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Authors: David Hagberg

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BOOK: Heartland
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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.
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.
In the seven years Newman worked with Vance-Ehrhardt, he learned his lessons well. And his own specialties began to emerge.
Early on, Newman developed the uncanny ability to sense a grain deal in the works. A run on shipping tonnages here; there the emergence of an African leader who understood that his people had to be fed; an adverse weather report in one section of the world, with bumper crops in another—all became signs to Newman that a deal was in the making.
This ability, combined with the backing of the Vance-Ehrhardt conglomerate, allowed him to undercut competitive grain dealers even before they knew what hit them. Corn to Johannesburg at two-ten a bushel? He could turn it into two-fifty. Canadian wheat languishing in the fields? He bought at fifty cents a bushel discount, held for three months, and resold it at a ninety-cent profit when everyone else was screaming for a quarter higher.
Thus he became known as the Marauder.
Then, eight short years ago, Newman had branched off on his own, taking with him not only the expertise Vance-Ehrhardt had taught him, but several of the conglomerate's most lucrative contracts.
For that Jorge Vance-Ehrhardt had never forgiven him. The term Marauder was not used as an endearment in that household, rather as an obscenity.
It didn't matter, though, he kept telling himself. Today was the wedding, and by this evening he and
Lydia would be gone. After a brief honeymoon he would be back at work.
He turned off the shower, dried himself, and went back into this bedroom, tying the belt of his robe.
Lydia was standing there, her back to the hall door. She was clad in a black bikini, a light robe over her shoulders, sandals on her feet. She jumped, a surprised look on her face that turned to a seductive grin.
“What are you doing here?” he said mildly.
“I was getting set to join you in the shower,” she said. Her voice was soft and very pleasant, with the slightest trace of a German accent. She was a tall, willowy woman, with small breasts, a flat stomach, and a small, almost boyish derriere. Her skin was deeply tanned, which accented the long blond hair that cascaded around her shoulders.
“Your mother will have a fit,” Newman said, not moving from the bathroom doorway. He was conscious of his heart beating in his chest. Lydia was a lovely woman.
“Screw it,” she grinned. She undid her bikini top, tossed it and the robe aside, stepped out of her sandals, and slipped off her bikini bottom. Her pubic hair was nothing more than a light tuft of blonde. She came across the room to Newman, put her arms around his neck, and pressed her body against his.
“Hmmm,” she sighed luxuriously. “I've missed you, Kenneth.”
Newman resisted for just a moment, but then he pulled her even closer, and they kissed deeply, her breasts crushed against his chest, her long legs soft against his, and he could feel himself responding despite his determination to do absolutely nothing here that
could be criticized. But he loved her. Despite her faults, which he knew and understood all too well, he loved her.
He had watched her develop and mature during the years he had worked for her father. At first he had called her the snot-nosed kid. But then, one day, he had suddenly seen her in a new light. She was not a kid, snot-nosed or otherwise, but a beautiful woman, though headstrong, petulant, and spoiled. A woman he had fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with. Nothing had happened to change that in the two months since he and Lydia had announced their engagement. Not her family's animosity, not her shenanigans (as her father called her defiant acts), and certainly not any second thoughts on his part. If anything, he had fallen even more deeply in love with her.
If he was a marauder, then she was a pirate. Uncompromisingly selfish, but lovely.
They parted, and he held her at arm's length as they looked into each other's eyes.
“Not now,” he said firmly.
“Don't be a boor, Kenneth,” she said.
He laughed, pulled her closer so that he could kiss her tiny, upturned nose, then spun her around by the shoulders, and slapped her on the bottom.
“Your mother and aunts are probably having fits right now trying to find you. Don't disappoint them. Just this one time.”
She wheeled back to him, her hands on her slim hips. “You son of a bitch,” she shouted.
Newman laughed again. “Hell of a thing to call your groom on your wedding day.”
For just a moment it seemed as if she wouldn't back
down, but suddenly she grinned. “It's one of the many reasons I love you, you know. You're such a bastard, I can't get around you.”
“And you're a spoiled-rotten little bitch. A hell of a relationship we've got ourselves here.”
She laughed as she gathered up her bikini and threw on her robe, but then she turned serious. “You'll rue the day you met me, Kenneth. You do know that, don't you?”
He nodded. “It's one of the reasons I love you. I like living dangerously.”
“I will hurt you.”
“You already have.”
“Bastard,” she said. Someone knocked on the door. She threw it open as her startled father was raising his hand to knock again.
She reached up and pecked him on the cheek. “He's a son of a bitch, Father,” she snapped, turning around to smile at Newman. “But I love him.” And she brushed past her father and was gone.
Vance-Ehrhardt looked after her for a long moment, shook his head, then turned back to Newman. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” Newman said.
Vance-Ehrhardt stepped into the room, softly closed the door, and came across to where Newman was standing. He seemed ill at ease, almost embarrassed.
“I came to offer you money to quit this nonsense.”
“It would have to be quite a sum to tempt me, Jorge,” Newman said angrily. He had always respected the older man's wisdom when it came to business. But his judgment of the people closest to him had always been wanting.
“Five million.”
“Dollars?”
“Of course,” Vance-Ehrhardt said. He was a short, stocky man with thinning white hair, a double chin, jowls, and deep-set, hooded eyes. No one knew his real age, but Newman was sure he was in his late sixties at least.
“You value your daughter highly,” Newman said.
“Don't play games with me, Kenneth,” the older man said, a bit of color coming to his cheeks. “I don't want you as a son-in-law. I don't want you married to Lydia. I don't want you a part of this family.”
“You're forgetting, Jorge, that Lydia will take my name. She becomes a part of my family.”
“You have no family!”
“Does that mean you will deny your own grandchildren?”
Vance-Ehrhardt raised his right hand as if he would strike Newman, but then he lowered it. “Are you saying my daughter is pregnant?”
“No, unfortunately not. But I'll do everything within my power to make sure she is within the next few months, with or without your blessings.”
A range of emotions played across the older man's face, which had turned a mottled red. “Why have you done this to me, Kenneth?” he asked at length. “Why have you singled out my family?”
BOOK: Heartland
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