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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Heartland
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“Your bill has been paid, monsieur. Shall I tell your friends you will be down soon?”
“Tell them nothing,” Riemé said, and he closed the door. He remained standing there for a long moment, until he heard the concierge leave. Then he turned and threw his few things in his suitcase, draped his jacket over his gun hand, and left the room.
He took the back stairs down, emerged into the alley, and hurried around to the street. There he saw a Citroën sedan parked at the curb, the driver behind the
wheel, another man standing in the hotel doorway.
Riemé crossed the street at the corner, walked down the block until he was even with the car, then crossed directly to the driver and placed the barrel of his gun against the man's temple.
“Who has sent you?”
The driver looked up, his eyes bulging. “It is time by the clocktower,” he squeaked.
“Where am I to go?”
“Not Moscow,” the driver said. “Your plans have been changed since Paris.”
The man by the hotel door glanced over. Seeing that something was wrong, he stepped aside and reached in his jacket.
“Tell your partner you are both dead if he pulls out his gun.”
“No, Claude! It is all right! It is he,” the driver called over. There was a lot of traffic, but no one else was paying them any attention.
Riemé nodded, and slowly the other man relaxed and took his hand away from his coat. He came over to the car.
“You gave me a fucking scare, you son of a bitch,” Claude said.
Riemé cocked the hammer of his automatic and pointed it at the man. “Monsieur?”
The man's eyes widened, and he stepped back. “Oh, Christ, pardon me. Didn't mean a thing,
mon brave
.”
Riemé said nothing.
“We have a new assignment for you. Sealed instructions. We're to get you to the airport. You are going to Buenos Aires. There is something to be cleaned up there.”
Maria Soleres had not come at eight with their supper, and by ten-thirty Juan Carlos was very hungry. He had put Teva out of her misery, and they had planned on killing the Vance-Ehrhardts in any event, so the operation was still functional as far as he was concerned. But he could not remain here. Not like this, without food. Even the little man could not expect that from him.
Wearily Juan Carlos dragged himself over to the pile of weapons in front of the couch, picking up one of the Uzi submachine guns and two spare clips of ammunition, which he stuffed in his pockets.
If need be, he told himself, he would hijack an airplane and force the crew to take him to Libya. Colonel Qaddafi would receive him. He would be a hero of the people.
At the door he stopped to listen, but there was no sound from outside, and after a minute he opened the door.
The apartment was on the fourth floor, the landlady's apartment on the first. There was a stairwell in the middle of the building.
He moved silently to the railing and looked over, pulling back immediately. There was someone below. On the first floor.
Again he looked over the railing, and this time he waited long enough to see that it was Maria Soleres and a dark-haired man. Talking.
Quickly, his heart hammering, Juan Carlos started down the stairs, moving on the balls of his feet so that he would make absolutely no noise.
She had not come with their dinner. Was she now speaking to the police? Telling them about the people in the apartment on the fourth floor?
At the second-floor landing, Juan Carlos moved a little closer to the rail. He could hear the words now.
“ … come to help them,” the man was saying. He spoke with a French accent.
“They are all dead up there, I think,” Maria Soleres said. “I saw through the skylight. The woman is dead in the tub, and the other two are dead in the bed.”
“What about Juan Carlos? Is he dead as well?”
“He was lying on the floor in the living room without clothes. He was dead, I think.”
“Why didn't you go in?”
“I want no further part in this. You may go up and take them away. I want no further part in it.”
“I will need your help.”
“No,” Maria Soleres said sharply. “I will call the police, if need be.”
Juan Carlos crept farther down the stairs, until he was at a spot where the stairs turned a corner, around which he would be in their view.
“No …” Maria Soleres started to say, but her voice was choked off, and sounds of struggle came up the stairs.
It served her right, Juan Carlos thought as he stepped around the corner.
The dark-haired man with the French accent looked up from the inert form of Maria Soleres, raised his gun, and fired, hitting Juan Carlos in the throat and driving him back against the wall.
Juan Carlos raised his Uzi as the Frenchman fired again, and his finger jerked on the trigger. Just before
everything went dark, he saw that the Frenchman was falling backward, several red holes in his chest and stomach.
It was hot in Atlanta when Newman stepped off the plane and crossed the tarmac to the Ford LTD waiting in front of the terminal. Janice Wilcox, Paul's widowed daughter, was waiting by the car.
She was a tall woman, with a pleasant face that was somewhat reminiscent of her father's, and a trim, almost athletic body. Paul had recently bragged that his daughter, at thirty, looked more like a girl of eighteen. She wore a black dress, a small black hat, and a dark veil across her face.
“I'm sorry, Janice,” Newman said as he reached her.
She lifted her veil, and he kissed her on the cheek. “I'm glad you could come, Kenneth. I wanted to talk with you before we met the others.”
“Has there been any trouble with the arrangements, anything I can help with?”
