Conspiracy

by Dana Black

  In a telephone booth outside the Madrid Airport, an ordinary-looking gray-haired man in a trench coat dropped a twenty-five Peseta piece into the slot and dialed the number of the police. In careful, rather academic Spanish he told the desk sergeant on duty that something of international importance could be found in rooms at the Palace Hotel registered to Rachel Quinn, an American with UBC.

  Then he hung up the phone. The man known in America as Ross Cantrell and in Moscow as Pyotr Tavda felt some frustration as he walked out of the phone booth and into the International Terminal building. The cabdriver’s radio he had listened to on his taxi ride from Bernabeau Stadium had told him that his plan had failed. His own pocket TV set had told him that the tape had gone off as scheduled, for he had seen the TV Espana signal change to the UBC newsreel.

  All that had seemed to have miscued were the last few seconds of that tape, which had not been played. That would account for one grenade, the one in the stadium drainage system. The other two in the field-level cameras? Possibly they had been discovered during some last-minute security check that he had been unaware of. He was certain, however, that the woman who had called herself Molly was dead, along with Sharon Foster. That grenade had been programmed to detonate first, after only ten seconds of the tape had elapsed.

  So no one would be alive to link Ross Cantrell with the Soviet Union. It would also be some time before anyone who entered his office would be able to live, considering the amount of Cobor that was present in one grenade, and the rate at which the penthouse ventilation system dispersed it into the air above the stadium.

  So even if someone had come into Cantrell’s office and found the evidence against him immediately, they would not have been able to spread the alarm.

  Meanwhile, his call to the Madrid police would put the focus of attention on Rachel Quinn. That would be enough to create tomorrow’s headlines: TWO KILLED IN WORLD CUP BOMB ATTEMPT: AMERICAN TV STAR HELD.

  Not the distinctive numbers Chelkar had asked for, but something at least.

  Regardless, however, Cantrell was not overly anxious to label his mission a success; he had no reason to try to disguise the truth. Because of the sensitive nature of the assignment, Chelkar had explained, they were using the Izhevsk system. None but he and Helena were now alive to say that there had even been a mission in Madrid.

  Carrying a small, ordinary-looking briefcase with makeup equipment inside, Cantrell walked toward the nearest men’s room. There, in one of the lavatory cubicles, he would alter his facial appearance to match the photograph on his passport.

  Cantrell did not notice Helen Bates, who was seated among those waiting for incoming passengers. She was reading a Spanish movie tabloid and did not appear to notice Cantrell’s arrival.

  2

  “Aren’t you going to come to the embassy?” Dan Richards asked.

  Rachel shook her head. She reached in front of him to open the door of the UBC mobile unit. “I’ll get out here at the hotel. I want to catch the last plane to Seville tonight.”

  Outside her hotel room, Rachel hesitated. She remembered another carpeted hotel corridor, another polished door of darkened wood. When she had waited outside Helen Bates’s room on the seventh floor of the Ritz, Rachel had been prepared to expose Alec Conroy’s affair and then to abandon him.

  Now, by returning to the Seville hospital where Alec lay paralyzed, she would be making a commitment to help him. I can always back out, she told herself.

  But she knew that to raise Alec’s hopes and then leave him again would be a cruelty of which she was not capable.

  You really can’t win, she thought. She would be getting him, not because of her attractiveness or personal charm, but because he needed someone who would help him. She thought of massaging his motionless legs and lifting them in the exercises that the doctor had said would keep up the muscle tone. She wondered if Alec would be able to sustain an erection. She pictured herself behind his wheelchair, getting out of a limousine to wheel him into a theater opening.

  You silly romantic broad, she thought. You’re letting Bill Brautigam broadcast the story at the stadium and giving Katya’s story to Dan Richards.

  But she got out her key and opened the door to her room. At least, she thought, Alec wouldn’t be running out on her. Not until he had recovered, anyway.

