Heartland

Michael McCandless stuffed the last of the computer-enhanced photographs in his already bulging briefcase, snapped the catch, and walked out of his office on the third floor of the Central Intelligence Agency complex near Langley.

“Your car is ready, sir,” his secretary said.

“Right,” he mumbled, preoccupied as he passed her desk. He emerged into the corridor, took the elevator down to the subbasement, and was processed through the security post.

McCandless, a tall, thin man in his late forties, was deeply worried. But those who knew him would not have been surprised. He always seemed to be worried about something. This evening, however, his concern went deeper than usual, for reasons even he could not completely define.

Slipping his plastic identification card in the key slot at the door marked TELEMETRY AND ANALYSIS, he waited impatiently for the lock to cycle. When the door buzzed, he pushed it open and stepped inside.

The room was very large, and plunged three stories deeper beneath the building; equipment-filled balconies ringed what was called the pit on three sides. Dominating the far wall were two huge displays. One was an electronic map of the world over which were superimposed a dozen satellite tracks. The Agency’s spy satellites. The other was an identical map of the world, superimposed with the computer-enhanced photographic images of the earth as seen from the satellites whirling far overhead.

“Anything new?” McCandless asked, approaching the chief analyst’s console.

Joseph DiRenzo, a young man with flowing mustaches and deep, penetrating eyes, turned in his chair. “Are you all set, then?”

“I have a few minutes yet. I thought I’d stop down to see if anything else has come up.”

DiRenzo glanced over at the maps. “SPEC–IV is just coming up on Novosibirsk,” he said. “You’ve got the entire package, along with our best estimates. I haven’t seen anything to modify what we already know.”

McCandless set his briefcase down and pulled out his cigarettes, offering the other man one. DiRenzo declined. McCandless lit up and looked at the huge photographic display.

To the east of the central Soviet city of Novosibirsk, dawn had come to the land. To the west it was still night. As the satellite continued beaming its photographs down, widely separated pinpoint groupings of lights indicated cities still in darkness. But as the dawn came, the lights went out.

It was a strangely lonely, nearly empty view of the world. And McCandless caught himself thinking morosely that they had not come much further than cavemen. The world was still essentially uninhabited. Populations, for the most part, were centered around major rivers, along coasts, or within areas of natural resources. The oceans, and most of the land mass, were barren of people.

DiRenzo smiled. “If all of our problems were like this one, we wouldn’t have much to worry about.” He glanced again at the maps. “I mean, it isn’t as if they were building new missile bases, or moving troops. This isn’t going to amount to anything more than a social and perhaps minor political problem.”

McCandless stubbed out his cigarette, his taste for smoking suddenly gone, and shook his head. DiRenzo was called the whiz kid around here, but he had no real understanding of geopolitics. None whatsoever.

He picked up his briefcase. “Anything comes up, you know where to reach me.”

“Sure thing,” DiRenzo said, and McCandless turned on his heel, left the pit, went up to the ground floor and signed out with the Marine guard at the front door, and went out into the early May evening.

As he was being driven into Washington, McCandless worried that the President would take the same offhanded view that DiRenzo had taken. He tried to marshal his arguments, fighting his underlying fear that he was missing something. Some vital element that would make certain sense of all this.

As an assistant DCI, he had had no problem in getting an early appointment with the President. General Lycoming, the director, was away, speaking before the California Bar Association, so there had been no one else to take this information to the top.

But now he was almost beginning to worry that he had overstepped his bounds. Paranoia, every Agency officer’s constant companion. He sighed deeply, then lit another cigarette.

Lycoming would certainly hear about his appointment, but not until tomorrow, after the fact. The seed would have been planted in the President’s mind.

At the White House, the President’s appointments secretary showed McCandless immediately into the office in the West Wing, where he greeted the President, opened his briefcase, and laid out the photographs and bulky report he had prepared.

“I’m not going to read this tonight, Michael. You’d better give me an overview of what you’ve come up with,” the President said. He was an old man, and although he normally looked years younger than his age, this evening he seemed wan, tired.

“In a nutshell, Mr. President, the Russians are preparing seemingly every square inch of their land for planting.”

“Planting?” The president looked up from the dozens of photographs.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t mean to seem cavalier about this, but so what? Don’t they do that every spring?”

“Not to this extent, Mr. President. What they are doing amounts to the most massive agrarian reform in the history of mankind.”

The President ran a hand across his forehead. He seemed vexed, and McCandless suddenly was very uncomfortable. “Give me the upshot.”

“The results could be devastating not only to our farmers, but to the entire world economy. If the weather holds, they’ll have massive surpluses.”

The President sat back in his thickly padded leather chair. “If the weather holds. If they actually plant the acres you say they’ve prepared. If they can harvest such a massive crop. If they can distribute it.” He shook his head.

“I’m worried, Mr. President. We’ve had our troubles in the Middle East and now in Central and South America. Such surpluses could be a political bombshell.”

“I’m worried, too, Michael,” the President said, getting to his feet. “And I want to thank you for coming to me with this. I’ll look it over in the next few days and get back to you. We’ll probably get Curtis Lundgren in on it. Meanwhile, I want you to keep on top of things.”

“Yes, sir,” McCandless said, disappointed. He had tried.

When he was gone, the President’s National Security adviser, Sidney Wellerman, came in.

“What was McCandless all het up about this time?”

“The Russians have given their farmers carte blanche, and he’s worried about surpluses.”

Wellerman’s right eyebrow rose as he slumped down in a chair across the desk from the President. He eyed the photographs and report. “Ship it over to Lundgren. He’ll love it. Meanwhile, have you had a chance to look over the material I brought you this afternoon?”

The President nodded tiredly. “Do we get the rest of the Cabinet in on this?”

Wellerman shrugged. “Not yet, I don’t think. But something big is happening, or is about to happen. Lycoming tells me that the Russians haven’t had such a run on hard Western currencies since 1981, when they needed operational funds to hit Afghanistan.”

“Give me the bottom line, Sid.”

“No way of telling for sure, but the run’ll be in the billions of dollars, unless I miss my guess.”

“What the hell do they need it for?”

“The sixty-four-dollar question, Mr. President.”

1

No one had all the pieces to the puzzle, certainly not that summer. Afterward, though, when conversations came around to Kenneth Newman’s response to the summons from the Russians, there were those who said it was due in large measure to his frustration at the time.

Other, less charitable souls, who perhaps didn’t know Newman quite as well, simply shrugged it off, saying that Newman was “the Marauder” after all. The man could hardly not respond as and when he had.

Some people who did not know Newman at all, except by reputation, maintained that Newman’s response wasn’t significant. Anyone could have done what he had. The fact that the Russians called at all, was the sole important factor.

The people who were charged with picking up the pieces didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the puzzle. They were more interested in repairing the damage.

But the very few who were in the know pointed to a certain dark, brooding Friday evening in Moscow, when two incidents inseparably bonded the lives of two diametrically opposed Russians with that of Newman.

The weather had been almost too warm all week, culminating in a record high for June second of eighty degrees Fahrenheit. It was still in the seventies, with a humidity to match, when Colonel Vadim Leonid Turalin stepped outside the service entrance and cautiously sniffed the air. He was a small, intense man, not given to hurrying under any conditions, especially in such warmth, so he lingered by the door for a moment. His eyes were large and very dark — penetrating, his peers said — and his complexion swarthy. He was dressed in uniform.

The two guards on the door snapped to attention, but he ignored them. He strode across the Lubyanka courtyard and passed the black statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which was the forerunner of the KGB.

Turalin was in a foul mood. Over the past weeks he had been getting the distinct impression that his department was being interfered with. And he did not like it. From the beginning of his career with the GRU, and more recently with the Komitet, Turalin had always been a hard man, in the parlance, but an accurate one. He brooked absolutely no meddling by outsiders, either above or below him in rank.

In his mind at this moment was the nagging concern that whoever was looking over his shoulder was doing so as a direct result of the operation he had begun putting in place more than two years ago.

“From flights of fancy to the harshness of reality is often an unbridgeable gap,” they had been taught at 101 School. “Often the simple idea, put in place with ease, will have the most telling effects.”

The rear door of a Zil limousine opened as he approached, and a tall, heavy-set man, dressed in civilian clothes, climbed out.

“Good evening, Comrade Colonel,” he said. His voice, like his manner, seemed oily.

One of Brezhnev’s aides, Turalin thought, but he wasn’t sure. “It was you who telephoned?”

“My office, but permit me to introduce myself. I am Shumayev. Anatoli Andreyevich.” He held out a pudgy hand. Turalin ignored it.

“What do you want with me this evening?”

Shumayev smiled, then stepped aside, motioning for Turalin to get in the car.

When a summons came, one never refused it. Turalin nodded and climbed in. Shumayev joined him, and a few minutes later their driver was heading briskly out Yaroslavskoye Road. An army jeep joined them as an escort.

Shumayev poured a small glass of vodka from his flask and handed it to Turalin. Then he poured himself one and raised his glass in toast.

“To operation…” He hesitated a moment. “Is there a name for your plan?”

Turalin drank his vodka and put the glass back in its slot on the seatback rack. “What is this all about, Comrade Shumayev?” he snapped. “Why have you come for me like this?”

As chief administrator for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, Turalin enjoyed a certain power within the Soviet hierarchy. But his long, hard years with the Komitet, and his reputation for being an unpleasant man, lent him even greater power.

It was said of him, although certainly never to his face, that he was a man with an iron will, steel muscles, a heart of granite, and the mind of a computer.

His wife had never been seen at any Party functions, nor had his three children, who were stowed away at school in Leningrad all but the summer months.

Shumayev, as close to Brezhnev and the reins of government as he was, had power too. But for this moment he bowed to Turalin.

“There is someone who wishes to speak with you,” Shumayev said.

“Then we will proceed?”

“It would appear so. But it depends upon you. Do you feel convincing this evening?”

Turalin shook his head in exasperation. The man was a pompous, arrogant fool.

“I’m with you, Vadim Leonid, in other words,” Shumayev said. He leaned closer. “And no matter what you may think of me, I am a man to have as a friend in this.”

Shumayev’s chauffeur drove fast but skillfully through the deserted Moscow streets. The smell of the lovely spring that had been and of the summer that was approaching lay thick in the air. And a haze, or a light fog, had settled in over the great city. Turalin wondered who he was supposed to meet tonight.

If too many people knew what he was involved in, it would ruin everything. There were bound to be leaks. And it was such a delicately balanced operation, that even the slightest leak could be deadly.

As First Directorate chief, Turalin was responsible for all Soviet clandestine activities abroad, and he ran a very tight ship, accepting absolutely no excuses from those beneath him. An operation either succeeded brilliantly, as planned, or he knew the reason why, and heads rolled.

