Murder in the CIA by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page A

If he’s making an overture to us, Collette, he could be playing games—or he could be damn valuable. No, Christ, that’s an understatement. He could be gold, pure gold.”
    “I wonder why he sought me out,” she said.
    “It doesn’t matter. He liked the way you looked, sensed someone he could trust. Who knows? What matters is that we follow up on it and not do anything to scare him off, on the long shot that he might be turned—or
has
turned.” He looked at his watch, said, “Look, go on home and pack a small overnight bag. I’ll meet you at the embassy in two hours, after I get hold of some others we need on this. Take a circle route to the embassy. Make sure nobody’s tailing you. Anybody look interested in your conversation with him at the museum?”
    “I really wasn’t looking for anyone, but he sure was. He was a wreck.”
    “Good. And for good reason. Okay, two hours, and be ready for a marathon.”
    The next thirty-six hours were intense and exhausting. By the time Cahill headed for the square of St. John Capistrano, she’d had a complete briefing on Árpád Hegedüs provided by the station’s counterintelligence branch, whose job it was to create biographical files on everyone in Budapest working for the other side.
    A gray Russian four-door Zim with two agents was assigned to follow her to the street-meet with Hegedüs. Therules that had been laid down for her were simple and inviolate.
    She was to accept nothing from him, not a scrap of paper, not a matchbook,
nothing
, to avoid being caught in the standard espionage trap of being handed a document from the other side, then immediately put under arrest for spying.
    If anything seemed amiss (
“Anything!”
Podgorsky had stressed), she was to terminate the meeting and walk to a corner two blocks away where the car would pick her up. The same rule applied if he wasn’t alone.
    The small Charter Arms .38-caliber special revolver she carried in her raincoat pocket was to remain there unless absolutely necessary for her physical protection. If that need arose, the two agents in the Zim would back her up with M-3 submachine guns with silencers.
    She was to commit to nothing to Hegedüs. He’d called the meet, and it was her role to listen to what he had to say. If he indicated he wished to become a double agent, she was to set another meeting at a safehouse that was about to be discarded. No sense exposing an ongoing location to him until you were sure he was legit.
    Cahill lingered in front of a small café down the street from the Gothic church. She was grateful for its presence. Her heart was beating and she drew deep breaths to calm down. Her watch read 10:50. He said he’d wait only five minutes. She couldn’t be late.
    The gray Zim passed, the agents looking straight ahead but taking her in with their peripheral vision. She walked away from the café and approached the church, still in ruins except for the meticulously restored tower. She had a silly thought—she wished there were fog to shroud the scene and to give it more the atmosphere of spy-meeting-spy. There wasn’t; it was a pristine night in Budapest. The moon was nearly full and cast a bright floodlight over the tiny streets and tall church.
    She went behind the church, stopped, looked around, saw no one. Maybe he wouldn’t show. Podgorsky had raised that possibility. “More times than not they get cold feet,” he’d told her. “Or maybe he’s been made. He’s put his neckway out on a limb even talking to you, Collette, and you may have seen the last of him.”
    She had mixed emotions. She hoped he wouldn’t show up. She hoped he would. After all, that’s what her new job with the CIA in Budapest was all about, to find just such a person and to turn him into a successful and productive counterspy against his own superiors. That it had happened so fast, so easily, was unlikely, was … “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” her father had always