Conspiracy (13 page)

On the field a few minutes later, Sharon did not yet feel like a producer. She stood beside the new cameraman, watching his coverage on a small monitor set up on his platform. On the playing area, the U.S. team was scrimmaging, the youngsters full of bounce, darting here and there after the ball. Keith watched from the west goal, stretching, loosening up, waiting for the play to drift closer. Sharon thought of the news she would have to tell him tonight, and of the new responsibilities that would demand more of her time, and about poor Larry Noble. She would visit Larry in the hospital and tell him his job was waiting as soon as he was well again. She had her mental list of things to do: an on-the-air apology to the Russians; the appointment of Maria as her assistant; an investigation into what caused the mixup of documentary cassettes; also some policy talks about turning the programming attitudes around to an optimistic, entertainment frame of mind. She wondered if her view of the “big picture” of the economic future of America that she’d given Cantrell was oversimplified, and decided it didn’t matter. She’d read enough business columns and newsletters to know that no one had all the answers.

On the far side of the field, a defender suddenly accelerated, stole the ball, and sent it flying out in front of a lanky, blond-haired forward who was running full speed for Keith’s goal. Another defender ran with the forward, matching stride for stride. Sharon glanced at the monitor screen. “Get in close,” she said, “I want to see faces!” She could hear Dan Richards’s voice in her earpiece, calling the play-by-play: “Both men are straining now, moving with extraordinary speed, and it’s a foot race for the ball. . . .”

In close, she thought, that was the way. Her way, at least, and for better or worse she would stay with it as UBC’s producer. She would take one thing at a time. The “big picture” would have to take care of itself.

She leaned forward to watch Keith Palermo as he moved, catlike, into position to protect the goal.

3

In Salt Lake City it was 1:00 a.m., and Groves knew he would have to give up the car. He’d made good moves up till now—doubling back from the eastbound route and then heading north to the city so he could lose himself for a night’s rest in an urban area instead of somewhere out on the road. He’d been listening to the police frequencies on the little CB-shortwave unit he’d bought in Green River, which had been another good move. They hadn’t mentioned finding the jeep. He took that as a good omen. He wasn’t stupid enough to think they hadn’t found it, or that they’d stop searching for the Cobor just because they’d found the jeep and a man who might have taken it. But this way, if he’d been spotted in the jeep earlier and remembered, they’d match that description with the body of the salesman and decide they were now looking for a third person, one whose description was unknown and whose vehicle was also unknown, who had taken the Cobor from the jeep driver and killed him. That would take some of the heat off. They wouldn’t be so quick to narrow their search to a sandy-haired white male who stood about six feet tall and weighed about one-eighty.

If he was even luckier, they’d have decided that since the jeep had been heading east on Interstate 70, whoever had taken the Cobor would have continued in that direction. So by now they’d be concentrating their search in Colorado.

But he still had to give up the Chevy. He had to ditch it, and quick. The problem was that the salesman, Barry Austin, had a wife, who had gotten nervous when he hadn’t shown up at home for dinner in Grand Junction, Colorado, and grew even more nervous when midnight rolled around and he was still missing. So she had called the police. Unluckily for Groves, she had called the police in the town where Austin had been working the day before—which happened to be Salt Lake City. 

Groves had heard the missing-persons alert over his short-wave radio about fifteen minutes earlier, when he’d been driving past a copper-smelting plant. A good thing he’d bought that radio—another good omen—but this development was definitely a handicap. Now he couldn’t check into any of the motels for a night’s sleep in a decent bed without having to wonder what kind of a call-in network the police had up here. Also, unfortunately, the wife had of course given Barry Austin’s description to the Salt Lake City cops. Utah being not very densely populated, some bright cop might put Austin’s description together with that of another white male, whose body had been found in a jeep along Interstate 70. Being Barry Austin in Salt Lake City was looking less and less like a good thing, the more Groves thought about it.

It was at that point, parked among the midnight-to-eight shift’s cluster of vehicles in the employee lot of Anaconda’s Copper Sheet and Tube Unit Number 3, that Groves noticed the railroad.

