Conspiracy

by Dana Black

  Then he saw the patrol boat coming at him from the east, the huge white oval of its forward searchlight glittering on the waves ahead of its bow. He took evasive action with the raft to move it out of range, yet the light came closer, sweeping across the water like a radar beam, side to side, its trajectory too wide for him to escape.

  An inconvenience, thought Groves. They had changed the schedule of the patrol boats. It was a half-mile swim from where he was now to the outer perimeter of the beach jetty. And as everyone knew, the waters in this part of the Mediterranean abounded with sharks.

  Groves was rather pleased with the shark repellent he had devised.

  He gripped his mouthpiece with his teeth and breathed in. He rinsed his mask again and pulled it over his eyes and nostrils, flexing his feet in his swim fins. Then he pulled his knife from his belt sheath and unscrewed the wing-nut valve of the Cobor grenade strapped to his waist.

  When he judged that the sweep of the searchlight was certain to reach him within the next few seconds, that there was no chance the beam’s arc would reverse itself and swing back toward the shore, he moved. Four quick thrusts with the knife, and the front and sides of the raft collapsed into empty fabric. Another thrust into the remaining wall behind him, and the motor coughed and went silent, its weight and the weight of the Cobor cylinders, added to that of his body and scuba gear, dragging the raft under. Before the light reached him, Groves was in the water with the Cobor, and the raft and its motor were spinning on their way to the bottom.

  He stayed on the surface, letting the beam come within inches of him before ducking beneath the waves. They could not notice bubbles from this distance. He watched the oval of light from underneath now, where it did not look bright at all, only a slight relief in the overwhelming darkness that surrounded him. When he could see the light no longer, he kicked upward the few yards that separated him from the surface. He moved without haste, keeping his leg movements smooth. Jerky movements meant distress in the ocean and attracted predators. The Cobor now bubbling from the cylinder at his belt would eliminate most, but he wanted to run no more risks than he had to.

  The searchlight was swinging back now, but farther east. The patrol boat was moving on, not changing speed. They had not seen him. When the white oval passed over him again, he needed to stay under for only a few seconds, for he was almost at its trailing edge.

  The patrol boat passed between him and the land, roughly a hundred yards away. Groves was pleased to see that it did not have a searchlight aft.

  He hooked the ropes to the Cobor bag around his right arm and leaned into the next wave, kicking for the jetty. Slow and rhythmic, he told himself, and there would be no razor-sharp teeth coming up out of the darkness below him to tear open his belly. To reduce the noise from splashing, he swam just below the surface, though he paused from time to time to get his facemask out of the black water and look at the shore.

  When he reached the outermost rock of the jetty, he dragged himself up onto it, cutting his palms. Then he remembered the Cobor at his belt: the valve was still open. He found the wing-nut valve and twisted it shut. He hauled the sack with the other grenades out of the water and tested the wind. A land breeze.

  Nonetheless, he decided to breathe scuba air for the next five minutes, waiting hidden among the black jetty rocks.

  There was entertainment as he rested. Along a ten-foot swath in the ocean that led away from his rock toward where he had scuttled the raft were splashes of white water. The Cobor had hit some fish, and now the predators were coming in for a free meal. The water close to Groves’s rock seemed the busiest; more fish had lived in the shelter of this jetty than on the narrow band of surface water in the open sea where Groves had swum. He leaned forward to see the corpses that were getting eaten, curious to see whether the Cobor had eliminated a shark that might otherwise have killed him. He took off his mask to see more clearly.

  A glitter reflected in the mask caught his eye. He froze. Mirrored in the Plexiglas was the image of a man in bathing dress behind him. The Thin One. A knife gleamed in the man’s hand.

  The sudden realization took Groves’s breath away. In a flash it was all clear to him. They had never intended to make payment. They had chosen him because his beachfront house would make him seem like only a casual night swimmer— that much was true enough. But they were not concerned with his being caught coming ashore. They had chosen him because the authorities would believe he had only suffered a swimming accident when they found his body.