  After she had packed, she reached behind the bathroom medicine cabinet, removed the small plastic bag that held her cocaine, and tucked it away in her purse. More of the white crystals remained than she had expected; on this day, the last she had intended to remain away from New York, she had originally planned to have used up her supply, so that there would be no problems getting the drug past U.S. Customs officers.

  Yet here she was with enough to last through at least a full week of daily broadcasts. Or even two weeks, at the rate she had consumed the stimulant during recent days. Taking the drug, or not taking it, seemed to make less of a change in her performance lately. It was difficult to see the difference when she watched the broadcast tapes each night.

  She supposed her system was finally adapting; to get a real rush of energy she would need to increase the dosage.

  Then she remembered Alec’s stash in the room next door. He would not be able to either use it or protect it against prying customs inspectors.

  She went into his room. Using a dime from her change purse, she unscrewed the back of the amplifier to Alec’s guitar. From inside the speaker housing she withdrew a plastic-wrapped white egg of cocaine roughly the size of a golf ball. She tucked it into her handbag with her own supply of the drug and was about to replace the cover of the amplifier when she noticed something.

  At the bottom of the speaker.

  A dull.black cylinder.

  A chill swept over her. For a moment she wondered if Alec could somehow have been part of the plan to detonate the bombs like this one, in the stadium. But her mind worked swiftly. Alec was the last person a group of ruthless professionals would trust with Cobor. He was too unstable. He talked too much when he had been drinking; saw too many people; was too conspicuous.

  This bomb was a plant.

  Later, Rachel would question Alec Conroy and learn that Helen Bates had never returned Alec’s room key.

  This evening, however, she spent no more time in speculation. She put the Cobor grenade into her handbag. Then she picked up the heavy black bedside telephone receiver and dialed the extension for the bell captain. She and Mr. Conroy would be checking out immediately, she said. Someone should be sent up to pack the suitcases and get them to the airport for tonight’s flight to Seville.

  She locked both doors and went out to the service elevator, carrying her purse.

  Getting on when the elevator arrived, she pressed the lowest button on the control panel and rode down to the sub-basement. The doors opened, revealing a dark, dirty corridor with bare concrete floors, dingy soot-covered walls, and a maze of asbestos-covered pipes overhead. The air was stiflingly hot and smelled of garbage and machine exhaust.

  Not far down the corridor she found what she was looking for. Beside two greasy carts bearing empty waste cans was a wide metal chute, stained and reeking of garbage.

  A sign above the chute warned in Spanish that only paper and other combustibles were to be deposited.

  She pulled the brass handle and the chute opened. From inside she heard the clanking roar of machinery, saw the glare of distant flame.

  As she flung the grenade down the chute, her thoughts were on Yuri Zadiev and the torch that had burned his hand.

  Perhaps, she thought, she might travel to Moscow to interview Yuri about his heroism. The attention of a Western journalist, she knew, would add to his status and further offset some of the blame he would be certain to take when it became known that Katya Romanova had slipped through his fingers.

  As an afterthought, almost without realizing what she was doing, she took out the two plastic bags of cocaine and dropped them into the chute as well.

  A secon
d later she regretted the move and lunged to get them back. It was too late.

  Hell, she thought, eight hundred dollars, maybe more, gone up in smoke. As she walked back to the elevator, she consoled herself with the thought that she could always get more in New York if she needed it.

  Shortly afterward, the thirty-fifth Cobor grenade ruptured under the intense heat of the Palace Hotel incinerator. The lethal fumes entered the air inside the refractory oven, at a temperature of thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

  Within moments, the Cobor burned into a harmless mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapor that rose through the antipollution scrubbers of the hotel smokestack and into the twilight air of Madrid.

  Coming out of the hotel lobby, Rachel Quinn immediately saw Walter J. in the mobile van. Parked at the curb, he was waiting to take her to the airport.

  As she got in, she noticed a small black police car arriving at the hotel entrance with four uniformed officers squeezed inside. Walter J. was telling her of the reception he and Dan Richards had been given at the American embassy when they arrived with the two Russians, however, and the Spanish radio announcer was describing the closing minutes of the overtime period at Bernabeau.

