Heartland

It was late, and Michael McCandless was dead tired. He had worked through the afternoon and into the evening on the latest batch of field reports on the Argentine situation. The aftermath of the Falkland Islands debacle still lingered; would for years. Some of the reports were in the form of raw data, while several large boxes contained asessment and analysis files; all of them bulky and dull.

For the last few weeks he had been expecting either the President to call, or the DCI to come down on him over the way he had handled the Soviet crop forecast. But no one had called, and nothing had been said.

On the positive side, however, neither had anyone interfered with McCandless’ continuing work on what he was calling the Emerging Soviet Agrarian Threat.

The CIA’S SPEC satellites continued watching the Soviet fields, and DiRenzo continued sending up his reports. McCandless continued collating them with the others, digesting and then filing them.

The Soviet farm fields had been plowed into furrows, dragged to pull up the rocks, and finally disked and planted. Corn and wheat mostly, in a wide variety of hybrids. If the crops came to maturity, and if they were harvested, the Soviet Union would not only become food self-sufficient (something it had been unable to manage for several decades), it would have mammoth surpluses. Which would, McCandless firmly believed, have far-reaching political consequences.

But no one would listen, he thought, looking up from his Argentine reports. Hardly an hour went by when he did not think about it. Yet he knew he was getting nowhere.

He had thought about going to the President again, or at least forcing the situation to a head through General Lycoming. But in the end he had decided against it. He had alerted the White House. He had done what his job demanded of him; he had provided hard intelligence to the President. Whatever became of that intelligence was totally outside his purview.

Swiveling around in his chair, McCandless stared out his third-floor window down at the woods behind the agency complex and let his mind drift, just as the SPEC–IV satellite was at this moment drifting over the Soviet continent.

His worry was very probably moot, he told himself. Most estimates from meteorology were for an early winter… possibly too early for a decent harvest over there. If that was the case, all the acres planted would amount to naught.

Yet, as much as he wanted to comfort himself with such thoughts, he could not. It simply would not work.

In the morning, he would telephone Curtis Lundgren, the Secretary of Agriculture, and find out if the President had indeed passed the first report and photographs along. If he hadn’t, McCandless decided, he would personally meet with Lundgren and lay it all out.

Meanwhile, what would happen next would be up to mother nature and the Soviet farmer.

7

The dying sun was just touching the western horizon, its light reflecting deep red off the upper windows of the skyscrapers in downtown Buenos Aires, when Carlos stepped out of his hovel in the villa miseria. He was a short man, something under five foot five, but his dark-skinned, youthful body was muscular from his constant workouts and field training.

He looked nervously to the left and right, unconsciously fingering a long scar on his side. He proudly carried his training scars from the PLO camp he had attended two years ago outside of Beirut, as well as the slightly misshapen left arm which had been broken during training in one of Colonel Qaddafi’s schools for terrorists in Libya.

Behind the tin-and-cardboard shack where he had lived for the past few months, he pulled aside a filthy piece of canvas, uncovering the only possession, besides his training, of which he was proud: a small Honda 125 motorcycle. He pushed the bike back around to the narrow dirt track at the front of the shack, kicked it to a start, and took off toward the city, several miles distant.

It was still warm, although the South American winter had officially begun. Before the cold came, however, he and the others would be long gone from here. Probably back to Libya for asylum, now that the Israelis had overrun Beirut. Perhaps even to Iran.

As Juan Carlos drove, he found that now that he was actually on his way, now that the months of planning were finally coming to an end, he was nervous. His stomach seemed empty, and the muscles at the back of his legs were tense, as if he had just run ten miles.

Their instructor in Libya had been sympathetic when he had displayed the same problems during the live-fire exercises.

“There is no shame in feeling fear, comrade. The only shame is in allowing your fear to control you.”

Juan Carlos was frightened now. At the same time he was proud of going ahead.

Within fifteen minutes he had made it downtown to the Plaza del Congreso, alive with pigeons and old ladies and children, occasional lovers strolling arm in arm, and cars, motorcycles, and bicycles everywhere.

He threaded his way through the early-evening traffic around to the rear of the fountains, just across the avenue from the slim-domed capitol building, spotting Teva Cernades seated at the edge of the pool.

She jumped up as he pulled to the curb and nervously scanned the area behind and to the left and right of her. There was no one watching them.

“Did you have any trouble getting away?” he asked as she came up to him.

She pecked him on the cheek. “None whatsoever,” she said climbing onto the motorcycle behind him. “You?” Her eyes were bright, and there was a smile on her delicate face. She wore designer jeans, a sweatshirt, sandals, and a bright red bandana to contain her long, light-brown hair.

“I circled around and came up from the university,” he said. “Have you heard from Eugenio?”

“Not today. But he’ll be there, don’t worry about it.”

“I worry about him.”

“You worry about everything, Juan. Perhaps you worry too much.”

Juan Carlos looked over his shoulder at her. She was very slim, almost emaciated, but he had seen her in action in the training camps, and they had been lovers for thirteen months now. He knew that her slender body was powerful and well muscled. She could outshoot, outfight, and certainly outlast most men in the field. Besides his work in the camps, and his motorbike, he was most proud of Teva. “Too much?” he asked. “Someone must be concerned. I do not want to throw my life away uselessly.”

“Nor I, estúpido,” the young woman flared. “But you know what the man told us.”

“No, refresh my memory, my little dove,” Juan Carlos said sarcastically. She hated being called his “little dove.”

“The plan is a good one. It will work. We will see to it.”

“The plan is a good one, because it is my plan. And without concern for detail, even the little man could never make it work.”

Teva’s nostrils flared, but she looked the other way, across at the capitol. “Pigs,” she said half under her breath.

Juan Carlos slipped the bike in gear, revved up the engine, and popped the clutch, nearly spilling both of them before he managed to regain control. Teva’s arms were around his midsection, and she jerked hard, causing him to wince in pain.

They rounded the plaza and headed north out of the city, up the coast, toward the railway station at Olivos. Conversation was impossible because of the wind whipping around their ears and the engine noise, and it was just as well, he thought. Just as it was for the best that very soon they would be going into action. It was already the end of June, and all of them were on edge. Each accused the other of worrying too much, of being too nervous.

“It is the pigeon in the park too frightened to eat near the well-intentioned passerby, who will starve,” the Argentine homily went.

And it was true. Drink at the well, or die of thirst. Move forward, ever forward, or stagnate and die.

For years there had been order and stability in the country. Socialist goals were becoming a fact. But then, after Perón, nothing seemed the same. Of course Juan Carlos knew of those times only through books and political tracts, but he could see with his own eyes what was happening these days. The farmers were oppressed, little more than slaves. The government was rotten, a mere tool of the North American capitalists. And even the military was unable to do anything right. The loss in the Malvinas was a national shame that would sting for years to come.

A blow had to be struck. Now. And very hard. But with care, lest they fail. They could not fail, for if they did, it would set back their cause — Argentina for Argentines — by years.

Loyal but empty-headed women like Teva, and idiots like Eugenio, knew what had to be done and why, but neither of them had the slightest feel for the details.

The little man had taken him aside personally last night and told him that he was to be the leader, because he had an iron courage and a head for detail.

“You are a natural-born leader, Juan,” the little man had said. “I trust you to be my field commander.”

“I will not let you down,” Juan Carlos had promised. Nor would he.

It was a few minutes after 7:00 P.M. when they finally made it into the small college town of Olivos. Juan Carlos drove directly over to the railway station, where he parked his bike behind the market stalls, closed now for the evening. He was careful to wrap his chain first around the bike’s frame and then around a metal light pole, before locking it and pocketing the key.

Teva watched him, and when he straightened up, she shook her head. “Is that what you call your attention to detail?”

He looked back at his bike and shrugged.

“We are not returning here. Not for a very long time. Once we are finished we will be leaving the country. Or we will be dead. Yet you lock your precious motorcycle.”

“If they are to steal it, let the bastards work for it,” he said, and he strode off around the corner, toward the front of the depot.

There was quite a bit of traffic around the station, mostly college students heading into the city, farmers going to market, and businessmen coming out of the city from work.

Eugenio was waiting for them, across the street from the taxi stands, in a battered old pickup truck. “Any trouble coming up here?” he asked, pulling slowly away from the curb. He was dressed as a farmer.

“None,” Juan Carlos said. “How about you? Did you notice anyone watching you? Anyone suspicious?”

“There was an accident in front of the depot, and the stupid police had half the barracks there. Must have been someone important. There were ambulances too.”

“When?” Juan Carlos snapped, looking back at the depot. It didn’t smell right. That was how they could have brought in their snoops. Set up their watchers, maybe even taken photographs of stupid Eugenio.

“Half an hour ago. Maybe a little more. They just cleared it up a few minutes before you arrived.”

Eugenio Mendes was a larger man than Juan Carlos, and although at twenty-eight they were the same age, Eugenio seemed ten years older in his face, his actions, and his speech. At first he seemed a thoughtful man who chose his words with care. Perhaps a scholar. But in actuality Eugenio was that rare person who was slow, yet recognized he was slow, so always took care with what he said and how he acted. As slow as he was mentally, however, he was quick on his feet. In school he had been a fine athlete, and now as a terrorist, he was a fearless fighter. A follower, not a leader.

They came onto a narrow secondary road that roughly paralleled the main federal highway back into Buenos Aires. Eugenio drove at a steady forty miles per hour, a huge yellow dust cloud rising behind the truck.

Teva lit a cigarette with nervous hands and flicked the ashes on the floor. “Did you call your cell?” she asked Eugenio.

He glanced over at her and managed a thin smile. “Yes, I did. They will all be out of the city by morning, and ready the night after tomorrow. There is nothing to worry about now, Teva.”

“All hell is going to break loose once we pull this off. You know that, don’t you, Juan?” she asked, turning the other way.

“As long as everyone keeps his cool, and doesn’t do anything he isn’t supposed to do, it’ll work out. Is it you worrying now?”

“Of course I’m worried, but about the proper things,” she shot back.

“Don’t fight,” Eugenio said simply.

Teva started to say something, but then thought better of it and slumped down instead, staring out the dirty windshield.

Juan reached for her cigarette, took a deep drag, and handed it back. “Where is the meeting to take place?”

“On the boat,” Eugenio replied, without taking his eyes off the road.

“When?”

“As soon as we get there. He is taking us up to Tigre; from there we will have to go on foot to the clearing.”

After that it would be touch and go. But in the short time that Juan Carlos had known the little man, he had developed an abiding trust in him and his judgment. If the little man said such-and-such was so, and would work… then such-and-such was the truth, and it would go like clockwork.

He had known only a few men like that in his life: a professor at the university, who had introduced him to the group; two instructors in Libya; and then of course Colonel Qaddafi and Arafat.

All great men. All like the little man, who inspired trust and confidence. Anything that could be thought of as worthy of doing for the cause, could be done. Given the proper plan, the proper equipment, and the proper manpower, anything on this earth could be accomplished.

The Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Sandinistas, the FALN — all of them lent credence to that philosophy.

Juan Carlos and his Montonero cell would go into the history books for their upcoming action. He could almost taste the victory that would be theirs. Soon, very soon.

Eugenio drove them into Buenos Aires, right through the downtown Federal District, and then to the commercial docks along the southern waterfront. There they entered a warehouse and parked the truck.

Without a word, the three of them climbed out of the truck, hurried across the warehouse, and slipped out a back door. They crossed the wide dock and went down a flight of stairs to the floating concrete dock, riding on the tides, where a sixty-foot sport fisher was tied, its diesels ticking over slowly, its bridge lit a dull red. Farther up the dock, a Swedish ship was unloading cargo. But here it was quiet, with no prying eyes to see the two men and the woman slip quietly aboard the local charter fisher Santiago, and move into the shadows along the port companionway.

As soon as they were aboard, several deckhands emerged silently from one of the aft hatches and slipped the docklines. The boat slowly headed away from the dock toward the breakwater and out into the Rio de la Plata.

When they were under way, a steward came out onto the deck. “This way, please,” he said politely.

They followed him aft to the well-furnished main salon. Its entire rear wall was sliding glass doors looking out over the fantail, beyond which were the lights of the city they were leaving.

Only the light from the outside provided any illumination. The steward left, closing the door.

“I trust you managed to make it here without attracting undue attention,” someone said from the far corner.

Juan Carlos took a step forward. “Is it you, comrade?” he asked.

“It is I,” the man said, and a soft light came on, revealing the little man seated on a high-backed stool before a wet bar. “But you have not answered my question.”

“No one followed us,” Juan Carlos said. He moved across the room, Teva and Eugenio right behind him.

“Your cell leaders have been alerted?”

“They will be leaving the city this evening, and all of them will be in position within forty-eight hours.”

“Very good, Juan, very well done.” The little man got off his stool and went around behind the bar, where he brought out a bottle of good red wine and a large bottle of carbonated water.

He was an intense-looking little man, with large, penetrating eyes, and a swarthy complexion. In a way the man almost looked Oriental to Juan Carlos, or perhaps even Indian, except that he knew the man was almost certainly a Soviet officer of some sort. He had come with the highest recommendations of Colonel Qaddafi himself, so from the beginning the Montonero leadership had not questioned his presence. Nor had Juan Carlos or the others.

They sat down across the bar from him. He poured them each a tall glass of wine, mixed half and half with carbonated water, then poured himself some of the wine straight.

When they all had their drinks, he raised his in toast. “To the liberation of your people.”

“Libertad,” Juan Carlos said, and Teva and Eugenio repeated the single word. They drank deeply.

Just outside the breakwater the ship rose to meet the larger waves, and the little man came around the bar to a long dining table in the center of the room where a detailed topographic map was spread out. He flicked on an overhead light. Juan Carlos and the others gathered around.

“We will have to be well away with this boat before the operation begins, which is why I am dropping you at Tigre so early,” the little man began.

They had all seen this map before, but Juan Carlos leaned forward so that he could get a better look at it. He didn’t want to miss a detail.

“How far is it from the drop point to the clearing?”

“A little less than ten miles. It will be difficult, but you should be able to manage it by morning.”

“Our provisions are there?”

The little man nodded. “Along with your weapons, and the radio with which you will summon the helicopter. There’s enough food for a week, in case we run into any delay.”

