“For what end?”
The little man stood up. “It is not for you to ask. Can it be done?”
Dybrovik nodded, a new strength seemingly pouring into his veins. He was on his own territory now. He knew what he was doing. “There will of necessity be travel abroad.”
“I understand.”
“A lot of it. This will take time. Months, perhaps.”
“Yes.”
Dybrovik moved around his desk. “Do I report to you on my progress?”
“It will not be necessary.”
“How about the funds? We will need Western currencies.”
“A conduit has been set up for you with a bank in Geneva.”
“My passport?”
“Unlimited external travel.”
The little man smiled again, then started to the door.
“And afterward, comrade?” Dybrovik asked on impulse.
“Afterward, Pasha? There is no afterward, only here and now. And always there will be the question of poor Larissa.” The little man looked directly into Dybrovik’s eyes. “Did you kill her, or did we? Which would the civil police want to believe?” And then he was gone.
The call to Kenneth Newman went out the very next day, but it was a full twenty-four hours later, on June 17, that he got the message. That was due in part to the fact that in the interest of secrecy Dybrovik had initiated the contact through a low-level Exportkhleb clerk as a routine telex to a Newman subsidiary, Abex, Ltd., in New York City. From there it was shuttled to Newman’s main office in Duluth, Minnesota, and finally down to Buenos Aires where Newman was a guest of the Vance-Ehrhardt family. The delay was also due to the fact that no one wanted to pass on any kind of business message to Newman on the day of his wedding. Thus it was only later, after many hours had passed, that Newman became aware that he was being summoned by the Russians. And his reaction then, according to those who knew him well, was understandable. To those who didn’t, it was outrageous.
4
It was a few minutes after 8:00 A.M. on a lovely South American fall Saturday. The Vance-Ehrhardt estate stood at the center of two thousand heavily wooded acres just to the northeast of Buenos Aires along the Rio de la Plata. The house was huge: three stories, with gables and dormers, and bristling with chimneys. It had been copied after the original Vance-Ehrhardt estate of the 1700s in Austria, but was not out of place here. Many Germans, Austrians, Swiss, and even Belgians had immigrated to Argentina over the past hundred years, especially during and after the Second World War. The German-speaking peoples had their own residential areas and styles, their own hospitals, churches, schools, and shopping centers.
The house fronted on a paved road that meandered three-quarters of a mile through the forest to the government highway. On either side of the road were rose gardens, well-tended lawns, fountains, statuary, and innumerable trees of dozens of different species.
To the rear of the house, however, a much shorter section of tended lawn gave way rather abruptly from the pool and patio area to a thick tangle of jungle undergrowth that led down to the river. It was cut through by a wide flagstone path that led, to the right, to the river and boat docks; and to the left, one mile away, to a well-lit paved runway that could handle all but the largest of business jets.
On this morning Kenneth Newman stood at the balcony window of his third floor bedroom, looking toward the airstrip as he drank his first coffee of the day and smoked his first morning cigarette.
He was a large, good-looking man in his early forties, with a broad, honest face, wide blue eyes, and a thick shock of wavy brown hair. “The face that has sealed a thousand deals,” Time Magazine had once called it.
“Eyes that inspire trust, and a personality that requires all who come in contact with the man to open wide, to hold absolutely nothing back,” Newsweek had written.
At this moment he was dressed in a soft velvet robe. His hair was tousled and his eyes still somewhat clouded with sleep, although he had not slept well last night. The same dream that had been plaguing him for weeks had bothered him again. In it he was dressed for the wedding and was walking slowly down the aisle. Lydia waited for him at the altar. Only he knew somehow that the woman behind the veil wasn’t her, and yet he could not resist going to her side and continuing with the ceremony. Each night, at the point where he was supposed to raise her veil and kiss her, the congregation began to hiss and boo and throw things at him, and he awoke in a cold sweat. Some nights he would have the dream several times. And each morning on awakening, he would wonder if it had been a dream at all, or some kind of portent of something disturbing to come.
The distant roar of a Learjet, approaching from the northeast, broke him out of his thoughts, and he looked that way, shielding his eyes against the sun as the plane came in low and very fast for a landing.
It had been like that for the past forty-eight hours. Guests had been arriving from all over the world, some by limousine up from the city, but most by private jet. And yet it was not the festive, happy occasion that it should have been. There was a lot of animosity toward him from the Vance-Ehrhardts, as well as their guests.
Newman smiled, stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the small wrought-iron table at his side, finished his coffee, and went inside to the marble bathroom. He stepped into the shower, and turned on the spray as hard and as hot as he could stand it.
Except for Lydia, he would be friendless at his own wedding. He had been the one to insist they marry here in Argentina. Lydia had wanted simply to get married by a judge somewhere in a civil ceremony, and the hell with her parents. Another in a long string of defiant acts. But he had insisted. And because of his insistence, he had not felt right about inviting any of the people from his business.
It didn’t really matter. Newman was a loner, had been a loner all of his life. His parents had died within months of each other when he was nineteen and in college. He took a couple of years off to work in the wheatfields of Kansas, near his father’s boyhood home, before he went back to school at the Polytechnic in Berne, Switzerland.
His father, who had been a small American name in the oil-tooling industry in France, had given his son two important things. The first was absolute honesty (“Your word is the only thing you cannot lose, so don’t give it away”). The second was an inheritance of slightly less than one million dollars.
Newman had parlayed both into a reputation as a tough but honest grain dealer and a fortune approaching the fifty-million-dollar mark.
For a time, after college, he had worked in his father’s business — which was finally taken over by Arlmant-Genard, S.A., a gigantic French steel, oil, and shipping conglomerate — as a common laborer, and later as an ordinary seaman aboard the A-G fleet, which included grain ships.
It was there he met Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt, through a shipping contract, and a working friendship had resulted. Within a year the friendship had developed into a job for Newman as personal assistant to the great man himself.
From that moment on — it seemed a million years ago to Newman — he had learned the grain business. He had learned about weather, which was vital to grainmen the world over. Sunspot cycles of eleven and twenty-two years, which affected the weather, therefore crops and as a result prices, became second nature to him. Shipping tonnages and contract rate schedules were music to his ears. New hybrids, new planting methods, new tractor designs, elevator construction, and dock workers’ union business became his front-page news. Balance of trade, international currency exchange rates, the gold and silver standards were all important. And finally there were personalities, dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. That was the most important of all.