  Rachel was soon distracted.

  She did not think of the police until the next day at the Seville airport, when an officer politely asked if he might inspect the contents of her purse.

  3

  At Madrid International Airport, radio coverage of the World Cup Championship had replaced the Muzak coming from the metal ceiling speakers. The man who had been Ross Cantrell heard the score as he entered the Aeroflot waiting room. Four to two in favor of Argentina, one minute remaining. He grimaced.

  His face appeared ten years older than before and much heavier, that of a rather lumpish Soviet bureaucrat nearing retirement.

  Other men in the waiting room resembled him, even to their Western-style suits and shoes. They waited patiently for the jeep-drawn trailer van that would carry them from the terminal building to the Tupolev jet now being maneuvered into position on a distant runway.

  Cantrell began to relax as he walked to an empty seat facing the glass window-wall. He was still under Spanish jurisdiction, true, but the waiting area was, to all intents and purposes, Soviet territory. He was practically home.

  He thought of the briefcase he had left in the trash can of the airport washroom, of the makeup that had served its purpose; of the thirty-sixth Cobor grenade, the empty one, that he had left in the briefcase after deciding a bluff of some kind would not be necessary. And there had been no subsequent challenges, no suspicious glances—only polite nods from inspection personnel glad to be on duty now, before the rush began when the game ended.

  He eased himself slowly into the vinyl-covered chair, in a manner befitting a traveler of his apparent years.

  As he did so, he felt a slight twinge in his left buttock, a faint stinging, as though a mosquito or an insect slightly larger had just bitten him.

  He turned. Beside him, a woman was sitting down. She wore the drab wool uniform of an officer in the Red Army. Under her uniform cap her face appeared overweight.

  The eyes, sparkling black, glistening with sympathy, were Helena’s.

  Cantrell felt weakness overpower him. He tried to speak, but no words came.

  Helena was holding up two fingers.

  As he died, Cantrell understood. Helena was carrying out orders. Her farewell gesture was one of courtesy, of comradeship between agents who had worked together.

  She was telling him that Chelkar had altered the Izhevsk number from three to two.

  4

  Less than ten minutes elapsed before Helena’s plane was airborne for Moscow. When the no-smoking and seatbelt lights were extinguished she got up to stretch her legs. To occupy her mind she scanned the faces of the men as she walked back to the lavatory, trying to decide which were the two KGB guards assigned to the flight.

  She had not yet made up her mind when she passed an Aeroflot stewardess more attractive than most. The woman was moving up from the rear seats, taking drink orders. In the narrow aisle, her thighs brushed against Helena’s.

  Feeling the closeness of the pretty stewardess, Helena warmed with pleasure. More than a week had elapsed since she had slept with anyone but Eugene Groves. And Groves’s efforts had failed to satisfy her. As her momentary desire quickened, Helena thought with amusement of removing her facial disguise in the lavatory and emerging to show the young stewardess what she really looked like. A foolish idea, considering that she would be expected to continue in her present appearance until her passport had been checked at Moscow Terminal three hours from now.

  However, Helena made it a point to get the name of the stewardess when she returned to her seat and gave her order for vodka. And when the drink came, she allowed her fingertips to linger momentarily on the girl’s as she took the ice-filled plastic glass.

  “To the future,” she said in Russian, and sipped delicately.

  Precisely five minutes after Helena had finished her drink, the stewardess appeared at her side. She carried more drinks on her tray, along with a small white envelope. She handed the envelope to Helena. It was sealed but unmarked.

  “I was told to give you this,” she said. Her blue eyes met Helena’s for a moment. “And I want to tell you I don’t know what it’s all about.”

  Helena waited until the girl had gone before opening the envelope. Inside her abdomen she felt a bubble of pain begin to rise. She was looking at a blank white calling card.

  Turning the card over, she saw a single mark in blue ink.