She shook her head. “I want to know what happened there, Kenneth,” Janice said without preamble as they drove off. She was a very strong woman. A junior executive with one of the insurance companies here in Atlanta. She wasn't giving way to hysterics now.
“There was an explosion, which was probably meant for me. Paul just happened to be there,” Newman said.
“What were you two working on?”
“I can't say, Janice.”
She turned toward him and lifted her veil. “Is that what you told the police?”
“Yes. But I also told them that I think I know who killed him, and why.”
Janice's complexion was pale and her eyes moist. Her lower lip was quivering at last. “I'm listening,” she said after a slight hesitation.
“It has to do with Lydia, my wife.”
“The Vance-Ehrhardt Company had him killed?”
“No,” Newman said. “While I was down there I had a run-in with the chief of the Buenos Aires police, Reynaldo Perés. Lydia warned me twice that he wanted to see me dead. Wanted to put some of the blame for her parents' kidnapping on me.”
“That's insanity. Isn't it?”
Newman nodded. “I had just hung up from talking with her—she called to warn me that I would be assassinated—when the bomb went off.”
“My father was devoted to you. He spoke often of his work. How much he admired you. Said you were a man of principles. He told me once that you were the most honest man he had ever met. I told him to go out on his own. Start his own business. He had plenty of money. He had the knowledge, and certainly the
talent. He could have made it. But he told me that he'd never leave you so long as you wanted him as a business associate.”
Newman was touched. He and Paul had become close friends over the years. Yet he had never known just how devoted Saratt had been. His death had been a terrible blow, made even worse by what Janice was telling him.
He reached out and touched her hand, but she jerked away as if she had been burned.
“The service is at two,” she said. “Afterward some friends and relatives will be coming to my house. But your presence isn't necessary. I'm sure you have a lot of work to attend to. We don't want to take up much of your time.” She didn't have much control left.
“Stop it, Janice,” Newman said gently.
She was finally crying.
“I loved him too. He was a friend.”
“Catch his murderers, Kenneth. Catch the bastards and string them up,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” Newman said. But it would not be that easy. They'd probably never catch the real murderer, Perés, and it wasn't likely they'd catch his henchmen who had actually placed the bomb. He, or they, were probably already back in Buenos Aires.
 
Paul's remains—what the coroner had been able to reassemble—had been sent back to Atlanta for cremation. The minister who gave the sermon was evidently an old friend of the family, because he spoke in a choked voice of Paul's childhood. There were a lot of people at the service, only a few of whom Newman recognized. Most were relatives who had visited Paul in Duluth at one time or another over the past few years.
He had been a popular man. Well liked, well respected. There were a lot of questions for Newman, who had been with him when he was killed.
“Have they caught the bastards, yet?” was the most common.
Afterwards, Newman had ridden to the house with an uncle from Buffalo who hadn't said a word, and who refused to be drawn into a conversation.
Janice seemed genuinely pleased that Newman had come to the house, and she personally fixed him a drink and made sure he had something to eat.
“Will you be staying in Atlanta tonight?” she asked him.
“I haven't decided yet,” he said. He had been thinking about Dybrovik and the Russian deal. Paul had not had the chance to set up a meeting away from Geneva before he was killed. It was going to have to be somewhere on neutral territory … such as Athens, they had decided. He felt guilty thinking about it now.
“I'd like you to stay, Kenneth. We could have the day together tomorrow. There's a lot I'd like to ask you about my father.”
“I'd love to, but I just don't know. I'll have to call my office.”
She stared at him for a long moment. The house was filled with people, most of them standing around in little groups. “You can use the phone in the study,” she said. “First door on the right, upstairs.”
Newman went upstairs to her study, which had been made over from one of the smaller bedrooms. Its windows were covered in heavy, rich drapes. There was a small, leather-topped desk and a couple of matching file cabinets. The walls were lined with books. But there
were no bits and pieces of memorabilia. The study was neutral.
He sat down behind the desk, picked up the telephone, and had the operator place a person-to-person call to Sam Lucas, the manager of Abex, Ltd., in New York.
Lucas seemed excited. “Am I ever glad you called, Mr. Newman. I was getting set to call down there, and I really didn't want to do that.”
“What have you got, Sam?”
“We just received a telex from Dybrovik himself. Wants a meeting pronto.”
“In Geneva?”
“No, that's the odd part. The telex originated in Moscow, and that's where he wants the meet. Immediately. Says your visa will be handled through their embassy in Washington.”
“Impossible,” Newman said without hesitation. “It'd blow everything wide open. I don't know what the hell he's thinking about.”
“He says the meeting is ‘most important.' His words.”
“I'll meet with him, but not in Moscow. Telex him we'll meet in twenty-four hours in Athens. At the Grand Bretagne. He knows the hotel. Make the arrangements there for us yourself. Tell them we'll require adjoining suites, and absolute confidentiality.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Sam, I want you to get a hold of Felix and tell him what's going on. He's going to have to cover for me in Duluth. He should be able to handle it with no problems.”
