Privateers (13 page)

“You have made a fool of me,” Hernandez said in an angry whisper.

“I had no intention of doing that. Your daughter came to me and asked for a ride. …”

“You knew that I did not want her to leave Caracas!”

Dan put on a careless grin. “All I knew was that a lovely young child asked me for a favor. Your own daughter. How could I refuse? I didn’t ask her why. I’m not interested in your family disagreements.”

“You did not have to ask her. You knew!”

Dan shrugged.

“You slept with her, didn’t you?”

The smile faded. “A gentleman does not discuss such matters, not even with the lady’s father.”

“You did! Don’t deny it!”

“Are you afraid that the Russian won’t accept her?” Dan asked. “From the information I’ve heard, that won’t matter to him. He’s quite a liberal fellow, for a Russian.”

Hernandez’s eyes narrowed. “It is a mistake, Senor Hamilton, to make an enemy of me.”

“I certainly agree,” Dan said smoothly. “I don’t want to be your enemy. I’m not your enemy. Your daughter is a very headstrong, willful young lady. If I had refused her request, who knows what she might have done? It would have been easy enough for her to take her car and drive to Georgetown, in Guyana. Or rent a boat at La Guaira and go to Trinidad. Who knows what would have happened to her?”

“You-”

“This way,” Dan continued, “she was safe from strangers, and stayed in the home of a highly respected and honorable family. She flew in a commercial airliner to Rome, where she is registered in a first-class hotel. With her duenna.”

“So I should thank you, is that it?” Hemandez’s face showed bitter scorn.

“No. I should apologize to you. I realize that now.”

The Venezuelan huffed disdainfully.

“To tell the truth,” Dan admitted, “I never even thought of the distress this escapade might cause you. Your daughter told me that she wanted to get away from the Russian, and the idea of spitting in his eye was too much for me to resist.”

Closing his eyes as if struggling to maintain his self-control, Hernandez said, “You have placed me in an impossible situation.”

“You know your daughter better than I. Wouldn’t she have gone anyway?”

“Nevertheless, the fact is that she went with you. Both Comrade Malik and I hold you responsible.”

Dan leaned back in his desk chair and ran a finger across his chin. “I suppose you’re right. If Malik is that eager for her, though, he’ll fly out to Rome and surprise her there. Might do him some good.”

“He must return to Moscow today.”

“He could stop off at Rome. That’s what I’d do, if I were in his place. That’s what you would do, wouldn’t you?”

Despite himself, Hernandez almost smiled.

“But I do feel responsible,” Dan admitted. “If your daughter is incurring expenses that are a burden to you, I would be happy to help you. …”

“That will not be necessary,” Hernandez replied stiffly.

Dan hunched forward, leaning one arm on the desk, and the older man leaned toward him slightly without consciously realizing that he was unbending a little.

“Rafael,” Dan said earnestly, “I am truly sorry that this matter has come between us. We should not be enemies. That can bring nothing but pain to both of us.”

“What you did was not the act of a friend.”

“It was unthinking, I agree. But I did not intend to hurt you. We have too much in common; the great goals that we share should not be endangered by this misunderstanding.”

“She is my only daughter.”

“She has not been compromised,” Dan insisted. “And it would be a shame to allow this Russian to drive a wedge between us. That could do nothing but damage our chances to make Venezuela the most important nation in space industry.”

Some of the stiffness seemed to go out of Hemandez’s back.

“The Russians would like nothing better than to make the two of us enemies,” Dan went on. “That would destroy the Venezuelan space program. And that would mean the end of your dream.”

Hernandez said nothing.

Swiveling slightly away from him, Dan pointed toward the view through his window. “The rainstorm wreaked havoc with the squatters’ shacks. You can see where they’ve been washed away.”

“More than a hundred were killed,” Hernandez said.

“I would like to donate some money to help them.” Dan said, turning back to face the older man again. “Perhaps a hundred thousand bolivars?”

Hemandez’s mud-brown eyes had lost their angry spark. Now they went flat as he made a quick mental calculation.

