Murder in the CIA (6 page)

“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. The
rules 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 neck
way 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 said.

“Miss Cahill.”

His voice shocked her. Although she was expecting him, she was not ready for his voice, any voice. She gasped, afraid to turn.

Hegedüs came out of the shadows of the church and stood behind her. She slowly turned. “Mr. Hegedüs,” she said in a shaky voice. “You’re here.”

“
Igen
, I am here, and so are you.”

“Yes, I …”

“I will be brief. For reasons of my own I wish to help you and your country. I wish to help Hungary, my country, rid itself of our most recent conquerors.”

“What sort of help?”

“Information. I understand you are always in need of information.”

“That’s true,” she said. “You realize the risk you take?”

“Of course. I have thought about this for a very long time.”

“And what do you want in return? Money?”

“Yes, but that is not my only motivation.”

“We’ll have to talk about money. I don’t have the authority to …” She wished she hadn’t said it. It was important that he put his complete trust in her. To suggest that he’d have to talk to others wasn’t professional.

It didn’t seem to deter him. He looked up at the church tower and smiled. “This was a beautiful country, Miss Cahill. Now it is …” A deep sigh. “No matter. Here.” He pulled two sheets of paper from his raincoat pocket and thrust them at her. Instinctively, she reached for them, then withdrew her hand. His expression was one of puzzlement.

“I don’t want anything from you now, Mr. Hegedüs. We’ll have to meet again. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yes, you can reconsider your offer and withdraw it.”

It was a rueful laugh. “Pilots reach a point in their flight that represents no return. Once they pass it, they are committed to continuing to their final destination—or crashing. It is the same with me.”

Cahill pronounced slowly and in a clear voice the address of the safehouse that had been chosen. She told him the date and time: exactly one week from that night, at nine in the evening.

“I shall be there, and I shall bring what I have here to that meeting.”

“Good. Again, I must ask whether you understand the potential ramifications of what you’re doing?”

“Miss Cahill, I am not a stupid man.”

“No, I didn’t mean to suggest that.…”

“I know you didn’t. You are not that kind of person. I could tell that the moment I met you, and that is why it was you I contacted.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Hegedüs, and I look forward to our next meeting. You have the address?”

“Yes, I do.
Viszontlátásra!
” He disappeared into the shadows. Somehow, his simple “Goodbye” was inadequate for Collette.

If the meet went smoothly, she was not to get into the Zim but return to her apartment by public transportation. A half hour after she’d arrived, there was a knock on the door. She opened it. It was Joe Breslin. “Hey, just in the neighborhood and thought I could buy you a drink.”

She realized he was there as part of what had gone on at the church. She put on her coat and they went to an outdoor café, where he handed her a note that read,
“Tell me what happened without mentioning names or getting specific. Use a metaphor—baseball, ballet, whatever.”

She recounted the meeting with Hegedüs as Breslin lighted his pipe and used the match to incidentally ignite the small
slip of paper he’d handed her. They both watched it turn to ash in an ashtray.

When she was done, he looked at her, smiled his characteristic half-smile, touched her hand. “Excellent,” he said. “You look beat. These things don’t take a hell of a lot of time, but they drain you. So drain a
hosszúlépés
and I’ll take you home. If anyone’s tail is on us, they’ll think we’re having just another typical, torrid, capitalistic affair.”

Her laugh caught, became almost a giggle. “After what I’ve been through, Joe, I think we should make it a
fröccs
.” Two parts wine to one part soda, the reverse of what he’d suggested.

Now, two years later, she prepared for another meet with the Fisherman. How many had there been, fifteen, twenty, maybe more? It had gotten easier, of course. She and “her spy” had become good friends. It was supposed to end up that way, according to the handbook on handling agents-in-place. As Árpád Hegedüs’s case officer, Cahill was paid to think of everything that might compromise him, threaten him,
anything
that conceivably could jeopardize him and his mission. So many rules she had to remember and remind herself of whenever a situation came up.

Rule One:
The agent himself is more important than any given piece of information he might be able to deliver. Always consider the long haul, never the immediate gain.

Rule Two:
Never do anything to jog his conscience. Never ask for more than his conscience will allow him to deliver.

Rule Three:
Money. Small and steady. A change in basic lifestyle tips off the other side. Make him come to depend upon it. No bonuses for delivering an especially important piece of information, no matter how risky it was to obtain. Among other reasons, don’t reveal how important any one piece of information might be.

Rule Four:
Be alert to his moods and personal habits. Be his friend. Hear him out. Counsel when it’s appropriate, hear his confessions, help him stay out of trouble.

Rule Five:
Don’t lose him.