But in dealing with those outside the First Directorate his control was less than absolute, and then he often became frustrated. He was frustrated now.

“How did you come to learn of this operation?” he asked sharply.

“Comrade Brezhnev asked me to look in on it.”

“As a control?” Turalin asked, concealing fury. He knew that he should maintain civility. But he found it difficult.

“Don’t overstep your bounds,” Shumayev said harshly.

Control. Turalin sank into his own thoughts. Control was everything within the Soviet hierarchy, from the lowliest corporal stationed on the Chinese border to Brezhnev himself who answered to the Central Committee.

Control in itself was an intrinsically sound idea. But in practice the bureaucracies it spawned were monstrous, and often self-defeating.

Control, he would accept. A committee he would not. And yet… another thought came to him. Brezhnev himself did not know all of the pieces of this puzzle, nor would anyone until the operation was firmly in place. By then it would be too late. Far too late, he thought with satisfaction.

As they passed the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition on the north side of town and continued out into the country, Turalin turned the operation over in his mind.

It was all a vast game of chess. Only the pieces were real men, and the stakes actual life or death. But, as in a game of chess, the king played no part in the attack. Other pieces, such as the knights, were far more powerful.

A dangerous game, he cautioned himself. The risks were high, but the rewards…. He smiled.

It was dark now in the car. Through the haze outside he could see the sparse birch forests on both sides of the road, white on black. And he imagined that he could hear the wind sighing through the upper branches. A sound that was at once lonely, yet comforting; cold, yet gently warm.

Indeed, he thought. The board had been laid out, the chess pieces set in place. This evening would see the opening moves.

The dacha was set on several hundred acres beside a small manmade lake. It was a large, very old house, with etched-glass windows, a half-dozen massive brick chimneys, dormers, and a large porch, the roof of which was supported by ornately carved wooden pillars.

There were no other automobiles in sight when the Zil pulled up in front and the chauffeur jumped out to open the rear doors. Turalin stepped out, his boots crunching on the loose gravel of the driveway.

It was quiet out here. The fog’s wispy tendrils among the trees, and low across the lake, lent the place even more isolation and detachment than it actually had.

Turalin stared up at the house. He recognized this place. He had seen it before. But when?

“Lovely old place, isn’t it?” Shumayev asked good-naturedly.

“Lovely,” Turalin agreed absently.

Shumayev took his arm, and as they mounted the steps to the porch, the memory suddenly came to Turalin. He did know this place; he had seen photographs of it. And the realization was startling.

“He requested your presence here,” Shumayev said, sensing Turalin’s sudden understanding and emphasizing the first word, almost as if he spoke of a god.

Inside they went directly into a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases along three walls and a massive fireplace in the fourth. A fire blazed in the grate, making the room almost unbearably hot.

Several deeply padded leather chairs were grouped around a massive oak coffee table. Shumayev directed Turalin to take a seat.

“Vodka?” he asked. “Or perhaps a little cognac?”

“Cognac,” Turalin said sitting down.

Shumayev poured his drink and then set down.

There was a large painting above the mantel, a Van Gogh perhaps, and the bookcases held numerous statues, medals encased in frames, and other bric-a-brac as well as books. The floor was covered with a huge Persian rug, and in a far corner was a standup writing table, such as accountants might have used long ago.

“You have done a fine job with your directorate, Vadim Leonid,” Shumayev said almost casually.

In the light now Turalin could clearly see the man. He was large but shapeless, like a sad lump of clay. His eyes were set deep beneath a simian ridge of bone, and his puffy cheeks were crisscrossed with broken veins. He was disgusting.

“We manage,” Turalin grumbled.

“I have an admission to make to you.”

Turalin said nothing to the man’s inane prattling. Instead he was listening to the sounds of the house. Somewhere in the distance, he thought he could hear someone talking. From elsewhere came the sound of an electric motor running, and he also thought he could hear music.

“You have been presented for promotion twice in the last two years. Each time I’ve recommended no. You have been doing such valuable work where you are, it would have been a shame to remove you.”

“Promotion to what?” Turalin asked.

“To the third floor, of course.”

“As a Komitet deputy?”

Shumayev flared. “You would do well to curb your tongue…” he had begun, when the library door opened and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union walked in, bringing both Shumayev and Turalin to their feet.

He was a tall man, husky, with a wide face and large peasant eyes set beneath bushy eyebrows. He was not smiling.

“Leave us now, Anatoli Andreyevich,” he said. His voice came from deep within his chest. But it was soft.

“Of course,” Shumayev said, and he left the room, gently closing the door behind him.

“Have a seat, comrade,” the First Secretary said, his voice cold. He poured himself a small cognac. “Your family is well?”

“Yes, they are, Comrade First Secretary. I will tell them you asked.”

“You will not,” the First Secretary said, sitting down across from Turalin. “No one will know that we have spoken.”

“Of course,” Turalin said, looking the man in the eyes. He felt as if he were very near a high-tension line. The slightest wrong move on his part would be instantly fatal.

“It is not too warm in here for your liking?”

“It is fine, comrade.”

The First Secretary shook his head, then took a small, delicate sip of his drink. “We must not begin on the wrong foot, Vadim Leonid. I am an old man, and not well, but I still have full use of my faculties, unlike poor Shumayev who is afraid for his own skin.”

Turalin was silent. That the First Secretary admitted weakness was disappointing.

The First Secretary spoke again. “What is it exactly that you hope to accomplish?”

“I don’t understand, comrade.”

“Come, Vadim Leonid, let us not play games. Please. It is late and I am tired. I want to know what you are up to in your dark building. What are you doing? What is your operational goal?”

“Revolution on the North American continent,” Turalin replied.

“You are either incredibly naive, or you have something up your sleeve. Something that you have omitted from your daily summaries. Something even that ferret Shumayev cannot discover.”

“Yes, comrade,” Turalin said.

The First Secretary sat forward and very carefully set his glass down on the table. His hand shook as if he had a slight palsy.

“You have stetched many rules, Vadim Leonid. That in itself is no mean feat. You have been a difficult man to watch. But watch we have.”

Turalin found that he was becoming angry with this old fool who obviously was on his way out. Angry that something might be going wrong and a scapegoat being chosen.

He had worked so hard, these past twenty-four months, with a dozen bureaucracies in a dozen regions, each of them independent of the others; with a hundred ministries; with a thousand factories and distribution networks for cover; and with thousands of people who all were made to feel that Turalin’s ideas were their own.

He started to speak, but the First Secretary held him off with a gesture.

“It may take us years to come to a complete knowledge of how you have operated, so that such a thing cannot happen again. From what I understand, you have single-handedly created at least three hundred conduits for Western funds.”

“It is for the Party, Comrade First Secretary. Certainly not for personal gain.”

“Nothing you have caused by your ingenious manipuations has occurred without the tacit approval and cooperation of your chairman, of the Politburo, and, indeed, of me. But, Vadim Lenoid, you failed us. You neglected to reveal your ultimate goal.”

The First Secretary looking longingly at his unfinished drink. He shook his head. “The American workers shall rise and a new socialism will sweep the land, all because of the Soviet farmers’ willingness to believe a new promise.”

“No, comrade, nothing like that.”

The First Secretary’s eyebrows rose. “You do surprise me. What then?”

“An economic revolt of the consumer.”

“And how will this come about?”

“When American food prices rise, as oil and gasoline prices have risen, there will be a revolt of the American people that will demand a change in their government. A change in their government’s basic structure.”

“Nonsense.”

“No, comrade, not nonsense. Hard, true fact. We almost accomplished it in the early seventies, when my predecessor manipulated the grain market. There was chaos worldwide.”

“Is that what you desire? Chaos?”

“The breeding ground for revolution.”

“Explain then to me. Explain it well, because you have caused us to embark on a path that is fraught with danger.”

“There are three vital elements to my operational plan, Comrade First Secretary. The first is the creation of a surplus of wheat and corn.”

“Such a mundane beginning,” the First Secretary said with some sarcasm.

“Yes, comrade. The second is a surplus of Western currencies. We will have the grain and the money.”

“Certainly nothing in comparison to the wheatfields of Kansas or the pampas of Argentina.”

“By the time we are finished, perhaps.”

“And the third?” the First Secretary asked.

Turalin had to smile inwardly. Even now he would not reveal the third corner of the triangle. He had his deceptive answer ready.

“And the third is the ruination of the American farmer by the manipulation of the market.”

For a long time the room was silent, except for the music still playing somewhere in the house and the crackling fire on the grate.

The First Secretary reached out for his cognac and drank it in one swallow. He slammed the glass back on the table, then got to his feet.

“Rubbish, Turalin. Pure rubbish! You are maneuvering us into madness.”

Turalin looked up at the man. At that moment he felt very much alone. There was no one to turn to.

“I’m giving you a choice, now, of either abandoning your scheme, or returning here within forty-eight hours with the details for its implementation.”

Turalin got to his feet. “I will return in forty-eight hours, Comrade Secretary.”

“See that you do. And the next time we meet, there will be no lies. No half-truths. Nor will we be alone.”

Outside, alone as he waited for Shumayev’s car to take him back into the city, Turalin tried to think out his next moves. It seemed almost chilly outside after the oppressive heat in the study, and he shivered.

He had done well over the past two years, and would probably have continued to do well if not for Shumayev’s snooping. There were leaks within his own directorate that would have to be plugged. And yet the next phase of the operation would of necessity have to be expanded outward. More people would have to be included. More resources committed.

He turned and looked back at the house. Had he underestimated the First Secretary?

The car came, and the driver jumped out and opened the rear door. “Comrade?” he said respectfully.

Turalin looked at him, then shook his head. “I will not be returning just yet,” he said. He went back to the house and let himself in, just as Shumayev was coming from the parlor.

“Vadim Leonid. You forgot something, perhaps?”

Turalin nodded. “Will the First Secretary see me again?”

“Of course. I’ll just tell him you’ve returned.”

The truth, Turalin thought. Or at least enough of it to insure Brezhnev’s cooperation.

2

Delos Fedor Dybrovik closed the file he had been staring at for the last hour, lit an American cigarette with shaking hands, and got up from behind his desk. He went to the window and looked out across the dark rear gardens to the Polytechnic Museum, which was brightly lit from the front. It was very late.

He shook his head in sadness. The spring had been lovely and the summer, less than a week away, promised to be wonderful. But the fall. The glorious fall harvests were only four months away, and then Exportkhleb would shine as it hadn’t since the seventies.

There were some who would call him poetic. Others would classify him as a maudlin fool.