Juan Carlos studied the map thoughtfully. “Another five miles from the clearing to the house. A ten-mile round trip. The most difficult part of the operation.”

“Under cover of darkness and the diversion, you should not have any trouble. You should be able to make it well within the limits.”

Juan Carlos switched his attention from their objective to the river where the other Montonero cell would be waiting with a very old, very large river boat. At the set hour, they would bring the boat up behind the main house and set it on fire. The commotion would, according to the little man, bring most of the house staff on the run down to the river.

“His personal bodyguard may be with him, but between the three of you, there should be no real difficulty.”

“What if we meet with heavier resistance?” Eugenio asked.

Juan Carlos and the little man both looked up at him.

“You will have your radio. Channel A is the helicopter, and B will be monitored by the cell leader aboard the boat. He understands the contingency. If you run into unexpected trouble, he will lead his people up to you.”

“Will we have time to get out of there?” Eugenio asked.

Juan Carlos was frustrated by the questions, because they were valid and well thought out. He, the leader, should have thought of those contingencies first.

“Timing will be critical, of course. We’re assuming that, once the action begins, the authorities will be notified,” the little man said. He turned to Juan Carlos. “If that happens, if you need help from the river, then your fallback code will be ‘Helpmate one,’ which will bring the helicopter directly to the airstrip behind the house.”

“There may be more resistance there.”

“Almost certainly there will be. But by then you will have been joined by the other cell, and the helicopter crew will be armed.”

“There will be no other changes in that event?” Juan Carlos asked.

“None,” the little man said. “You will be set down with your cargo at the interior point where the van will be waiting.” He stabbed a blunt finger at a spot on the map about fifty miles inland and slightly north of Buenos Aires. “You only have to hold them for twenty-four hours, then you can release the ransom message and get out. The second cell will take over from there.”

Juan Carlos nodded. Eugenio looked thoughtful. Teva was flushed.

“Transportation will be provided for you to Tripoli, but there will be absolutely no negotiations from there. The colonel was most clear on that point. All communications will go through Geneva. We have someone in place there at this moment. Once you get to Tripoli, instructions will be waiting for you.”

Juan Carlos studied the map a bit longer, almost overwhelmed by what they were about to pull off. Their action would forever change Argentine history. And the blow to the morale of capitalist pigs the world over would be stunning.

He raised his glass again. “Libertad,” he said fervently. “Libertad!”

8

The weather had turned slightly cool this evening, causing a dense fog to rise up from bayous surrounding New Orleans, across Lake Pontchartrain, along the commercial docks, and among the grain elevators standing like proud, erect ghosts.

Traffic over the causeway toll bridge, and along the interstates and bypasses which cut through the city, moved at no more than 15 miles an hour. There was an eighteen-car pileup on Interstate 10 just west of Lakefront Airport. All flights were grounded, of course, and even the city bus service was running late on every one of its lines.

As one hip disc jockey put it over the air, not long before midnight: “You might just as well stay home, baby, and enjoy the soup, ‘cause ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere nohow tonight.”

Louie Benario, a long-time torch out of Detroit, only lately arrived in New Orleans, shuffled along the railroad tracks behind the International Trade Mart near the Bienville Street Wharf. He was a tiny man who all his life had been called the runt, or peewee, or short stuff, or midget. Terms he resented deeply, because he had always thought of himself as a big man.

In the old days, when someone called him such a name, he would puff up to his full five foot two and take a swing at his adversary, which more often than not landed him flat on his back beside his bar stool. His nose had been broken so many times he had lost count; his arms had been broken, his fingers snapped, his wrist half-crushed, his jaw dislocated, and his skull fractured. His ribs had been battered until they were soft to the touch.

Because of this, he was, at forty, a misshapen old man who walked with a stumbling gait and hardly ever raised his eyes in public. Louie had finally learned his lesson: In public, keep your mouth shut. Blend into the woodwork. Make no waves. Be inconspicuous.

But in private Benario shone. He was an expert. One of the best torches in the business. Those in the know never called him peewee or midget to his face, because they knew they might wake up the next morning in a burning house.

He had learned his trade from Studs Logan, one of the most famous of all Detroit torches, before Logan became a victim of his own handiwork.

For a few years afterward, Benario had worked Logan’s territory, and in ten indictments he had been convicted only once, for setting fire to a warehouse for a client who needed the insurance money more than he needed his business. The boys hired Benario a crack lawyer out of Los Angeles, and in three months Benario was back on the streets, free on a technicality.

Eighteen months ago, Louie had burned down the home of a General Motors executive who had been putting the heat on a union-organized numbers racket. The executive was a fighter, and Louie had been advised by his friends to get out of Motown for a year or two until the smoke cleared.

Louie did just that, and had fallen instantly and deeply in love with New Orleans, whose mild winters and ultra-hot summers reminded him of a furnace. His kind of place.

He stopped for a moment, away from the railway traffic signals, adjusted the heavy pack on his right shoulder, and peered through the dense fog. He knew his objective was less than a block away. But he could see nothing except for the swirling mist, and after a bit he continued forward.

In his years Benario had set fire to no less than thirty warehouses, nineteen hotels, two nursing homes, a dozen or more private residences, and even a Chicago police precinct house for an irate out-of-town client. In those blazes, he had been responsible for at least ninety-five deaths and more than three hundred and fifty serious injuries, including a dozen or so firemen.

But Benario never thought of himself as a murderer. He was a torch, plain and simple; a man devoted to fire.

In the distance to the east, he heard a siren. He stiffened instinctively, a faint smile coming to his lips. There would be sirens after this job. Lots of sirens. The thought broadened his grin, and he chuckled out loud.

This would be his biggest job ever, made even more important by the sheer size of his target. It was the largest grain-elevator complex in the world, and brand new. Owned by the Cargill conglomerate, it had been put in service less than six months ago, to replace hundreds of antiquated elevators up and down the delta. It would burn beautifully, the little man had assured him. The hot yellow flames would reach hundreds of feet into the sky. People for miles around would taste the smoke. Newspaper headlines across the country would blare: GREATEST GRAIN DISASTER IN HISTORY. LARGEST FIRE IN THIS DECADE. THE WORK OF AN EXPERT ARSONIST.

Benario had to laugh out loud with the sheer magnificence of it all.

On top of all that, like frosting on a cake or the cherry atop a sundae, was the fact that Benario had finally come into his own as an internationally known torch. The little man who had hired him for this job was a foreigner. French or Jewish or a Polak or something. Not only was he foreign, he was a little man, not much taller than Benario. They saw eye to eye.

He laughed even louder at his little joke. Eye to eye, watching the flames that’d tower over the tallest man in the world.

“Eye to eye,” he sang a tuneless melody. “Eye to eye, watching the pretty flames. My pretty, my pretty, watching my pretty flames, eye to eye to eye.”

A series of massive structures loomed out of the darkness to the right, toward the waterfront, less than a hundred yards away. Benario stopped in his tracks, hiccoughing as he choked off his song.

He could see now the dim halos formed around the lights at the base of the grain elevator, and around the red lights at the top.

He took a few steps forward, over the rail, and then scrambled down into the ditch beside the tracks. There was activity over there this evening beyond the chainlink fence. Trucks were coming and going with their loads of grain. He could hear the dull, deep-throated mechanical noises of a grain ship tied up at the dock, although he was unable to pick out the ship’s lights from where he stood.

It was there, in front of him. Ready and waiting for his skills.

He climbed up out of the ditch, soaking his trousers to the knees in the wet grass, then crouched down at the base of the fence and fumbled inside his heavy pack for his large wirecutters. Within a couple of minutes he had cut a large hole in the fence and crawled through it. On the other side, he pulled the cut section back in place, so that nothing but a very close examination would reveal the hole.

Spittle was oozing from the corners of his mouth. He licked his lips frequently as he scrambled away from the fence, toward the edge of the blacktop driveway that surrounded the mammoth elevator complex.

Five days ago, the little man had supplied him with a complete set of working blueprints for the complex, along with totally self-destructive fuses and enough plastique to bring down ten such installations. Benario had worked with such materials only once before, up in Detroit, but he had read all the available literature and was certain it would be a piece of cake.

The problem, he had reasoned, would be to contain the initial explosion very low in the complex, in the conveyor system, where the explosive grain dust would be at the highest concentration. The explosion and fire would start, then, from the bottom and quickly work its way upward.

At the edge of the blacktop, Benario worked his way among the long rows of parked trucks, until he came to a grain-unloading bay that wasn’t in use.

He slipped inside through a service hatch that led directly down into the mixing and delivery conveyor system. There he began placing his explosives, attaching each package with loving care, setting the fuses for 8:00 A.M., when, the little man had assured him, the grain would be moving through the system and the dust would be at its maximum concentration in the air.

It was a little after 6:30 on the morning of June 28 when Laura Conley’s bedside telephone rang, the shrill noise bringing her instantly awake. She sat up with a start, the sheet falling away and exposing her bare breasts, looked down at Peter Rossiter still sleeping beside her, then reached across him and picked up the telephone on the second ring.

“Hello?” she said sleepily.

“This is Elizabeth Rossiter. I have to speak with my husband.”

Laura’s heart skipped a beat. She and Peter had been lovers for less than six months, and she had had no idea that his wife even suspected. Today he was supposed to be in Minneapolis, meeting with Cargill executives.

“Miss Conley?” his wife said. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Laura said. “I think you must have the wrong number.”

“Cut the bullshit, I know my husband is there. I telephoned Minneapolis and there is no such meeting. Which leaves only your place. Now put him on the phone.”

Peter was starting to wake up, and Laura began to panic. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about…” she started, but Elizabeth cut her off.

“Goddamn it, there’s trouble down at the elevator center. They need him immediately. If you don’t want him to talk to me, at least pass on that message.”

Laura slowly hung up the telephone. Peter sat up, his eyes still clouded with sleep.

“Who was it?” he asked.

Laura just stared at him for several seconds. It was over for them now. He would never leave his wife and children. His marriage might be ruined, but she would be the loser.

“Who the hell was it, Laura?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the center,” she stammered. “There’s some kind of trouble down there. They want you.”

“The elevator center?” He came fully awake. “How the hell did they know where I was? Who was it on the phone?”

Laura started to get out of the bed, but Peter reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back.

“Who the hell was on the phone?” he shouted.

“Your wife,” she said, hanging her head, the tears coming to her eyes.

“Jesus,” Rossiter swore, half under his breath. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He let go of Laura, grabbed the telephone, and dialed, speaking to Laura over his shoulder. “Get dressed. You’re going to have to drive me down there.”

She padded across the bedroom and went into the bathroom, softly closing the door.

“Cargill,” said the phone at Peter’s ear.

“Stan? This is Pete.”

“Am I glad to hear from you,” the night manager said. “You’d better get down here right away.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. What the hell is going on?”

“I tried to get you at home, but Liz said you were in Minneapolis. I called up there. and they told me you hadn’t arrived, but to get ahold of you somehow and keep the cops out of it.”

“Out of what?”

“We’ve got a guy here with a bomb. Carl found him down in L tunnel getting ready to set it.”

“A bomb!” Rossiter shouted. “He hadn’t set it yet?”

“No. Carl said he was just taping it up to one of the overhead conveyors.”

“Was that the only one?”

The night manager sucked his breath, the sound clear over the phone. “Christ, Pete, we never even thought of that. We just assumed…”

Rossiter cut him off. “Get the night crew down there immediately. I want every tunnel searched, inch by inch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And call the New Orleans P.D. bomb squad.”

“But Minneapolis said no cops.”

“I don’t give a shit what they said! It’s my elevator. Now get on it, Carl. I’ll be down there within fifteen minutes.”

As Rossiter hung up, Laura came out of the bathroom. She was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

He jumped up, grabbed his clothes, and started to get dressed. “Get your car out and bring it around to the front. I’ll be taking it.”

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No way. Some nut has planted at least one bomb down at the center. There may be more.”

“I’m coming with you,” Laura said defiantly, and before he could object again, she grabbed her purse and left the apartment.

Within a couple of minutes, Rossiter was at the front door of the building, where Laura waited for him in her Chevy Camaro, the engine running, the headlights on. The dense fog of the night had gotten worse, if anything, and as he jumped in the car he realized with a sinking feeling that it would take a hell of a lot longer than fifteen or twenty minutes to get across town.

“Let’s go,” he said, “but for God’s sake, be careful in this shit. I don’t want to be in an accident.”

She pulled out of the driveway and headed at a crawl toward the freeway, the low beams barely illuminating the road one car length ahead of them. They didn’t speak, both of them staring intently out the windshield, the wipers slapping back and forth, until they had made it to the freeway, and she was able to speed up to twenty miles per hour.

“What did my wife say to you?” Rossiter asked gently.

Laura glanced at him, her eyes red rimmed. “She knew you were there.”

“What’d you tell her?”

Laura shook her head. “Nothing. I was frightened.”

“Then she doesn’t know for sure.”

“She knows, Peter! Goddamn it, she called Minneapolis and they told her you weren’t up there. If she didn’t know about us, then why would she have called my number?”

One more piece of shit in an already overloaded pot. “Laura…”

“Don’t say it,” she said. “You’ve got your hands full now, so don’t lie to me just to keep me quiet. When everything is settled at work, and you’ve had time to think this all out, then talk to me. But no lies, Peter. No false promises. I’m thirty years old, you’re forty. We’re old enough now for the truth.”

He reached out to touch her cheek, but she brushed his hand away. They continued in silence.

It was fifteen minutes before eight when they finally made it to the elevator complex, where they were stopped by the police.

Rossiter jumped out of the car. “Get out of here now, Laura, or I’ll have the cops take you away. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

She looked at him and smiled wanly. “Good luck,” she said. She turned around and headed back into the city.

Rossiter jumped into the back seat of one of the waiting cruisers, and they headed across the staging area toward the main office. There were fire engines, ambulances, police cars, and people everywhere.

“What’s the status?” he asked.

“They’ve found two other bombs, and they’re looking for more.”

“When were they set to go off?”

“No way of telling for sure, Mr. Rossiter, but soon,” one of the cops said.

“There’s too many people here. If this thing blows, it’ll go sky high. I want you to get everyone nonessential the hell out of here. Immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” the cop said.