Along the loading spur, two freight cars waited silently in the dark, and the small yellow light of a switching engine, off in the distance, was growing larger. The engine was coming this way.

Meant to be, Groves thought. Plain as day, this was another chance he ought to take. But he would have to hurry.

Quickly he drove to the far side of the cars in the parking lot, as close as he dared to get to the chain-link fence that separated the end of the parking lot from the railway spur roadbed. As far as he could see, there was no night watchman on duty guarding the parking lot. Before he got out of the Chevy, though, he took care to put on the salesman’s jacket, so the white shirt wouldn’t act as a beacon in case somebody was looking. The air outside the car was rank with sulfides from the furnaces in the factory, a putrid smell that stung his nostrils.

But at least the night was warm and it wasn’t raining. Even more fortunate, the chain-link fence was only four feet high, so Groves was able to hoist the carton of canisters over the top and then, standing on tiptoe and leaning far over die top of the fence, to ease the carton down to the ground. The pointed ends of the chain-link wire stuck into his chest, and his arms felt like they were going to come off at the shoulders, but he managed the lift without any noise.

Then he vaulted the fence.

A consignment tag on one of the ends of long one-inch-diameter copper pipe told him this load was bound for Portland, Oregon, which was not the destination he had in mind. Still, it was in all ways better than waiting for the police to pick up Barry Austin in Salt Lake City. He hefted the Cobor up onto the end of the flatbed freight car farthest from the approaching engine, and slid it between two stacks of pipe. Then he climbed in on top of the Cobor and hunkered down to wait.

Soon the light from the switching engine spilled around the roadbed. Groves was pleased with himself for choosing the car he was riding on, for he was in the shadow of another one, and was invisible from the engineer’s cab. Nevertheless, he kept low. He heard the throb of the diesel engines behind him getting closer, and then felt the jolt as the coupler on the engine engaged the other car. The pipes clattered some at the impact, and Groves felt momentary fear that the load would shift and roll inward from both sides, crushing him, but then the switching engine reversed gears and he heard the diesels rev up. The cars started to move as the engine backed them away. The little train gained speed slowly. Groves could smell the diesel fumes now mixing with the sulfides from the plant, and with the lubricants or preservatives that they used to coat the pipes for shipment. It could be a lot worse, he told himself. Be glad it doesn’t smell sweet, like the Cobor.

As they passed the switch that took them off the spur and onto the main line of track, Groves realized that if they found the Chevy in the Anaconda parking lot before any more rail shipments went out, they’d be checking the trains pretty closely. That was okay, he thought. He knew this engine wasn’t going to pull two cars all the way to the West Coast; they’d be heading into the freight yards. Up there, in Salt Lake City’s central terminal, they’d link up with more rolling stock. It would still be dark. He’d have a good chance to change trains. Not that he liked riding the rails as a hobo— life in a Costa del Sol villa didn’t exactly prepare a man for that mode of transportation—but it would do temporarily, until he could get to the escape route he’d originally prepared.

Then the train stopped moving.

He’s changing direction, Groves thought. That meant the Salt Lake City yard was forward of the car. In a minute the engine would be pushing instead of pulling, and Groves would have the wind in his face instead of at his back.

Then he heard the crunch of boots on gravel.

4

For his part, after having lunch with Alec Conroy in the Palace Grill on Tuesday, Jack “Fireball” Farber felt well satisfied with his purchase. As he stood on the narrow sidewalk outside the hotel’s main entrance, it was hard to resist the impulse to put his hands on his hips, throw back his head, and crow like the Peter Pan he saw most nights in his dreams. He felt confident, proud, the monarch of all he surveyed. The gray-faced hotel doorman who so skillfully braved the flow of traffic to hail a taxi was acting in Fireball’s service. The cars that swirled past him in the current of the Plaza de Cortes were, for the most part, those of
futbol
fans, he was certain, and so were also, though unknowingly, working in his behalf. The whole of Spain, he felt, was his stage, and the rest of the world would be his theater. Fireball could sense that the doorman recognized his power, for the man occasionally diverted his gaze from the oncoming vehicles to look admiringly in Farber’s direction. Farber felt certain that more than his smoothly tailored lightweight suit was making the impression. The strength radiating from his hands and facial features and vibrant red hair seemed an aura that would move the greatest obstacles, subjugate the strongest wills to Father’s purpose.

