Murder in the CIA (3 page)

It all happened so quickly. No one seemed to notice … until she dropped both briefcases to the floor and her hands clutched at her chest as a stabbing pain radiated from deep inside. She couldn’t breathe. The airport, and everyone in it, was wiped away by a blinding white light that sent a spasm of pain through her head.

“Lady, are you …?”

Her face was blue. She sank to her knees, her fingers frantic as they tried to tear open her clothing, her chest itself in search of air and relief from the pain.

“Hey, hey, over here, this lady’s …”

Mayer looked up into the faces of dozens of people who were crouching low and peering at her, in sympathy or in horror. Her mouth and eyes opened wide, and rasping sounds
came from her throat, pleas without words, questions for the faces of strangers so close to her. Then she pitched forward, her face thudding against the hard floor.

There were screams now from several people who saw what had happened to the tall, well-dressed woman who, seconds before, had stood in line with them.

The man who’d gone to get cigarettes returned. “What’s this?” he asked as he looked down at Mayer, sprawled on the floor of Terminal Number 2. “Good God,” he said, “someone do something for her.”

BUDAPEST—TWO DAYS LATER

“I just can’t believe it,” Collette Cahill said to Joe Breslin as they sat at an outdoor table at Gundel, Budapest’s grand old restaurant. “Barrie was … she’d become my best friend. I went out to Ferihegy to meet her flight from London, but she wasn’t on it. I came back to the embassy and called that hotel in Cadogan Gardens she always stays at in London. All they could tell me was that she left that morning for the airport. Malev wouldn’t tell me anything until I got hold of that guy in operations I know who checked the passenger manifest. Barrie was listed as a reservation, but she hadn’t boarded. That’s when I really started worrying. And then … then, I got a call from Dave Hubler in her Washington office. He could barely talk. I made him repeat what he’d said three, four times and …” She’d been fighting tears all evening and now lost the battle. Breslin reached across the table and placed a hand on hers. A seven-piece roving Gypsy band dressed in bright colors approached the table but Breslin waved them away.

Collette sat back in her chair and drew a series of deep
breaths. She wiped her eyes with her napkin and slowly shook her head. “A heart attack? That’s ridiculous, Joe. She was, what, thirty-five, maybe thirty-six? She was in great shape. Damn it! It can’t be.”

Breslin shrugged and lighted his pipe. “I’m afraid it can, Collette. Barrie’s dead. No question about that, sadly. What about Réti, her writer?”

“I tried his house but no one was there. I’m sure he knows by now. Hubler was calling him with the news.”

“What about the funeral?”

“There wasn’t any, at least nothing formal. I called her mother that night. God, I dreaded it. She seemed to take it pretty well, though. She said she knew that Barrie wanted immediate cremation, no prayers, no gathering, and that’s what she had.”

“The autopsy. You say it was done in London?”

“Yes. They’re the ones who labeled it a coronary.” She closed her eyes tightly. “I will not buy that finding, Joe, never.”

He smiled and leaned forward. “Eat something, Collette. You haven’t had a thing for too long. Besides, I’m starved.” Large bowls of goulash soup sat untouched in front of them. She took a spoonful and looked at Breslin, who’d dipped a piece of bread in the hearty broth and was savoring it. Cahill was glad she had him to lean on. She’d made many friends since coming to Budapest, but Joe Breslin provided a stability she needed at times like this, perhaps because he was older, fifty-six, and seemed to enjoy the role of surrogate father.

Breslin had been stationed with the American Embassy in Budapest for just over ten years. In fact, Collette and a group of friends had celebrated his tenth anniversary only last week at their favorite Budapest night spot, the Miniatur Bar on Budai Läszlö Street, where a talented young Gypsy pianist named Nyári Károly played a nightly mix of spirited Hungarian Gypsy melodies, American pop tunes, Hungarian love songs, and modern jazz. It had been a festive occasion and they’d closed the bar at three in the morning.

“How’s the soup?” Breslin asked.

“Okay. You know, Joe, I just realized there’s someone else I should call.”

“Who’s that?”