They pulled up at the main office, which faced the dock itself. The gigantic grain ship Akai Maru was lit up like a Christmas tree in the fog.

Rossiter jumped out of the cruiser and raced inside the building. It was jammed with policemen and elevator personnel. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Telephones were ringing, and near the front window two police officers were tending portable radios, which hissed and blared with messages from the search teams below.

“Listen up, everyone!” Rossiter shbuted. The noise did not diminish.

He jumped up on a desk. “Listen up!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

Everyone turned his way now, and the noise began to subside.

“I want everyone not directly connected with the bomb search to get the hell out of here, and away from the elevator. Right now!”

“Pete! In here!” the night manager shouted from the doorway to Rossiter’s office.

Rossiter jumped down from the desk, and hurried across to his office, where Carl, the chief engineer, and two plainclothes detectives stood around a small, seedy-looking old man seated on a chair in the middle of the room. He was smiling.

“Who the hell are you?” Rossiter demanded.

“He won’t give us a thing…” one of the detectives started, but the little man smiled.

“Louie Benario,” he said in a soft voice.

The detectives looked at him in amazement.

“Who sent you to sabotage my elevator, and why?”

Benario laughed out loud, and he pointed up to the clock, which showed one minute until eight. “It’s too late!”

They all looked at the clock as the second hand swept up toward the hour, then at each other.

“Sound the siren!” Rossiter screamed. “Get everyone out of here!”

“Too late, too late,” Benario sang. “My pretty, my pretty fire.”

A dull explosion sounded from somewhere below them. Then something shook the building, and another, much larger explosion sent a part of the ceiling down.

“Jesus,” someone swore as the lights went out, and then all hell broke loose as the entire elevator complex burst apart in a gigantic explosion that sent flames and debris nearly one thousand feet into the air, breaking windows over a two-mile radius and burrying the office area beneath thousands of tons of concrete, steel, and burning grain.

9

The hot North African sun hammered the open docks at the ferry terminal within the protected harbor of Tripoli. It was a few minutes after noon, and several last-minute passengers for the boat to Palermo shuffled across the quay and boarded. A thick miasma hung in the windless air over the minarets and domed mosques of the surprisingly oriental Libyan capital. Within the city, the noon traffic was heavy. Although much of the population slept during the hottest part of the day, business still had to continue; the country, despite its protestations to the contrary, had been irrevocably influenced by the West.

Among the final passengers was a tall, well-built Frenchman, with thick black hair, wide, dark eyes, and a handsome face that would have been more at home on the rocky beaches of Cap d’Antibes than here in this forsaken place of dust and poverty.

He was dressed plainly in a short-sleeved safari suit and soft desert boots. He carried two pieces of soft leather luggage.

At the head of the gangway, he was greeted by the ship’s purser and deck officer, and a steward was assigned to show him to his first-class cabin for the thirty-hour trip.

“Have a pleasant voyage, Monsieur Riemé,” the purser said, touching the bill of his cap.

“Merci, I will.” He followed his steward forward to his cabin, where he ordered a bottle of good white wine and a light lunch of fish soup. He ate the soup and some bread, drank one small glass of the wine. He then poured the rest of it in his bathroom sink, careful to rinse all traces of the wine away.

He lay down and slept for one hour. When he got up, he rang his steward and ordered a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice. When it came he poured a small tot into a glass, sloshed a bit of it on his bed and on the carpeted deck, as if he had had an accident, and sent the remainder of the bottle after the wine down the sink.

Then he settled down to wait until nightfall, smoking Gauloise cigarettes one after another.

Henri Riemé, at twenty-nine, was young enough to have missed General de Gaulle’s terrible betrayal of the French officer corps in Algeria during the fifties and sixties, but his father and three of his uncles had been left out in the cold and hung by fanatics.

For a time afterwards (his mother called those days the horrible years), the Riemé family had sunk into obscurity, the mother, Uncle Paul, and Henri living in a small flat on the Left Bank of Paris.

In the sixties, and into the seventies, when young Henri was attending school, it seemed as if the family would never make its mark on French history beyond the footnote in the texts listing the father and uncles among those purged.

It seemed that way until the Sorbonne, where young Henri, who was studying engineering, met Robert Sossoin, a radical from Marseille. They roomed together for two years. Then Henri had to drop out of school for lack of money. But meanwhile Sossoin had filled his head with Communist doctrine.

“The Communist Party is the future of France, Henri,” Sossoin would argue endlessly.

“Look what it has done to the Soviet Union,” Riemé would counter.

“Ah, the grand experiment you speak of now. You expect that in such a short time, with such a large nation, with so many different peoples, miracles can or should occur? It is only after time and effort, only after the sweat of the worker’s brow runs hard and fast, that miracles will happen. There is no starvation in Russia. There are no homeless. They have brought themselves from a backward icebox of a nation to the most powerful country on this earth,” Sossoin said fervently. “We must align ourselves with them. We must free France from the stagnating grip of capitalism.”

Even those high-sounding words did not completely sway young Henri, however. His conversion did not come until nearly a year after he had dropped out of college, when he was working as a waiter at a touristy Left Bank café.

His uncle had died several months earlier, and his mother was ill, in need of hospital care. She was too proud to accept state care, and Henri was too poor to afford private doctors. At that propitious moment, Robert Sossoin showed up, offered money, and thus recruited Henri into the LPN — Le Poing Noir (The Black Fist). The LPN’s avowed aim was redistribution of wealth by taking it forcibly out of the hands of the rich and placing it in the pockets of the deserving worker.

For the next few whirlwind years, Henri and his newfound group robbed department stores and banks, their targets becoming larger and larger, their methods more and more sophisticated, and the price on their heads ever greater.

In 1977, their activities came to the attention of the KGB resident in Paris, who contacted the LPN leadership and arranged for reorganization and training.

Riemé was one of the men selected to go to Libya and then Moscow for terrorist schooling: hand-to-hand combat, demolitions, and weapons, as well as secret codes, radio work, and languages, primarily Russian and English.

Eventually their control officer, whose real name they never knew, pronounced them ready to return to France to do some real work.

The officer was a little man, with intense eyes and a dark complexion. Sitting now aboard the ferryboat, Riemé remembered well that last meeting after they had graduated, when the little man clapped him proudly on the shoulder.

“You will become a first-class assassin to rival Carlos himself. An assassin for freedom.”

Henri had been startled. He had thought of himself as an administrator, or perhaps a soldier, like his father and uncles. But an assassin? There was something faintly dirty about the notion.

Within two months of returning to France, however, he had been ordered to assassinate a minor political figure in Nancy, which he did with such sophistication and dispatch — and with such congratulations from his comrades afterward — that he was hooked. He had found his place. He was an assassin. An expert. His mother, who had died despite her operation, would have been proud of him, as would his father and uncles.

“For them,” he had told himself. “For France, and for my family.”

Those phrases had become his talisman, his prayer to the gods, before, during, and after each job.

And now there was a new assignment. It was the first to come directly from his little control officer. It would be a terrible blow against capitalism in France.

“The rich will tremble in fear,” the little man had told him one week ago in Tripoli. The meeting had been arranged through a complicated line of intermediaries.

“But why this one?” Riemé had asked, studying a photograph. It showed a man in his early fifties, coming out of a modern glass-and-steel building, apparently in Paris.

“His name is Gérard Louis Dreyfus,” the little man said. The name meant nothing to Riemé. “He is one of the most wealthy and most powerful of the international grain merchants. From France, he controls a huge portion of the world’s food supply.”

“I still do not see…” Riemé began, but the little man continued as if he had never been interrupted.

“I ask you, Henri, is there starvation in the world?”

Riemé nodded.

“Then it is the people who control the food to whom we must look. Men like Louis Dreyfus, who is known as the Octopus. He steals the grain of France and other nations, and then sells the food to the very rich for obscene profits. A man who does not deserve to live.”

“The assassination of one man in such a large business would do nothing to stop it,” Reimé argued.

“On the contrary, Henri. The Louis Dreyfus business is very special. It is entirely owned and operated by one family. By one man. Gérard. Eliminate him, and the business would take years to recover, if it ever would.”

“Others would take its place.”

The little man nodded sagely. “Not quickly. Not efficiently. And certainly not in France.”

“For France,” Riemé had said softly.

During the next five days, the plan, at once simple and yet stunning in its savagery, emerged. The LPN in Paris had made the arrangements, and Riemé was on his way.

It was just before midnight when Riemé rose from his chair and took off his shirt, laying it aside. Across the cabin, he opened one of his suitcases and extracted a thin, rubber life vest with a carbon-dioxide cartridge, which he donned. Then he put his shirt back on, making sure it totally hid the vest. If he was seen on deck, he wanted no one to notice it.

Next he unpacked a few of his clothes and scattered them around the room, leaving his wallet and passport lying conspicuously on the small writing table, as if he meant to return to his cabin. He would no longer need them, however.

At the door he listened, and when he heard nothing except the ever-present throb of the ship’s diesels, he opened the door and slipped out.

He hurried down the corridor and out the hatch onto the main deck, where he waited for several moments.

There was no one about. Most of the passengers were already asleep in their cabins; only a few of them were in the bar forward.

Riemé moved aft, keeping in the shadows close to the bulkheads so that the officers on duty above on the bridge would have no chance of spotting him. The sound of the ship’s engines was much louder at the stern, and he could hear the prop churning the water twenty feet below the rail.

Checking one last time to make sure no one was on deck to see him, he quickly climbed over the rail and jumped.

The boiling sea came up at him incredibly fast, and he hit badly, plunging fifteen feet beneath the water. He grappled with the carbon-dioxide cartridge beneath his shirt, finally found it, and gave a sharp tug on the lanyard. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, but then the vest tightened against his chest, ripping his shirt, and he shot up to the surface.

The ship was already a couple of hundred yards away. He cocked his head to listen for any sounds of an alarm, but there was nothing. It would be morning before it was discovered he was missing. They would find the empty wine and liquor bottles, and would come to the easy conclusion that poor Monsieur Riemé had gotten perhaps a bit too drunk, taken a stroll on the deck, and simply fallen overboard. An unfortunate but not uncommon occurrence.

Within twenty minutes, the ship was gone from sight, even its highest lights lost over the horizon. Riemé opened the large side pocket on his vest, removed the radio in its waterproof container, activated it, and held the antenna as high out of the water as he could.

For twenty minutes he bobbed up and down on the empty sea like that, utterly alone, even the stars overhead somewhat obscured by a thin haze. At last he heard the faint buzz-saw noise of an approaching boat.

He twisted around until he was able to pick out the lights, which flashed on and off at ten-second intervals, almost as if something were wrong with the electrical circuits. Then he took out his small but powerful strobe light, flipped it on, and held it out of the water.

Immediately the boat turned directly toward him, slowing down as it approached.

“Like clockwork,” the little man had told him. “This job will go so smoothly that you will be in and out of France before the authorities have any idea what hit them.”

The pickup had come at 12:43 A.M. Less than twenty-three hours later, at 22:28 P.M., Riemé was climbing into a legally registered, two-door Peugeot in Marseille, and heading north toward Paris five hundred miles away.

Near dawn he stopped at a small inn near the town of Briare on the Loire River, registering as Bennette Roget, a salesman from Le Havre. At this point he was less than one hundred miles from his target, on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, near the Arc de Triomphe.

He slept a few hours and had a moderately large breakfast. He took his time the rest of the way into Paris, arriving there shortly before noon. He went directly to an address on the Left Bank, which turned out to be a parking garage in a rundown section of similar structures.

With the car parked safely inside, next to a dark-blue, nondescript van he had been assured would be there, Rieme laid his head back on the car seat, closed his eyes, and mentally readied himself for his task.

The weapon he would use was already in the van. After killing the afternoon at a movie, he would drive across the river to the office building, where he would park at exactly 6:00 P.M. Within five minutes, Gérard Louis Dreyfus would come out to his waiting limousine. Riemé would kill him and drive immediately back here. He’d take the car back to Marseille. A boat would be waiting there to take him to Barcelona and his plane to Moscow. There he would be given a new identity, and in due time another assignment.

André Blenault, chief comptroller for Louis Dreyfus operations in Paris, stepped out of his office on the third floor and hurried down to the receptionist near the elevator, hugging a fat briefcase to his chest. He was in a foul mood this afternoon, as he had been since one week ago last Sunday, when the cable from New York had arrived.

First there had been the trouble with the damned Vance-Ehrhardts, who had somehow managed to sign the France-Océanique shipping agreement. Next had come the Cargill coup, which gave the Minneapolis-based firm a solid foothold with the Canadian Wheat Board for the next five years. And finally, the cable: Newman, the filthy Marauder, was on the move again.

From what Blenault and others on the staff had pieced together, Newman had begun to set up a complex arrangement of subsidiaries within the world shipping community. Left to his own devices, he would, within a month, tie up damned near every scrap of tonnage currently available. And there was little or nothing they could do to block him.

The most damning aspect, the one that the New York cable had spelled out, or failed to spell out, depending upon the point of view, was that no one — simply no one — had an inkling of what the Marauder was up to. And that worried the staff, which in turn disturbed Blenault, which finally upset Gerard.

“Heads will roll. Mon dieu, heads will surely roll,” Blenault muttered as he came to the reception area.

The young woman at the desk looked up, startled. “Monsieur Blenault?”

“His car, have you called it up yet?”

The woman looked up at the wall clock, which showed it was a couple of minutes before six, and without a word grabbed the telephone and dialed while the comptroller waited impatiently.

“Bring his car around now, please,” the woman said. “Merci.” And she hung up the telephone.

“If it’s late… oh, heavens, if it’s late. He simply does not need that kind of aggravation at this moment, don’t you understand, you dolt?”

“Oui, monsieur,” the poor woman said.

Blenault stared pointedly at her for another long moment as she fidgeted nervously, then turned as Gérard Louis Dreyfus approached.

He was a short man, with a thick, rich voice, and he was dressed, as usual, in a pin-striped suit. He smiled as he saw Blenault.

“Ah, André, are we ready for the weekend?”

“Oui, monsieur, I have the files you requested right here.”

“Then let us be on our way.”

