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is hopelessly outclassed here in world competition,” she said with a disarming smile. “Are the players afraid to talk about it?”
    The clock on the wall said 19:15, which meant it was a quarter past seven. Rachel felt her stomach muscles tighten. She was good for another twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. And then the level voice would start to crack, the sparkling on-camera presence would begin to disintegrate.
    The interview was set to run thirty minutes.
    Beside her, Keith Palermo was making a low-key reply. “We’re Americans, Rachel. Nobody’s afraid. We’re just thrilled to be here.”
    Automatically checking the studio monitor positioned just to the left of Camera One, Rachel could see that Keith was presenting a good image. He sat effortlessly, as though he could move in any direction at a moment’s notice, a quality Rachel had seen before, in gymnasts and ballet dancers. His soccer uniform showed his well-muscled chest and legs to advantage, and the studio lights seemed to set off his dark eyes and hair.
    “I wonder if we could get a closeup on Keith now,” she said when he had finished. “You’ve been in this game nearly ten years, Keith—does a soccer goalie get scarred up, like a goalie in ice hockey?”
    He tapped one fingertip alongside his white, even teeth and grinned. “Got some bridgework in here,” he said. “A few stitches too. Face, arms, legs. Don’t forget, there’s no pads in soccer.. Somebody kicks you instead of the ball, it’s going to hurt.”
    “So soccer’s a violent game.” She kept him on the subject of violence as she discovered he had a lot to tell: the illegal kinds of tackling when the referee’s back was turned; the setups, where one man would take his opponent down legally, using legs only and going for the ball, with a second man coming full speed behind the tackler to “accidentally” stumble and catch his cleats in the opponent’s face.
    Rachel looked at the clock again and winced inwardly. She had expected to complete the interview with the little Russian girl more than a half hour ago, leaving herself plenty of time for retakes. And so many other things had gone wrong. She had not had time to do the kind of probing research on Keith Palermo that had made her a top network reporter during the last decade. And even before the last-minute substitution that Sharon Foster had made, Wayne Taggart, the director, had demanded thirty minutes of taping—even though only ten minutes of the interview would be aired. 
    Five years earlier, when her career was at its peak, Rachel would never have allowed two-thirds of her work to be cut, except possibly by the network evening news. But now she did not want to antagonize Wayne Taggart. He was vindictive and dangerous. With his power as director, he could easily spoil what he had already cruelly referred to as her “first comeback attempt.”
    “Brazil used the same program to win the 1970 World Cup,” Keith Palermo was saying. “The long-distance roadwork every day and the hard interval sprint training, all added to the regular workouts, to build up the cardiovascular reserves. And they’ve also done high-intensity workouts with the Nautilus machines, for body strength.”
    She leaned forward to interrupt, concentrating hard now. “You say the American team’s been training for two years, Keith. What about you? You haven’t been with them that long.”
    He laughed. “The kids call me ‘the old man.’ But I’m the goalie. I pretty much stay put in the penalty area, while they’re running seven, eight miles every game. And that’s hard sprinting, most of it. So you can see where the conditioning really pays off.”
    Her eyes glittered. “Haven’t the other teams trained hard too?”
    “Look at the second-half scoring in our games. That’s where we’ve outscored our opponents. They get tired—we don’t.”
    She kept at him, knowing the viewers would expect it of her. “But isn’t the World Cup