Empire Builders Read Online Free Page B

was not physically in the room with them.

    “Do you mean that you can use that regulation to confiscate Dan’s holdings? All of them? All of Astro Manufacturing and everything else he owns?”

    Malik nodded. “He stepped into my trap and I intend to snap it shut on him.”

    “Lots of luck.”

    “You don’t believe I can do it?”

    “I believe that Dan is very resourceful, very powerful, and very stubborn. He won’t give up easily.”

    “You can be of great help in this.”

    “I can?”

    “Yes,” said Malik, pulling his chair even closer to her. “It will be easier to deal with him here on Earth, rather than on the Moon. He has too many friends there, too many places where he can hide himself away while his lawyers try to find loopholes he can escape through.”

    “You don’t intend to jail him, do you?” For the first time a hint of emotion showed on Jane’s face. Malik could not decide whether it was fear or anger. Or something else.

    “It would be better,” he said slowly, “if he were … under protective custody, let us say. Someplace where he can be held incommunicado—only until the confiscation orders have been processed and carried out, of course.”

    “That’s not legal.”

    “Not in America, I realize that. But the Global Economic Council’s regulations do not include a Bill of Rights, you know. And there are many nations on Earth where he could be held indefinitely.”

    Her face hardened.

    “Oh, I don’t mean to put him in a dungeon,” Malik said, smiling easily. “A small island, perhaps. Some tropical paradise where he can have everything he wants: wine, women and song.”

    “Everything except his freedom.”

    “And his holdings.”

    Jane thought a moment, then smiled back at the Russian. “I know just the place: a coral atoll out in the middle of the Pacific. A very romantic spot, as a matter of fact.”

    “Excellent!” Malik resisted the urge to rub his hands together gleefully. Instead, he asked, “Is this a place you know from personal experience?”

    “My husband and I honeymooned there, a thousand years ago,” said Jane.

    That took Malik aback. But only for a moment. “I see. Do you think that you could somehow get him to meet you there?”

    She nodded. “I’m sure he’d come if I asked him to.”

    Yes, Malik thought. Dan Randolph would come flying to this woman. What hatred she must have for him! To turn the site of her honeymoon into a prison for her former lover. Ah, women! They are far fiercer than men.

    “There is no sense getting angry at me,” said Napoleon Bazain, over the muted roar of the plane’s engines. “I am merely a messenger. A middleman.”

    Sergio Alvarez stared down his patrician nose at the Frenchman. “You are a parasite.”

    Bazain smiled blandly. “No, I work for a parasite.”

    “It is all the same to me,” Alvarez muttered.

    The twin-engine plane was cruising high above the Madeira River, an hour out of Manaus. Below them, where there had once been pristine forest there now stretched long ugly brown gashes of bare ground, scars left by the timber companies and the landowners who had chased away the native Indians in the vain hope of turning the area into grazing land for cattle.

    Up front in the cockpit sat the pilot and the ecologist, a young university graduate who still had stars in his eyes. Back here, sitting on bare bucket seats amid the big tanks of seed and fertilizer, Alvarez faced reality.

    “Why be angry?” asked the Frenchman. His smile was still showing, but his eyes looked uneasy, as if he were worried that this hot-blooded Castilian might toss him out of the plane in a fit of righteous anger.

    Bazain was small, light of frame, almost delicate. His face, though, was fleshy with the beginnings of jowls. His thinning hair was slicked back as if he were about to go out on a date. He wore a custom-tailored silk business suit. As far as Alvarez could tell, he was unarmed.

    Sergio Alvarez,