Dybrovik was unlike most Russians, in that although he was a large man, almost fat, his hands and especially the features of his face were light and delicate. Western, his closest friends called him, a remark that pleased him greatly, because he loved the West.

The Soviet Union was, in his estimation, a magnificent country — from sea to shining sea, as the Americans might say. From the awesome steppes of Siberia, to the Ural Mountains, and finally European Russia, the Soviet Union was as varied as her people.

But once a man traveled outside of the country, to the gaiety of Paris, the hustle of New York, the charm of New Orleans, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Rome or Montreal or Buenos Aires, Moscow paled to a dark insignificance.

He had been born in Leningrad, and he should never have been given schooling or promotion. His father, a carpenter, had spent more time criticizing the Revolution than building cabinets. And it was rumored that his mother, a white Russian, had been more of a lady of the evening than a wife.

But schooling had come, nevertheless, possibly through some contact of his mother’s, and at Lomosov University Dybrovik distinguished himself in business administration and finance.

From there he had gone to work for the Soviet Economic Council, one of his most important early projects being the turnaround of the department store Glavny Universalny Magazin: GUM. It was only a couple of blocks away from his present office, but seemed a million years ago in time.

Actually, it was only fifteen years ago that he had been assigned to Eportkhleb, the Soviet grain-trading bureau. At first he had languished there. “What does a poor carpenter’s son from Leningrad know about grain trading?” he had cried more than once. He had learned though, and learned well, and had in fact risen spectacularly in the ranks. Now he headed the bureau, much of his rapid rise due to the Soviet reward system. Those who did well, who learned their jobs well, were allowed to travel abroad. At once a simple and stunning idea.

Less than a year after he had started with Exportkhleb, Dybrovik had seen Paris, spending two marvelous weeks there with the trade mission. Then Buenos Aires the next year. New York, London, and Paris all in the third year. And, in the next years, every major Western capital.

He smiled now with fond memories, not really seeing the Polytechnic Museum. He had always loved Mother Russia, he told himself, almost as if he had to tell himself in order to believe it. Yet he loved his country better from afar. While in Paris, he often lunched at Russian restaurants. While in New York, he would extravagantly telephone his wife, Larissa, to tell her how much he missed her and their tidy apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

After those little nationalistic indulgences, Dybrovik would invariably dress in his finest Western suit, dine at the finest Western restaurant, and hire an escort for an evening of dancing and then pleasure.

This double life in no way affected his performance for the bureau. On the contrary, he often told himself that he did so well precisely because of this dichotomy in his personality and tastes. He could at once understand the solidity and comfort of collectivism and yet see the obvious merits of capitalism. He understood his peers and loved his wife, while at the same time he felt a certain kinship with Western grainmen such as the McMillans of Cargill, the Louis Dreyfuses, the Fribourgs of Continental, and of course the mavericks like Ned Cook and Kenneth Newman.

He laid his forehead against the cool window glass and closed his eyes for a few seconds. His father, who had lived with his share of strife, had told him once that being a man was nothing more than the willingness to accept responsibility. But what happens when the responsibility is killing you? His father had never been able to answer that question. And his father’s responsibility had eventually killed him.

A truck rumbled distantly up the street and disappeared around the corner. Dybrovik turned back to his desk, bundled up the files he had been studying, and stuffed them in a lower drawer. Then he locked the drawer.

If all went well, if the weather held, the grain harvest in the fall would top 250 million metric tons. The largest in the history of the nation. A glorious achievement of the collective farm system, the posters would proclaim. A triumph of Soviet knowhow, the radios and televisions would blare.

But he would not be here to participate in the sale of the twenty to thirty million tons of surpluses expected. He would no longer be a part of the system. He would no longer even be a Soviet citizen.

They had been watching him over the past year or more. His personal mail had been tampered with, and there always seemed to be new staff members underfoot. And three months ago, in Montreal, he was certain that he had been followed.

Degeneration, they would call it. They always had names for everything. He had succumbed to Western decadence. He smoked American cigarettes, drank Scotch whiskey, preferred steak to borscht, drank coffee instead of tea with lemon from a glass. He understood free enterprise too well. And he had been unfaithful on more than one occasion. In Paris with Marie Genarde. In New York with Marilyn Morgan. In Montreal, just three months ago, with Susanne Armor.

“For those and other crimes against the state, against the sensibilities of good morals, we find you unfit for further travel abroad.”

Dybrovik left his office, walked past the darkened rows of empty desks in the main trading and posting center and down the two flights to the ground floor.

The evening smelled warm and moist, a fog forming from the Moscow River a few blocks away. It was the kind of evening that most people preferred to spend indoors, but it suited Dybrovik’s bleak mood.

Unlike Paris or New York, cities that never slept, Moscow was a dark, forbidding city after nightfall. There were very few cars on the streets, no pedestrians in this section, and only the occasional streetlight to provide any illumination.

Stuffing his hands deep into his pockets, he turned east and headed toward his apartment building half a mile away, the soft slap of his heels on the pavement keeping time with his fears, with the nagging worry that had been with him for months. Had he made the wrong decision?

The buildings here were all old, with baroque exteriors, and stained, it seemed, with the sweat of the city; windows like blank eyes, blind to the tribulations of the people who passed. Doorways locked now, but in the daytime opening to shops and offices and a clinic. Busy people here by day, but by night they were all at home, locked away with their own fears and guilts.

Maybe he was going insane, he thought, stopping momentarily at the corner. Only this morning Larissa had planted that seed in his head.

“What’s wrong with you lately, Pasha?” she had asked from the bed where she lay bundled under the covers.

He had opened the windows in their bedroom last night and had forgotten to close them before he went to bed. Larissa had spent a restless night cuddled next to him. It was chilly in the room.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, coming from the bathroom.

“Look at you, you’re getting fat, and you don’t care. You eat greasy food and smoke disgusting cigarettes. Who would want you, except for me, I ask?”

Dybrovik stared down at his wife. Her face was plastered with a mudpack he had brought back for her from Montreal; her hair was done up with French curlers and wrapped in a scarf from Finland, blue and green.

He loved her, there was no doubt about that. But he loved the West and personal freedom as well. And he never hated them, as he sometimes hated her.

Across the street and down the block Dybrovik turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt, his step slower now that he was nearing his building.

In less than twenty-four hours he would be on an airplane for Geneva, where he would pick up the money he had hoarded there (another of his crimes against the state), and continue west. Paris the day after, and then New York City and finally Washington, D.C., where he would ask for political asylum.

It was time, he told himself again. It was time to leave. Time to expand. Time to change — or more accurately, to shed — his old skin, and become, in the light of day, what he had always been.

“Larissa,” he cried out loud, stopping once again, his own voice startling him. It was too late to go back. There were no simple Leningrad days to return to. No Black Sea vacations to pine for. Only freedom in the Western sense of the word.

Years ago he had been in Gaborone, Botswana, with a trade delegation to the capital city, and he had watched from his hotel balcony as five thousand blacks gathered in the city square shouting the one English word “Freedom!” Only in their chanting it came out as two words: Free Dom! Free Dom! Free Dom!

He could almost hear them now. Shouting, screaming for something they had no earthly conception of. Free enterprise, and voting, and telephones without taps, and butcher shops without lines (supermarkets, they called such places). Free Dom.

All day he had vacillated about saying something to Larissa — some small word by way of a gentle goodbye. He would never see her again. But did he really give a damn? No children to worry about. Just twenty years of marriage, stretching backward like a littered path through a dense, troubled jungle. Vacillated between that and maintaining a stoic front. Another trip. Be gone for a week. Bring you back something special.

Without realizing it, he had begun walking again. Brezhnev himself lived on this street. Several blocks away, in a less shabby stretch, but on the same street nevertheless.

It had been the proudest moment of Larissa’s life when her husband had been promoted to chief of the bureau and they had been assigned this apartment on the Prospekt.

At length, Dybrovik arrived at his building. He checked his empty mail slot, then walked down the corridor to the back stairwell. They had been having problems with the elevator for the past several months, and the OUT OF ORDER sign was still on the door.

Why was it, he thought as he started up the dirty stairs, that his countrymen never seemed able to get telephones or elevators to work? Rockets to space, deterrent nuclear missiles, and world-girdling nuclear submarines. Triumphs of technology. But when it came to telephones and elevators, all science and technology seemed to break down.

At the top floor he walked down the corridor to his apartment as he pulled the key from his jacket pocket. Once again he hesitated.

If he tried to be tender with Larissa, she would either mistake his intentions for desire and would rebuff him, as she had for the past several years, or she would read right through him, another trick she had developed over the past few years, and would understand that he was leaving.

Either way he would come out the loser. Better not to say a thing. Later, when he was out, he could write her a very long letter, explaining what he had learned in Africa.

He unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside the tiny vestibule, where he took off his sweat-stained jacket and hung it on one of the hooks. He looked at himself in the mirror beneath the hat rack. He had been sweating profusely. His forehead was wet, and his hair was plastered against his skull.

He did what he could with it, with his fingers, then turned and, bracing himself, marched down the short corridor and around the corner into the living room.

Only the light on the small table in front of the window was on, and it illuminated the features of a dark, very intense-looking man who fairly exuded officialdom, although he wore civilian clothes. His three-piece gray suit, although out of date by Western standards, looked very modish here.

“Delos Fedor Dybrovik?” the man asked politely, his voice soft.

“Yes?” Dybrovik said. His knees were weak; his stomach churned and he felt the urgent need to relieve himself. This was trouble. Very big trouble.

The man uncrossed his legs, got slowly to his feet, and shook his head sadly. Dybrovik was surprised at how short he was. His features too, were small, almost delicate.

Silently, the little official crossed the room to the bathroom door, which was between the bedroom and the kitchen. It was ajar, and the little man reached out with his right foot and eased it the rest of the way open.

“We have much to talk about, Pasha,” he said.

Something was hanging from the ceiling of the bathroom, but for several seconds Dybrovik could not understand exactly what he was seeing. It was pink, with mottled splotches of red and blue. But…

Suddenly he understood what it was hanging from the ceiling. Hanging nude, her toes just inches above the tiled floor, her buttocks dimpled with overweight and strangely colored with blue.

“Larissa.” Her name choked at the back of his throat.

3

The night had suddenly become cold, the fog thick and malevolent, the darkness empty. Dybrovik, walking closely beside the official who had not bothered to identify himself, had no real sense of time or of what was happening to him. Larissa was dead. She had hung herself. But why? The question kept hammering in his head. And almost more important to him: Why couldn’t he feel sorry for her, or feel the loss? He was in a dream.

“I’m really very sorry for you, Pasha,” the little man said softly.