As they rode down in the elevator, Gérard studied his comptroller’s face for a long moment. “Any further word from New York?”

“None as of the late-afternoon telexes.”

“Then we will call them on the way home. I have told no one as yet, but I will be flying to New York tomorrow, and if need be to Moscow on Monday.”

“Moscow?” Blenault asked, bewildered.

“Oui, André,” Gérard said. “I have a feeling that our friends at Exportkhleb may be up to something.”

They called it the “trader’s nose,” Blenault thought. It was absolutely amazing, but a good grainman, such as Gerard Louis Dreyfus, could smell out a large deal in the making, often even before the principals making the deal knew that they would make one.

“I have not heard of anything…” Blenault trailed off.

Louis Dreyfus smiled. “Marie Longchamps telephoned this afternoon, said she was certain she had seen Dybrovik in Geneva last week. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t even him. But…” He shrugged.

“Where that man moves, there is trouble.”

“And profit, my dear André.”

They reached the ground floor and the doors slid open. The building’s security guard jumped up from his position by the door, and Louis Dreyfus greeted him as he and Blenault stepped outside.

The company Rolls-Royce had just come around the corner, a plain van right behind it. The car pulled up to the curb as Louis Dreyfus and Blenault stepped across the sidewalk.

Later, from his hospital bed, Blenault would be unable to say clearly what had happened next, but he did remember the plain blue van with a French-looking driver pulling up beside the Rolls.

The driver’s window was open, and as Louis Dreyfus turned to say something to Blenault, a dark, slender object was thrust out. There was suddenly a series of loud pops, as if a truck or some other vehicle were backfiring.

Louis Dreyfus was flung backward into the glass doors, a dozen holes erupting in his chest and face, blood splattering everywhere.

Someone screamed something. At the same moment a hard, very hot, compelling force slammed into Blenault’s side and right buttock, driving him sideways, down on Gérard’s already lifeless body.

“Mon dieu! Mon dieu!” some foolish woman kept screaming over and over, as Blenault tried to catch his breath.

10

The dusty white station wagon came up the deeply rutted road from the farmhouse in the hollow by the creek. As it topped the rise it stopped, and William Bormett got out.

He was a huge bear of a man. He was six foot four, and, last week on his fifty-first birthday, had tipped the scales at 275 pounds. In his younger days he had been the kid who could lift a young bull up on his shoulders; or lift the back end of a pickup truck; or toss seventy-five-pound bales of hay to the top of the hayrack all day long, then go out that night dancing and drinking.

Over the past years, however, Bormett had begun to slow down. His weight had redistributed itself, more going to his expanding paunch and less to his shoulders. But, like many succesful men, he had automatically compensated for his waning physical abilities by increasing his acumen.

He shaded his eyes now against the morning sun as he stared across his fields to the east, and he smiled with satisfaction.

Fifteen thousand acres of the finest land to corn anywhere in the world. It was an achievement rivaled by very few, and certainly equaled by no one.

It had begun with his grandfather, who had come to Iowa as a young man, where he planted two hundred acres to corn to feed his small dairy herd. Within a few years, however, the Bormett herd had died off from cow fever just at harvest time, and the corn had been sold as feed.

By the time William’s father had taken over the farm, they were planting nearly a thousand acres to corn, which they sold to area dairy farmers. And the business prospered.

To the first crude drying bins that Grandfather Bormett had put up, William’s father had added an extensive number of Butler corrugated-metal storage units, so that in time the farm began to take on the appearance of a major grain depot. As area farms came on the market, William’s father bought them, tore down the fences, and planted more and more acres to corn, ever increasing his drying and storage capabilities.

Grandfather Bormett had died at the ripe age of 93, but his son died at the age of 56, leaving William in charge of eight thousand acres at the age of 24.

That was twenty-seven years ago. Since then, William had nearly doubled the farm’s acres to corn, had purchased and maintained a fleet of twenty five semitractor trailers, and established what the Des Moines Register called the most modern corn-drying and — storage facility anywhere in the world, with a total investment in equipment, machinery, and land approaching the twenty-million-dollar mark.

The Bormett farm was definitely big business. A big business that William was justifiably proud of.

He was dressed, this morning, in a three-piece suit, with a subdued blue tie and an offwhite shirt. Looking at him, no one would have suspected he was a farmer, except that his large hands were roughly calloused.

Unlike many successful farmers who delegated all but the book work to hired hands, Bormett continued to put in his time on a tractor, on and in the silos, and in the machine sheds. He actively worked his fifteen thousand acres; he did not merely manage them, although he did have more than one hundred paid farmhands.

Pretty soon they’d be leaving for the airport, fifteen miles away in Des Moines, but before they left he had wanted to come out here and look at his fields. They were the reason he had been called to Moscow.

The invitation had come from the University of Moscow’s Department of Agriculture, through the U.S. State Department, over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and then one week ago out here in the person of Stuart Finney, a tight-assed assistant of Curtis Lundgren, the Secretary of Agriculture.

Bormett had to chuckle now, thinking back on it. Finney had come to the farm with not so much as a phone call or a howdy-do, just marched up on the porch and banged on the door.

“Hello, I’m Stuart Finney, from the United States Department of Agriculture. I’ve come to tell you that you are going to Russia to speak to the Agriculture Department at Moscow University.”

At first Catherine had just laughed at the man. Laughed right in his face. But then he had looked so forlorn, she had invited him in for some coffee and sweet rolls.

Slowly, that afternoon, it came out that he was for real, that it wasn’t some kind of a joke. Several telegrams and telephone calls to Washington, including a long conversation with Secretary Lundgren himself, finally convinced the Bormetts. The Russians did want him to come to Moscow to speak with their farm experts.

In the distance to the southeast, Bormett could see the little grain elevators at Adel. Nearly everything between where he stood now and those elevators was his land. All of it under cultivation. All of it corn, his cash crop. Except of course for the household vegetable garden.

Within a couple of years, if all went well (and everything had gone extremely well for the Bormetts for the last half-century), their holdings would be increased to more than twenty thousand acres.

If all that land were to be placed in one huge square, it would have been over five and a half miles on a side. Over thirty-one square miles of land to corn. An amazing amount of corn. A staggering pile of grain at harvest time.

As it was, his fleet of trucks had to run twenty-four hours a day during the harvest, back and forth to the railhead at Des Moines where there were large enough facilities to handle the shipment of their grain. With another five thousand acres, he’d have to think seriously about building his own rail spur to the farm. It’d be a hell of a lot more efficient and certainly a lot more profitable that way.

At his car door, he looked once again across the fields he had worked since he was a boy. Already the corn was coming up in perfect green rows. A hybrid dent, the most common corn in the country, it would by harvest time have grown to twenty feet in height, with yields per acre that would have dazzled his father and totally stunned his grandfather.

The old saw “Knee high by the Fourth of July” was hopelessly out of date. July 4 was four days away, and it was already more than waist high.

He laughed again, and shook his head for the joy of it all, got in his car, swung it around, and headed back down the hill to collect his wife. She was going with him for the ten-day visit to Moscow.

Catherine was waiting for him out on the porch with their luggage when he pulled up in the driveway. She was a small woman, somewhat rotund, but with a pleasant, smiling face, rosy, dimpled cheeks, and beautiful, prematurely silver hair. Whereas William ran the farm operation, Catherine ruled the house with an iron will and a very firm hand. And although they were traveling to Russia (the first time anyone in the family had been outside the United States) so that William could tell the Russkies how to grow corn, Catherine felt it was her God-given duty to oversee the trip, since technically it did not involve the actual operation of the farm.

“William Owen Bormett,” she scolded. “I’ve been waiting here on this porch for the past half-hour, wondering if somebody hadn’t kidnapped you or something.”

“Had to take a last look out at the east fields to see how they were coming along after the rain,” he said, getting out of the car. He went around back and opened the tailgate, his wife right behind him.

“We’ve got barely an hour to catch our flight, and they wanted us there an hour early,” she argued.

He smiled. “It’s all right, Katy, we’ll get there in plenty of time. They won’t leave without us.” He went up on the porch, got the luggage, and brought it back to the car. “Where are the kids? Are they ready to say goodbye yet?”

“They said their goodbyes last night at supper. Justin is in town, and Albert is out with Harold at the airstrip. Harold is giving him another flying lesson.”

Bormett nodded, slightly disappointed that his sons would not be here to see them off. Yet at sixteen and nineteen, he himself had been much more interested in his own life than in that of his father or grandfather. They would come back into the fold in due time. It would be fifteen or twenty years yet, before they would have to take over the farm. There was plenty of time.

“You’ve got the tickets? Our travelers checks? The passports?” he asked his wife as he helped her into the car.

“Everything,” she said.

Before he closed the door, he looked in at her. “Excited to be going?”

She grinned. “Plenty excited.” She fingered her dress. “Do you suppose I’ll be dressed okay for Washington?”

“You look fine, Katy, just fine.”

They would be staying in Washington for two days, during which time they would be meeting with the Secretary of Agriculture and his people, as well as someone from the State Department who’d tell them what to say and how to act while they were in the Soviet Union.

It was a lot of nonsense, as far as he was concerned. Hell, he was just going over to talk farming with the Russkies. He wasn’t going to give them any secrets, leastwise nothing they couldn’t get themselves by studying American farm magazines.

“You are going over there representing the United States of America, Mr. Bormett,” Finney had told him.

“I know that. I won’t embarrass you.”

Finney had smiled his tight-assed little smile and shook his head. “I’m sure you won’t, sir,” he said. “We — that is, Secretary Lundgren — mostly just wanted to meet with you in person and get to know you a little better before you leave.”

“Wants to pump me full of propaganda. Shit, I fought the Commies in Korea. I know what the hell the score is. You don’t have to tell me that.”

“No, sir,” Finney had said. “But before you leave, you will have to meet with Secretary Lundgren and someone from the State Department. It’s required of all Americans before they go to the Soviet Union.”

“Bullshit,” Bormett had said. “But I won’t fight you on it. Not at all. We’ll meet with your boss and whoever else wants to meet with us. It’s just fine with me.”

“Oh, that’s very good, Mr. Bormett,” Finney had said, obviously relieved.

Their flight left at 8:30 A.M. They switched planes in Chicago, and arrived at Washington’s National Airport a little after lunch, where Finney met them with a limousine and chattered incessantly all the way to their hotel.

“Secretary Lundgren is tied up today for lunch, but he wants to meet with you for breakfast about eight tomorrow morning,” Finney said.

“I’m used to having my breakfast around five-thirty or six,” Bormett said, poking fun at him.

“Oh, dear,” Finney said. “I don’t think Secretary Lundgren would be able to…”

“It’s all right there, now,” Bormett said. “I suppose I could hold until eight A.M. just this once.”

In actuality Bormett had stopped eating big breakfasts years ago, preferring instead to work through until around 9:30 or 10:00, when he would stop for coffee and a doughnut. But he was a farmer, and in front of easterners, he wanted to behave like one.

It was like the old bib-overall joke. The city folks thought the bibs made a man look like an ignorant, sod-busting hick, down on his luck. The country folk knew the farmer wore the bibs cause they had large pockets to hold all his money.

“I’ll drop you off at your hotel, where you can rest for an hour or so. You have a meeting at three with Leonard Ruskin, an Undersecretary with the Foreign Trade Mission Desk at State.”

“An impressive title,” Bormett said.

Finney smiled. “Then at five, the Vice-President and his wife would like to have cocktails with you and Mrs. Bormett at their home.”

Catherine gasped, her eyes wide, and she began to blush.

“Now that is an impressive title, even though I didn’t vote for the rascal,” Bormett said.

“I didn’t either,” Finney said. “But don’t tell anyone.”

They all laughed at the little joke. Within ten minutes they were at their hotel, being shown their suite of rooms. Everything had been paid for by the Department of Agriculture, including, Finney informed them, their airfare to and from Moscow, their accommodations in the Soviet capital, and their meals and drinks.

“We have our own money,” Bormett had protested, but Finney had shaken his head.

“Use it to buy souvenirs, if you’d like. Everything else has already been taken care of.”

When Finney was gone, Bormett took a shower, and afterward, while his wife was in the bathroom, he ordered himself a bourbon and water from room service. He was sitting looking out the window at the capitol a few blocks away when she came out.

She was glowing. “Nothing like this has ever happened to us, Will,” she said.

He looked up at her and smiled. She was a good woman, and although at times she was a bit shrill, he loved her.

“Are you glad you tagged along?”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she said, but then her brows knitted. “It’s just that I don’t know what to wear to see a vice-president and his wife.”

Bormett thought about that for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “When I’m meeting with the State Department people, why don’t you go out on the town and buy yourself something?”

“I couldn’t,” she protested.

“Of course you can,” Bormett said, crossing to the telephone. “I’ll call Finney now and see if there isn’t someone who could go along with you. Sort of show you around the town.”

Later, Catherine described that first day in Washington as a “whirlwind,” and even William had to admit to himself that it had been interesting. He and his wife had been treated with the utmost respect and interest.

At the State Department he was told nothing more than Finney had already told him: He was an American, and as such he would be representing all American farmers. The Russians had invited him because he was the best, and they hoped to learn as much from him as they possibly could.

Catherine, with the help of Finney’s wife, had bought a lovely, offwhite cocktail dress, and they had gone on to meet the Vice-President and his wife.

Although Bormett had little or no regard for the present administration, he found the Vice-President a bright, amiable man who immediately impressed him with the statement that he, the Vice-President, was nothing more than a politician, whereas Bormett and men like him were much more important.

“The farmer has always been the backbone of this nation, Mr. Bormett,” he said. “All the computer companies, steel mills, coal mines, and oil wells would be totally impossible without the basic human necessity: food. Food, which you provide us.”

It didn’t really matter that nowadays most of the Bormett corn was shipped to overseas markets; he was a supplier of food to a hungry world. His farm was a shining example of American knowhow and hard work.

Near the end of that pleasant meeting, Bormett had delighted everyone by admitting to the Vice-President that he had not voted for this administration, but if it was going to try for reelection, he’d be the first at the polls with his support.

Their flight was scheduled to leave the next afternoon at 3:00, and the Bormetts went to bed early to get a good night’s sleep. In the morning William was picked up by Finney, who took him over to a private dining room in the Department of Agriculture.

