and the opposition looks ten feet tall,” one of them had said, “and then suddenly you’re knocked down and, before you know it, it’s over and you’re in the locker room peeling off your socks and wondering if you’ll ever be able to do it again.”

  Keith wondered if he would get the chance to do it even once. He rarely let himself hope, because he knew that no one expected the United States to be in the running after even the first week of play. Probably the only time he would be playing in Bernabeau would be at tomorrow morning’s practice—three hours of workout time at the stadium, made available as a courtesy of the Spanish to each of the other twenty three teams here for the finals. Tomorrow was the Americans’ turn.

  All the other teams, even Saudi Arabia, had already been in. The order of entry was based on the number of teams each country had sent to a World Cup final during past years, and served to illustrate how far away the Americans were from the top contenders.

  And at thirty-five, Keith Palermo didn’t have many more World Cups ahead in his playing career. Four years from now, when the games moved to Colombia, he would be lucky still to be playing NASL soccer. So he was ready to give this one his best shot.

  “Tell the crew to sit tight,” Sharon was saying. “It’s not as though they had anything else planned for this half hour, and by then maybe I’ll know what our Russian friends are up to.”

  From where he stood, Keith could hear the telephone receiver crackle with Rachel Quinn’s outraged response. Sharon held the receiver at arm’s length until the tirade had passed. Then she spoke again. “I won’t argue with you, Rachel, and I’m not going to release the crew, either. We’ve got a show to put on.”

  Keith asked, “Why don’t you have her do my interview now, instead of on Tuesday? I’ll go over there now, and you can clear up the rest of your work.”

  Sharon spoke into the telephone once again. “There’s been a change. I just learned that Keith Palermo is on his way to your studio now to fill in for Katya.”

  She put the receiver back into the cradle before Rachel could offer any further objections.

  “Sounds like she’ll be a lot of fun to talk to,” said Keith.

  “Just her way of handling the pressure when she’s not in control. By the time you get over there, she’ll be the perfect professional.”

  He shook his head in admiration. “And how does Sharon Foster handle the pressure?”

  Sharon hesitated for a moment, then she smiled. “Oh, sometimes I go out to dinner with a national soccer hero.”

  4

  About twenty feet from the first igloo, the sergeant stopped and killed the engine.

  At this distance he could see that the skin of brown rubberized paint that coated the concrete was unbroken, and he could verify that the vinyl seals around the heavy steel door had not been disturbed. Any farther away, the fine details tended to blur. He had meant to have his eyes checked the last time he was on leave in Salt Lake City, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

  The corporal was staring at the igloo. “Big,” he said.

  “Forty feet wide, twenty feet high. You want to get out the masks? They’re under your seat.”

  The corporal handed him a mask, not taking his eyes off the igloo. “Suppose they bombed that thing. What do you think would happen?”

  “It’s all according to the lethality of the warhead, impact area, weather conditions, and so on. You had any training with bombs?”

  “Yeah, what I mean is, supposing it was a direct hit. A nuclear.” He pronounced it “nookular,” and the sergeant set his jaw.

  “Nuclear?” the sergeant asked, and went on, saying it correctly each time. “Nuclear’d wipe the whole thing out. I’d rather see a nuclear here than a conventional explosive. Nuclear heat would oxidize all these poisons.”

  “Wouldn’t make any difference to me. We wouldn’t be around to see it, either way.”

  “I’m not thinking about us,” the sergeant said. “Get your mask on. We’ll start your training.”

  The air outside the vehicle was hot and dry, and the sergeant felt the prickle of sweat breaking out on his upper lip and forehead. But he knew it was nerves, not the heat. The sweat came out every time he got ready to walk into an igloo, day or night, winter or summer.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he said as they went forward. “If you’re scared at all now, that’s good. Keeps you alert. The time to start worrying is when you think this patrol can’t be fucked up.”

  He spoke a little louder because of the mask. The corporal said he’d be careful and looked back down the access road to the guard station, a square-cornered, one-story building constructed of cinder blocks, with only a small radio antenna dish to break the flat roof line. On the far side of the building was a guard’s shelter, empty, and a gate blocking the main road that came from Dugway Proving Ground, where the rest of the platoon was stat
ioned.

  The guard’s shelter was empty during patrols because only three men were on duty at any one time, and the third man had to watch the electronic equipment. Besides, from his position inside the station he could see anything coming up the road. There were no trees on the plateau to block the view, only scrubs of mesquite and tumble weed. You could see for miles. When the sergeant was down at the base, it sometimes made him feel lonely with so much empty countryside around him.

  Today he could see something on the road coming their way. A car, or maybe a jeep; you couldn’t tell because it was at least two miles off.

  “Company,” he said. “Probably the inspection team from Denver.”

  A layer of dust and sand covered the asphalt pavement on the service road. As they walked across, the sergeant looked for the tire tracks of the patrol that had come through at night, but the wind had blown them away. That irritated him. Some guys didn’t mind the dust, but he did. It left a yellow-gray film that dulled the shine on everything, from the fenders of his vehicle to his boots. It worked its way inside his handgun and had to be cleaned out before every patrol. His wife especially hated to see the dust around his bare ankles when he took off his socks at night.

  He punched the day’s code into the electronic lock of Unit One. The door was thick and heavy, but it swung open easily.

  “All right,” he said. “Now I’ll show you why I don’t want to see us hit with anything conventional.”

  He motioned the corporal down the fifteen metal steps to the floor of the igloo, which had been dug in some ten feet below surface level. The corporal hesitated as he went down. He was looking at the bank of two-hundred-watt fluorescent lights that hung from the top of the white concrete dome, and at the ordinary wood platform beneath it in the center of the floor.