“Who are you, what do you want of me?” Dybrovik asked. Everything he had worked for — his apartment here on the Prospekt, his position, and his travel to the West — it was all gone.

“I came to see you, and when no one answered the door I opened it and went in. I was just going to wait inside in comfort, you see, rather than out in the corridor. And I found her like that.”

“How do you know I am called Pasha?” Dybrovik asked stupidly.

The little man smiled. “Ah, Pasha, we know many things about you. Many things. You have been a naughty boy these past two years. Perhaps, and please, it is merely a suggestion, perhaps your behavior drove your poor, overburdened wife to take her own life.”

“No,” Dybrovik cried, raising his right hand, almost as if warding off a physical blow. “What do you want of me? What have I done to you?”

“It is not so much what you have done, my dear Pasha. It is what you can and will do for us.”

They had stopped, and Dybrovik looked at the other man. Perhaps he had killed Larissa. Perhaps he had hung her to make it look like a suicide. Things like that happened. It wasn’t beyond possibility. But why?

Geneva and the West seemed so far away now, so unobtainable, and yet Dybrovik felt a certain sense of relief. The question of Larissa had been solved for him, and as heartless as it seemed even to him, he could feel the mammoth guilt he had carried with him these past months begin to bleed away. But what did that make him? A heartless monster, who was dancing on his wife’s grave?

“I have worked hard for the department…” he started, breathlessly, but the expression on the other man’s face stopped him.

“Of course you have, my dear friend. And you will continue to work hard. Harder than you have ever worked. But with elegance, Pasha. With an elegance that will earn you a medal. You’ll see.”

The little man took Dybrovik’s arm, and they started down the deserted street again, almost as if they were lovers out for an evening stroll.

Larissa was dead. It was an amazing thing to contemplate. At once frightening and yet somehow relieving. No longer did he have to face his wife — face the problem of loving her and hating her at the same time. But he was tied up with another, deeper guilt now, because of those complicated feelings. His mind seemed disjointed. It was difficult to focus on one thought, let alone follow a train of ideas.

“I know what is going through your mind, my poor fellow,” the official said. “Believe me, I know and understand, and sympathize with you. But it is a terrible thing, nevertheless, don’t you agree?”

Dybrovik found himself nodding. “Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes, comrade.”

“Yes, comrade,” the little man said softly. “I understand, but alas, I do not think your colleagues would. Nor do I believe the Presidium would understand, and they have been taking notes of you these past months.”

A cold wind passed through Dybrovik’s soul, and he shivered.

“Don’t you know, Pasha, that we have been disappointed with you? Deeply disappointed. We had such high hopes.”

The fog seemed thicker now, the night more intense, the deserted streets even more lonely, the West more distant.

“It is why we began to look very carefully at you. It is why we wanted to know more about you, to see if you were of the necessary caliber.”

If there was a choice at this late hour, which would he pick? He had wanted the West, still wanted the lights and the freedom. Yet this was home, this was comforting. He had never felt lonely here.

“And then, when we all began to realize what you had done, what you had been doing, we were deeply disappointed. Heartsick, if you will.” The little man’s voice was almost like an aphrodisiac, but the words he spoke were painful. “Still,” he said on a more positive note, “all need not be lost.”

Dybrovik turned to him. Was it possible?

“I’m talking about redemption here, Pasha. Do you understand that?”

Dybrovik nodded, the saliva gathering suddenly in his parched mouth. Maybe he had never wanted the West. Maybe he had never wanted anything more than what he already had. Moscow as home, the West as a plaything. A bauble.

“It could take years, you know. But you could redeem yourself. You could become a useful citizen once again.”

They had turned the corner and were heading down the final half-block to the bureau, and Dybrovik had the sudden terrible thought that whatever was asked of him, he would be incapable of doing. All his life he had lived with the fear of being unable to manage whatever was expected of him. And now he was terrified.

“If you are worried that you will not be able to do what I ask, banish that from your mind,” the little man said, as if on cue. “You are the right man for the job. None of us ever doubted that.”

“Thank you,” Dybrovik said simply.

“No, it’s never been your abilities under question, Pasha. It has been your willingness that we have wondered about.”

A tentative sense of hope filled Dybrovik’s breast. “Anything,” he said, the word sounding hollow to him.

“Splendid,” the little man said. “I told them we could count on you. I told them just to leave everything to me, that you were right for this.”

They turned into a doorway, then went down a hall and up two flights of stairs that were familiar to Dybrovik and yet, in his present state of shock, strange.

“You will have to begin immediately,” the little official said, his voice echoing hollowly in the stairwell. “Tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes.”

They had reached the second floor, and the little man unlocked a door and stepped inside, waiting for Dybrovik. Only then did Dybrovik recognize that he was back in his own building, in his own office, and he stopped short. The rows of desks in the dark trading and posting room were like soldiers in ranks, all staring at him, accusing him of his crimes past and present. It was an embarrassment to be here now like this.

“In Geneva,” he began, “there is a bank…”

“I know, Pasha,” the little man said comfortingly. “I have the funds, and no one here will ever be the wiser. Your trip to Geneva will simply be postponed for a few days, perhaps as long as a week.”

They had known everything after all. He felt even more foolish that he had tried to desert his country. Yet he felt a certain sense of pride and comfort in the knowledge that such capable, all-knowing people were in charge.

Across the large room they entered Dybrovik’s office, where the official motioned for him to sit behind the desk. When they were both settled, the only light in the room coming from the outside, the little man delicately crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. He did not offer one to Dybrovik.

“You have done well for yourself, you know. Some might argue, too well.”

“What about my wife?”

“The civil police are at your apartment. It will all be quietly taken care of. Believe me when I promise you that.”

Dybrovik nodded. There was nothing he could say, nevertheless he shuddered at the image of her gross body hanging from the bathroom ceiling. He had had the thought at the back of his mind that Larissa would end up married to some minor Party official or perhaps an engineer; someone more precise than he had been. That was it. She had always needed accuracy in her life, a crispness that he had never been able adequately to provide.

“I would like to talk about grain, Pasha,” the little man said.

Dybrovik blinked in surprise. “Grain?”

“Corn and wheat.”

“To sell?” Dybrovik asked. His heart accelerated. “This fall there will be surpluses.”

“The harvest will be nearly three hundred million tons.”

The figure took Dybrovik’s breath away. It was much more than he had been told. Yet he did not think to question it.

“But we need more, Pasha. I want you to buy grain futures. Immediately.”

“But what would we do with it?”

The little man smiled, his eyes flashing in the darkness almost as if they had a light of their own. “What nations provide the largest surpluses these days, Pasha, can you tell me that with certainty?”

“The United States,” Dybrovik said immediately. “Corn, wheat, soybeans, barley, even rice.”

A nod. “And corn? Who else provides corn?”

“Argentina.”

“Wheat?”

“Canada.”

“No Warsaw Pact countries?” The question was almost sad.

Dybrovik shook his head. He had no idea what was coming.

“Tell me, Pasha. How much grain could you manage to buy in complete secrecy?” His voice was still very soft, but even in his present confusion Dybrovik could sense that the little man was excited. But such a question.

“In secret?” he said, drawing it out. “It would depend upon how much grain was needed.”

“As much as could possibly be purchased.”

“It would take money. Hard Western currencies.”

“An unlimited amount would be at your disposal.”

Dybrovik stood up, suddenly very excited with what he was being asked to do. It had almost happened back in the seventies. They had bought mammoth amounts of grain futures, and then, when the market suddenly destabilized because of their massive purchases, they were left holding huge grain reserves whose prices had shot up to unusual levels. The Western press had dubbed it the Great Grain Robbery. But these days there were closely monitored international regulations to stop just such a thing. And yet….

“This would be for me, Pasha,” the little man said, looking up at him. “Your expertise would become your path to redemption. But there could be no mistakes.”

Dybrovik’s mind was far ahead now: leaping to personalities, because that was what the international grain market was all about, after all.

Six family businesses controlled more than ninety percent of the industry. The McMillans of Cargill in Minneapolis; Michael Fribourg of Continental out of New York; the Louis Dreyfus conglomerate in Paris; Georges Andre, the Swiss; the Hirsches and Borns in Brazil; and largest of all, E. Vance-Ehrhardt, Ltd., in Buenos Aires.

In each case, the company was privately owned; its finances were its own concern and highly secret. Yet such huge conglomerates always suffered leaks of information because of the sheer number of persons involved.

Still thinking, Dybrovik lit a cigarette, unmindful for the moment of the man sitting quietly, watching him.

No, he told himself firmly. It could not be one of the conglomerates. Rather, it would have to be one of the independents. Ned Cook in Memphis would have been perfect, but he was gone now. His business ruined. Which left Newman, the Marauder, the one man in the business whom Dybrovik feared and respected most. The one man who could pull this off. Who would do it.

“Are we purchasing world grain, or are we targeting the United States?” he asked, suddenly turning.

The little man smiled, the expression totally devoid of humor. “You can be perceptive, Pasha,” he said. “The United States.”

“For what end?”

The little man stood up. “It is not for you to ask. Can it be done?”

Dybrovik nodded, a new strength seemingly pouring into his veins. He was on his own territory now. He knew what he was doing. “There will of necessity be travel abroad.”

“I understand.”

“A lot of it. This will take time. Months, perhaps.”

“Yes.”

Dybrovik moved around his desk. “Do I report to you on my progress?”

“It will not be necessary.”

“How about the funds? We will need Western currencies.”

“A conduit has been set up for you with a bank in Geneva.”

“My passport?”

“Unlimited external travel.”

The little man smiled again, then started to the door.

“And afterward, comrade?” Dybrovik asked on impulse.

“Afterward, Pasha? There is no afterward, only here and now. And always there will be the question of poor Larissa.” The little man looked directly into Dybrovik’s eyes. “Did you kill her, or did we? Which would the civil police want to believe?” And then he was gone.

The call to Kenneth Newman went out the very next day, but it was a full twenty-four hours later, on June 17, that he got the message. That was due in part to the fact that in the interest of secrecy Dybrovik had initiated the contact through a low-level Exportkhleb clerk as a routine telex to a Newman subsidiary, Abex, Ltd., in New York City. From there it was shuttled to Newman’s main office in Duluth, Minnesota, and finally down to Buenos Aires where Newman was a guest of the Vance-Ehrhardt family. The delay was also due to the fact that no one wanted to pass on any kind of business message to Newman on the day of his wedding. Thus it was only later, after many hours had passed, that Newman became aware that he was being summoned by the Russians. And his reaction then, according to those who knew him well, was understandable. To those who didn’t, it was outrageous.