Bormett took an instant dislike to Secretary Lundgren.

“You’re going to have to come to the understanding early on, Mr. Bormett, that the Russians are not, nor will they ever be, capable of farming the same way you do,” Lundgren began.

“How so?” Bormett asked innocently.

Lundgren smiled superciliously. “They don’t have air-conditioned tractors to ride around in, with stereo systems, two-way radios, refrigerators for cold beer.”

Bormett could feel the color coming to his cheeks. “Tractors that pull twelve-bottom plows. Two-way radios in case of a breakdown so we can get a repair crew out there on the double. No beer boxes on my machinery.”

Lundgren sniffed and dabbed his lips with his linen napkin. “They’ll never have twelve-bottom plows, or fifteen-thousand-acre farms, either. Nor will they ever understand agribusiness and marketing, not in their society.”

“I’m going over to speak with farmers…” Bormett began, but Lundgren cut him off.

“I beg your pardon. You are going to Moscow to speak with professors of agriculture. Book people who probably have never even seen a farm.” He leaned forward, his elbows on the highly polished mahogany table. “You will be a cultural exchange program. We send orchestras, they send dancers. We send farmers, they send engineers. As long as we’re talking, we’re not shooting. Leastwise, that’s the President’s foreign policy in a nutshell.”

Lundgren, as far as Bormett was concerned, was insufferable. “Tell me, Mr. Secretary, were you raised on a farm?”

Finney had been drinking coffee, and he choked, sputtering and coughing.

“As a matter of fact, no, Mr. Bormett,” the Secretary said coldly. “I was born and raised in Chicago, and I attended Northwestern University. I am an attorney.”

“I see,” Bormett said, his voice equally cold. “I’ll try not to embarrass this administration either in Moscow or back home.”

“I’m happy to hear that. When you return, I’d like to meet with you again. We can talk at greater length about what you learned.”

11

The large house high in the hills overlooked the magnificent harbor at the head of Lake Superior in Duluth. It had suited Kenneth Newman’s needs as a grainman since the day he had moved here eight years ago. And in the weeks since he had brought his new bride here, it seemed to have suited her needs as well.

When he broke away from the Vance-Ehrhardt conglomerate, he had had his choice of any city in the world in which to work. New York would have been logical, as would Geneva or Paris or even Amsterdam. Those cities were financial centers.

Instead, Newman had chosen to live in a grain port where the commodities he dealt with would be ever present.

On the North American continent, he was left with three major grain ports: New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi; Minneapolis at the navigable head of the great shipping river; or Duluth-Superior, the westternmost port on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Neither the climate nor the people of New Orleans suited Newman. Besides, Cargill had a very strong foothold in that city.

Minneapolis-St. Paul would have been fine, but Cargill all but owned that city as well.

Which left Duluth-Superior. The brisk climate suited Newman. The friendly, hard-working Scandinavian population suited him. And, best of all, the northern port city suited his willingness for a good, ongoing fight.

It had been touch and go, for as many years as anyone could remember, whether it was cheaper to ship grain to the river, load it on barges, haul it down to New Orleans, and then load it aboard grain ships, or cheaper to load the grain aboard trains at or near the farms, transport it to Duluth-Superior, and use the ultramodern handling facilities there to sort, grade, and load the grain directly aboard ocean-going ships.

For years the river-barge operators and railroad managements had been stimulating the agreement — and the business — with rate-schedule wars.

Competition like that was healthy for the grain business, he reflected this morning as he stepped out of the shower. But the explosion at Cargill’s giant elevators in New Orleans, and Friday’s gruesome murder of Gérard Louis Dreyfus by the French LPN, were the work of fanatics.

The world press had not yet made the connection between the two events, but Newman had. And the conclusions he drew worried him.

Without Gerard, the Louis Dreyfus clan’s business would take years to recover. Already there had been a noticeable slump in the French and Mediterranean markets that would deepen as currently negotiated deals began to come to fruition.

Simply put, Gérard’s assassination had placed a serious crimp on the European grain market. Georges André and the others would be hard pressed to remove it.

On this continent, Cargill’s mammoth New Orleans elevator complex had been bigger in size and grain-handling capabilities than even the Duluth-Superior facilities. The destruction of that elevator would not ruin the gigantic Cargill Company, but it would seriously strain the firm’s abilities to deliver grain that had been ordered and, in some cases, already paid for.

Which left South America, the third largest supplier of grain. Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt. If anything happened to Lydia’s father, the results within the grain industry could be nearly catastrophic.

Back in his bedroom, as Newman began to dress, the worry that had been nagging him for the past day or two came again to the forefront of his mind: The fact was that the Newman Company stood to gain the most from it all.

With his secret Russian deal, he needed all the grain, and all the ships to transport it, that he could lay his hands on.

Louis Dreyfus was all but out of the picture, so he had almost the entire European grain market to himself, along with its shipping. With Cargill’s New Orleans operation nearly shut down, grain that normally would have been shipped downriver would now be brought up to Duluth-Superior.

And, if something should happen to Vance-Ehrhardt the world would become Newman’s alone… or rather, Newman’s and Dybrovik’s.

He knotted his tie, put on his jacket, and went downstairs.

Lydia was waiting for him with the morning newspapers in the breakfast nook overlooking Lake Superior, the Aerial Lift Bridge, and the harbor far below.

She was staring out the window at a Japanese cargo ship just coming under the bridge into the harbor, and when he entered the room, she looked up with a start.

“Good morning,” he said. He went around the table, and they kissed.

“I was just going to send Marie to make sure you had gotten out of bed,” she said, smiling. She seemed a little peaked this morning.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked, taking his seat.

Marie, their housekeeper, came in before she had a chance to answer, set a plate of toasted English muffins on the sideboard, and poured his coffee.

“Good morning, Mr. Newman,” she said. “Will you be wanting breakfast this morning?”

“Just coffee, thanks,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Lydia was staring out the window again, and Kenneth reached across to touch her hand. She looked back at him.

“What is it?” he asked. “Are you bored here?”

She managed another smile. “No.”

“I’ve been terribly busy these past weeks, and I can’t say that it’ll get much better until fall. But afterward we can go somewhere for a month or two. Perhaps back to Monaco to finish our honeymoon.”

She squeezed his hand. “It’s not that, Kenneth. When I married you, I knew that you were a busy man.” She glanced again out the window. “Besides, I can always take a plane to New York or Europe or someplace if I want to.”

“That’s an excellent idea. Why don’t you call up some of your friends and go on a little holiday? London would be nice. Or even Sardinia.” Newman could hear how hollow his words were, yet he could not help himself. There were too many other things on his mind at the moment.

“I might go to Buenos Aires for a few days,” she said.

“You miss your father?”

“I’m worried about him.”

Her answer startled him, because he had been worried about him, too. “Isn’t he feeling well? Have you spoken with him?”

“Come off it, Kenneth, for Christ’s sake. You know goddamned well why I’m concerned,” Lydia snapped, her voice rising. “First it was Cargill, then Louis Dreyfus. My father may very well be next.”

“What about me?” Newman said, instantly regretting the petty, selfish remark. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“I’ve hired a security service for you,” Lydia said coldly. “They’re here now.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No it’s not. But my father will think so, and my mother is too weak to insist he take extra precautions when he travels. I’ll have to go to him and make sure he’ll be all right. Unless you don’t want me to go,” she said, looking pointedly into his eyes.

“Of course you should go if you want to, but I think you’d be going for all the wrong reasons. Call him first, then make your decision. See how he feels about Cargill and Louis Dreyfus.”

“And report back to you?”

Newman said nothing.

“Who did you meet in Geneva…” she started, but then she clamped it off. “No. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.” She shook her head. “He won’t tell me anything over the phone, anyway.”

“Then maybe there is nothing to it. Maybe the two incidents were just coincidence.”

Lydia’s eyes widened. “You’ve been thinking about it as well, haven’t you?”

Newman nodded. “But the Cargill elevator was out there in the open for anyone to get to, and Gérard was never one for security precautions. On the other hand, your father lives and works on his estate. He’s surrounded by staff and armed guards.”

“In a country whose tradition is violence and revolution,” Lydia countered.

“Speak with him first, before you go,” Newman said. He had visions of his wife becoming caught in an assassination attempt, and it frightened him.

She lowered her head. “I’ll call him later this morning,” she said. She looked up. “Will you be late again tonight?”

“I’ll try not to be. But call me at work as soon as you find out anything,” Newman said. He finished his coffee, kissed Lydia, and left the room.

In his study he grabbed his briefcase, went into the garage, and started his small Mercedes.

Out on the street, two men dressed in business suits were waiting in a gray Chevrolet sedan. When Newman passed, they pulled away from the curb and fell in behind him.

It gave him a curious sense of security, having them behind him, and yet he resented the invasion of his privacy that they represented, and at a deeper level he felt they were unnecessary. Cargill here, Louis Dreyfus in Europe. Vance-Ehrhardt in South America, if his fears were justified, would complete the triangle.

If his fears were justified, it would mean the Russians were behind it, in which case Dybrovik’s mammoth grain deal was nothing more than a plot to hit at Western grain merchants — the Newman Company in particular.

But why? Dybrovik was a shrewd businessman, who had always played it straight. If he was playing some kind of game, and it got out, the Soviets would be hard-pressed in the future to secure any licenses to purchase Western grain. They would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Newman’s office was a modern three-story building of glass and steel next to the Port Authority terminal on the waterfront. He had built it shortly after he selected Duluth-Superior as his base; his business had expanded so rapidly that the once too-large building was now bursting at the seams with employees.

The parking lot was nearly full when Newman pulled into his slot and got out of his car. The gray Chevy pulled up beside him, and the two men jumped out and hurried around to him.

“Good morning, sir,” one of them said, while the other scanned the lines of parked cars. “I’m Evans, from Tri-States Security. And this is Humphrey.”

“I’ll be in my office for the remainder of the day,” Newman said, feeling a little foolish.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Coatsworth is there now. He’ll explain the procedure to you.”

Newman nodded and went into the building. The reception area had a grouping of plants and modern furniture to the right, and the receptionist and telephone operator to the left.

This morning a large man was seated on one of the couches, and when Newman came in he nodded.

“Good morning, Mr. Newman,” the receptionist, a young, good-looking woman, chirped.

“Good morning. Is Paul here yet?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have him come up to my office immediately.”

“Yes, sir. And there is a Mr. Coatsworth from Tri-States Security waiting to see you.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine,” Newman said. He went up to the third floor, where Paul Saratt was waiting for him with a huge man whose steel-gray hair was cropped military-fashion.

“Good morning, Paul,” Newman said.

“Morning, Kenneth. This is Rupert Coatsworth, Tri-States Security.”

Newman shook his hand. “Lydia told me this morning.”

“There are a number of things I’ll have to discuss with you this morning, Mr. Newman,” Coatsworth said, his voice deep and booming. There was a bulge beneath his left armpit, and Newman realized with a start that the man was armed.

“Can’t wait?”

“No, sir.”

“You might just as well sit in on this, Paul,” Newman said. He turned to his secretary. “Hold all my calls except for Geneva, Abex, and my wife.”

“Of course, Mr. Newman,” the woman said, and the three men went into Newman’s office, which overlooked the terminal. A half-dozen foreign ships were tied up and loading.

“Evidently you do not feel our services are necessary, Mr. Newman,” Coatsworth said perceptively.

“My wife does.”

“And so do I,” Saratt said. “Lydia and I discussed it yesterday.”

“I’m busy this morning, so let’s get immediately to the point,” Newman said. He would go along with this, for a few weeks. At that time he’d make the decision whether or not to continue.

“First, my people will need your complete cooperation.”

“As I said, I am a busy man, and I resent intrusions.”

“My people are as unintrusive as humanly possible, given the circumstances. But if something should begin to develop, I ask that you do exactly as my people instruct you. Your life could very well depend upon that single act.”

Newman nodded.

“Good. Secondly, we will need to be kept informed of your itinerary, as far in advance as possible.”

“My secretary will be able to provide you with that.”

“And last of all, I would like you, and perhaps your wife and Mr. Saratt, to come up with a list of people who would like to see you harmed, and their reasons.”

“I know of no one like that.”

“I’m sure you do, Mr. Newman,” Coatsworth said with an air of authority. “All of us have enemies. No matter how farfetched you may think the idea, it would be of immense help to us. We do want to protect you.”

“That would be a potentially dangerous list. Very sensitive.”

Coatsworth smiled. “You may wish to check with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington and, internationally, with Interpol in Paris, Geneva, or London. We are a recognized and legitimate firm, I assure you.”

“If I travel?”

“We will come with you. Are you planning on going somewhere soon?”

“Very likely. But I travel constantly, Mr. Coatsworth. All over the world.”

“We will be at your side,” Coatsworth said. He got to his feet. “I’ll check with your secretary for your schedule. May we have the list by this afternoon?”

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” Newman said dryly.

At the door the security chief stopped and turned back. “My technicians will be here a little later this morning to sweep your telephones and electrical circuits. They are at your house now.”

Newman nodded. When Coatsworth was gone, he sat back in his chair and shook his head ruefully.

“This time I agree with Lydia,” Saratt said.

“Two weeks, Paul, then we review the situation.”

“Fair enough,” Saratt said. “But you told Coatsworth you would be going somewhere soon. Anything I should know about?”

“I’m going to Washington to speak with Lundgren.”

“We have our licenses for stateside grain; or are you worried about the Justice Department finding out about our foreign activities?”

“I’m worried about the entire thing,” Newman said, choosing his words with care. He still hadn’t thought it out completely, but it seemed as if everything was somehow missing a beat. Off kilter. Out of sync. It felt wrong to him.

“All our subsidiaries are third- and fourth-party agreements, most of them on foreign holding companies. What can go wrong?”

“It’s not that.”

“What then? The Cargill and Louis Dreyfus business?”

“Partly. But it’s this entire deal, Paul. I think we’re being set up.”

“So did I. But Dybrovik is taking the corn as and when we ship it, and the funds are being transferred without question into our TradeCon account in Zurich. So even if the bottom fell out tomorrow, we’d be safe.”

“How close have the actual transactions been played?”