“A hundred thousand would hardly make a dent in the problem. A quarter of a million would be necessary, at least.”

Dan hesitated just long enough to let him feel that he was getting the better of the deal. “A quarter of a million.” He pursed his lips, scratched his chin, swung the chair around toward the window again and then back to face the minister.

“All right,” Dan said at last. “A quarter of a million it is.”

Hernandez nodded once in silent acknowledgment of Dan’s generosity. They spoke for a few minutes more, but they both knew that the words were merely formalities now. Dan had made the best of a bad situation. It had cost a quarter million bolivars, approximately half of which would go into

Hernandez’s own pocket. God knows where the rest will end up, Dan thought. Those poor bastards in the shacks on the hillsides will never see any of it.

Hernandez left, mollified. He was embarrassed that his daughter had disobeyed him, but satisfied that her reputation had not been tarnished. But Dan had no illusions about Hernandez. He had made an enemy out of the Minister of Technology, there was no doubt in his mind about that. Taking the bribe merely confirmed the fact: Hernandez was now solidly on the side of the Russians.

“It was a very foolish thing to do,” said Quentin Andrews. “Extremely foolish.”

He, Dan, and Andrews’ wife, Millicent, were sitting in the ambassador’s library, a snug little room lined with bookshelves and dark oak paneling. The rest of the ambassador’s residence was light, open and airy, but Andrews had created this little refuge for himself, this room that simulated the feeling of his family home in snowy Buffalo, New York.

Lissa, sitting on the plushly cushioned love seat with her feet tucked under her and a snifter of brandy in one hand, eyed Dan craftily. “You didn’t fly her all the way to Japan just to spite that Russian, now did you, Dannie boy?”

Dan gave her a shrug. “Actually, yes, I did.”

Andrews was standing between the love seat and the armchair where Dan was sitting. He had a cut-glass tumbler in his hand, half-filled with whiskey. Dan realized that he had not seen Andrews without a glass in his hand for the better part of the past year.

“It was extremely foolish,” he repeated. “Stupid, even. Relations with the Soviets are difficult enough, these days, without you throwing romantic entanglements into the equation.”

“Our relations with the Russians aren’t that difficult,” Dan countered. He was drinking sherry, amontillado, his favorite ever since he had read Poe’s tales when a teenager.

“Not difficult? Do you have any idea-”

Dan interrupted, “Come on, Quentin. The Russians tell us what to do and we do it. What’s so difficult about that?”

Lissa made a snorting, laughing sound. Andrews frowned at her, then turned back toward Dan.

“It’s all well and good for you to be so smug about it, but the fact of the matter is-”

“The fact of the matter,” Dan said, unwilling to listen to another one of the ambassador’s pointless speeches, “is that I have to see Jane, and I have to see her right away,”

“The President? What makes you think she’ll have time to see you?”

“It’s important,” Dan said.

Sitting up straighter on the cushions, Lissa said, “I thought you two were finished for good.”

“This has nothing to do with our personal feelings,” Dan said. “It’s strictly business, and it’s vital that I see her, soon. Before the week is out, if it can be arranged.”

“Impossible!” Andrews flapped his free hand in the air.

“I said it’s vital,” Dan repeated.

“She can’t be seen with you, you know that.”

“Then something clandestine has got to be arranged. Like tonight. Nobody knows I’m here except your butler and your security chief.”

“And the KGB,” Lissa cracked.

Dan laughed. “Still cleaning bugs out of the walls?”

“The walls, the floors, the ceilings … we even found some in the books in here.”

Andrews dismissed his wife’s candor with a shake of his head. “Dan, I am not going to ask that woman to find the time to see you.”

“Not even as a favor to a fellow American?” Dan asked, grinning slightly.

“You gave up your American citizenship when you moved your corporate headquarters here, remember?”

“It wasn’t my idea! That silly law required it.”

“Still, she won’t take the chance of being seen with you, and I’m not going to lower myself by asking her to.”

Dan drained the last sips of his amontillado and put the tulip-shaped glass down on the coffee table in front of his chair.

