"I guess I'd better explain," he said, turning to Shumakov. "Adam Stern is just as dangerous a bastard as you describe your Major Romashchuk. He works for an outfit in New York called the Foreign Affairs Roundtable. They've got to be involved in this deal somehow. And that spells real trouble."
"Trouble for who?"
"For me. And probably for you."
"But how? Nikolai Romashchuk does not know—"
"I took another passenger up to that canyon last week. He was a writer, working on a book about the Roundtable. He told me a bit about the group. Particularly about Adam Stern. That night, Stern tracked him down and killed him. I can't prove it, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Evidently Stern found out I was the pilot who flew him up there. He came looking for me, but I hid out a couple of days until he was gone. He's bound to have told this Romashchuk about me. The Major could be on his way here right now. I'm sure he'd like to know if I'm the guy who flew over there this time, and who was with me."
Shumakov quickly unbuckled his seatbelt. "Then I suggest we find somewhere else to talk."
Instructing the investigator to meet him in the lounge, Rodman stopped by Alba's office to explain the bullet holes. He suggested that it may have been caused by a stray shot from a hunter. Back in the lounge, he headed for the telephone.
"I have a friend who may be able to help us," he said as he dialed Elena Castillo Quintero.
Her cheery voice was reassuring. "Back from Tequila already?" she asked.
"Damned glad to be back," he confided. "My passenger and I have some real problems. He wanted to fly over that barranca your friend Madero owns. I'd like to come over there and tell you about it, but I need to stop by my house first."
"Sure. Come on anytime, Roddy. I'll be here until around two. Then I have a business meeting to attend."
He hung up the phone and turned to Yuri Shumakov, his voice more confident. "She's got connections. Look, I doubt if my house is safe after this, or your motel. I'm going home to throw some things in a suitcase, then I'll drop by La Palma and pick you up."
Shumakov hurried out to his rented Nissan and Rodman wheeled his Toyota out of the employee parking area. He headed down the four-lane highway toward Chapala, remembering too late that he should have asked Pablo Alba not to give out any information about this morning's flight to Tequila. Still, he wasn't too worried. He had a good head start on Major Romashchuk, who would have to maneuver through a precarious mountain trail and then drive all the way back from Tequila. He hoped for some sticky tapatío traffic tie-ups on the Anillo Periferico, the circumferential thoroughfare that skirted the suburbs.
As he raced down the highway, he fretted over what he had gotten himself into and how he might possibly get himself out of it. Equally as disturbing was the question of what Romashchuk and Adam Stern had in mind for the chemical weapons. And what, if anything, he might do to thwart them. Despite the obvious attempts to distance himself from his Air Force past, he hadn't managed to re-program his mind. He still thought like a military officer.
He was nearly home before all of that mental friction finally produced a spark of hope. It required going all the way back to that winter at Eglin Air Force Base when he was recuperating from his crash injuries. He recalled the surprising visit by Greg, the mysterious CIA operative, who had offered to be of help if he ever needed it. Roddy had saved the phone number. Why, he wasn't sure. He'd had no thought he would ever use it. Greg had written the number inside the flap of a Holiday Inn matchbook. As best he could remember, it was in a large brown envelope that contained some of his old Air Force records.
As soon as he pulled into the driveway, he jumped out of the Toyota and hurried inside. He found the envelope in the back of a desk drawer and poured out the contents. There lay the book of matches. The number had a Northern Virginia area code. He dialed it and waited.
After a few rings, a recorded voice answered. "You have reached Information Consultants. After the beep, please leave your name, phone number and message. It will be date-time stamped automatically. I'll return your call as soon as possible."
Damn, he thought at the beep's forlorn sound, I should have known he wouldn't be at home. He was about to hang up when he changed his mind.
"This is is Colonel Roddy Rodman, Greg. I've got a problem, but I can't stay—"
"Give me your phone number and stand by," a voice broke in. "I'll get right back to you, Colonel."
"It's country code five-two," Roddy said quickly. Then he gave the city code and his phone number and heard the line go dead.
Greg was as mysterious as ever, he thought. He hoped the CIA man would, indeed, "get right back." Roddy glanced at his watch. It had been about an hour since they had witnessed the mortar firing in the barranca. He calculated it would take Major Romashchuk an hour and a half to reach the airport, nearly two hours to make it all the way here. But what if the Major had other people in Guadalajara? He could easily stop along the way and make a call, dispatching someone immediately to the airport or Lake Chapala.
During his sojourn in Mexico, Roddy had learned to slow down and pace himself in the leisurely Latin manner. When a native promised something "mañana," it could be tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Now he found himself moving with an unfamiliar urgency. He hurried into the kitchen, stuck a filter into a small coffee maker, spooned in two measures of coffee and filled the decanter with water. He had just flipped on the switch when the phone rang.
41
Murray Bender sat at the desk built into the corner of the room he used for an office. The solid, knotty pine paneling, which had darkened several shades over the years, marked it as somewhat beyond the age of thirty and originally a den, although it had also seen service as a bedroom before Bender bought the house. That was five years ago, when the communist conspiracy was headed for the scrap heap and the Central Intelligence Agency had decided to bring him in from the cold. His talents would be utilized for special assignments.
They put him in a small office with a telephone that rarely rang for any important reason. He hated Langley. He was a field man, had always been a field man, would always be a field man. For the most part it had been a lonely, boring, physically stressful existence. Making contact with agents who might be real or bogus, people with axes to grind or grandiose ideas of the money they could make peddling secrets, most of which were hardly worth passing on to headquarters. Tracking down lost contacts or whole networks that had disappeared with the poof of a soap bubble. Long stints of surveillance in rain or snow, in sweltering heat and bitter cold. But he had a natural inclination for the clandestine life. He liked operating on the fringe, on his own, with no one to monitor his comings and goings. He had been married twice, briefly. Neither woman could abide his sudden departures on "business trips" that might last anywhere from a couple of days to several months. He had boundless patience and enough acting talent to have landed a role on Broadway. And with an actor's ear for accents and dialects, he could be convincing in whatever part he was called on to play. But in the final analysis, what he really loved was matching wits with the opposition. Most of the time he had come out on top.
After a couple of years at the Agency's massive house of mirrors on the Potomac, doing mostly mundane things between occasional "real" assignments, Bender had been sent off to Cambodia to follow up on what appeared to be a fairly solid report of an American POW being held by a faction of the Khmer Rouge. It was during the agonizing congressional hearings on the POW-MIA problem when everybody was attempting to dodge the blame for years of denial that there was, indeed, a problem. Word filtered back to Langley that Bender, too, had become a prisoner. Unfortunately, the operation had been mounted in such a rush that some of the niceties of informing congressional watchdogs had been overlooked. Rather than risk the embarrassment of another hearing on who had screwed up this time, the guilty party on the seventh floor decided it would be "in the best interest of the service" to cut him loose and deny any knowledge of his mission. The gentleman hadn't reckoned with the wily field man's ability as a survivor. He had managed to convince two of his guards that he was actually a French trader who possessed a fortune in gemstones stashed away just inside the Thai border. He would happily share this booty with them if only he could get to it. Once they were inside Thailand, he managed to sneak word to the police that his escorts were Khmer Rouge illegals.