4

It was a few minutes after 8:00 A.M. on a lovely South American fall Saturday. The Vance-Ehrhardt estate stood at the center of two thousand heavily wooded acres just to the northeast of Buenos Aires along the Rio de la Plata. The house was huge: three stories, with gables and dormers, and bristling with chimneys. It had been copied after the original Vance-Ehrhardt estate of the 1700s in Austria, but was not out of place here. Many Germans, Austrians, Swiss, and even Belgians had immigrated to Argentina over the past hundred years, especially during and after the Second World War. The German-speaking peoples had their own residential areas and styles, their own hospitals, churches, schools, and shopping centers.

The house fronted on a paved road that meandered three-quarters of a mile through the forest to the government highway. On either side of the road were rose gardens, well-tended lawns, fountains, statuary, and innumerable trees of dozens of different species.

To the rear of the house, however, a much shorter section of tended lawn gave way rather abruptly from the pool and patio area to a thick tangle of jungle undergrowth that led down to the river. It was cut through by a wide flagstone path that led, to the right, to the river and boat docks; and to the left, one mile away, to a well-lit paved runway that could handle all but the largest of business jets.

On this morning Kenneth Newman stood at the balcony window of his third floor bedroom, looking toward the airstrip as he drank his first coffee of the day and smoked his first morning cigarette.

He was a large, good-looking man in his early forties, with a broad, honest face, wide blue eyes, and a thick shock of wavy brown hair. “The face that has sealed a thousand deals,” Time Magazine had once called it.

“Eyes that inspire trust, and a personality that requires all who come in contact with the man to open wide, to hold absolutely nothing back,” Newsweek had written.

At this moment he was dressed in a soft velvet robe. His hair was tousled and his eyes still somewhat clouded with sleep, although he had not slept well last night. The same dream that had been plaguing him for weeks had bothered him again. In it he was dressed for the wedding and was walking slowly down the aisle. Lydia waited for him at the altar. Only he knew somehow that the woman behind the veil wasn’t her, and yet he could not resist going to her side and continuing with the ceremony. Each night, at the point where he was supposed to raise her veil and kiss her, the congregation began to hiss and boo and throw things at him, and he awoke in a cold sweat. Some nights he would have the dream several times. And each morning on awakening, he would wonder if it had been a dream at all, or some kind of portent of something disturbing to come.

The distant roar of a Learjet, approaching from the northeast, broke him out of his thoughts, and he looked that way, shielding his eyes against the sun as the plane came in low and very fast for a landing.

It had been like that for the past forty-eight hours. Guests had been arriving from all over the world, some by limousine up from the city, but most by private jet. And yet it was not the festive, happy occasion that it should have been. There was a lot of animosity toward him from the Vance-Ehrhardts, as well as their guests.

Newman smiled, stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the small wrought-iron table at his side, finished his coffee, and went inside to the marble bathroom. He stepped into the shower, and turned on the spray as hard and as hot as he could stand it.

Except for Lydia, he would be friendless at his own wedding. He had been the one to insist they marry here in Argentina. Lydia had wanted simply to get married by a judge somewhere in a civil ceremony, and the hell with her parents. Another in a long string of defiant acts. But he had insisted. And because of his insistence, he had not felt right about inviting any of the people from his business.

It didn’t really matter. Newman was a loner, had been a loner all of his life. His parents had died within months of each other when he was nineteen and in college. He took a couple of years off to work in the wheatfields of Kansas, near his father’s boyhood home, before he went back to school at the Polytechnic in Berne, Switzerland.

His father, who had been a small American name in the oil-tooling industry in France, had given his son two important things. The first was absolute honesty (“Your word is the only thing you cannot lose, so don’t give it away”). The second was an inheritance of slightly less than one million dollars.

Newman had parlayed both into a reputation as a tough but honest grain dealer and a fortune approaching the fifty-million-dollar mark.

For a time, after college, he had worked in his father’s business — which was finally taken over by Arlmant-Genard, S.A., a gigantic French steel, oil, and shipping conglomerate — as a common laborer, and later as an ordinary seaman aboard the A-G fleet, which included grain ships.

It was there he met Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt, through a shipping contract, and a working friendship had resulted. Within a year the friendship had developed into a job for Newman as personal assistant to the great man himself.

From that moment on — it seemed a million years ago to Newman — he had learned the grain business. He had learned about weather, which was vital to grainmen the world over. Sunspot cycles of eleven and twenty-two years, which affected the weather, therefore crops and as a result prices, became second nature to him. Shipping tonnages and contract rate schedules were music to his ears. New hybrids, new planting methods, new tractor designs, elevator construction, and dock workers’ union business became his front-page news. Balance of trade, international currency exchange rates, the gold and silver standards were all important. And finally there were personalities, dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. That was the most important of all.

In the seven years Newman worked with Vance-Ehrhardt, he learned his lessons well. And his own specialties began to emerge.

Early on, Newman developed the uncanny ability to sense a grain deal in the works. A run on shipping tonnages here; there the emergence of an African leader who understood that his people had to be fed; an adverse weather report in one section of the world, with bumper crops in another — all became signs to Newman that a deal was in the making.

This ability, combined with the backing of the Vance-Ehrhardt conglomerate, allowed him to undercut competitive grain dealers even before they knew what hit them. Corn to Johannesburg at two-ten a bushel? He could turn it into two-fifty. Canadian wheat languishing in the fields? He bought at fifty cents a bushel discount, held for three months, and resold it at a ninety-cent profit when everyone else was screaming for a quarter higher.

Thus he became known as the Marauder.

Then, eight short years ago, Newman had branched off on his own, taking with him not only the expertise Vance-Ehrhardt had taught him, but several of the conglomerate’s most lucrative contracts.

For that Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt had never forgiven him. The term Marauder was not used as an endearment in that household, rather as an obscenity.

It didn’t matter, though, he kept telling himself. Today was the wedding, and by this evening he and Lydia would be gone. After a brief honeymoon he would be back at work.

He turned off the shower, dried himself, and went back into this bedroom, tying the belt of his robe.

Lydia was standing there, her back to the hall door. She was clad in a black bikini, a light robe over her shoulders, sandals on her feet. She jumped, a surprised look on her face that turned to a seductive grin.

“What are you doing here?” he said mildly.

“I was getting set to join you in the shower,” she said. Her voice was soft and very pleasant, with the slightest trace of a German accent. She was a tall, willowy woman, with small breasts, a flat stomach, and a small, almost boyish derriere. Her skin was deeply tanned, which accented the long blond hair that cascaded around her shoulders.

“Your mother will have a fit,” Newman said, not moving from the bathroom doorway. He was conscious of his heart beating in his chest. Lydia was a lovely woman.

“Screw it,” she grinned. She undid her bikini top, tossed it and the robe aside, stepped out of her sandals, and slipped off her bikini bottom. Her pubic hair was nothing more than a light tuft of blonde. She came across the room to Newman, put her arms around his neck, and pressed her body against his.

“Hmmm,” she sighed luxuriously. “I’ve missed you, Kenneth.”

Newman resisted for just a moment, but then he pulled her even closer, and they kissed deeply, her breasts crushed against his chest, her long legs soft against his, and he could feel himself responding despite his determination to do absolutely nothing here that could be criticized. But he loved her. Despite her faults, which he knew and understood all too well, he loved her.

He had watched her develop and mature during the years he had worked for her father. At first he had called her the snot-nosed kid. But then, one day, he had suddenly seen her in a new light. She was not a kid, snot-nosed or otherwise, but a beautiful woman, though headstrong, petulant, and spoiled. A woman he had fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with. Nothing had happened to change that in the two months since he and Lydia had announced their engagement. Not her family’s animosity, not her shenanigans (as her father called her defiant acts), and certainly not any second thoughts on his part. If anything, he had fallen even more deeply in love with her.

If he was a marauder, then she was a pirate. Uncompromisingly selfish, but lovely.

They parted, and he held her at arm’s length as they looked into each other’s eyes.

“Not now,” he said firmly.

“Don’t be a boor, Kenneth,” she said.

He laughed, pulled her closer so that he could kiss her tiny, upturned nose, then spun her around by the shoulders, and slapped her on the bottom.

“Your mother and aunts are probably having fits right now trying to find you. Don’t disappoint them. Just this one time.”

She wheeled back to him, her hands on her slim hips. “You son of a bitch,” she shouted.

Newman laughed again. “Hell of a thing to call your groom on your wedding day.”

For just a moment it seemed as if she wouldn’t back down, but suddenly she grinned. “It’s one of the many reasons I love you, you know. You’re such a bastard, I can’t get around you.”

“And you’re a spoiled-rotten little bitch. A hell of a relationship we’ve got ourselves here.”

She laughed as she gathered up her bikini and threw on her robe, but then she turned serious. “You’ll rue the day you met me, Kenneth. You do know that, don’t you?”

He nodded. “It’s one of the reasons I love you. I like living dangerously.”

“I will hurt you.”

“You already have.”

“Bastard,” she said. Someone knocked on the door. She threw it open as her startled father was raising his hand to knock again.

She reached up and pecked him on the cheek. “He’s a son of a bitch, Father,” she snapped, turning around to smile at Newman. “But I love him.” And she brushed past her father and was gone.

Vance-Ehrhardt looked after her for a long moment, shook his head, then turned back to Newman. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” Newman said.

Vance-Ehrhardt stepped into the room, softly closed the door, and came across to where Newman was standing. He seemed ill at ease, almost embarrassed.

“I came to offer you money to quit this nonsense.”

“It would have to be quite a sum to tempt me, Jorge,” Newman said angrily. He had always respected the older man’s wisdom when it came to business. But his judgment of the people closest to him had always been wanting.

“Five million.”

“Dollars?”

“Of course,” Vance-Ehrhardt said. He was a short, stocky man with thinning white hair, a double chin, jowls, and deep-set, hooded eyes. No one knew his real age, but Newman was sure he was in his late sixties at least.

“You value your daughter highly,” Newman said.

“Don’t play games with me, Kenneth,” the older man said, a bit of color coming to his cheeks. “I don’t want you as a son-in-law. I don’t want you married to Lydia. I don’t want you a part of this family.”

“You’re forgetting, Jorge, that Lydia will take my name. She becomes a part of my family.”

“You have no family!”

“Does that mean you will deny your own grandchildren?”

Vance-Ehrhardt raised his right hand as if he would strike Newman, but then he lowered it. “Are you saying my daughter is pregnant?”

“No, unfortunately not. But I’ll do everything within my power to make sure she is within the next few months, with or without your blessings.”

A range of emotions played across the older man’s face, which had turned a mottled red. “Why have you done this to me, Kenneth?” he asked at length. “Why have you singled out my family?”