“Eric Edwards.”

Breslin’s eyebrows lifted. “Why?”

“He and Barrie were … close.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“She didn’t talk about it much but she was mad about him.”

“Hardly an exclusive club.”

The comment brought forth the first smile of the evening from her. She said, “I’ve finally gotten old enough to learn never to question a relationship. Do you know him well?”

“I don’t know him at all, just the name, the operation. We had some dispatches from him this morning.”

“And?”

“Nothing startling. Banana Quick is alive and well. They’ve had their second meeting.”

“On Mosquito?”

He nodded, frowned, leaned across the table, and said, “Was Barrie carrying anything?”

“I don’t know.” They both glanced about to make sure they weren’t being overheard. She spotted a table four removed at which a heavyset man and three women sat. She said to Breslin, “That’s Litka Morovaf, Soviet cultural affairs.”

Breslin smiled. “What is he now, number three in the KGB here?”

“Number two. A real Chekist. Drives him crazy when I call him Colonel. He actually thinks not wearing a uniform obscures his military rank. He’s a pig, always after me to have dinner with him. Enough of him. Getting back to Barrie, Joe, I didn’t always know whether she was carrying or just here on business for her agency. She’d tightened up a lot lately, which made me happy. When she first got involved, she babbled about it like a schoolgirl.”

“Did she see Tolker before leaving?”

“I don’t know that, either. She usually contacted him in Washington but she had time to kill in New York this trip,
so I assume she saw him there. I don’t know anything, Joe—I wish I did.”

“Maybe it’s better you don’t. Feel like dinner?”

“Not really.”

“Mind if I do?”

“Go ahead, I’ll pick.”

He ordered
Fogasfile Gundel Modon
, the small filets of fish accompanied by four vegetables, and a bottle of Egri Bikavér, a good red Hungarian wine. They said little while he ate. Cahill sipped the wine and tried to shake the thoughts that bombarded her about Barrie’s death.

They’d become friends in college days. Collette was raised in Virginia, attended George Washington University, and graduated from its law school. It was during her postgraduate work that she met Barrie Mayer, who’d come from Seattle to work on a master’s degree in English literature at Georgetown University. It had been a chance meeting. A young attorney Cahill had been seeing threw a party at his apartment in Old Town and invited his best friend, another attorney who’d just started dating Barrie Mayer. He brought her to the party and the two young women hit it off.

That they became close friends surprised the attorneys who’d introduced them. They were different personalities, as different as their physical attributes. Mayer, tall, leggy, had a mane of chestnut hair that she enjoyed wearing loose. She seldom used makeup. Her eyes were the color of malachite and she used them to good advantage, expressing a variety of emotions with a simple widening or narrowing, a partial wink, a lift of a sandy eyebrow, or a sensuous clouding over that she knew was appealing to men.

Cahill, on the other hand, was short and tightly bundled, a succession of rounded edges that had been there since adolescence and that had caused her widowed mother sleepless nights. She was as vivacious as Mayer was laid-back, deep blue eyes in constant motion, a face punctuated by high cheekbones that belied her Scottish heritage, a face that seemed always ready to burst apart with enthusiasm and wonder. She enjoyed using makeup to add high color to her cheeks and lips. Her hair was black (“Where did that
come from, for heaven’s sake?” her mother often asked), and she wore it short, in a style flattering to her nicely rounded face.

Their initial friendship was rooted in a mutual determination to forge successful careers. The specific goals were different, of course. For Mayer, it was to eventually head up a major book-publishing company. For Cahill, it was government service with an eye toward a top spot in the Justice Department, perhaps even becoming the first female Attorney General. They laughed often and loudly about their aspirations, but they were serious.

They remained close until graduation, when the beginning stages of their work moved them away from each other. Cahill took a job with a legal trade journal published in Washington that kept tabs on pending legislation. She gave it a year, then took a friend’s advice and began applying to government agencies, including Justice, State, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was first with an offer and she accepted it.

“You
what
?” Barrie Mayer had exploded over dinner the night Cahill announced her new job.