“To within a couple of hundred thousand tons on shipments, but we’re going to have to start going after the futures market within the next week to ten days.”

“Which has been made a damned sight easier for us because of Cargill’s troubles.”

Saratt started to say something, but then he held off, an odd look suddenly crossing his features. “You’re not worried about a market manipulation. Not at all. It’s something else.”

“We’re talking about as much as a hundred million tons of corn. Unprecedented. The largest deal in the history of grain trading.”

Saratt nodded.

“And no one seems to be overly excited. Least of all Dybrovik. And hardly anyone else, except for Louis Dreyfus, whose people were snooping around Abex, and Cargill, who cut their barge rates again last week. What the hell does that tell you?”

“There is interest in us. We expected that.”

“You’re missing my point,” Newman snapped.

“Evidently.”

“How much current corn will we be able to ship to the Russians before the supplies bottom out?”

Saratt shrugged. “Considering his seventy-five percent restriction, perhaps as much as seven or eight million tons.”

“The rest is in futures. As much as we can nail down.”

“On margin, with Exportkhleb’s funds.”

“And our reputation.”

“I still don’t see…” Saratt started, but Newman cut him off.

“Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Russians have a bumper year. Suppose they harvest all the corn they need — or nearly all the corn they need — with perhaps only a seven- or eight-million-ton shortfall.”

“Then the deal wouldn’t make any sense. Why purchase futures? By the time they came out of the fields, we’d all know the state of the Soviet crop, and their game would be up. So why do such a thing?”

“I can think of two reasons right off the bat. The firs would be for them not to honor their futures contracts They’d lose their ten percent, but the entire marke would go down the tubes… including our business.’

“That doesn’t make any sense. What grudge do the Russians have against us?”

“The second would be that they’d go ahead and take delivery on the corn. All of it.”

“To dump it back on the market?”

Newman shook his head. “To store it within the Soviet Union. A grain stockpile.”

“To what end, for Christ’s sake, Paul?”

“A siege?” Newman suggested, his stomach tight.

Saratt said nothing, although his mouth was open.

“We’re stockpiling oil in old saltmines as a national crisis reserve. Why not stockpile food?”

“They wouldn’t need it. Next spring they’d plant again, and in the fall they’d harvest.”

“If they could. If their transportation network was still intact. If their population hadn’t been decimated.”

“Good Lord, you’re talking war!”

“I don’t know, Paul. I just don’t know, but I think we should do what we can to find out.”

“If you make waves, the entire structure could come down around our ears.”

“I know it.”

“It’s crazy,” Saratt said.

“Frightening, is more like it.”

12

Newman was a pragmatist who made his decisions and accomplished his tasks a step at a time. That, despite the fact his agile mind could grasp dozens of seemingly disconnected events and unrelated details, and intuitively reduce them into recognizable patterns. His mother, who had died a few years after his father, had called this ability, evident since childhood, his “artistic talent.” She had always maintained that her son would someday become a great painter, or perhaps even a poet, although she admitted he was nowhere nearly tragic enough for the latter.

His father agreed only insofar as his son’s artistic temperament was concerned, but he maintained that such talent was best served in the business world.

“It’s the creative ones who amass the fortunes, who build the bridges, or discover the oil, or make the deals,” the old man said. “Not the plodders.”

Newman stood at his window watching the crew clear the dunnage from the holds of a ship which had come in this morning for powdered milk, as he thought about himself and tried to justify what he was doing. There had been nothing creative or artistic about his work this day. Through BanLine Shipping, Inc., his subsidiary in Savannah, he had secured three bulk-cargo vessels to carry paper to New York and then come empty down the St. Lawrence to Duluth for corn.

Through Abex in New York he had hired a fourth vessel, carrying flour to Buffalo, to take on corn for shipment to Gdynia in Poland.

From Masters & Kildare, Inc., a nationally recognized farm-survey firm (another of his subsidiaries), he had received the first reports on corn futures in this country; Blencoe, S.A., out of Brussels, had promised its international futures survey within a couple of days.

He had read a report from TradeCon, his financial holding company in Zurich, that another $11.5 million had been transferred from Eurobank in Geneva, bringing the total to well above $20 million.

He had perused masters’ reports from eleven vessels now at sea carrying corn, heading toward seven different ports within the Warsaw Pact. He had studied the constantly fluctuating rate schedules of a dozen trucking firms, two river-barge companies, and the railroad.

The Teamsters here in Duluth-Superior were filing a series of grievances with the Port Authority that if left unchecked could blossom into a wildcat strike, so Newman had dictated a letter to Robert LaBatt, the Port Authority director, outlining his concerns and suggestions.

His secretary had secured an appointment for him with Secretary of Agriculture Lundgren at 2:00 P.M. tomorrow and had arranged for the company aircraft to be ready first thing in the morning.

One hour ago he and Saratt had put their heads together to come up with a list of people who would like to see the Newman Company harmed, and in particular Kenneth Newman himself put out of commission. It was a very short list. It did not include Dybrovik or the Russians.

And now it was the end of the day. Nothing essential had been accomplished that any one of his office people could not have managed nicely, and Newman felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction with himself and his work.

Such feelings were rare for him, and he had learned that they indicated he was on the wrong track; that he was ignoring some central problem. Yet he felt somewhat foolish that he had suggested to Saratt the possibility that the Russians were girding for a war.

Stop the deal, a voice at the back of his mind had nagged. Simply pull out. The easy part had been accomplished, or nearly accomplished. Within a month Exportkhleb would have its seven or eight million tons of corn. The big difficulties would come on the futures market, when other grain merchants began realizing that a significant portion of the available world crop had already been spoken for. The waves would begin then; the repercussions would spread like the shock from a nuclear blast. Prices would go wild. Shipping firms would revise their schedules sharply upward. But by then it would be too late. The damage would have been done. And if everything had been laid out correctly, it would be impossible to trace it back to the Newman Company.

They would be safe. In fact, they would scream market manipulation as loudly as everyone else.

It did not bother Newman that he was violating U.S. antitrust and licensing laws. Food was food, and as long as it was being used ultimately to feed people, it didn’t matter to him which people were fed. His job, as he saw it, was merely the redistribution of grain to wherever it was needed, and to make a profit as and where he could.

This deal with Dybrovik was profitable, there was no doubt about that, but the profits would not be excessive. Once the market went wild later this summer, corn prices would skyrocket, but by then he would have already sold his grain at the earlier, lower prices. The market profiteers would come later. They would be the ones to scream the very loudest.

Pull out? To what end, Newman asked himself as he stared blindly out the window. If his foolish fears were in fact groundless, he’d be the man who had backed out of the largest grain deal in history.

If he was right, however, and Exportkhleb was attempting to amass a crisis stockpile of food, then Dybrovik would not be deterred by Newman’s refusal to do business. He would simply go to the other independents.

He shook himself out of his contemplations, straightened his tie, grabbed his briefcase, and went out the door.

His secretary was getting ready to leave as well, her typewriter covered. She smiled. “Have a good trip to Washington,” she said.

“Thanks. Has Paul left for the evening?”

“I believe he’s still in his office,” she said, reaching for the telephone.

“Don’t call, I’ll stop down to see him on my way out.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said.

Newman took the elevator to the ground floor, where his two bodyguards were waiting in the reception area. They jumped up when he appeared.

“I’ll be just a minute,” he said. He went into the trading room, where worldwide grain quantities and prices were constantly monitored, the figures flashed on overhead screens. The large room was mostly in darkness now. The basic work on the Russian purchase was being done by Newman Company subsidiaries around the world so that no suspicion would fall here.

Saratt was in his office at the rear of the room, talking on the telephone. He looked up as Newman came in, said something into the phone, then hung up and got to his feet.

“Ready to call it a day?”

“Just on my way out,” Newman said. “I’ll call you as soon as I finish with Lundgren tomorrow.”

“You’re not going to get much out of him.”

“Probably not, Paul, but it’s worth a try.”

Saratt stared at him for a long moment, the expression in his eyes a mixture of concern and skepticism. “You’re still worried about Dybrovik?”

Newman nodded. He found himself at this moment unable to share with his old friend the extent of his concern. “If we could get any kind of an indication of the expected Russian corn crop, it’s help.”

“The President has signed the grain extension with the Russians.”

“That’s small stuff, and it’s in addition to what we’re selling them,” Newman said.

“Then I don’t know what you expect to get from Lundgren. If the President is convinced the Russians need only ten or fifteen million tons of grain — a big mix, including wheat — then they must believe the Russian shortfall will be normal.”

“Which would prove my point. If they only need ten or fifteen million tons, why order that as well as what Dybrovik wants us to supply?”

Saratt got up and came around his desk to where Newman stood just within the doorway. “We’ve been friends for a number of years, Kenneth. At the risk of straining that friendship, I have to tell you that you are running scared. I don’t think it’s just the grain deal with Dybrovik. There’s something else eating at you.”

“Lydia hasn’t been involved in this at all,” Newman flared.

“I didn’t mention her name, but since you did I must tell you that she—”

Newman cut him off. “Don’t say it, Paul. I told you once before that I wanted you to do whatever you thought was necessary to protect our business, but if it involved Lydia, never to mention it to me.”

“Goddamn it, can’t you see what’s happening to you?”

“I can see what’s happening to us, and I don’t like it,” Newman said harshly, and he could see that the comment had hurt his old friend.

“Talk to Lundgren then, and phone me when you’re finished. But for Christ’s sake be careful with him. He may be an ass, but he knows the business, and he knows us. If he gets wind of what’s going on here, even a whiff of it, he’ll scream Justice Department and they’ll be on our backs.”

“I’m going for a chat, that’s all. Newman Company is interested in licenses for the new grain extension the President signed.”

Saratt nodded. It was clear from his expression that he wanted very much to say something else, but he was holding back. Newman knew that it concerned Lydia, but he could not bring himself to ask what it was, although he had a fair idea. When Coatsworth’s security people had come back here to sweep the office telephones, they had said nothing about his home phones. It was either because they had found Saratt’s tap, the one he was using to monitor Lydia’s telephone calls (to Buenos Aires?), or it was because they had found nothing.

“Are you staying the night?”

“No. I’m going up to New York to check in with Abex. Roger is becoming concerned that we’re not making any direct deals through him.”

“You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

“No,” Newman said. “I’m just going to calm him down.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

Back in the reception area, Evans and Humphrey rose to follow him out to the parking lot, and then across town to his home, where they took up position across the street.

He let himself in through the side door from the garage, and Marie met him in the vestibule.

“Good evening, Mr. Newman. Would you care for a drink before dinner?”

“That’d be fine. Where is Mrs. Newman?”

“She said that she would be traveling to Washington with you in the morning, and had some last-minute errands downtown.” The woman obviously did not like Lydia.

“Did she say when she’d be home?”

“No, sir,” Marie said.

Newman nodded. “I’ll take my drink upstairs in my study.”

“Very good, sir.”

Newman showered and changed, then went into his adjoining study which looked down over the harbor and beyond to Lake Superior, stretching to the eastern horizon. Marie had brought up a snifter and a bottle of cognac. He poured himself a healthy measure, lit a cigarette, and sat down in an easy chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Keep booze out of your office,” his father had told him years ago. “Otherwise you’ll pour yourself a drink every time you make a deal, and every time a deal falls through. It’s the habit that’s been the death of more executives than any other cause.”

Whenever he was troubled, he thought about his father. Not really a successful man, at least not by his son’s present standards, but a man full of the elusive wisdom that could only be gained through hard living.

“The school of hard knocks,” his father loved to say. “When the situation around you gets difficult, you have to roll with the punches, but never walk away from a fight. Follow your instincts, but never turn your back.”

What about now? Newman wondered.

It was around one in the afternoon, when the Newman Company jet, its twin-eagle logo gleaming on the vertical stabilizer, touched down at Washington’s National Airport and taxied to the private aviation terminal.

Two burly men wearing business suits stepped out of the aircraft and sharply scanned the area. Inside, Newman was putting on his jacket.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said to Lydia, who stood facing him. He had a heavy feeling that he had done the wrong thing.

She smiled sadly. “You’re my husband. Naturally I’ll help.”

Newman had debated with himself last night, as he waited for her to come home, whether or not he should tell her about his deal with Dybrovik. In the end he had decided she would have to know something if he was to put an end to an impossible situation: his business partner spying on his wife for the good of their business.

He hadn’t told her about that, of course, nor had he told her the extent of the Exportkhleb deal. But he had told her that he was dealing with Dybrovik, and he spoke a little about his fears that the Russians were up to something.

“So what do you expect to find out from the Agriculture Department?”

“Dybrovik wants to purchase a lot of corn from us, in addition to the deal the President has already agreed to. I want to know what the Russians’ actual corn shortfall is projected to be. Lundgren should have that information.”

“Won’t that tip him off that you’re up to something?”

“I don’t think so. Officially I’m coming to him to inquire about grain licenses with the Soviets. It’s information I’d have to know in order to do business with them.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Lydia had said, “I could probably get that information from Grainex for you.”

Grainex was the Vance-Ehrhardt subsidiary in New York City. Like all the larger grain firms, Vance-Ehrhardt, Ltd., had its network of friendly informants within the world’s grain-trading bureaus. It was one of the methods of doing business. But among the top half-dozen top companies, Vance-Ehrhardt’s information-gathering capabilities were second to none.

“I couldn’t ask you to do this,” Newman had said, although it was exactly what he had wanted. His deceit, even now, gave him a deep pang of guilt.

“I’ll take the plane to New York while you’re meeting with Lundgren.”

“I’ll come up on one of the commuter flights,” Newman said.

“Between us we’ll find out what’s happening.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Lydia?” he had asked a dozen times, and each time she assured him she did.

But now in the airplane, facing her, he could see that she was deeply troubled, and he was sorry that he had involved her. Their relationship was a fragile one at best, and he feared now that he had probably strained it badly.

“I should be up in New York by eight at the latest,” he said.

“I’ll stay at the Plaza. We can have dinner in our room. We’ll have a lot to talk about,” Lydia said with a tiny sigh.

Newman took her into his arms, and held her close for a few moments. “I’m sorry, Lydia,” he said softly.

