Perés’ office was on the fifteenth floor, and they were already coming to the twelfth when Lydia hit the button. The elevator lurched to a halt, and slowly the emergency doors came open onto a corridor with office doors on either side.
She jumped off the elevator; a split second later an explosion shattered the silence. The car rattled in the shaft, and then suddenly dropped out of sight, crashing to the bottom. Perés had evidently placed an explosive charge on the elevator cables.
She raced down the corridor to the stairwell, and then up three flights of stairs to the fifteenth floor, where she opened the door a crack and looked out into the wide corridor. No one was in sight. She stepped out and hurried toward Perés’ office, which was off a side corridor to the left. She came around the corner as the large man was turning away from the open elevator doors, where he had been looking down the shaft. She raised her pistol as he started to bring his submachine gun up.
“Don’t!” she shouted.
He stopped, the gun halfway up. “Your husband is not dead,” he said. He was very nervous. She could see that he was sweating.
“But you ordered him killed, didn’t you?” she snapped.
“A lot of people will die for Argentina before it is right.”
“Why do the Russians want my husband dead, Perés? He has been working with them.”
“The Russians? How would I know that…”
“You’ve been seen with them, goddamn it! Don’t lie to me or I will kill you this instant.” She raised her gun a little higher.
Perés backed up a step. “It is a lie.”
“It’s not a lie,” Lydia said, advancing.
“You have to believe me. I’m not working with them. Please,” he pleaded.
Lydia said nothing.
“Look… the Russians ordered the kidnapping of your parents so that your husband’s deal with them would go through unhindered.”
“What?” Lydia cried.
“Yes, it’s true. We caught one of them who had been left for dead at your parents’ mansion. One of the terrorists. We gave him drugs. He told us everything.”
“Then you were involved with my parents’ kidnapping too!”
“No,” Perés shouted, backing up another step. He was very close to the open elevator shaft.
“Why, you dirty bastard? Why kidnap my parents, and then try to kill my husband? Why both? What are you trying to do?”
“Ask Belgrano. He knows everything.”
“Belgrano…” Lydia started, but then it hit her in a blinding flash. Jesus. Belgrano and Perés had been working together to take over Vance-Ehrhardt when the revolution came. They had used the Russians, but then doublecrossed them. All the killing would not stop. Her parents were dead, and they meant to finish by killing Kenneth and then her.
“Bastard!” she yelled. She pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped, but the shell didn’t fire.
Perés laughed and started to bring his weapon up. Without hesitation, Lydia leaped at the man. Only in the last instant did he realize what was about to happen, and he fired wildly, the shots ricocheting off the floor, as Lydia slammed into his chest with every ounce of her strength. Perés was driven backward, through the open elevator doors. Lydia tried to jump back, but he reached out and grabbed her arm. She could feel the bottom going out from under her as she tumbled into the shaft with him.
“Kenneth,” she cried, “Kenneth,” over and over, as she and Perés fell to the bottom.
Colonel Vadim Leonid Turalin stood at the third-floor window of the Lubyanka prison looking down at the preparations in the courtyard. He wore a pair of heavy gray woolen trousers and an open-necked cotton shirt. He shivered. It looked cold outside. A thin drizzle fell from a leaden sky, and the tall lights on the walls threw long shafts of yellow that glinted off the wet slickers of the men standing around the canvas-covered truck.
Actually it was old fashioned and somewhat melodramatic, he thought, taking a deep drag of his cigarette. If they had given him a choice, he certainly would have put a pistol to his own head and accomplished the task with a lot less fuss.
He sighed deeply.
The fool Dybrovik had been the key to his own undoing. Dybrovik had known what he was doing in the grain business, and, surprisingly, he had handled himself brilliantly, in the end, with the bankers of Geneva. All the money — all the Soviet money — had been neatly transferred into a numbered account in Turalin’s name. The fool had made it look as if Turalin were stealing the money. And the Internal Affairs Directorate had believed it.
It had all come down to a matter of control, Turalin thought. He had made a tactical error with Dybrovik’s wife. Perhaps it would have been better to have controlled the nagging woman, rather than killing her. But at the time it seemed to be clear. The control of Dybrovik had been keyed to his wife, with whom he had a somewhat complex relationship of love and hate. She had been his wife as well as his domineering mother. And he had deeply resented her absolute control over him, while at the same time finding comfort in it.
Again Turalin sighed deeply. Could have beens. But it didn’t really matter. He had won after all. The American corn crop was ruined, the Soviet wheat and corn crops mammoth. It was all going to work.
He turned away from the window as a key grated in the lock. The heavy steel door opened and Brezhnev’s aide, Anatoli Andreyevich Shumayev, stooped as he came in, a sad expression on his face. He closed the door behind him, and Turalin could hear the guard turning the lock again.
“Good morning, Vadim Leonid,” the large man said. He looked around the small cell, then pulled a wooden chair away from the table and sat down. He lit himself a cigarette, taking his time about it.
“You have come to gloat, comrade?” Turalin asked. He really didn’t care. The man was an incredible fool. Fortunately, the Soviet Union would survive despite him and his kind.
Shumayev shook his head. “No, my friend, merely to pick up the pieces. We have to know where we stand, you know. Policy and all that. Brezhnev meets with the American President in a couple of weeks. And he is very angry. He thought that since you and I had an understanding, perhaps I could talk some sense into you.”
Turalin had to laugh at the pompous fool. And yet Shumayev was sitting there, and he, Turalin, was waiting here to be escorted outside in the rain, to be stood up against the wall and shot to death.
“They called you ‘the little man,’” Shumayev said.
Turalin raised his right eyebrow. “You’ve seen the intercepts, listened to the tapes.”
Shumayev nodded. “We’ve seen it all.”
“Then what do you want with me?”
Shumayev looked disdainfully around the room. “I personally don’t want a thing from you — you disgusting little man—but Comrade Secretary would like an explanation.”
They were locked in here. Turalin had heard the key. It would take the guards several long seconds to make it in, even if they were watching, or even if they were alerted immediately. A lot of damage could be done in that time.
But he held himself in check. Just for a minute or two more.
“What have you to offer me, you disgusting obese fool? My life?”
Shumayev stiffened. Turalin had heard that he was sensitive about his weight.
“Let’s just say, a more perfect aim by your executioners, to eliminate any suffering.”
Turalin laughed. “And in return, what do you want? Specifically.”
“Comrade Party Secretary tells me that there were three operational phases to your scheme. The first was a surplus of grain. Our farmers, I am told, will provide that, mostly in wheat. The second was a surplus of Western currencies. From what I have learned, you managed somehow to amass more than one billion American dollars. In itself quite a feat. And third, you wanted to manipulate the world market for vast personal gain.”