Chris obliged as best he could, taking almost twenty minutes from beginning to end, almost laughing a few times at the incredibility of his story.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” he asked at the end.
“Some,” Felderberg replied. “Enough. I have no knowledge of these Spanish-speaking killers of yours but the others pulling the strings behind the scenes, the ones your friend calls ‘animals,’ they are what Lubeck came to see me about.”
“How did he get to you?”
“Through Peale, interestingly. He and Lubeck had worked together a few times before Peale came to work for me. He had met with that Colombian diplomat who tried to kill you and the meeting had raised certain questions he felt I could answer.”
“And could you?”
“Somewhat.” Felderberg leaned forward, interlaced his fingers tightly over the table. “The diplomat was his country’s delegate to the World Hunger Conference. When he learned that Lubeck was running a routine security check, he contacted him with the claim that someone powerful was plotting to sabotage the conference … and that same someone had by some shrewd manipulation become the virtual owner of Colombia.”
“An entire country?”
“Why are you so surprised, Mr. Locke? What else is a country besides land? And land can be bought in virtually any quantities for the right price. You think it’s any different in your country? See where Arab money is going these days. Land is by far the greatest investment, the only one guaranteed never to depreciate or be affected adversely by inflation or recession.”
“But Alvaradejo must have put Lubeck on to something far greater than clever investments.”
“Most certainly. What I said about some powerful force becoming the virtual owner of Colombia is a bit misleading, Mr. Locke. The force is only interested in great chunks of arable land, suitable for farming if not ideal. This may amount to only twenty to twenty-five percent, but much of the rest is arid. Control that twenty-five percent and you control the country.”
“Why?”
“Because all development, all industry, and all wealth will be centered there.”
Locke nodded. “And Alvaradejo sent Lubeck to you because you were the broker who sealed all the Colombian land deals for this … unknown group.”
“Yes,” Felderberg admitted. “But it wasn’t just Colombia. Every arable nation in South America has been affected. The pattern is always the same. Exact instructions are provided as to how to resettle massive funds stretching into the billions, subdivide and spread them out to make it impossible for anyone to realize that one party was behind it all. It is the kind of work I have done for twenty years, Mr. Locke, but I’ve never seen anything that even approaches the scale of this before.”
A soft knock came on the door.
“The waiter,” Felderberg told Locke. Then, in the direction of the door: “Yes?”
It opened and Peale escorted a man in white shirt and black bow tie inside.
“Some wine before our meal, Mr. Locke?”
“Thank you.”
Felderberg ordered a certain year and vintage, which the waiter jotted down on a pad before leaving. The door sealed shut again.
Locke felt a tremor in his stomach. The scope of what he was facing was finally taking shape.
“And the common denominator of all the countries and all the deals you completed was arable land,” he concluded.
“Much of it was still undeveloped, you understand. South American nations are seldom very good at utilizing their resources. But the potential for farming the lands was there. Hundreds of soil analyses from hundreds of regions in perhaps a dozen countries crossed my desk — another common denominator.”
“So your client is buying up farmland.”
“Yes.” Felderberg regarded him closely. “Obviously that interests you.”
“Charney thought food was the key to this somehow. Lubeck too.”
Felderberg nodded, leaning back. “And it all started with Alvaradejo. The Colombian contacted Lubeck and sent him to me.”
“Because he feared someone was buying up his country?”
“Not exactly,” Felderberg said. “Because he feared someone was going to destroy it.”
Chapter 13
“Destroy?” Felderberg’s response had hit Locke like a swift kick to the gut.
“Not physically, you understand. Alvaradejo’s fears were rooted in the belief my client was turning his country’s people into slaves, forcing them off land they believed they owned and leaving them destitute.”
“I told you about San Sebastian,” Locke said. “It fits.”
“What fits?” Felderberg demanded. “I apologize for my impertinence, but in my position control of the situation is everything and in this case I’ve lost mine. You described a massacre to me, hundreds of people murdered for no reason.”
“Unless they saw something, knew something.”
“Which your friend Lubeck also stumbled upon….”
“The fields,” Chris said. “It all comes back to his rantings about something in the fields. The townspeople were witnesses to it and then Lubeck became one too.”
“But what did he see? What did the townspeople know?”
“Your client was doing something on that land. Testing a new weapon, something like that.”
“Which was then burned in a fire?”
“The fire covered the effects, that’s all.”
Felderberg shook his head. “No, the key is land and by connection food.”
“An entire town wasn’t massacred over food.”
“Unless, Mr. Locke, something about that town made it a microcosm of a much greater picture.”
“The rest of South America …”
“At least those portions my client had purchased.”
Locke hesitated. “Did Lubeck come to any of these conclusions?”
“No. He had only shadows when I saw him. San Sebastian had not yet occurred and that, I’m certain, is somehow the key.”
“Along with food.” Locke ran his hands over his face. “But where does food tie in? Where does its importance lie for your client?”
Felderberg looked at him with mild shock. “Fifty percent of the world’s population goes to bed hungry every night and many, many of these suffer from true famine. A country as powerful as the Soviet Union can bargain with the United States to keep a sufficient grain supply flowing. When oil was the crisis, engineers simply built cars that used up less. When food reaches such a crisis, similar steps cannot be taken with the stomachs of man.”
“You said ‘when,’ not if.”
“Because the crisis is inevitable. A few bad Soviet harvests back to back, wars in other agricultural-producing nations, a change in the political climate of your own country — all or any of these could lead to a crisis like none the world has ever seen, ultimately bringing on a global revolution of catastrophic consequences.”
“I fail to see how—”
“Of course you fail to see!” Felderberg roared, jowls flushed with red. “Everyone fails to see, that is the problem. You think plutonium is the world’s most valued resource, or gold, or diamonds, or even oil? Hardly. Food is by far the most crucial commodity, and yet it is subject more than any other to gross mismanagement and unconscionably bad planning. Your own country is ruining its own topsoil by rushing crops in and harvesting them too fast. It takes nature anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years to create one inch of top soil. But in America’s frenzy to squeeze more food from the land, she is destroying on average an inch of topsoil every forty-five years. It is no wonder my client may well be planning for the crisis to come.”
“By buying up unused farmland in order to become an agricultural power….”