“Don’t be. You’re a grain trader. I knew that when I married you. We practically grew up together. And I love you for it, not despite it.”

13

It was night again, cold and very damp, deep in the forests along the Paraná River. Far to the southeast was Buenos Aires, to the northeast the border with Uruguay, and ten miles to the northwest the Vance-Ehrhardt estate.

Juan Carlos crawled wearily out of his sleeping bag and pulled on his boots before he unzipped the tent flap and crawled outside.

They had been expecting to remain in position for two days. But that had stretched to eight, and it was already July 6. Unless they received their signal to begin this night, it would go into the ninth day. Juan Carlos did not know if he or any of them could stand that.

In the dim light he could see Teva and Eugenio seated around the small kerosene heater, smoking and talking. Although he could not quite hear what they were saying, he could tell by Teva’s gestures that she was excited. But then, she was always excited about something.

He relieved himself behind the tent, and he went over to them. They looked up as he approached. Teva’s face was bright, and Eugenio’s eyes were wide. They were smiling.

“What is it?” Juan Carlos asked.

“It came,” Teva bubbled. “We have our signal. We got it tonight.”

“The message came? You’re sure?” Juan Carlos asked. His bowels suddenly felt loose.

“Just half an hour ago,” Eugenio said. “We leave tonight at ten, and strike at one.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” Juan Carlos demanded. It was he who should have taken the message. He was the field commander here.

“Take it easy, Juan,” Teva said, reaching up for his hand and pulling him down. She gave him her half-smoked cigarette, and Eugenio poured him a cup of very black, very bitter coffee.

“We wanted to let you sleep as long as you needed to. All of us will need our strength, but especially you,” Eugenio said. He was smiling, and for just a moment Juan Carlos wondered if his old friend wasn’t being sarcastic. But then the moment passed.

“It is only eight-thirty,” Teva said. “We still have an hour and a half before we have to move out. There is plenty of time.”

“The others are still asleep?” Juan Carlos asked, looking over his shoulder.

Teva nodded.

“Good. We will let them sleep for another half-hour,” Juan Carlos said, somewhat mollified. At least he hadn’t been the last to find out that this would be the night of action. He took a deep drag on the cigarette, then sipped at the coffee.

There were seven of them here, including Juan Carlos, Teva, and Eugenio, and seven aboard the river boat that would at this moment be heading up the Parana toward the Vance-Ehrhardt estate. Two complete cells. Two fighting units, dedicated selflessly to one goal: liberty for Argentines.

Juan Carlos smiled to himself as he thought about the political lectures and jargon. Classrooms and books were one thing, but this now — action in the field — was what it was really all about.

Teva and Eugenio were both looking at him when he glanced up out of his thoughts. He grinned. “It is a good thing we are doing tonight… striking a blow for liberty.”

“The fucking pigs will run in fear when we are done.” Teva spat out the words, her eyes locked suddenly into Juan Carlos’.

He knew the look, and he nodded as he stubbed out the cigarette and put his coffee down.

Without a word he and Teva got to their feet and went back to his tent, where they crawled inside. Juan Carlos zipped the flap.

Teva was breathing hard. Her nostrils flared as she pulled off her fatigue jacket and then her olive-drab T-shirt, exposing her small, firm breasts.

“Hurry, Juan,” she said urgently as he began tearing off his clothing. “Jesus and Mary, I need you. Now!”

When they were both nude, they fell into each other’s arms on the sleeping bag, and she went crazy, kissing him all over his body, taking him in her mouth, running her tongue around his testicles until he was almost ready to come.

He pushed her over on her back, and bit hard on her breasts as she held his head between her hands, and then he was inside her, penetrating deeper than ever before, her legs up very high, her knees up under his armpits.

He reached under her and grabbed her buttocks, pulling them up to meet his thrusts; faster and harder until her body went rigid, and she let out a stifled scream at the same moment he came, the pleasure coursing through him in waves that seemed as if they’d never end.

When they were finished, they lay in each other’s arms, sharing a cigarette. Their coupling had always been harsh and very quick, but afterward they would be tender with each other.

“Juan,” she said, “do you ever think about dying?”

He looked at her. “All the time,” he said softly. “I know that I won’t live to be an old man and have grandchildren and sit in the sun at the park.”

“That doesn’t really bother me,” she said after a moment or two of reflection, “even though I know it is probably true.” She raised herself on one elbow, her breasts rising and falling as she breathed. “But if something should happen to either or both of us tonight, I want you to know that I love you.”

Juan Carlos smiled. “Nothing will happen to us, Teva, not tonight. But when it does, I want you to know that I love you, too.”

“Thank you,” she said, lying back.

They headed out at 10:00 P.M. sharp, after dismantling the tents and heaters, and burying them away from the camp in the forest. They would no longer be needing them.

Each of them carried an Israeli Uzi submachine gun with its folding stock and several extra forty-round clips of ammunition, plus four F31 American fragmentation grenades. They were dressed in British commando camouflage fatigues and wore American jungle-combat boots.

Juan Carlos, carrying the two-channel radio the little man had supplied them, took the lead. Within fifteen minutes they had settled into a quiet, distance-consuming pace, roughly parallel to and a mile up from the river.

As they marched, he reviewed each step of their penetration of the Vance-Ehrhardt estate. At their second meeting, the little man had produced a scale model of the estate, pointing out the routes in and out, Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt’s private quarters, and the relationship of the main house to the other buildings, the river, and the airstrip to the north.

There were armed guards on the grounds and within the main house itself, he had told them, but fourteen trained soldiers, armed with grenades and automatic weapons, would cut through them with little or no trouble.

“The difficulty in this assignment is getting to Vance-Ehrhardt without harming him,” the little man had said. “If he is killed, his value to you as a hostage will of course be ruined.”

“We’re not going to let him live,” Juan Carlos had protested.

“Of course not,” the little man had replied. “But we must get him out alive in order to make the recordings of his pleas for mercy. Afterward, when he has served his purpose, he will be disposed of.”

They had all smiled at such brilliant logic and looked forward to setting their plans into motion. That time had come at last, and Juan Carlos could feel the old combination of fear and pride marching with him.

Around 11:00 P.M., they stopped for their last cigarette and something to eat, as an airliner from Buenos Aires roared far overhead on its way north, probably to Miami.

Before too long now, Juan Carlos thought, he and Teva would be on such an airplane. Only they would be traveling to Libya, to safety, to a heroes’ welcome.

He could almost taste that welcome now, the anticipation was so intense within him. Afterward, after a long vacation, they would receive more training, and they would be given another assignment. Possibly back in Argentina, but possibly in another part of the world.

“You must always remember, Juan Carlos,” his Libyan instructor had told him, “that liberty is not exclusively an Argentine word. It is the international battle cry.”

After this evening, then, he and Teva and possibly Eugenio would be joining the international fraternity of terrorists. The prospect filled Juan Carlos with a huge sense of importance.

“Are we ready?” Eugenio asked at his shoulder, and he looked up, then nodded and got to his feet.

“From this point on there will be absolutely no noise, he said to the group.”No talking, no noise whatsoever. Each of you knows his or her job. The strike begins at one o’clock A.M. By one-thirty, we should be well away, and by three-thirty back to our camp for the rendezvous with the helicopter.”

“Libertad,” Teva said softly after a moment of silence.

“Libertad,” they all repeated, and Juan Carlos headed out, Teva directly behind him, Eugenio bringing up the rear.

It was nearly one in the morning, and although Jorgé Vance-Ehrhardt was tired, he had not been able to sleep all night. For the past hour or so, he had been sitting out on the south veranda, smoking and sipping a light red Portuguese wine.

From behind the house, away from the river, he could hear the horses in the stables snorting from time to time, and in the opposite direction, toward the forest, the occasional night hunting cry of a jungle bird.

Vance-Ehrhardt had many things on his mind this night, chief among them his daughter and her husband. His people at Grainex in New York City had telephoned this afternoon with the disturbing news that Lydia had visited their statistical crop-survey department. They had, of course, told her she would have to get authorization for any inquiries directly from her father, and all evening he had expected her to telephone. But she hadn’t.

The most disturbing aspect of the entire situation was not Lydia’s obvious wish to help her husband in his business by making use of her Vance-Ehrhardt birthright; it was the nature of the information she was seeking. She had asked for Soviet crop projections, especially corn.

Rumors had been flying of a large Soviet grain buy. No one, not even Grainex, had been able to verify the rumors, nor were they able to pinpoint who was doing the buying.

But someone was active — overly active. And Lydia’s visit suggested that it was Newman.

Even thinking about the ingrate raised Vance-Ehrhardt’s blood pressure. Newman had stolen the Vance-Ehrhardt respect, some of its business, and finally Lydia.

He shook his head sadly. The fact of the matter was, he still liked and respected Newman. It was a terrible burden he carried.

He got tiredly to his feet. At the edge of the veranda, he leaned his weight against the marble balustrade and stared out toward the jungle, although he wasn’t really looking at anything in particular. Instead, his mind had turned to another worrisome topic — violence. The explosion at Cargill’s New Orleans facility and the brutal murder of Gérard Louis Dreyfus.

Both the elevator and the man had been vulnerable; both had been needlessly exposed to just that kind of risk. And yet, what kind of sick world was this in which a man and his achievements could not be safe?

Here in Argentina, everyone understood violence. It was a nation of violence, on a continent of violence. But Europe and North America were different. Supposedly more civilized.

Vance-Ehrhardt sighed deeply, then turned back into the house, passing Alberto, one of the outside guards he had put on two days ago.

“Good evening, sir,” the man said, but Vance-Ehrhardt was lost in thought and did not hear him.

Inside, he trudged upstairs to his second-floor bedroom, where he crawled into bed next to his wife, Margarita, who was sound asleep.

The Cargill elevator, the murder of Louis Dreyfus, and now Lydia’s strange inquiries; all those troublesome thoughts intertwined in his mind as he tried for sleep.

Moments later, an explosion shattered the still night air, followed closely by the sound of gunfire. Vance-Ehrhardt, his heart racing, jumped up from the bed, threw on his robe, and got his loaded automatic from the nightstand.

“Jorge?” his wife cried out. “What is it?”

“Stay there,” Vance-Ehrhardt snapped, heading out the door. “No matter what happens, don’t come out of this room.”

Juan Carlos had waited with his people at the edge of the forest until the explosion on the river had come, and seconds later he led them directly across the wide lawn.

They had expected little or no resistance from outside the house, but within the first thirty seconds Eugenio and one of the others had gone down, and the rest of them had taken refuge behind the statues that dotted the lawn.

Without hesitation, the others laid down a heavy line of fire along the front of the house, tossing the fragmentation grenades, which sprayed a huge area with deadly shrapnel. Juan Carlos switched the radio first to Channel A, which was monitored by the waiting helicopter crew, and then to B, which was being monitored by the cell on the river, and shouted the contingency code: “Helpmate one! Helpmate one!”

Within moments the gunfire from the river area intensified. He patiently counted to sixty, then gave the order to move forward.

It was too bad about Eugenio, he thought as he ran. He fired, then ducked behind another marble statue. Run, fire, cover. But they had all understood the risk. Eugenio had taken two hits, one in his chest and one in his face, either of them certainly fatal. But their instructions had been precise: If a comrade goes down, he will be left mercifully dead for the protection of all of us. If he is not dead by enemy gunfire, the unit commander will make sure he is dead. He was glad it had not been necessary to finish the job with Eugenio.

Within three minutes the firing from the river ceased, and as Juan Carlos, his remaining three soldiers, and Teva reached the veranda, the river cell was coming up the path on the run.

“Keep the alternate path open,” Juan Carlos radioed on B. “We’re going in.”

“Roger,” the hand-held radio blared.

They scrambled over the balustrade, crossed the veranda where four of Vance-Ehrhardt’s bodyguards lay dead, and crashed through the French doors.

Two men on the stairs leading to the second floor opened fire; Juan Carlos and Teva returned it. The two men slammed up against the banister, one of them going over it and hitting the parquet floor with a dull thud, the other slumping down, then tumbling down the stairs.

One of Juan Carlos’ men had gone down, and without hesitation he turned and fired a short burst into his head.

“Teva and I will go up for Vance-Ehrhardt,” he said to his remaining two soldiers. “Keep this exit open, no matter what!”

Teva started up the stairs. Vance-Ehrhardt appeared in the upper corridor, and he raised his automatic and fired two shots. The first went wide, but the second hit her in the right shoulder, just below her collarbone.

She let out a small cry and fell back against the banister. Juan Carlos, halfway up the stairs, raised his submachine gun to fire. But he hesitated as Vance-Ehrhardt stepped back, seemingly having trouble with his gun.

Juan Carlos leaped the rest of the way up the stairs and was on the older man before he could fire his automatic, knocking the gun from his hand.

“Jorge?” a woman’s voice called from farther down the corridor.

There was gunfire from below.

“Run, Margarita,” Vance-Ehrhardt shouted, but Juan Carlos shoved him aside.

“Out here, woman, or this man dies!”

“Jorge,” the woman screamed.

“Move it! Now!” Juan Carlos shouted, and Vance-Ehrhardt’s wife, in her nightdress, no slippers on her feet, came out into the corridor and into her husband’s arms.

“Downstairs! Now!” Juan Carlos snapped. He was sweating and his heart was hammering out of his chest. He was riding high.

As they started down the steps, Teva was getting to her feet and raising her weapon.

“Are you all right?” Juan Carlos asked.

“I’ll live,” she said weakly.

“Kill her!” one of the men below shouted.

Teva swiveled around and fired two short bursts from her hip, slamming both men backward out the remains of the French doors.

“Bastards,” she spat.

Juan Carlos laughed out loud as they herded Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife the rest of the way downstairs. At the door he stopped and brought out his radio.

“We have our objective. Can we come?”

“We have the path,” the radio blared.

Juan Carlos shoved Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife outside and helped Teva as they went across the veranda, down the steps, and around to the path that led to the airstrip. They were met fifty yards from the house by four men from the other cell, who without a word grabbed Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife, and the eight of them hurried down the path as their helicopter, running without lights, touched down.

They had done it! They had actually done it, despite the heavy resistance. They were home free!