“Stoned,” he whispered to himself, giggling with delight. “I must be stoned good and proper.”

He had gone straight to his room with the double-thick clear plastic baggie of white granules that Conroy had sold him, eager to test their quality. He had no idea how to determine how pure the stuff was that the rock singer had sold him; absolute numbers, however, weren’t important. What counted was the time a dose would last. He had moistened his little finger and dipped it into the crystals, scooping up a little mound just the way he had done years earlier as a boy, when no one was watching the sugar bowl. Then he had put the cocaine onto the center of his tongue and let it dissolve slowly before he swallowed. His tongue went numb, which delighted him, because he had read in his encyclopedia at his factory office in Woonsocket, Massachusetts, that cocaine had first been used medically as a local anesthetic. The genuine article, he whispered to himself as he felt the coolness spread. He knew that the fashionable way to ingest the drug was to inhale it through a nostril, but Fireball was not concerned with that kind of fashion. “Only with the kind that sells shoes,” he whispered to himself, pleased at his own wit.

The sense of strength and “aura” had come to him as he rode down to the hotel lobby in the elevator. The initial surge of warm energy had made him acutely aware of his surroundings: of the sorrel glow of the elevator’s polished wood paneling; of the grace and strength in the design of the brass control panel and push buttons; of the intelligence that had gone into the four-language translations of the operating instructions. To Farber, in that first rush of drug-induced mental energy, it seemed he at last understood all Europe, penetrated through the centuries of caste and tradition and tribal suspicion to fathom the difference between the European psyche and the souls of his own countrymen. Europeans, he thought, were petty and selfish, while Americans were big-thinking and generous. That was the distinction, pure and simple, and he congratulated himself for understanding it so well.

Now, in the clear, high-altitude afternoon sunlight of Madrid, Fireball was feeling strength of purpose as well as contemplative insight. “The banks,” he chuckled to himself. How the banks would stew in their own juices when the championships here ended and their takeover plans did not materialize! How they would stare, when he returned in triumph and strode into their drab old board rooms and showed them his sales book bulging with new orders! Already he could hear the murmurs of respect, commending him for his dramatic reversal of the company’s fortunes. Then he would go one step further.  He would make them lower their eyes and apologize for even hinting that his corporate loans could no longer be carried and would have to be called in. He could see them now, hunched over their ashtrays, scraping out their tobacco-pipes with their little silver knives on their little silver pocket chains, mumbling that the facts had probably been interpreted incorrectly by their underlings.

Then a little black cab with a red stripe veered out of the flood of cars in response to the doorman’s white-gloved signal, and stopped at the curb in a squeal of brakes and rubber.
My chariot awaits
, thought Farber, and pressed an American five-dollar bill into the white-gloved hand. Farber did not wait to see the doorman’s surprise and pleasure, as he normally did after tipping heavily. This time he simply clambered into the cab’s tiny back seat and kept his eyes facing front while the white gloves closed the door for him.
We are men of the world
, he thought,
accepting what comes with fine stoic indifference, and we encourage others by our example
. To the driver, a little gray ferret of a man who was chewing gum, he said, “El Corte Ingles,” mangling the Spanish with his American pronunciation. The driver showed his contempt at the wealthy foreigner’s determination to display ignorance. Farber saw the curled lip in the rearview mirror and felt scornful in turn at the driver’s pretensions to superiority. “I’m not the one drivin’ a damn cab all day long,” he said. The driver looked blandly at the road.

Farber settled back. He felt as though he could leave the cab and walk the four miles to his destination, but he knew that was an illusion. Cocaine would take him some of that distance, just the way it helped the Indians in the Andes to perform great feats of strength and endurance at high altitudes. But Farber had not been in sports-shoe manufacturing for twenty-one years without acquiring an appreciation for proper training. He was not in shape now, and knew it. He was not about to run off like some drug-crazed hippie.