The Negotiator Read Online Free PDF

production) Europe has three years of reserves. The countries of the Pacific Basin rely entirely on imported oil and have huge hard-currency surpluses. The result? Mexico, Venezuela, and Libya apart, we shall all be looking to the same source of supply: the six producers of the Middle East.

    Iran, Iraq, Abu Dhabi, and the Neutral Zone have oil, but two are bigger than the rest of the eight put together: Saudi Arabia and neighboring Kuwait—and Saudi will be the key to OPEC. Today, producing 1.3 billion barrels a year, and with over a hundred years (170 billion barrels a day) of reserves, Saudi Arabia will control the world’s oil price, and control America.

    At predicted oil-price rises, America will by 1995 have an import bill of $450 million a day—all payable to Saudi Arabia and her adjunct Kuwait. Which means the Middle East suppliers will probably own the very U.S. industries whose needs they are supplying. America, despite her advancement, technology, living standard, and military might, will be economically, financially, strategically, and thus politically dependent on a small, backward, semi-nomadic, corrupt, and capricious nation that she cannot control.
     
    Cyrus Miller closed the report, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. If anyone had had the nerve to tell him to his face that he stemmed from the ultra-right in American political thought, he would have denied it with vehemence. Though a traditional Republican voter, he had never taken much interest in politics in his seventy-seven years except as they affected the oil industry. His political party, so far as he was concerned, was patriotism. Miller loved his adopted state of Texas and his country of birth with an intensity that sometimes seemed to choke him.
    What he failed to realize was that it was an America much of his own devising, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of traditional values and raw chauvinism. Not, he assured the Almighty during his several-times-daily prayers, that he had anything against Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, or nigras—did he not employ eight Spanish-speaking maids in the mansion at his ranch in the hill country outside Austin, not to mention several blacks in the gardens?—so long as they knew and kept their place.
    He stared at the ceiling and tried to think of a name. The name of a man whom he had met about two years back at an oil convention in Dallas, a man who told him he lived and worked in Saudi Arabia. They’d had only a short conversation, but the man had impressed him. He could see him in his mind’s eye; at just under six feet a mite shorter than Miller, compact, taut like a tensed spring, quiet, watchful, thoughtful, a man with enormous experience of the Middle East. He had walked with a limp, leaning on a silver-topped cane, and he had something to do with computers. The more he thought, the more Miller remembered. They had discussed computers, the merits of his Honeywells, and the man had favored IBMs. After several minutes Miller called in another member of his research staff and dictated his recollections.
    “Find out who he is,” he commanded.
     
    It was already dark on the southern coast of Spain, the coast they call the Costa del Sol. Although well out of the tourist season, the whole coast from Málaga the hundred miles to Gibraltar was lit by a glittering chain of lights, which from the mountains behind the coast would have looked like a fiery snake twisting and turning its way through Torremolinos, Mijas, Fuengirola, Marbella, Estepona, Puerto Duquesa, and on to La Linea and the Rock. Headlights from cars and trucks flickered constantly on the Málaga-Cadiz highway running along the flatland between the hills and the beaches. In the mountains behind the coast near the western end, between Estepona and Puerto Duquesa, lies the winegrowing district of south Andalusia, producing not the sherries of Jerez to the west but a rich, strong red wine. The center of this area is the small town of