The Negotiator Read Online Free PDF Page B

Manilva, just five miles inland from the coast but already having a panoramic view of the sea to the south. Manilva is surrounded by a cluster of small villages, almost hamlets, where live the people who till the slopes and tend the vines.
    In one of them, Alcántara del Rio, the men were coming home from the fields, tired and aching after a long day’s work. The grape harvest was long home, but the vines had to be pruned and set back before the coming winter and the work was hard on the back and shoulders. So, before going to their scattered homes, most of the men stopped by the village’s single cantina for a glass and a chance to talk.
    Alcántara del Rio boasted little but peace and quiet. It had a small white-painted church presided over by an old priest as decrepit as his incumbency, serving out his time saying mass for the women and children while regretting that the male members of his flock on a Sunday morning preferred the bar. The children went to school in Manilva. Apart from four dozen whitewashed cottages, there was just the Bar Antonio, now thronged with vineyard workers. Some worked for cooperatives based miles away; others owned their plots, worked hard, and made a modest living depending on the crop and the price offered by the buyers in the cities.
    The tall man came in last, nodded a greeting to the others, and took his habitual chair in the corner. He was taller by several inches than the others, rangy, in his mid-forties, with a craggy face and humorous eyes. Some of the peasants called him “Señor,” but Antonio, as he bustled over with a carafe of wine and a glass, was more familiar.
    “ Muy bueno, amigo . ¿ Va bien ?”
    “ Hola, Tonio ,” said the big man easily. “ Si, va bien .”
    He turned as a burst of music came from the television set mounted above the bar. It was the evening news on TVE and the men fell silent to catch the day’s headlines. The newscaster came first, describing briefly the departure from Moscow of President Cormack de los Estados Unidos. The image switched to Vnukovo, and the U.S. President moved in front of the microphone and began to speak. The Spanish TV had no subtitles but a voice-over translation into Spanish instead. The men in the bar listened intently. As John Cormack finished and held out his hand to Gorbachev, the camera (it was the BBC crew, covering for all the European stations) panned over the cheering airport workers, then the Militiamen, then the KGB troops. The Spanish newscaster came back on the screen. Antonio turned to the tall man.
    “ Es un buen hombre, Señor Cormack ,” he said, smiling broadly and clapping the tall man on the back in congratulation, as if his customer had some part-ownership of the man from the White House.
    “ Si .” The tall man nodded thoughtfully. “ Es un buen hombre .”
     
    Cyrus V. Miller had not been born to his present riches. He had come from poor farming stock in Colorado and, as a boy, had seen his father’s dirt farm bought out by a mining company and devastated by its machinery. Resolving that if one could not beat them one ought to join them, the youth had worked his way through the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, emerging in 1933 with a degree and the clothes he wore. During his studies he had become fascinated more by oil than by rocks and headed south for Texas. It was still the days of the wildcatters, when leases were unfettered by environmental impact statements and ecological worries.
    In 1936 he had spotted a cheap lease relinquished by Texaco, and calculated they had been digging in the wrong place. He persuaded a tool pusher with his own rig to join him, and sweet-talked a bank into taking the farm-in rights against a loan. The oil field supply house took more rights for the rest of the equipment he needed, and three months later the well came in—big. He bought out the tool pusher, leased his own rigs, and acquired other leases. With the outbreak of war in 1941 they all went on stream