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.
After he finished reading the article, Newman stared at the photographs. He could feel the fear beginning to work at his gut. Something was going on. Something that connected Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Vance-Ehrhardt with Paul’s death, and in all likelihood with the Soviet corn buy.