  And Groves’s own knife was on the ocean floor with the raft.

  The surge of anger Groves felt at this betrayal gave him unusual strength, so that, even encumbered as he was by his scuba gear, he very nearly took the Thin One down.

  Surprise was his weapon. He came around in a crouch and flung his mask at the Thin One’s bare chest. That gave him a second or two to shrug off the scuba tank. As the Thin One leaped forward, Groves spun to one side and jerked the tank strap hard, so that the metal cylinder clattered into the thin one’s path and made him stumble on the rock.

  Then Groves sprang at him, trying to get under the knife blade and lock up the wrist. He made contact, but the other man’s arm slipped through his fingers, and when the blade came slashing down, Groves nearly caught the tip at the base of his neck. He dodged by reflex, barely in time, and then, again without thinking, slammed a stiff-fingered “knife hand” up into the Thin One’s belly and whirled around in an attempt to break the arm across the air tank. But his footing on the wet rock gave way as he moved, and though the knife fell from the Thin One’s hand into the sea, Groves’s neck took a hard blow from his opponent’s other hand.

  Stunned, he felt the bony forearm hard beneath his chin, against his throat, a stranglehold force bearing down on the back of his head. He knew it was a matter of time and chance whether he died from oxygen deprivation or a snapped neck unless he moved, but the hold had shut off the flow of blood in the carotid artery, and he felt his consciousness fading.

  Then he felt a warm rush of fluid on his shoulders. The Thin One’s grip loosened, fell away. Groves turned.

  In the silver-gray light of the stars and the aura from the beach house, the Thin One’s eyes bulged white. Blood gushed from his throat, mixing with bubbles of air from his severed windpipe. He sank slowly to his knees on the rocks of the jetty, trying to turn his head around to see who had betrayed him. But the muscles in his ruined neck had been severed and would not respond. Then his hands and knees lost their purchase on the blood-slick rock and gave way beneath him. He fell and lay prone, motionless now, his eyes white and staring as if even after death they still searched for the blade that had killed him.

  Behind the body stood the most beautiful bikini-clad blonde Groves had ever seen. The knife in her hand was stained red. She flung it into the ocean near the rocks, where the waves still churned with feeding sharks.

  “Get his body into the water,” she said.

  Later, Helen Bates explained. The Thin One had become greedy. When the Patrón had given him the money to pay Groves for the delivery, he had decided that Groves was now expendable. “But I had to wait until the last moment to stop him,” she told Groves. “He was too good for me to get close until you had him occupied.” She added, “I hope you’ll make the circumstances clear to the Patrón when he asks you to corroborate my story.”

  “I’ve never met the Patrón,” said Groves.

  “You will,” she said. “He has another job for you.”

  2

  This was her airport terminal to the world, Katya thought— her way station to freedom. She looked around the now-familiar UBC studio room inside Bernabeau stadium, still scarcely able to believe she was here a second time. The familiar blue walls, the gleaming black-and-chrome cameras and equipment, the bare chromed-steel furniture had been in her thoughts for nearly two weeks now. As she went from interview to interview with correspondents of other nations, she had been tempted, during quiet moments with other
reporters when Tamara’s attention had been diverted, to tell them her story, and ask them for help.

  But she knew she could not. What could the Europeans or the Africans do for her? She read the papers; she knew how intimidated by the Soviet Union the European and African countries had become. Pravda might call it “enlightened cooperation for mutual prosperity,” but everyone in Moscow who had traveled in the West knew differendy. The fear of war was gradually bringing the Third World and the European West into line, just as the fear of prison camps or worse had brought the Uzbeks and the Byelorussians and the Ukrainian separatists into line. Only from the Americans was there any opposition to be reckoned with.

  At least that was what both Sergei and Anton had said after returning from the qualifying matches in Sweden and France last winter.

