Conspiracy by Dana Black

Katya looked out her open bathroom window at the night-lit streets and buildings of Madrid, and tried to concentrate until she could no longer see them. Her view was from the seventeenth floor of a downtown office building near the Royal Palace, the top floors of which had been leased to the Hotel Lope de Vega from the time the building had gone up in the late forties. The Soviets, acting with both confidence and foresight, had booked the top two floors—enough rooms to accommodate their twenty-five soccer players and fifteen “support personnel,” including Katya—eight years before, when IFF A, the International Federation of Football Associations, had first announced that Spain would be the host country for the 1982 World Cup. The move showed confidence, because rooms in Madrid would have no possible use to the Soviet team until they reached at least the second phase of the tournament—when games would be played by some teams in Madrid, by others in Barcelona—and quite possibly not until the final championship game.
    To buy out two floors of a hotel under those conditions, when it was not even certain that the Russian team would qualify to come to Spain at all, seemed like wild optimism to the Soviet coaching staff, who were at that time mired in a rebuilding effort, and were despondent about the forfeit to Chile that had kept them from the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. The advance booking of the hotel rooms, however, like the refusal to play in Chile’s Santiago National Stadium after the pro-communist Allende government had been toppled, had not been ordered by the coaches. The move had been made by officials of the Politburo, acting on the recommendation of the KGB.
    The KGB had chosen the Hotel Lope de Vega for security reasons; Katya Romanova had come to appreciate that fact very well. Even now she was trying not to think of the guards on each of the three floors at the entrances to the hotel’s single tiny elevator. The miniature car had room for no more than three thin people—or fewer, if they were carrying luggage—and had a glass window at the front. If she managed to slip into the elevator when the guard on her floor was relieving himself, the other guards would see her coming down and push the “stop” button. Since the elevator was tiny, there was no hope of hiding in a crowd. And since the only stairs led directly into the hotel lobby on the fourteenth floor, where yet another guard was stationed, she could not hope to walk unnoticed to the fire stairs that served the lower floors of the building.
    Officially the guards were stationed here for the same reason that the burly Tamara Filatova, KGB-trained in unarmed combat, shared Katya’s room and traveled everywhere at Katya’s side: to keep potential attackers from the Soviets’ prize athletes. Unofficially, everyone knew, guard duty also included keeping Russian athletes in Russian custody. Despite press blackouts inside Russia on the subject of defections, Katya and others traveling with the Russian team were aware that many Russian stars of ballet, literature, and music who had gotten out were now living well in the West.
    The urge to escape—or at the very least to sample some of the forbidden cafes and entertainment spots in any Western country where the team traveled—had to come out during at least a few unguarded moments on such trips, even in the most dedicated Hero of Socialist Labor. The vigilance of people like Tamara was maintained to see that those urges never were translated into action.
    So Katya knew that her task would not be easy. She might fail, and end her days near the Arctic Circle in the work camps of Korkodon or Ugulyat, suffering punishments she was afraid even to think about.
    But a girl does not become an Olympic champion at fifteen by thinking of failure. Katya had beaten the best of other nations and the best of Russia, whose women had won all but two Olympic and World Team titles for nearly thirty years. She