This meet had been arranged like all the others. When Hegedüs had something to pass on, he left a red thumbtack in a utility pole around the corner from his home. The pole was checked each day by a Hungarian postman who’d been on the CIA payroll for years. If the tack was there, he called a special number at the American Embassy within ten minutes. The person answering the phone said, “International Wildlife Committee,” to which the postman would respond, “I was thinking of going fishing this weekend and wondered about conditions.” He would then abruptly hang up. The person who’d taken the call would inform either Stan Podgorsky, Collette Cahill, or the station’s technical coordinator and second-in-command, Harold “Red” Sutherland, a hulk of a man with sparse red hair, feet that had broken down years ago beneath his weight, and who was fond of red suspenders and railroad handkerchiefs. Red was an electronics genius, responsible for video and audio eavesdropping for the Budapest station, including an elaborate recording operation in the safehouse where Cahill and Hegedüs met.

It was understood that a meet would take place exactly one week from the day the tack was found, at a predetermined time and place. Cahill had informed Hegedüs at their last get-together of the change in safehouses, which was acceptable to him.

Cahill arrived an hour before Hegedüs. The recording and photographic equipment was tested, and Cahill went over a set of notes she and others at the station had developed. Hegedüs’s desk officer back at Langley, Virginia, had transmitted a series of “RQMs,” intelligence requirements, that they wanted met from this most recent meet. They all involved the operation known as Banana Quick. Primarily, they needed to know how much the Soviets knew about it. Cahill had given the requirement to Hegedüs at their last meeting and he’d promised to come up with whatever he could.

When Árpád Hegedüs walked into the room, he chuckled. A table was set with his favorite foods, which had been brought in that afternoon—
libamáj
, goose liver;
rántott
gombafejek
, champignon mushroom caps that had been fried in the kitchen by Red Sutherland shortly before Hegedüs’s arrival; a plate of cheeses, Pálpusztai, Márványsajt, and a special Hungarian cream cheese with paprika and caraway seeds known as körözött. For dessert there was a heaping platter of
somlói galuska
, small pieces of sponge cake covered with chocolate and whipped cream—they were a passion for Hegedüs. Everything would be washed down with bourbon. He’d been served vodka early in the game, but one night he expressed a preference for American bourbon and Red Sutherland arranged for Langley to ship in a case of Blanton’s, the brand Sutherland, a dedicated bourbon drinker, claimed was the best. An hour-long meeting on the subject of which bourbon to sneak into Hungary had been held behind embassy closed doors and, as often happened, it became a project with a name—“Project Abe,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s pre-political career as a bourbon distiller.

“You look well, Árpád,” Cahill said.

He smiled. “Not nearly as good as you, Collette. You’re wearing my favorite outfit.” She’d forgotten that at a previous meeting he’d complimented her on the blue and gray dress she had on again this night. She thanked him and motioned toward a small bar in the corner of the room. He went to it, rubbed his hands, and said, “Splendid. I look forward to these evenings for seeing Mr. Blanton almost as much as for seeing you.”

“As long as I’m still the most important, the highest proof, you might say” she said. He seemed puzzled; she explained. He grinned and said, “Ah, yes, the proof. The proof is always important.” He poured himself a full glass and dropped an ice cube from a silver bucket into it, causing the amber liquid to spill over the sides. He apologized. Cahill ignored him and poured herself an orange juice, almost as rare in Budapest as bourbon.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Always,”
he answered, his eyes lighting up as if there were candles on the table. He sat and filled a plate. Cahill took a few morsels and sat across from him.

Hegedüs looked around the room, as though suddenly
realizing he was in a new place. “I like the other house better,” he said.

“It was time to change,” Cahill said. “Too long in one place makes everyone nervous.”

“Except me.”

“Except you. How are things?”

“Good … bad.” He waved his pudgy hand over his plate. “This will be our last meeting.”

Cahill’s heart tripped. “Why?” she asked.

“At least for some time. They are talking of sending me to Moscow.”

“What for?”

“Who knows how the Russian mind works, what it’s for? My family packs now and will leave in three days.”

“You won’t be with them?”

“Not immediately. It had occurred to me that sending them has other meanings.” He answered her eyebrows. “It has been happening to others recently. The family is sent to Russia and the man stays behind expecting to join them but … well, he never does.” He devoured two of the mushrooms, washed them down with bourbon, put his elbows on the table, and leaned forward. “The Soviets become more paranoid every day here in Hungary.”

“About what?”

“About what? About security, about leaks to your people. Having the families in Russia is a way to control certain … how shall I say?… certain questionable individuals.”

“Are you now considered ‘questionable’?”

“I didn’t think so, but this move of my family and talk of moving me … Who knows? Do you mind?” He indicated his empty glass.

“Of course not, but put the ice in first,” she said lightly. She’d been growing increasingly concerned about his drinking. Almost the entire bottle had been consumed last time, and he was quite drunk when he left.