Labyrinth (16 page)

“Then why did you agree to see me?”

“Curiosity, I suppose. Since I knew you couldn't be one of my enemies' hired hands, I had to ask myself who you were and what bit of desperation led you to my door.”

“Desperation's as good a way to describe it as any… .”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Christopher Locke and you're absolutely right: I'm no professional killer. I'm no professional
anything
. I used to be a college professor. Now, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure what I am.”

“But you haven't come here to quiz me on ways to finance your retirement.”

“Right now my major concern is just making it to retirement. A friend of mine didn't. His name was Alvin Lubeck and he met with you last week, I believe.”

Felderberg's heavy breathing stopped all at once. He wet his lips. Locke noticed they were trembling.

“I'm here to find out what you told him,” he continued.

“On whose authority?”

“Or who's ‘running me'? That's the popular spy phrasing, isn't it? Doesn't matter. The answer's no one. I'm here on my own authority. There was someone else until two days ago but he was killed too, and there are quite a few people out there who'd like nothing better than to make me number three on their list.”

Felderberg's breathing became even heavier. His brow was sweating. “Who was this someone else?”

“A State Department intelligence man who was once my best friend. He put me in the field to follow Lubeck's trail because he figured I'd have the best chance of digging up what he discovered. Well, I dug part of it up all right and it buried him. He sent me to you and an English colleague of his made the arrangements to get me here.”

“You must tell me everything. From the beginning.”

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… .”

Felderberg frowned. “Except that would not explain the covert nature of their activities, nor the need for such haste. Growing crops in the abundance required for export take months, even years of effort and hard work. The motives of my client remain bathed in shadows. What are they after? What is worth the investment of literally billions of dollars?”

Neither man had an answer. Tension passed across the table between them.

“It might help if I knew who this client was,” Locke ventured tentatively.

Felderberg chuckled, but there was no trace of amusement in the sound. “You think in a situation such as this they would reveal their true identity? No. Everything has been concluded through middlemen, mostly lawyers, and mailings. The arrangements have never failed to be in order and because my commission is always paid promptly, the need has not arisen for questions.”

“But you must still pose them, Mr. Felderberg. You went through great pains this afternoon to have me checked out. I have to believe that is the rule for how you operate regularly.”

“Within certain limits. The force behind the South American land deals and the massacre at San Sebastian has gone through great pains to keep its identity secret.” He paused. “But there are clues, hints. They add up to little but still …”

“I'm listening.”

“All my commissions were paid out through the Bank of Vienna.”

“Interesting.”

“But not terribly conclusive. The Bank of Vienna is known for its willingness and ability to handle exceptionally large financial arrangements.”

“Going through Swiss institutions is more the norm, isn't it?”

“Not so much anymore. Political pressure from abroad has forced the famed Swiss banks to become less accessible and secretive. Accordingly, persons seeking large transactions have had to look elsewhere.” Felderberg cleared his throat, fingered the stem of his wineglass. “The problem then became determining how long my client's account had been active at the Bank of Vienna. I had the account number and knew there had to be a means to gain the information I sought.”

“But most banks take steps to make that impossible.”

“To a point, yet they must at some stage bow to procedures made necessary by the computer. There had to be a code in the account number, something in sequence the computer could use as a key. It took much time and money, but careful analysis of this account number and comparison with others whose origin I knew led to the discovery that the account in question had been active for some seventeen years.”

“Any chance of the account number leading back to its bearers?”

“Not through any means I'm aware of.”

“So all we're left with is the probability that your client is based in Vienna, at least Austria, and has been for some time.”

“And something else. One memorandum I was issued held the traces of a stamp on its bottom. Only the top half and quite light, as if someone had stamped another page with the memorandum protruding from beneath it. I had the stamp blown up and hired detectives in Zurich to trace it down. Their report led back to my own doorstep: the Sanii Corporation in Schaan, not more than eleven miles from where we sit now.”

“What is Sanii?”

“High-tech experiments and development.”

“Weapons?”

“I suppose.”

“Then we're back to San Sebastian again, what the people saw down there before they were killed.”

“That had nothing to do with a weapon, Mr. Locke. The key remains food. Sanii is part of an American conglomerate, but ownerships can be shielded just as funds can be.”

“Then whoever's behind the corporation is behind the land deals, San Sebastian, everything. That's an awful lot of power.”

“Indeed,” Felderberg agreed. “And at first I thought it was being wielded by an emerging nation with a plot somehow related to food. But everything was done too covertly. Organization and single-mindedness of the extent no country could possess. And then there was the account in the Bank of Vienna to consider. No, my client is someone from the private sector.”

“But the plot still exists.”

“And the best means for determining precisely what that plot is would be to uncover who's behind it.” Felderberg hesitated. “I sent your friend Lubeck to the Dwarf.”

“Who?”

“I broker large financial transactions, Mr. Locke. The Dwarf brokers large transactions of information. He maintains a chain of spies and informants across the world any intelligence service would be jealous of. His fees are often even higher than mine. Nothing of the magnitude we are discussing could escape his attention.”