  The voice of Dan Richards cut into her thoughts. “Katya, I know most of our viewers have never been inside the Soviet Union. Could you tell us a bit about everyday life there? Your apartment, your shopping, restaurants, that kind of thing?”

  He was keeping his manner absolutely cut-and-dried, so much so that Katya wondered fleetingly if something might have happened to make him decide not to help her. She watched him as she began her answer, partly because the camera lights made her eyes hurt and partly because Tamara was out of her line of vision when she sat that way.

  She tried to concentrate on simply giving a straightforward description, but her thoughts kept wandering to the things she could not tell. When she spoke of her Moscow apartment, her thoughts turned to two other men. Their presences were inextricably bound up in her memory with those four small rooms that she shared with her brother Sergei.

  Most important, of course, was Anton. Anton of the glad smile and the golden hair. Anton, who had befriended Sergei during a dispute with one of the coaches that could have lost Sergei his position on the World Cup team. Anton, who even now led the team here in Spain in both goals and assists, and whose statistics for each game Katya knew better even than Sergei’s.

  Anton Petrovich Volnikov, who had come home from the victorious qualifying tour with his teammate and lifetime drinking companion Sergei Ivanovich Romanov, just after Katya had been shipped home from the International Championship meet with her ankle encased in plaster of paris. Anton’s own apartment was only a few doors away on Kalinin Avenue, in another high-rise, and he would stay an hour or two before going out with Sergei to entertain “Little” as he called Katya, with “vodka stories” that brought tears of laughter to her eyes and often made Sergei blush crimson. When spring came and Katya could walk without the cast, Anton would treat both Romanovs to the nearby October Cinema and the Film Actor Studio Theater, and sometimes to the planetarium or the Tchaikovsky Conceit Hall.

  Anton, with whom Katya had fallen in love.

  Anton, whose child she now carried.

  Looking back, she knew it had been her own instigation that had brought them into bed. She had fantasized, but never dreamed of success until one day she had put on her leotard and been working on a move in her floor-exercise routine when he arrived to drink a hangover-clearing cup of coffee with Sergei before practice in Moscow Stadium.

  It had been a beautiful move, a long slow rise from a headstand into a handstand, and then coming down one-handed into a tuck, so that she eased down to the carpet on her back just above her shoulder blades and let her legs trail after, one bent, one extended, toes pointed, to finish with her back arched like the ballerina she had seen at the Bolshoi in Swan Lake.

  When Anton first saw it, she had been watching his face, and from the way his eyes grew, she thought she might have a chance. As soccer stars, he and Sergei had so many to choose from that Katya’s hopes were slim indeed, but when he watched her the second time he said, “Hey, Little. You’re not going to put that one in the routine, are you? Those judges won’t be able to find their scorecards!”

  Still, she wouldn’t have pushed if April 1 hadn’t happened. That had been the day Sergei came home and announced that the team was leaving the next day for “training quarters,” a rebuilt old army camp in the Urals with altitude higher than Madrid, where for three months they would breathe clean air and train hard and do without their vodka, cigarettes, and women long enough to turn into beasts.

  “They want us to live up to our publicity as wild animals,” Sergei said with a wry grin, “so they decide to treat us that way.” He and Anton were going out tonight for a last bender, Sergei added. Anton was coming over at seven-thirty to say goodbye. Katya thought of the future—after Madrid she was to go on tour in Africa. The Soviet soccer team would be performing in the Far East. Then it would be time for Katya to prepare for the International Championships.

  More isolation.

  While her brother was in the shower, Katya decided what she would do. When he came out, she told him Anton had called. He had said goodbye to her on the phone, she said, and wouldn’t be stopping at their apartment. Instead, he wanted Sergei to meet him across town at seven.

