When he discovered that he had been "written off," Bender told his superiors where they could shove their agency and turned his talents to the role of "consultant." Oddly enough, now he seemed content to spend a good deal of his time in his own office, working with a new toy that had come to fascinate him — the latest high-speed, high-resolution, high-capacity personal computer. After spending most of his life gathering raw intelligence, now he dealt mostly with the finished product. He had access to hundreds of data bases that contained literally millions of facts, including the latest details on various international hotspots. Added to that was a CD ROM drive that gave him the ability to instantly call up information from a wide array of discs containing everything from magazines and encyclopedias to business and financial documents and reports.
As soon as he hung up the phone that sweltering June morning in the D.C. suburbs, he typed in a few characters and all of the telephone country codes flashed on his color screen. He scanned down to fifty-two. Mexico. He did the same with the city code and read "Chapala." Using an atlas disc, he quickly filled the screen with a map of the Guadalajara-Lake Chapala area.
The desk held two telephones, one white, one black. White for business carried out in the open. Black for what black had always meant to Murray Bender, covert operations. Roddy Rodman's call had come in on the white line. He picked up the black phone and dialed the number in Mexico.
"Sorry for the delay, Colonel," he apologized. "I had to switch to my secure line. Well, it isn't really secure. Not like the Agency's scrambled circuits. But I'm sure it isn't tapped. Nobody has access to it but me and my buddy at the phone company."
"You never admitted who you worked for before," Roddy reminded him.
He gave a grunt that passed for a laugh. "I can say anything I damn well please since I left there. I'm in the information business now. I gather and disseminate information on companies, countries, people, places, things. Whatever the client wants, I can usually provide. You said you had a problem. What's happening there in Chapala?"
"Didn't take you long to pinpoint me," Roddy said, obviously impressed. "Some pretty frightening things are going on, Greg. What do you know about the Foreign Affairs Roundtable?"
"First, I buried Greg somewhere in Southeast Asia. I go by my real name now, Murray Bender. You're interested in the FAR, huh? Well, it's an outfit you won't find much about from either official or unofficial sources. Even the Agency has very little on it."
"Really?"
"Really. I learned the hard way it's a subject you don't dig into."
"Why?"
"The Director and his top deputies are FAR members. The official line says it's an organization of distinguished citizens interested in the study of foreign policy. They operate out in the open, have a nice New York headquarters with the name out front. But folks in the know tell me it works from a hidden agenda. Seems their real interest is in controlling the world economic system for their own benefit."
"Interesting. That's the impression I got from a guy I had as a passenger last week. I've been flying helicopters in Guadalajara since I retired."
As he talked, Bender had switched to a program that stored facts he had compiled on a variety of subjects. After typing in "FAR," a new screen appeared.
"According to my notes, the FAR is led by big international bankers like Bernard Whitehurst, who's the chairman, some multinational business leaders and a few heavyweight political types. They are allied with similar people in Europe and elsewhere through an organization called the Council of Lyon. The Council's leadership, a secretive group known as the 'Trustees,' decides what sinister activities they get involved in. Who was your passenger?"
"A New York writer named Bryan Janney. He was working on a book that would expose what the Roundtable is really up to."
"He probably won't get too far with the project. They have a neat way of handling such people. Whenever somebody hints at the conspiracy, they feed their pals in the news media stories designed to ridicule the guy. By the time they get through with him, he's thoroughly labeled as a kook. Nobody would listen to him."
"He'd have been lucky to get that treatment. This guy wound up dead."
"That's a bit surprising. He must have been onto something that could really hurt," Bender ventured. What he had heard, from one of his very knowledgeable and equally reliable sources, indicated they usually operated with more finesse than that.
"He had learned the FAR was sending a character named Adam Stern to Guadalajara. Something to do with what was taking place at a cabin up in the mountains."
Bender frowned and shook his head. "I hope he didn't get you involved."
"I flew him up to take a look at the cabin. Apparently Stern found out I was the pilot."
"Colonel, I'm afraid you're right. You do have a problem. I knew Stern when he worked for the Agency. He's a vengeful bastard and a deadly one to boot. He comes from the Wild West school of marksmanship. Shoot first and ask questions later."
"I found out something else. His threats caused a man to lie on the witness stand at my court-martial. You were right that day you came to see me. I was the fall guy for General Patton. He's the bastard who caused my chopper to get shot down."
"That figures."
"But Stern isn't really my problem now," Rodman continued, his voice taking on a new urgency. "He went back to New York. It's the guy he met with down here, what he's doing at that cabin in the mountains. Seems he's a former KGB major who brought some Soviet chemical weapons into Mexico. I flew over the cabin again this morning and saw them shooting mortars out of the back of a dump truck."
Oh, God, thought Bender, he's been hitting the bottle again. He had heard about Colonel Rodman's drinking problem. The part about Adam Stern he was prepared to accept, even the murder of a writer who had stumbled onto some incriminating evidence. But this business about an ex-KGB major and Soviet chemical weapons was a bit too much. Firing mortars from a dump truck? What the hell would a former KGB officer be doing in Mexico? Since their old Soviet patrons had been discredited and Castro was practically a basket case, the Mexican communists had about faded from view. Best to humor the Colonel, he thought.
"Does this KGB major know about you?" he inquired.
"I'm sure Stern told him about me. That's the most pressing problem. He could be on his way to my house right now."
"Then I'd get the hell out of Dodge, Colonel."
"I intend to soon as I get off the phone. But I had hoped you might have some ideas on where I could turn next. Maybe somebody at the CIA I could trust, somebody in a position to take some action."