14

It was late, nearly four in the afternoon, when William Bormett left the podium and went back to his seat at the speakers’ table. His audience in the big hall, mostly young agriculture students, was standing and applauding him. Each of the four previous days had seen the same conclusion. The same beginning, for that matter. In the morning he was introduced, and immediately he launched into the story of the Bormett farms, beginning with his grandfather’s immigration to Iowa. By late afternoon he had brought his audience up to date, including his plans to increase his land to corn to twenty thousand acres.

Dr. Nikolai Lubiako, dean of the School of Agricultural Engineering here at the University of Moscow, had gotten up from his seat. As Bormett sat down, he raised his arms for the applause to end.

“An amazing achievement,” his unamplified voice thundered throughout the great hall. “A tribute to the ongoing dedication of a family to agriculture.”

Catherine was seated in the front row, off to one side, and Bormett winked at her. She winked back, although it was obvious that she was very tired.

This trip had been hard on her. The food had not agreed with her system, and their room at the Metropole Hotel downtown, although nice by Soviet standards, was not up to hers when it came to cleanliness, so she really had not been able to relax.

For the first couple of days she had faithfully attended his morning and afternoon lectures, but then, since each day’s talks would be the same, she had gone sightseeing and shopping with their Intourist guide in the mornings. Now, at the end of the fifth day, with several more days stretching ahead of them, it looked as if she wanted to do nothing more than go back to their room, take a nice hot bath (if the water pressure was up tonight), and crawl into bed.

Bormett couldn’t have agreed more. Although his reception here had surprised — and in some ways exhilarated — him, he too was tired.

“This afternoon we have a special surprise for you,” Dr. Lubiako was saying, and Bormett looked up as a tall, blond young man left the audience and joined the dean at the podium.

“Here with us today we have Arkadi Fedorovich Kedrov, a distinguished man whom many of you know as the special agriculture correspondent for Izvestia. Some of you, perhaps, do not know that he is a graduate of our school and has traveled extensively through the American farmbelt states of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.”

The applause was thunderous, and Bormett was confused. He hadn’t been expecting this. At this point Dr. Lubiako usually made a number of nice remarks about him, and then dismissed the session. Afterward, there was half an hour or so of individual questions from students who had remained behind, and then he and Katy returned to their hotel for dinner or attended a reception the university arranged for them.

Two students brought in another podium, which they set up a few feet from the one in front of Dr. Lubiako and Kedrov. Lubiako gestured for Bormett to come up.

Bewildered, he got to his feet amidst more applause, and approached them.

“I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov said, smiling.

“I am sorry, Mr. Bormett, for this last-minute surprise, but Arkadi Fedorovich was kind enough to break away from his very busy day to join us,” Dr. Lubiako said.

“We will keep it very short,” Kedrov said. “No longer than a half-hour. You must be very tired.”

“I am,” Bormett mumbled, still mystified at exactly what was going on. “But we’re keeping what to a half-hour?”

“Oh, please forgive me,” Dr. Lubiako said. “I am sorry. Arkadi Fedorovich here has agreed to an informal debate with you on the hybrid issue.”

“What?” Bormett asked, stepping back.

Kedrov reached out and drew him back. “Dr. Lubiako is a very old friend, but like many academicians he tends to make everything seem more formal than it is. I had hoped that you and I could speak to the young people here about hybrids. Corn, if you’d like. I’m sure that you could say much about the subject.”

“I’m very tired,” Bormett said. There was no way he wanted to get into any kind of debate with these people.

“I understand, sir,” Kedrov said smoothingly. His breath smelled of cloves. “And I promise you I will hold it to no more than thirty minutes.”

“I still don’t see what you want from me.”

Kedrov glanced at Dr. Lubiako. “I’ll just ask you a few questions, and we can discuss the answers.”

“What kind of questions?” Bormett asked.

The audience had sat perfectly quiet throughout all of this, and Bormett felt ill at ease standing here like this.

“Well, I, for one, am worried about hybrids. I think we should move away from them.”

“Impossible,” Bormett said. He was on very familiar territory now. “Without hybrids — at least in corn — our output would drop by seventy percent, and the chance for corn blight and other diseases would be raised dramatically. All modern farming would come to an end.”

Kedrov laughed and slapped Bormett on the shoulder as he turned to face the audience. Dr. Lubiako backed off and took his seat.

“Mr. Bormett has kindly consented to discuss the question of hybrids with us this afternoon,” Kedrov said, and there was more applause. “When I told him I thought we should move away from the trend toward hybrid planting, he disagreed wholeheartedly.”

There was a smattering of applause, and Kedrov turned back to Bormett. “Won’t you share your views with us?”

For just a moment Bormett felt very uncomfortable. But then he looked down at Catherine, who was smiling, and she nodded for him to go ahead. It was a subject that he was familiar with.

“Without hybrid seeds,” he began, “farming would be pushed back fifty years.”

“Could you be more specific, Mr. Bormett?” Kedrov asked.

“As I told you just a moment ago, without hybrids the output of my farm would drop by as much as seventy percent. And unless the weather remained nearly perfect for the entire growing season, which it never does in Iowa, then there would be a very good chance for disaster.”

“But aren’t we inviting disaster by the very use of hybrids?” Kedrov asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“The genetic base of our major food crops the world over is narrowing, Mr. Bormett. Narrowing at a frightening rate. Most Western agriculture — and I’m talking now about the major crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans — is based on less than thirty species.”

“If that is the correct number, those hybrids have been engineered for exactly the soil and climate in which they will be grown. Hybridization is why, in the United States, we will produce four hundred million tons of corn this year.”

“If all goes well, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov rejoined. “If all goes well. Diversity is the first line of defense, however, against diseases and pests. Look at the outbreak of wheat stem rust in 1954, or the southern leaf blight in 1970 in which tens of thousands of acres of corn were destroyed. All because the acres were planted with a single hybrid that happened to be susceptible.”

Bormett had to smile at the simplistic view. “Surely, as an agriculture expert, you understand that there is no such thing as a guaranteed crop. Even the best of hybrids can be attacked. But no more so than a natural variety.”

“And your solution to that problem is…?”

“New and more hardy hybrids.”

“Hybrids, which cannot reproduce themselves, cannot be saved for seed? Hybrids that are totally dependent upon fertilizers and pesticides?”

“Chemically aided farming is a fact of life,” Bormett argued, “hand in hand with genetic engineering. Using these advances, the United States has become the breadbasket of the world.”

The audience was utterly silent.

“Your operation, Mr. Bormett, is dependent totally upon Exxon and Standard Oil and other gigantic conglomerates. Your chemicals are petrochemicals. Your farming is based on oil, our dwindling resource. When the oil runs out, and your hybrids can no longer survive, then what will happen to us all, Mr. Bormett?”

The applause was thunderous once again, and for the next twenty minutes Kedrov delivered a diatribe on the foolishness of Western farmers, calling for the Soviet farmer to lead the way back to diverse, organic farming, ending at last with the remark: “Our only salvation against certain worldwide famine is varietal planting.”

Bormett was given his chance for a final statement, but he was able to do little more than repeat what he had already said about output per acre, and the old saw about corn being knee high by the Fourth of July.

The applause came again, and Dr. Lubiako and Kedrov shook his hand and congratulated him as the students began filing out of the hall.

“You had me nearly speechless when you told us that the United States was the breadbasket of the world, because it’s so true, and I really had no defense,” Kedrov gushed.

“Brilliant, Mr. Bormett, simply brilliant,” Lubiako said, beaming. “One of the very reasons our selection committee chose you for this program.”

“There will be a little gathering at my home outside the city this evening,” Kedrov said. “I would be very pleased if you would be able to join us.”

“I don’t think so,” Bormett said. Catherine had joined them on the platform, and he looked at her.

“Please do, it would be a great honor for us all,” Lubiako said.

“Go ahead, William,” Catherine said.

“I thought you were tired.”

“I am. I’ll stay at the hotel and go to bed early.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“Nonsense,” she insisted. “I need the rest without you prowling around the room all night.”

“Then it’s settled,” Kedrov said smoothly. “I will send a car for you at seven. See you then.” He turned and left the platform.

“A brilliant man,” Dr. Lubiako said. “You’ll enjoy his little gathering tonight. Always very interesting people.”

Bormett insisted on having dinner with his wife before he left, and when he was ready to leave she had already taken her bath, and had gotten into bed.

“Have a good time, William, but don’t be too late.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can get away,” Bormett said, kissing his wife on the forehead. He took the elevator down to the lobby, where a chauffeur and his Intourist guide were waiting for him.

The evening was warm, and the drive north out of the city pleasant. The Intourist guide pointed out various buildings and institutions, including the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition which Dr. Lubiako had promised to show him over the weekend.

Beyond that, the road changed to a narrow blacktopped highway that ran through birch forests in full bloom now, the moonlight shimmering on the white bark, making it seem like an enchanted tunnel.

“Mr. Kedrov is a very influential man,” the Intourist guide, a young, good-looking woman, said to him. From her briefcase she pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two small glasses. She poured him a drink. “The past few days have been a strain on you, I can tell,” she said gently.

Bormett took his drink as she poured herself one, then raised her glass in a toast. “To friendship,” she said.

They clicked glasses, and drank. “I don’t think I can remember your name… I’ve been so busy.”

“I am Raya, and I’m an agriculture student at the university.”

“You are?”

“Yes,” she said earnestly. “I have listened to each of your talks. It must be fascinating, operating such a huge farm back in Iowa.” She laid a hand on his knee.

Bormett looked a little more closely at her, and she smiled, showing perfectly white teeth.

“Forgive me if I seem a bit forward, but I’ve always been attracted to big men like you,” she said.

Bormett didn’t know what the hell to say or do. And yet he found himself enjoying her attention for now. As long as it didn’t get out of hand, he’d go along with her.

He drank the rest of his bourbon and held out his glass for more.

“Now tell me something about yourself,” she said as she poured him another drink.

They drank and chatted for the rest of the hour-long trip out to Kedrov’s country home. By the time they arrived, Raya seemed quite tipsy and Bormett felt light-headed himself.

Inside, soft music was playing, there was food and drink laid out on tables, and a dozen men and women were dancing or sitting around talking.

Kedrov and Lubiako met them at the door, introduced Bormett around to the other guests, whose names and positions he would never remember, and within a half an hour he found himself dancing closely with Raya. She reminded him in many ways of what Catherine had been like as a young woman.

In between dances, Raya would pour Bormett another drink, and quite soon he relaxed, no longer giving a “good goddamn,” as he told her, “how drunk he was, how late it was, or where he was.”

The rest of the evening was sketchy in Bormett’s mind, except that some time after midnight he followed Raya up to one of the bedrooms because she said she needed help with something. Once there, she closed and locked the door, then took off her clothes and lay down on the bed, her legs spread.

“Please, William,” her sensuous voice penetrated the mist in his brain. “Please.”

He undressed, except for his socks, and got into bed with her. She pushed him over on his back and took him in her mouth, and for the next hour they did things together that he had never even thought of doing with Catherine. All of it excellent, all of it extremely pleasurable, and all of it without a thought of his wife.

Bormett woke at eight on Saturday morning back in his own bed at the hotel, with a splitting headache and a very foul taste in his mouth.

Catherine stood over the bed, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand and a rueful smile on her lips. “That must have been quite a party,” she said.

He sat up, his head nearly splitting apart. “Oh, God,” he moaned.

She laughed. “Dr. Lubiako wasn’t in much better condition that you, but he spent at least ten minutes apologizing for bringing you home so late.”

Bormett looked up at her, about to ask what time Dr. Lubiako had brought him back, when he suddenly remembered just what it was he had done, and his heart skipped a beat.

“Well, it serves you right to suffer like this,” Catherine said. She handed him his coffee. “Dr. Lubiako called ten minutes ago and said that, even though there’s no lecture this morning, you’re to come over to the university as soon as you’re ready — and I’d add, able. Someone there would like to meet with you. A farm region commander, or something like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Bormett said.

“Raya is picking me up in the lobby in a couple of minutes. We’re going shopping. We’ll meet you for late lunch back here.”

Bormett’s stomach flipped over at Raya’s name, and he could feel the blood rushing to his ears. Christ, what had he done? What was Lubiako thinking about him now? How could he face Raya, let alone Katy?

Catherine pecked her husband on the cheek and went to the door. “A university car and driver are waiting for you downstairs. Don’t keep them waiting, William,” she said brightly.

For several long minutes, Bormett sat in bed, sipping his coffee and thinking with great shame of what he had done last night. In all his years with Katy he had never been unfaithful. Not once. Until now.

He dragged himself out of bed, showered and dressed, and went downstairs.

At the university, Dr. Lubiako was in his office waiting for him, a bright smile on his face.

“Good morning, my old friend,” he boomed jovially. “How do you feel?”

“Not well,” Bormett said, sitting down. “I would like to talk with you.”

“Of course, and I with you, but at this moment there is someone else here who would very much like to speak with you.”

Bormett started to rise.

“No, no,” Lubiako said, getting to his feet. “You stay here and use my office. I will go fetch our visitor, and you two can have a nice long talk. Afterwards, I believe you will be meeting your wife for lunch.”

Lubiako went out, and a few seconds later a little man with large dark eyes and a swarthy complexion came in, a smile on his face. He was dressed in some kind of uniform, and he carried a manila envelope.

“Good morning, Mr. Bormett,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr….” Bormett trailed off.

“My name is of no importance.” The little man perched on the edge of the desk just a foot away from Bormett. “I think I will be able to offer some assistance to you.”

Bormett had a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. Whatever it was the little man was going to tell him wasn’t going to be pleasant.

“I’ve come to see you this morning because I would like to do a little horse trading with you. I think that is the proper term.” The little man opened the manila envelope and extracted a dozen large glossy photos. He handed them to Bormett, whose heart nearly stopped.

They were pictures of him and Raya in bed. He looked ridiculous in one of the shots; he looked disgusting in some of the others.

Katy could never be allowed to see these. Never in a million years. It would be the end of their marriage. The end of everything. He glanced up. “What do you want?”

“I need a favor, Mr. Bormett. Not a very large favor, and certainly nothing illegal by your own country’s laws. I’m not, as you may fear, trying to recruit you to spy for the Soviet Union. But you can be of some small help to me.”