“All right, Quentin,” he said lightly. “I’ve gone through official channels and been turned down. Now I’ll contact her through unofficial channels. You had your chance; don’t say I didn’t come to you first.”

He got to his feet, leaned down to peck Lissa’s cheek and strode out of the room.

The President of the United States felt close to crying.

She was sitting at her usual place at the long, gleaming table in the Cabinet Room, flanked on her right by the Secretary of Agriculture, on her left by the Secretary of State. The other Cabinet officers were arrayed around the table, a neatly picked balance of whites, blacks and Hispanics, men and women.

The Secretary of Agriculture, who once owned a chain of farm equipment dealerships in Nebraska and the Dakotas, was shaking his head mournfully. He had the round, slightly florid face of a born used-car salesman, but lately his optimistic smile and glib patter had been replaced by a somber, almost frightened look.

“That’s the bottom line,” he said. “The Russians set the international prices for wheat and corn, and they’ve set them eight percent lower than last year.”

The President lifted her chin a notch and held back the anger and frustration that was welling up inside her. For long moments no one around the table said a word. Through the French doors at her back, the President could hear a robin singing, out in the Rose Garden. She glanced up at the portrait of Franklin Roosevelt over the fireplace at the far end of the room.

How I wish I had your boundless confidence, Jane Scanwell said silently to the jaunty FDR. Nothing to fear but fear itself: if only it was that simple.

The Vice-President, sitting directly across the table from her, was scowling like the New England schoolteacher he had once been. He had been the Senate majority leader, and a power to be reckoned with. Once Jane had succeeded her husband, she had plucked this scrawny, severe, latter-day Daniel Webster out of the Senate and made him Vice-President, where he could do her no harm. She was beginning to realize, though, that he could no longer do her any good, either.

“Eight percent lower,” the Vice-President muttered. “But they can’t-”

“Yes they can,” Agriculture snapped. “The damned Commies set their price and the rest of the world market falls right into line with them.”

The Secretary of Defense, once a post so important that he always sat at the President’s right hand, said from the foot of the table, “We could refuse to sell at that price. Hold back the grain until the price goes up a little.”

Agriculture shook his head. “The other food exporting countries will undercut us … Argentina, Australia, Canada …”

The President turned to the Secretary of State. Like most of the Cabinet officers, he had been her husband’s appointee; she had not replaced them with her own choices. Not yet.

“Can we negotiate agreements with the other food exporters?” she asked.

“Bilateral agreements with each individual nation?” he asked. He was a former Dallas banker, a slim, elegant Hispanic with distinguished silvery hair and deep brown eyes that had a strange, slightly oriental cast to them. Jane thought of him as a department store mannequin, a figure of wax that displays clothes well. She imagined that he slept in a three-piece pinstripe suit of gray or navy blue.

“1 was thinking,” she replied, “more of a multilateral situation, sort of the kind that the oil-producing nations had back in the seventies.”

“You mean OPEC?”

“Yes, that’s it. An OPEC for the nations that export food.”

He pursed his lips, as if seriously considering the idea for a moment, then said flatly, “The Russians would never allow it.”

“You don’t think …”

He gave the President a patient little smile. “The men in the Kremlin would never permit anything that interfered with their ability to set the world price for grain and other foodstuffs. To think we could get around that in some way is idle dreaming.”

You condescending little prick, the President raged inwardly. It’s smug little bastards like you who got us into this mess in the first place.

The Treasury Secretary looked up from the pocket computer he had been fiddling with. “An eight percent drop in the price we get for food exports is going to mean a significant increase in unemployment.”

The President leaned back in her chair and let them take up that theme. They don’t understand, she told herself. They can’t see far enough to understand. If we can hold out, if we can just hang on for long enough, we’ll win. In the long run we can win-if we don’t destroy ourselves first. While the Cabinet officers argued hotly over just what percentage of the nation’s work force would be laid off, and what this would mean to the national economy and the value of the deflated dollar overseas, and to her chances for reelection in November, she let her mind drift to the message she had received that morning.