“I’ve not singled out your family, Jorge,” Newman said with feeling. He truly liked the old man. “In the beginning we were friends. You taught me nearly everything I know.” He turned away and looked out the open doors toward the jungle, the airstrip beyond. “I had always thought you would be proud of my achievements.”

“Proud?” Vance-Ehrhardt sputtered.

Newman turned on him. “Yes, goddamn it, proud. I was like a son to you.”

“A son who turned on his father.”

Newman wanted to tell him that Lydia had demanded they marry anywhere but here. He wanted to tell the older man many things, but he held his tongue. He could understand his feelings of betrayal, and although he could not help him, he would not make it any more difficult than it already was.

“I will not accept your offer, Jorge. Lydia and I will marry this morning, and afterward we will leave here and remain away for as long as you wish.”

Vance-Ehrhardt stared at him a moment longer, then turned, stalked out, and slammed the door behind him.

For a time Newman remained still, listening to the sounds of the house and to the roar of yet another approaching aircraft, but then he turned away, took his cigarettes from the bureau, and lit one.

The wedding was scheduled for 11:00 A.M., and afterward there was to be a reception on the lawn beside the pool. Lydia had made him promise that they would remain only two hours, and then they would leave. It would be one more thing Vance-Ehrhardt would blame on him, but in the end it wouldn’t really matter.

They had been friends once. Now they had become fierce competitors, not only in business, but for the affection of Lydia, Vance-Ehrhardt’s only child.

A deep sorrow passed through Newman, because he knew that his marriage to Lydia would never work out. They were bound to fail. And if there were bad feelings all around now, they would worsen with time. And yet he could not help himself. Because he did love her.

5

The heat shimmered off the main east-west runway at Mexico City’s International Airport as the gigantic Aerolinear Argentinas 747 came ponderously in on its final approach. Newman glanced past Lydia, who was seated by the window, his earlier agitation finally subsiding. They had flown all night, and a thick early-morning haze covered the city so that he could not see the mountains, and he was glad that they would not be staying here, as they had originally planned. The city was too depressing. They had only two weeks, and he wanted to relax and enjoy himself.

He sat back away from the window, and Lydia reached over and kissed him on the cheek. “It wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be, was it?” she asked.

“Still, we should have stayed a little longer.”

“So what?” Lydia said disdainfully. “You and he would have gotten into an argument sooner or later. My mother would have cried. Pablo would probably have threatened you. And my uncles would have stormed out.” She tossed her right shoulder and glanced out the window as they crossed over the end of the runway. “We saved them all that grief.”

Newman reached for her hand, and she turned back to him. “No regrets?” he asked.

She started to laugh, but then she read the serious expression on his face. “No regrets, Kenneth,” she said softly. “But I’m frightened.”

It was a rare admission for her, and Newman wondered if she was merely toying with him. “Of what?” he asked, nevertheless.

“Of myself,” she said solemnly.

For several seconds they looked into each other’s eyes, but then the aircraft touched down with a lurch and a loud bark of its tires, breaking the mood. Lydia smiled.

“I really don’t know what married life is all about, yet. But as soon as I get you into our hotel room, I’ll see what I can do about that.”

“There’ll be a slight delay,” Newman said, and before she could say anything, he added, “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

“Surprise? What kind of surprise?” Lydia bubbled.

“You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“What have you done?”

“Soon,” Newman said. “You’re Mrs. Newman now, not Lydia Vance-Ehrhardt.”

Lydia’s expression darkened for just an instant, and Newman felt certain she was going to flare, but then she settled back in her seat, a quiet smile on her lips. “Mrs. Kenneth Newman. Strange.”

They were slowing down now, and as they turned off the main runway onto the taxiway, the stewardess came down the aisle. She was smiling. Newman looked up.

“Mr. and Mrs. Newman, you will be the first off the aircraft. There is transportation awaiting your arrival.”

“Thank you.”

“I hope you enjoyed your flight.”

“Yes, thanks,” Newman said, “Our luggage will be taken care of?”

“Yes, sir, it will be sent on.”

“Sent on where?” Lydia asked sharply.

Newman glanced at her. “You’ll see.”

The stewardess went back up the aisle, and Newman watched her go. She was a plain girl, but she had a pleasant Spanish face and a warm smile. How different his life would have been, he thought, had he never met Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt. Had he never fallen in love with Lydia. How different, and how much less complicated.

Lydia squeezed his hand, and he turned back to her again. “Any regrets?” she asked.

“Lots,” he said. “But not because I married you.”

Lydia gazed down the aisle toward where their stewardess was talking with another. “You’re not sorry you didn’t marry someone less complicated?”

“Simple women bore me,” he said.

“I’ll never bore you.”

“I don’t think so.”

The aircraft lumbered up to the terminal and stopped, but before the loading tunnel was attached, the stewardess came back to them. “You may deplane now, your car is waiting. And may I offer my congratulations?”

“Thank you,” Newman said. He unbuckled his seat-belt, then got up, helping Lydia out of her seat. They went down the aisle, the other first-class passengers looking up curiously. Boarding stairs had been pushed up beneath the waiting tunnel at the front door, and the stewardess smiled at them again as they left the aircraft.

It was hot outside, and the air smelled strongly of burned jet fuel and automobile exhaust. Paul Saratt, Newman’s business assistant, was waiting at the bottom, a huge grin on his face.

“Welcome to Mexico City,” he said, as they came down the steps. “And congratulations.”

Newman shook his hand. “Thanks, Paul, but don’t say a thing to Lydia about our plans, she has no idea yet what’s going on.”

“May I offer my congratulations to you, Mrs. Newman,” Saratt said gallantly.

“Only if you tell me what’s happening here,” Lydia retorted testily.

“My lips are sealed,” Saratt said. He was a heavyset man of medium height, with white hair and a wide, pleasant face. He had worked with Newman for the past eight years and knew almost as much about the grain business as Newman himself, and certainly more about Newman’s actual holdings. They had become great friends, and Newman trusted him more than any other person on the face of the earth. It had hurt Saratt that he was not invited to the wedding, but he said he understood. Newman had the distinct impression, however, that Saratt did not entirely approve of Lydia.

He led them to a waiting Rolls and, when they were in the back seat, climbed in the front with the uniformed driver. They headed rapidly across the field, toward the private aviation hangars and terminal.

“Will someone tell me what’s going on here?” Lydia asked.

Saratt did not turn around, and Newman stared out the window, a silent grin on his face. Two weeks ago he had arranged all this with Saratt, and now he intended to play it to the hilt. As far as the Vance-Ehrhardt family knew, he and Lydia would be spending the next couple of days here in Mexico City, and then a week and a half at the family’s estate near Mazatlán, before returning to the States. Several weeks ago, however, he had been offered the use of a lovely villa overlooking the Mediterranean just above Monaco, and he had accepted. Very few people would know where they had gone, which was the way Newman wanted it. He knew he would have felt uncomfortable in a Vance-Ehrhardt house, with a Vance-Ehrhardt staff watching his every move and reporting back to Jorge.

Despite himself, Newman found his thoughts drifting back to the business, specifically his relationship with Jorge. Had his and Jorge’s positions been reversed, Newman had no doubt that he would have reacted much the same as the older man. He too would have been hurt, then angry. Yet it was part of the grain business. From the earliest days it had been a cut-throat enterprise. And after the Second World War, when many nations had suddenly found themselves very dependent upon their neighbors’ food supplies, the business had become even more fiercely competitive.

“It is the survival of the fittest, Kenneth,” Jorge had once told him. “The strong survive, the weak perish. As it should be.” It was a lesson Newman had learned all too well.

The car pulled up by the front hatch of a 707. The plane was painted a muted gold color, with the Newman Company logo — twin eagles holding stalks of grain in their talons — in bright red on the tail.

“We’re not staying in Mexico City?” Lydia asked, realizing what was happening.

Newman smiled. “How about Monaco?”

For a moment it seemed as if Lydia would flare again, but then she laughed. “Father will be furious,” she said. “He wanted us in Mazatlán under his control for a couple of weeks. He probably had our bedroom bugged.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Newman said.

“Or me?”

Newman wanted to laugh, but something in her eyes held him back. Or her? It had happened before. Industrial espionage through a carefully arranged marriage. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. The vagrant line crossed his mind. It wasn’t beyond Jorge. But Lydia?

The chauffeur opened the rear door on Newman’s side, then stepped back respectfully. Saratt turned around in his seat.

“I’m going to hitch a ride with you two, and then take the plane. I have some business to take care of.”

Newman started to ask where, but then held back as Saratt’s eyes narrowed. Lydia caught the exchange of looks between the two men, but said nothing.

“Are we just going to sit here for the remainder of the day?” she asked.

“I hope not,” Newman said, and helped her out. Saratt followed them up the boarding stairs.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Jacob, Newman’s steward, said, greeting them just within the cabin. He was a small, dark-skinned Arab.

“Are we about ready to take off?” Newman asked.

“Whenever you and Mrs. Newman are ready, sir.” Jacob had been the chief steward aboard the grain ship Pamplonas, owned by one of Newman’s subsidiaries, until Newman had been so impressed by the man’s grace and abilities that he had hired him off the ship for personal service. Jacob had proved to be even better than Newman had hoped he’d be.

Saratt went forward onto the flight deck as Newman led Lydia back into the luxuriously appointed main cabin, equipped with several easy chairs, a couch and coffee table, and a wet bar. An aft cabin contained a bedroom with a queen-sized bed and a large bathroom.

When they had strapped into easy chairs, Jacob went forward, and moments later the jet’s engines whined into life.

“I have a feeling something is going on,” Lydia said.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play games with me, Kenneth. I saw the look between you and Paul. He’s got something cooking. You forget, I know the business too.”

Newman nodded. “He probably does,” he said. “But I’m on my honeymoon.”

As the aircraft began to move slowly away from the terminal, Lydia reached out for Newman’s hand, an intense expression on her face. “It’s not going to be easy between us, Kenneth. We both know that. But…” She hesitated a moment.

“But what?”

“These next two weeks may be the only nearly normal time we’ll ever have.”

Newman started to protest, although he knew she was correct, but she held him off.

“No, listen to me, darling. I don’t want anything to spoil these next few days. I was going to suggest we not go on to Mazatlán, that we go someplace else. But whatever it is that Paul is going to tell you once we take off, don’t let it change anything. At least not now.”

Newman didn’t know what to say. At that moment he felt an overwhelming love for her. She was like a little lost child whom he would have to protect, not the willful, headstrong daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the world.

“I’ll have to listen to whatever it is Paul has to say. But whatever it is, I’ll talk it over with you,” Newman said.

Lydia shook her head. “I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear about anything except us.”

Newman just looked at her.