  One vertical line.

  5

  Dr. Ferguson stood ramrod-straight, holding his medical bag and oversized briefcase as he waited with Sharon for the guard to unlock Cantrell’s elevator. Sharon envied him his strength. Though his gray hair and aging features seemed out of place with his a blue air force uniform, he still looked alert and purposeful, as though he would have whatever inner strength was needed for what lay ahead.

  In contrast, Sharon felt a weariness deeper than physical fatigue, more penetrating than mental exhaustion. Her emotional reserves were drained. When she thought of the future, a great emptiness seemed to open up within her.

  Keith was gone.

  To fill the void—what?

  The UBC network existed no more. Larry Noble would be waiting in New York, eager to help Sharon find another position. Unlike Wayne Taggart, whose cowardly flight would be remembered in the union grapevine and in the executive suites, Sharon had ended the World Cup with her professional reputation bright and shining.

  But how much could work temper her grief at Keith’s loss? Even the letters she received every day from the children would now carry the sharp reminder of the moments she had spent with Keith in Granada. The pain she knew she would have to face through the coining months and years made Sharon afraid.

  Most of all, she feared the task that awaited her now. She had a visceral dread of returning to Cantrell’s office and seeing Keith’s body.

  Yet she knew she had to go there before Joaquin’s security men. Not many Spanish authorities, Sharon knew, would believe her story that Cantrell was KGB. Her word would not be strong enough evidence to counter the fact that American weapons had been used against Russian athletes. Headlines would drag America’s name through the mud now in any case, because of those weapons.

  But if the documents Cantrell had forged to link his name and Rachel Quinn’s to the CIA were found and made public, the outcry would be almost as savage as if those bombs had gone off.

  “If we can’t prove we weren’t responsible,” Dr. Ferguson was saying as the elevator door opened, “there could be a serious diplomatic problem. The Geneva treaty we signed with the Soviets agrees that neither side will be the one to use poison gas first. They’ll be trying to make the case now, I’m sure, that America has violated that treaty.”

  Sharon pressed the button to take them to Cantrell’s penthouse. She s
tared at the carpeted floor of the elevator as it began to move.

  “I’m afraid to go up there,” she said. “I’m afraid to look at Keith.”

  “I admired him,” Dr. Ferguson said. His voice softened. “He had a real following in the medical unit. We even took a professional interest in his condition after he’d been kidnapped.”

  “Professional?”

  “He said they’d used a knockout gas to abduct him.”

  The elevator stopped. Dr. Ferguson pushed the “Close Door” button. “Hold this in for a moment, would you please?”

  He opened his briefcase and handed Sharon a small green oxygen mask. “We’ll breathe only from these,” he said, “until we’ve had a chance to observe what happens to our two specimens.”

  Looking inside the briefcase, Sharon saw two tiny white mice, each in a separate small cage.

  “They react nearly three times as quickly to Cobor as human subjects,” the doctor was saying. “If there’s still a problem in the hallway or in either of the office rooms, we’ll know it within fifteen seconds.”

  The doors opened and they waited, breathing oxygen. After half a minute the doctor took his mask away from his face.

  “Which room are they in?” he asked. Sharon told him. “Then I suggest you search in the receptionist’s area for a short while,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to come in to the office area.”

  As they opened the door marked “Reception” they heard the telephone start to ring. It rang for thirty seconds more while they breathed oxygen and watched the two white mice. Then Sharon went in and answered it. Dr. Ferguson went back into the hallway and entered Cantrell’s office through the outside door.

  It was Rachel Quinn on the phone, calling from Madrid International Airport. Sharon’s heart sank when she heard Rachel was with the airport security chief. But at what Rachel said next, Sharon came fully alert.

  A man had died at the airport, of an apparent heart attack. He had been waiting for a departing flight to Moscow. Rachel had seen the crowd when she arrived to buy her ticket for Seville, had gone over with Walter J. and the portable camera, sensing a story.