“I talked with him this morning. Secretary Lundgren
wants to talk to you. Said it was urgent.”
“Tell Felix to stall him. Tell him I went to Buenos Aires or something. Anything. I'll talk to him when I get back from Athens.”
“Will you be needing any backup?”
“I'll keep in touch, Sam. It's up to you and Felix to keep things running while I'm gone.”
“How's everyone holding up down there?”
“About as well as you could expect. Janice is all right.”
“Give her my sympathies, if you would.”
“Sure,” Newman said, and Lucas hung up. Newman was just taking the phone away from his ear when he heard a second click over the line. He left the receiver on the desk, and rushed downstairs. Janice was just moving away from the hall telephone. She looked up and their eyes met. No one else noticed that anything was going on.
“Don't worry,” she said. “I won't say anything to anyone.” She had a defiant expression.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I wanted to know what's going on, and you wouldn't tell me. I'm not going to let my father's murder slip by. I lost my mother when I was five, and my husband two years ago. I've been through this before.”
“If and when I find out anything, Janice—anything at all—you will be the first to know. I promise you that. But my conversation just now had nothing to do with your father's death.”
“Do the authorities know that you're dealing with the Russians?”
“It has nothing to do with your father's death.”
“I want to believe you, Kenneth. God, if you only knew how I want to believe you.”
“You won't be helping matters by—”
She cut him off. “I told you I wouldn't discuss this with anyone, and I won't.”
He just looked at her.
“But I'm going to hold you to your promise. When you find out who murdered my father, you will tell me.”
“I will.”
She nodded sadly.
He needed Paul now, he thought, more than he ever had. He needed to bounce his concerns off someone whom he could trust entirely. At this moment there was no one on this earth who fit that description. No one.
 
Newman slept on the company aircraft; his crew timed their flight so they arrived at Athens a few minutes after noon on Saturday. The telex had been sent to Exportkhleb and acknowledged within two hours. Dybrovik would be there, no later than eight this evening.
He had a light lunch and half a bottle of wine by himself at the top Grille Room of the hotel, and then went up to inspect the rooms. They were on the top floor at the front of the hotel, overlooking Syntagma Square. It was the tourist season, but tourists rarely took suites, so only one other suite in that wing of the top floor was booked. They would have privacy.
Later in the afternoon he went for a walk around the square to put his thoughts in order. So much had happened to him in the past couple of months that it was difficult for him to put it in perspective. He had gained
a wife, and then lost her. He had lost his best friend. There had been killings and kidnappings, and the Cargill elevator explosion. And overriding all of that was the Russian corn buy. So mammoth a deal that it went beyond surprise or awe. The numbers were so large as to seem unreal.
Paul was dead, and Lydia was gone from him. But thinking about them sharpened his desperate need to be with someone, so he put them out of his mind, thinking instead about Dybrovik.
The man was an enigma. Paul would have said he was a con artist, and Lydia wouldn't trust him. They'd agree that he was hiding something. Each time Newman had met with the man, he seemed just a little more desperate than the last time. Something was eating at him, and it had begun to eat at Newman.
Yet as far as the buy was concerned, everything was turning out exactly the way Dybrovik had promised it would. The Russians were taking the grain. They were providing the hard currencies with which to purchase more.
It was a straightforward corn buy. Except that the money was already in the hundreds of millions of dollars and would rise well above the two-billion mark, and the corn amounted to one-fourth the entire U.S. output.
He was torn. The Russians truly needed the grain. The Russians were playing some kind of market manipulation. The Russians were gathering a stockpile of food for a siege.
He had come around the square, opposite his hotel, where outside the American Express Building he bought a
Wall Street Journal
from the news vendor. He got a
table at the sidewalk cafe, Papaspirou, and ordered coffee and a cognac.
It was six o'clock—two hours before Dybrovik was scheduled to show up. Newman was slightly hungry, but he decided against eating anything now. He wanted to be as sharp as he possibly could be for their meeting. There would be plenty of time to eat later.
As he sat sipping his coffee and cognac he unfolded the newspaper. There on the front page were photographs of Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife, Margarita, under the headlines:
INTERNATIONAL GRAIN TRADER AND WIFE DEAD
 
Found Strangled In Buenos Aires
Montonero Kidnap-Murder Plot
Blossoming Into Revolution
He was stunned. Lydia had expected this. She had felt all along that her parents would never be returned alive. He, on the other hand, had thought there was a very good chance that they would come out of it.
According to the story, Vance-Ehrhardt officials, who declined to be named, had agreed to the kidnappers' demands of one hundred million dollars in gold for themselves and for food and medicine for the peasants. But gunfire had been reported in a slum area of Buenos Aires, and when police investigated they found two gunmen and the landlady dead on the first floor, and upstairs the bodies of another terrorist and Jorge and Margarita Vance-Ehrhardt.

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