  When Anton arrived at seven-thirty, Katya was waiting for him. She had no negligee in which to look alluring, but she had taken one of Sergei’s shirts and rolled up the sleeves and buttoned only the lowest button, and she received him at the door wearing only that. He wouldn’t come in at first when she told him Sergei had been called away by a young lady, because he said he’d had a drink or two to get warmed up for the evening and didn’t trust himself with her dressed that way—or undressed that way.

  She told him she’d had a drink or two herself, and that if he didn’t come in she’d be so disappointed she’d probably have two or three more and miss practice tomorrow. When he’d handed her his coat, she flung it aside the way she’d seen an American actress do once in a film, and kissed him right on the mouth.

  Since that time she’d thought about it more than once, and still believed that a kind of magnetism had flowed between their bodies. Her own had never seemed so strong or so responsive; not even in world-class competition had she felt the flow of energy that coursed through her when she clung to him. Afterwards she’d cried as he said he loved her and had wanted this too, but that they would have to wait for years until they could marry. “Not until after the ’84 Olympics,” he’d said. “They need you in that one too badly to let me turn their star into my wife. We’d have trouble with a license, housing, all the rest of it. But if we only wait—if you’ll only wait for me, Little, we can live together and raise children who live well.”

  Then, in mid-April, her period hadn’t come. She’d known before, really, felt the changing inside, so she wasn’t surprised. But she hadn’t known what to do then; she’d felt all alone since Anton and Sergei had gone, even though the officials sent in Tamara to act as her “chaperone.”

  So she turned to the other man whose presence haunted her apartment: Nikolai Kormelin, Deputy Minister of Economics in the Kremlin. She’d seen him first back in 1980, about two months following the Olympics. A dignified, round-faced man of middle age with sleek black hair and a mustache to match, in an office with furnishings that had once belonged to the Tsars.

  He’d made a joke of her name, linking it with that of the once-royal family, and then cheerfully confessed that he’d fallen in love with her from afar, while watching her perform. He wanted her to charm the rest of the world in the same way. It would mean going on tours from time to time, but her practice sessions would not be interfered with.

  It would also mean an apartment for her and her brother, a two-bedroom beauty in one of Moscow’s most desirable high-rise buildings. She’d been ready to accept on the spot, but he went on and told her about her duty to the state and The Soviet Union’s expanding role in world economic affairs, and how really economics was the study of public opinion because all things had their value only because people thought they did, and how Katya could make others see the true value of the Russian people. That had really sold her.

  He’d said it in a cheerful way, but with a certain melancholy, as though he knew
they both understood that with the current bunch of bureaucratic oafs running the government, the true value of the Russian people might have become very heavily obscured indeed. A real man of the world, Katya had thought after that first meeting, and he was her benefactor! He had continued to bring her to his office from time to time, asking for her impressions of people she met, making her feel important. He cared for her opinions and remembered them, even if months had gone by. As close to a father as she’d had, was Nikolai Kormelin.

  So when the middle of May came around with no period too, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was pregnant, she called his office, something she’d never done. When his secretary asked the purpose of the call, she said she was going to Spain shortly and wondered if she could bring anything back for the Deputy Minister, since he’d been so good to her in the past.

  She was rewarded for her generous intentions with an appointment, which then had to be postponed until that evening at the Deputy Minister’s apartment. They sent a car for her and she rode in the back seat with the windows open, drinking in the spring air of Kutuzovsky Prospect. She felt like a queen and a beggar all at once because of the favor she was about to ask of him.

  As soon as she’d seen him she knew that it wouldn’t work. Far from being receptive to helping her marry Anton, Nikolai Kormelin had sent his wife and children off to their dacha and was waiting for her with all the eagerness she’d felt when she’d waited for Anton! The whole thing struck her as so ludicrous, yet so predictable, that she’d not felt either surprise or disappointment just then—only ironic detachment from her own problems and sympathy of sorts for the feelings of the Deputy Minister. Poor man, she thought, if he’d waited years for this moment, at least she could repay him for her apartment by staying to have a drink.