“In fact, I never want to know anything about your business. I’m still a Vance-Ehrhardt. It’s something you should never forget.”

“You’re my wife…” Newman started, but again she cut him off.

“Listen to me with your brain, not with your heart, Kenneth, because this is probably the only time I’ll ever be this honest with you. I am a Vance-Ehrhardt, I’m Jorge’s daughter. I love you, but I love my father as well. I never want to know about your business. That will have to remain totally separate from our world together. It’s for your own protection.”

The aircraft’s intercom chimed, and the pilot’s voice came over the speakers. “Are you ready back there, Mr. Newman?”

Newman reached over and picked up the telephone. “Any time you are,” he said.

Immediately they turned onto the runway, the engines rose up the scale, and they were accelerating, pressed deeply into their seats.

Newman found himself thinking back to the stewardess on the flight from Buenos Aires. She had seemed like a simple, sweet girl. Uncomplicated, with no guile. He had always been a loner in his business, and yet he had wanted someone to share in it with him. A wife with whom to live his triumphs and defeats, his fears and regrets. But Lydia was telling him that that would be impossible with her, because whatever he told her about his business would of necessity get back to her father.

It was ironic, he thought, that he had hurt Jorge so terribly and now had placed himself in a position where Vance-Ehrhardt could gain the advantage. But such was life. Despite the difficulties, he was glad he had married Lydia. Despite the fact their marriage was doomed to fail, he was still happy at this moment.

Within a few minutes they had cleared the Mexico City Terminal Control Area and had climbed to cruise altitude. Jacob came back and offered them a glass of champagne, and a moment later Saratt motioned for Newman to join him forward.

“Be just a moment,” Newman said to Lydia.

She squeezed his hand. “Remember what I said, Kenneth.”

“I will.”

Saratt stood between the main cabin and the flight deck. On the port side was a complete galley; on the starboard, a small but well-equipped communications station, including teletype and fascimile.

“This came from Abex while we were waiting for you,” Saratt said. He held out a short piece of yellow teletype paper.

Newman made no move to take it. Instead, he looked directly into Saratt’s eyes. “I’m on my honeymoon, Paul, so I’m going to ask you to take care of this on your own if it’s at all possible. I don’t even want to know what it is, unless it’s of the most extreme importance. Your decision.”

Saratt nodded, grim-lipped. “You’d better look at it, Kenneth.”

“No doubt in your mind it’s that important?”

“No doubt.”

Newman sighed deeply and took the telex from Saratt.

“He wants to meet with us,” Newman said, looking up.

“With you,” Saratt corrected. “He says exclusive.”

“I can’t. You’ll have to go.”

Saratt shook his head. “I appreciate your position, Kenneth, I really do. But when the Russians call — and it’s an exclusive call — through Eurobank, they mean business. Business we cannot afford to pass up.”

“We can afford it.”

“Goddamn it, you know what I’m saying,” Saratt snapped. “Last time something like this came up, you were with Vance-Ehrhardt, and he decided to pass on the Montreal meeting. And you know what that cost him.”

His reputation and a lot of Warsaw Pact grain deals, Newman thought. He glanced back. Lydia sat sipping her champagne, staring out the window.

What the hell were the Soviets up to now? It had to be big, otherwise Dybrovik himself would not have been the signatory on the telex, nor would he have mentioned Eurobank in Geneva. That meant money. Hard Western currencies. It also meant immediate action was required, or, whatever the deal was, it would be canceled and someone else asked.

Newman had worked with Dybrovik on a number of occasions. He did not particularly like or trust the Russian, but he did respect the man’s expertise.

“What do you think, Paul?”

Saratt shrugged. “There’s been no glimmer of anything cooking with the Russians over the past month or so. At least nothing I’ve noticed.”

“How about an estimate on their harvests?”

“Too early, really, for that. But from what I gather, it’ll be a routine year, although Fairbanks is calling for an early winter across the plains.”

“Could be they’re running scared, and Dybrovik is hedging his bets.”

“I thought so at first, but he mentions Eurobank. I’m assuming he’s talking not only about instructions for the meeting, but about the availability of real money.”

Newman reread the message and glanced again at Lydia. She was watching them. He smiled at her, then turned back.

“Get on the wire and have Sam dig up anything he can. Have Felix set up something in Geneva for me.”

“Are we going first to Monaco?”

Newman nodded. “Might as well. Lydia can stay there while I meet with Dybrovik. Let’s hope it won’t take more than twenty-four hours.”

“It lasted two weeks in Montreal.”

“Three-fourths of the industry power was there. There was more infighting than work going on.”

“Do you want to confirm with Dybrovik?”

“I think not, Paul. I have a feeling he wants to keep this very quiet. For now, we’ll play it this way.”

“All right,” Saratt said. He glanced beyond Newman at Lydia. “What about her?”

“I’ll take care of that problem.”

“She won’t be very happy.”

“Don’t look so smug,” Newman said sharply. “She’s a grainman’s daughter. She’ll understand.”

6

The weather in Geneva was gloomy. It had rained all afternoon, and now, as Newman stepped out from beneath the awning in front of his hotel, a cold, windblown mist enveloped him.

He was tired from the nearly nonstop flying he had done, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, from there to Nice, and then this afternoon here to Geneva. And he was disgusted with himself over his inability to arrange his life in proper priorities.

“You’re a grainman, first and foremost,” Lydia had said yesterday afternoon, over the Atlantic, when he had told her he would have to be gone for a day and a night.

He had not told her whom he was meeting, or where the meeting was to take place, but she had known that it had to be a grain deal — that was the only thing that would take him away from her on their honeymoon.

Beyond that, she had not been visibly upset. They had made love on the bed in the aft cabin, and later had taken a long, leisurely shower together.

It was late at night when they touched down at Nice, so Newman set aside his plans to go straight to the villa, and the three of them checked in at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. He had left Lydia there early in the afternoon, and he expected that she had immediately telephoned her father with the information.

Saratt had driven with him out to the airport, and on the way he had seemed disturbed.

“Out with it, Paul,” Newman had said.

Saratt glanced at him. “With what?”

“You’ve got a bug up your ass. Lydia?”

“She’ll call Jorge… probably is on the phone right now.”

Newman looked out at the city, and nodded. “Probably.”

“Don’t you care?” Saratt asked. He was exasperated.

Newman turned back. “Yes, I do care. Very much. But it doesn’t change a thing. She’s my wife.”

“Despite what could happen to your business?”

“Leave it alone, Paul.”

“Jesus! At least let me cover our—”

Newman cut him off. “Don’t say what I think you’re going to say. Don’t ever say it to me. You’re my friend, as well as my closest business associate. If you have to do something to protect our business, something I shouldn’t know about, then do it. But don’t ever tell me or Lydia what you’ve done. Clear?”

“Clear,” Saratt said glumly. “But it’s a hell of a way to do things.”

Newman had not picked up on that remark, and they had dropped the subject, turning instead to the information the Newman Company’s affiliates had gathered on Dybrovik and the upcoming meeting.

From their meteorologist at Fairbanks, Alaska, Saratt had received confirmation that the best prediction was for an early, cold winter all along the Soviet East European Plain, the Ust’-Urt Plateau, and the West Siberian Plain, which could mean a shorter growing season for the Russians at best, or, at worst, a widespread disaster in which much of the Russian wheat and corn crops would be lost.

Saratt had sounded a cautionary note on that point, however.

“Bender stressed the fact that the long-range forecast was entirely his doing, and that there has already been quite a bit of heated discussion about it.”

“They might have good weather?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“If Dybrovik is aware of that, he just might be hedging his bets after all.”

“It’s a possibility, but there’s something even more worrisome. Everyone is mum about the Soviet winter and spring planting. We couldn’t even get a noncommittal statement out of them. Not average, below average, or above. Not even if the crops were in yet. Nothing.”

“Another Great Grain Robbery?”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Saratt said.

“I wouldn’t think they’d have the hard currencies available to them. Not after Afghanistan, or their five-year revitalization project in Cuba. They’ve pumped a lot of money into those projects.”

“We checked with Eurobank on a routine money-transfer verification. We tried once at a mil five American, and again at eight-point-seven million West German marks.”

“Both were verified?”

“Immediately. Dybrovik has got at least four million American on call. Possibly a lot more. And even more significantly, there were no holds or blinds on his account. They didn’t give a damn that we were obviously checking on them.”

“He’s in Geneva to do business, then.”

“Exactly,” Saratt said. “But what kind of business, and how much?”

“I guess we’ll see,” Newman said. “What about Dybrovik himself? Anything?”

“The usual. He’s been screwing around again, this last time back in Montreal.”

“Anything we can use?”

A sour look came over Saratt’s face. “She’s a young girl. College student, working nights to help support her expensive habits. Unless you want to upset her apple cart, there’s nothing we can or should do.”

“We don’t do business that way.”

Saratt grinned. “I didn’t think so, but I put a loose watch on her to see if she heads to Geneva. So far, she hasn’t moved.”

“When did Dybrovik come out?”

“No one seems to know, although I didn’t push it too hard. Things like this have a tendency to get out, and then we’d have half the world on our tails, especially the Georges Andre crowd.”

“I don’t want that. It’ll probably get out fast enough as it is,” Newman said. “How about State?”

“Not a thing from Washington, which also strikes a strange note.”

“Good. Lundgren’s one idiot I’d just as soon keep as far away as possible. We’ll backtrack later for licenses if and when we make a deal with Dybrovik. Anything else I should know about?”

“Brezhnev is sick again. He’ll probably be out within the next six months.”

“We were told that three years ago, and the old goat is still going strong.”

“Not this time, Kenneth. He hasn’t been seen anywhere.”

Newman thought about that for several moments. “We’ll just have to watch our backs, then, on anything long range. Let’s stay beyond a hundred and twenty days. If Brezhnev steps down, there’s no telling what his successor might do with existing agreements.”

“Especially if it’s Andropov.”

With those remarks in mind, Newman hunched up his coat collar and headed away from the hotel, which was on the Quai Mont Blanc, facing the inner harbor, and worked his way to the main post office.

He had telephoned the depositors’ special night number at Eurobank, giving his name and the telex number, and had received the instruction to proceed on foot alone to the main post office just off the Rue des Alpes at 10:00 P.M.

It was nearly that time now, and as Newman walked he went over everything Saratt had told him, as well as what he knew about the Russian he was to meet. But ever present at the back of his mind was Lydia, and guilt that he had left her alone on their honeymoon. A shaky beginning to a difficult marriage; it did not portend a rosy future.

There was very little traffic, and even fewer pedestrians, because it was late, the weather was rotten, and the real tourist season had not yet begun. Geneva, besides being a business center, is a tourist town in July and August. In the off-season it resumes its usual Swiss flavor: quiet and somewhat stodgy.