“I’m going to work for the CIA.”

“That’s … that’s crazy. Don’t you read, Collette? The CIA’s a terrible organization.”

“Media distortion, Barrie.” She had smiled. “Besides, after training, they’re sending me to England.”

Now Mayer’s smile matched Collette’s. “All right,” she said, “so it’s not such a terrible organization. What will you be doing there?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out soon enough.”

They ended the dinner with a toast to Collette’s new adventure, especially to London.

At the time of Collette Cahill’s decision to join the Pickle Factory, as CIA employees routinely referred to the agency, Barrie Mayer was working at a low-level editorial job with
The Washingtonian
, D.C.’s leading “city” magazine. Her friend’s decision to make a dramatic move prompted action on her part. She quit the magazine and went to New York, where she stayed with friends until landing a job as assistant to the executive editor of a top book publisher. It was during
that experience that she took an interest in the literary agent’s side of the publishing business, and accepted a job with a medium-size agency. This suited her perfectly. The pace was faster than at the publishing house, and she enjoyed wheeling and dealing on behalf of the agency’s clients. As it turned out, she was good at it.

When the founder of the agency died, Mayer found herself running the show for three years until deciding to strike out on her own. She ruled out New York; too much competition. With an increasing number of authors coming out of Washington, she decided to open Barrie Mayer Associates there. It flourished from the beginning, especially as her roster of foreign authors grew along with an impressive list of Washington writers.

Although their careers created a wide geographical distance between them, Barrie and Collette kept in touch through occasional postcards and letters, seldom giving much thought to whether they’d ever renew the friendship again in person.

After three years at a CIA monitoring station in an abandoned BBC facility outside of London, where she took raw intercepts of broadcasts from Soviet bloc countries and turned them into concise, cogent reports for top brass, Cahill was asked to transfer to a Clandestine Services unit in the Hungarian division, operating under the cover of the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. She debated making the move; she loved England, and the contemplation of a long assignment inside an Eastern European Socialist state did not hold vast appeal.

But there was the attraction of joining Clandestine Services, the CIA’s division responsible for espionage, the
spy
division. Although space technology, with its ability to peek into every crevice and corner of the earth from miles aloft, had diminished the need for agents, special needs still existed, and the glamour and intrigue perpetuated by writers of spy novels lived on.

What had they said over and over during her training at headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and at the “Farm,” the handsome estate a two-hour drive south of Washington? “The CIA is not essentially, or wholly, an espionage organization. It has only a small section devoted to espionage,
and agents are never used to gain information that can be obtained through other means.”

Her instructor in the course “Management of the Espionage Operation” had quoted from British intelligence to get across the same point. “A good espionage operation is like a good marriage. Nothing unusual ever happens. It is, and should be, uneventful. It is never the basis of a good story.”

Her cover assignment would be the embassy’s Industrial Trade Mission. Her real responsibility would be to function as a case officer, seeking out and developing useful members of Hungary’s political, industrial, and intelligence communities into agents for the United States, to “turn” them to our side. It would mean returning to Washington for months of intensive training, including a forty-four-week language course in Hungarian at the Foreign Service Institute.

Should she take it? Her mother had been urging her to return home from England and to put her law training to the use for which it was intended. Cahill herself had been considering resigning from the Pickle Factory and returning home. The past few months in England had been boring, not socially but certainly on the job as her routine became predictable and humdrum.

It was not an easy decision. She made it on a train from London after a weekend holiday of good theater, pub-crawling with friends she’d made from the Thames Broadcasting Network, and luxuriating in a full English tea at Brown’s.

She’d take it.

Once she’d decided, her spirits soared and she enthusiastically prepared for her return to Washington. She’d been instructed to discuss it with no one except cleared CIA personnel.

“Not even my mother?”

An easy, understanding smile from her boss. “
Especially
your mother.”

“You will hear two things from Hungarians,” her language instructor at Washington’s Foreign Service Institute told the class the first day. “First, they will tell you that Hungary is
a very small country. Second, they will tell you that the language is
very
difficult. Believe them. Both statements are true.”