Conspiracy (43 page)

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 stared 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. 

The dead man had altered his appearance with cosmetics, but Rachel had recognized him: Ross Cantrell.

“The thing is,” Rachel went on, her voice urgent, “he’s got a Russian passport that says he’s someone else, and the Soviet embassy’s trying to have the body flown out on the next plane. Walter J. and I are trying to convince Mr. Santiago and his men here that this is Cantrell, but I don’t think we’re getting very far. Could you come out and back us up?”

Outside the glass wall of the office penthouse, night was falling over the stadium. The windows and street lamps of Madrid were coming on, glowing here and there like fireflies. From her vantage point Sharon could see the faint aura of yellow-white from the airport’s landing lights. It made a soft fringe on the horizon against the dark background of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range. 

A beautiful vista, but not hers. Sharon wanted to go home.

“They wouldn’t believe me any more than you,” Sharon said. “But they’ll believe some Spanish officials who can identify Cantrell.”

As Rachel wrote, Sharon gave the names: Joaquin, the stadium security chief; Valera, minister of culture; Posarda, the Spanish
futbol
organization leader. Those men had seen Ross Cantrell at the meeting less than four hours ago.

“Tell the security people it’s vital to Spain’s interest not to relinquish the body until those officials have made identification,” Sharon said. “Tell them it concerns the emergency meeting held in Minister Valera’s office this afternoon. With their help we can show conclusively that Spain was not at fault for what happened at Bernabeau. I’ll call the American embassy and join you as soon as I can.”

“I won’t let them off the hook,” said Rachel. Obviously, from her tone, she was speaking for the benefit of the airport security man. “This is the story of the year, and they know I’m not about to let it slip away.”

Sharon hung up. For another long moment she looked once more at the darkening landscape outside the penthouse. 

Then she quickly searched through Molly’s desk. The forged CIA papers were in a neat manila folder in the back of the center drawer. Sharon tore the papers to bits as she took them to the washroom. Moments later they were flushed.

That much done
, she thought.

Now she had another phone call to make; then a ride to the airport; then people to meet with, testimony to give. 

Stepping-stones of activity that would take her through the darkness of the next few hours.

Yet she would go to the airport, she knew, for another reason, the one that had brought her here to Cantrell’s office. There was no other choice. 

If she failed to act, what she had done before, the efforts of Keith and all the others, Cindy and Max and Dan and Nancy and the rest of UBC, would be undone. 

Maybe that was duty, she thought. Even though it just seemed like not letting people down. 

She picked up the receiver again and scanned the Rolodex file for the number of the American embassy.

Before she could dial the number, she heard Dr. Ferguson asking her to come in.

“In a minute,” she said. She was still afraid to come near. “I just have to make this call.”

Then she looked up. 

He had opened the door to the room that had been Cantrell’s office and was standing off to one side of the doorway. The light inside the office had been turned on, revealing a handsome, muscular, dark-haired man who sat propped up on Cantrell’s couch. 

Keith Palermo was rubbing the left side of his bared chest and blinking at the light.

The doctor began to speak.

Sharon did not hear him.

“I had hope,” the doctor said later, “when you first told me what had happened, because I knew two things. I knew that Keith had been kidnapped a week ago with a knockout gas, and I knew what we used as an antitoxin against Cobor for our field troops.”

But now Sharon felt like she was floating across the room, in a haze of joyful tears.

“He’s waking up after a cardiac injection of adrenaline,” Dr. Ferguson went on. “I’d advise you to take it easy.”

The doctor realized that neither Sharon nor Keith was paying the slightest attention to him, or to his medical advice. He turned away, looking a little smaller and older in his blue uniform, as he he quietly replaced his syringe and stethoscope into his medical bag with the rest of his equipment.

He permitted himself a momentary smile. 

The World Cup conspiracy had been defeated.

THE END

Thank you for reading
Conspiracy
. If you have enjoyed this book and would like to see more like it, please consider reviewing and/or tagging it on your favorite sites and telling your literary friends about it. Plans for future projects will be based in part on reader feedback and the success of previous projects. It would give Dana great joy to write what you want to read.

You may also enjoy Dana’s latest novel,
Legacy
. A preview follows the author’s note.

Author’s Note

The characters and events in this book are all fictional. The UBC television network is wholly a product of my imagination. The United States men’s national soccer team did not play in the 1982 World Cup, or any modern-era World Cup, until 1990.

However:

- The descriptions of the locations in Spain as they appeared in 1982 are largely accurate and are based on my personal observations at the time I began the first draft of this book in 1979. 

- FIFA has in fact had a drug testing program in place since 1966, and disqualified a well-known international soccer player for cocaine use in 1991.

- Dugway Proving Ground, Utah has housed chemical warfare facilities since 1943, and conducted extensive testing of air-borne “nerve agents.” Two articles of particular interest might be a Wikipedia reference to the 1968 “Dugway sheep incident,” available at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugway_sheep_incident
and a PDF file dated June, 2010 entitled “Final Closure Plan for Igloo G,” available at
www.hazardouswaste.utah.gov/HWF_Section/Adobe/DPG/Final_Closure_Plan_for_Igloo_G.pdf
.

Legacy (Preview)