The post office was housed in a large, very ornate building. As Newman approached the front entrance, guarded by twin lions flanking the stairs, and gargoyles above, a black Citroën DS 19 pulled up to the curb beside Newman. The rear door came open.

Newman looked both ways up the street. There was no one else in sight, no cars or buses or people.

“It is I,” Dybrovik’s voice came from the dark interior of the sedan.

Newman climbed into the back seat beside the Russian, who reached across and pulled the door shut. Immediately the driver pulled away, turned the corner at the end of the block, and headed toward the Cornavin main railway station.

“So,” Dybrovik began, “you received my message, you were intrigued, and you came. All despite my understanding it is your honeymoon.” There seemed to be a sadness about the Russian. His manner was not as light as Newman remembered it.

“At this time tomorrow evening, I will have returned to my wife,” Newman said evenly.

“A time limit he now imposes,” Dybrovik guffawed. But before Newman could reply, he went on, “It is just as well. When men like us gather, it is not very long before the wolves begin snapping at our heels.”

“You are expecting surpluses and you want to sell grain,” Newman said, taking a stab in the dark.

Even in the darkened interior of the car, Newman could see something flash in the Russian’s eyes. But it was gone, covered up as rapidly as it had come.

“We would hope for surpluses, my friend. But, alas, such will likely not be the case.”

Something wasn’t right. “Then you wish to purchase grain?”

“Indeed.”

“Why me? Why like this?” Newman asked, still fishing.

Dybrovik grinned. “The second question is so obvious, it demands no serious answer. But the first… well, then, that is serious. To that we shall speak at length. Soon.”

“Soon? When? Where?”

“Do not attempt to manipulate me, and I shall not attempt to do so with you. Without that, it is possible that we shall have a fruitful association.”

Dybrovik was probably in his forties, Newman figured, but he sounded like a sixty-year-old, his baby face looked twenty, and at times he acted like a naive teenager. Despite those outward appearances, however, the man was no fool, and had been around the grain business longer than Newman.

At this point, then, Newman decided he would play the Russian’s game, at least until he had a better understanding of what was going on.

They turned north at the railway station and headed up the lakeshore past the Museum of Scientific History, toward Versoix and finally Coppet about ten miles away, where their driver turned onto a narrow, graveled driveway that led into the woods away from the lake.

Within a hundred yards the road entered a wide clearing in which stood a large, rambling house with a huge marble portico. Their driver pulled up beneath the overhanging roof and wordlessly jumped out and opened the rear door on Dybrovik’s side. The Russian shuffled his bulk ponderously out of the car, and Newman slid to that side and got out as well.

“I’ve leased the house for one year, and it will be our operational headquarters for the duration, although I suspect we will have concluded our business by early fall,” Dybrovik said.

Inside, a dim light illuminated the entrance hall; the stained-glass windows were dark. The wide stairs leading up were lost in darkness, as were the corridors to the left and right.

Without hesitation Dybrovik led the way to the right, into what appeared to be a large, luxuriously decorated drawing room. He flipped on a bronze table lamp, motioned Newman to take a seat, then went to a sideboard and pulled out two brandy snifters.

“Cognac or whiskey?” he asked.

“Cognac will be fine,” Newman said, crossing the room and sitting down on the long leather couch. He lit a cigarette.

Dybrovik handed Newman his drink, then raised his glass in a toast. “To a successful business between us.”

Newman nodded, took a sip of his drink, then set his glass down on the low coffee table in front of him. Dybrovik remained standing. Psychology, Newman thought. He had used the same methods himself. It was going to be a job, he figured, to hold Dybrovik to a reasonably short initial negotiation process.

“You mentioned you would like to return to your bride no later than this time tomorrow evening,” Dybrovik said. “You will be able to return to her this evening, if you like, or certainly no later than tomorrow morning. Our business will be very simple. Your work will not be.”

Strangely, for just an instant, Newman had a premonition of doom, and with it the urge to get up and leave before the Russian had a chance to say anything else. But then the feeling passed, and he held his silence.

“Simply put, my government wishes to purchase corn.”

Newman wasn’t quite sure he had heard the man correctly. “American corn?”

“It is of no consequence where it comes from.”

“Routine,” Newman said. “Why not just put through a simple order? Abex would have been pleased to handle it for you.”

“You do not understand yet, my friend, which is entirely my fault. We wish to purchase a lot of corn.”

“How much?”

Dybrovik shrugged. “Ten million tons. Twenty million. Thirty.”

“Large numbers,” Newman said cautiously, although his blood was beginning to race.

“Perhaps larger.”

“Meaning?”

Dybrovik took another large swallow of his drink, then set the glass down. “We want to purchase, in absolute secrecy, as much corn as you can possibly supply us.”

“What is the limit?”

“There is no limit.”

Newman carefully held himself in check. “A hundred million metric tons?”

“More, if you can get it.”

“At what price?”

Dybrovik laughed. “At the prevailing market price. But of course it must be done in secret, so your purchases will not inflate unit costs.”

“Not until later, when the information is leaked by your government,” Newman said, getting to his feet. “You’ll buy on margin, drive the price up, and resell, as you did in the seventies.”

“We will purchase on margin if we can,” Dybrovik said unperturbed. “We will pay cash for the futures if need be. It is negotiable.”

“You will guarantee that the grain is for internal consumption?”

“If you are asking me, internal to the Soviet Union, I cannot answer that with any degree of certainty. If you are speaking, internal to our Warsaw Pact nations, I can give you a qualified yes.”

This was all wrong. Newman knew it; he could feel it thick in the air between him and the Russian. And yet it was food they were speaking of here. Food that would ultimately be used to feed people. Cubans in addition to Albanians? South Africans in addition to Poles? Did it matter?

“Licensing would be difficult if not impossible,” Newman said cautiously, but he could see the glimmerings of triumph on the Russian’s face. More psychology, or the real thing?

“Difficult, yes, but not impossible given a proper infrastructure, which is your particular area of expertise.”

Multilevel dummy corporations, shipping companies, elevator firms, railroad cars. Newman saw every bit of it as one large picture, and it excited the hell out of him. It could be done. But what of the moral implications? What of the international ramifications? What of the political weapon a hundred million metric tons of corn could become? It was akin to selling the entire year’s output of oil from all the OPEC countries in one fell swoop.

“It’s a powerful thing you ask,” Newman said, sitting down.

“It would make you a wealthy man.”

“I’m already wealthy,” Newman countered.

Dybrovik smiled, his grin feral. “You hesitate. You are afraid, perhaps, of another market manipulation? Your people called it the Great Grain Robbery. Amusing.”

“It has crossed my mind.”

Dybrovik laughed out loud. “Several dozen times in the last minute or two, no doubt. But so what, I ask you?”

“Neither I nor any other Western grain company would do business with you again.”

“I think that would not be the case, Mr. Kenneth Newman. I think not. Money, after all, is why you do what you do.”

The remark offended Newman, all the more because it was true. Like all grainmen, Newman feared and resented government meddling in what they felt was one of the last truly free international enterprises. Yet Newman personally felt a deep moral responsibility toward people. Not merely Americans, but people the world over.

“Two conditions,” he said.

Dybrovik’s eyes narrowed, but he nodded.

“A ceiling is to be set on the unit price at which your government will ultimately sell its surplus grain.”

“Impossible.”

“Just outside the Warsaw Pact.”

Dybrovik went back to the sideboard and poured himself another drink. “I would have to get approval from my government before I could agree to such a condition.”

“How soon could you have an answer?”

“Within twenty-four hours.”

“That’s acceptable. In any event, it will take me longer than that to begin.”

“The second condition?” Dybrovik asked.

“Much of the corn I will be selling you will be in the form of futures, naturally, but a significant portion is already dried and in storage.”

Dybrovik said nothing.

“I will want the majority of your grain moved immediately to the Soviet Union.”

“If we were to resell the corn at a later date, we would pass the cost of transportation on to the end user.”

“I assure you, there will be excessive storage charges at my end if it is not moved.”

Dybrovik turned away again. “We will accept fifty percent of the corn now in storage, and negotiate later on movement of the futures as they come in.”

“Ninety percent and negotiate on the futures within thirty days.”

“Seventy-five percent,” Dybrovik said. “And that is my top. But I will agree to on-the-spot negotiations for the futures.”

It was Newman’s turn to keep silent. It was better than he had hoped for. They both understood that storage the world over was at a premium. When the bins were full, the corn would have to be stored either in railroad cars or on the ground. Bad weather would ruin millions of dollars’ worth of grain. Storage was, simply put, the biggest headache of the business. Dybrovik had agreed to shoulder the lion’s share of that problem.

“Is it a deal?” Dybrovik asked.

“Contingent on your answer about the resale price.”

“You will have your answer tomorrow. But if it is a no?”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“Further negotiations would be possible, I would assume. If not, I would have to approach someone else.”

“Like Georges André?” Newman said, again getting to his feet. “I think not. They would run you around in circles, if they would deal with you at all.”

“Then your father-in-law.”

Newman smiled. “I don’t think he could keep it quiet.”

“Probably not,” Dybrovik said. He finished his drink. “Where may I contact you tomorrow?”

“Through Abex, as before,” Newman said. “You mentioned that this place will become your operational headquarters?”

Dybrovik nodded. “Communications equipment will be brought in tomorrow, and my staff will be arriving by evening. But it will take a week or perhaps ten days before everything is ready at this end.”

“Very good,” Newman said. “We may have a deal, then, depending upon what your government has to say tomorrow.”

“Excellent,” Dybrovik said, and they shook hands, which in the grain business was all the contract needed.

“And now, if you would ring your driver, I’d like to return to my hotel.”

Alone again, Dybrovik stood by the window in the hall, watching Newman climb into the back seat of the Citroën. A great, almost overwhelming sadness overcame him. On the one hand, he wanted very much to be a man such as Kenneth Newman. A free-wheeling spirit who was at home in all the capitals of the Western world. But he was already beginning to miss Moscow.

He laid his forehead against the cool window as the Citroen pulled away from the house, and watched its taillights disappear into the darkness.

Newman would return to Monaco, to his wedding bed. Within a few days he would be back in Duluth, Minnesota, one of the major American grain ports, at work on his deal. The deal of his life. A deal so mammoth that its international repercussions would certainly last for years… even without whatever it was the little man had in mind.

He turned away from the window finally, went back into the drawing room, poured himself a stiff shot of the Glenlivet he had been drinking most of the night, and sat down on the couch with a cigarette.

He closed his eyes. Larissa. Where was this all heading?