Murder in the CIA

by Margaret Truman

  He went for her. She’d shifted the revolver to her left hand minutes before. As he lunged, she dropped Vern’s envelope, stiffened her right hand, and brought the edge of it against the side of his neck. The blow sent him sprawling to the carpet. A string of four-letter words exploded from him as he scrambled to his feet. They stood facing each other, their breathing rapid, their eyes wide in anger and fear.

  Collette slowly backed toward the door, the revolver held securely in two hands, its tiny barrel pointed directly at his chest.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She said nothing, kept retreating, her attention on controlling the damnable shaking of her hands.

  “You’ve got it all screwed up,” he said. She sensed the tension in his body as he prepared to attack again, a spring being compressed to give it maximum velocity and distance when released. The restraint on the spring was disengaged. It uncoiled in her direction. Her two fingers on the trigger contracted in concert; there was an almost silly “pop” from the revolver—a Champagne cork, a dry twig being snapped, Rice Krispies.

  She stepped back and he fell at her feet, arms outstretched. She picked up the envelope, ran through the door and to the street where, once she realized the revolver was still in her hands, she shoved it into her raincoat and walked deliberately toward the nearest busy intersection.

  The message light on her telephone was on when she returned to her suite at the Watergate. She called the message center. “Oh, yes, Miss Cahill, a gentleman called. He said”—the operator laughed. “It’s a strange message. The gentleman said, ‘Necessary that we discuss Winston Churchill as quickly as possible.’ ”

  “He didn’t leave a name?”

  “No. He said you’d know who he was.”

  “Thank you.”

  Collette went to the balcony and looked out over the shimmering lights of Foggy Bottom. What had Joe Breslin told her? She could make contact with someone at the Churchill statue any evening for the next two weeks at six o’clock, and that the contact would remain there for no more than ten minutes.

  She returned to the living room, drew the drapes, got into a robe, and sat in a wing chair illuminated by a single floor lamp. On her lap was Vern Wheatley’s envelope. She pulled the pages from it, sighed, and began reading. It wasn’t until the first shaft of sunlight came through a gap in the drapes that she put it down, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and went, soberly, to bed.

  31

  Sleep. It was what she’d needed most. The small travel alarm clock on the nightstand next to her bed read 3:45. She’d slept almost ten hours, and it had been easy. The events earlier in the evening seemed not to have happened or, at least, had happened to someone else.

  It was four-thirty when she got out of the shower. As she stood in front of the bathroom mirror drying her hair, she remembered she was supposed to call Vern. She found the number for the Allen Lee Hotel and dialed it, asked for Mr. Black’s room. “Sorry to be late calling,” she said. “I slept all day.”

  “It’s okay. Did you read what I gave you?”

  “Read it? Yes, two or three times. I was up all night.”

  “And?”

  “You make some remarkable accusations, Vern.”

  “Are they wrong?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay, talk to me. How did you react to …?”

  “Why don’t we discuss it in person?”

  He whooped. “This is called progress. You mean you’re actually going to initiate a date with me?”

  “I wasn’t suggesting a date, just some time to discuss what you’ve written.”

  “Name it. I’m yours.”

  “I have to meet someone at six. How about getting together at seven?”

  “Who are you meeting?” he asked. It irked her but she said nothing. He said, “Oh, that’s right, Miss Cahill operates incognito. Known in high school as the girl most likely to succeed dressed in a cloak and dagger.”

  “Vern, I’m in no mood for your attempts at sarcasm.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not in any mood for jokes, either. You ever hear of Operation Octopus?”

  She had to think. Then she started to mention Hank Fox, cut off her words, and said, “No.”

  “It’s a division of the CIA that keeps computer tabs on writers, at least the ones who don’t carry briefs for the goddamn agency. I’m at the top of the list.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “And they take care of writers like me, Collette. Take care.” He guffawed. “They goddamn kill us, that’s what they do.”

  “Where shall we meet at seven?” she asked.

  “How about picking me up here at the hotel?”

  “No, let’s meet at the bar in the Watergate.”

  “You buying? Drinks there cost the national debt.”

  “If I have to. See you here … there at seven.”

  She found a vacant cab and told the driver to take her to the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. As they approached it, she kept an eye out for a statue. There it was, less than a hundred yards from the main entrance, set into clumps of bushes just off the sidewalk. The driver made a U-turn and let her off in front of the embassy gate. It had started to rain, and the air had taken on a distinct chill. She brought the collar of her raincoat up around her neck and slowly walked toward the statue of Winnie. It was imposing and lifelike, but the years had turned Churchill green, blending into the foliage. He would not have liked that.

  Traffic was heavy on Massachusetts Ave. It was raining harder, too, which slowed the traffic. There were few pedestrians, those scurrying past her coming from jobs at the British Embassy. She checked her watch; exactly six. She looked up and down the street in search of someone who might be interested in her but saw no one. Then, across the broad avenue, a man emerged from Normanstone Park. It was too dark and he was too far away for her to see his face. His trench-coat collar was up, his hands deep in his pockets. It took him some time to cross the street because of the traffic but, eventually, there was a break and he took advantage of it with long, loping strides. Good.

  She sensed someone approaching from her right, turned, and saw another man coming down the sidewalk. He wore a hat, and had hunched his shoulders and lowered his head against the rain. She’d forgotten the rain and realized her hair and shoes were soaked. She quickly looked to her left again. The man from the park was gone. Another look to the right. The man in the hat was almost abreast of her. She poised, waiting for him to look up and say something. Instead, he walked by, his head still lowered, his eyes on the sidewalk.

  She took a deep breath and wiped water from her nose and eyes.

  “Miss Cahill.” It came from her left. She knew immediately who it was from the accent. British. She turned and looked into the long, smiling face of Mark Hotchkiss.

  “What are you doing here?” she said quickly. The question represented the only thought on her mind at the moment. What was he doing there?

  “You arrived precisely on time,” he said pleasantly. “Sorry I’m a few minutes late. Traffic and all that, you know.”

  As difficult as it was to accept, she had no choice. The contact who was to meet her here at the Winston Churchill statue. “I suggest we get out of this bloody rain and go somewhere where we can talk.”

  “You left the message at my hotel?”

  “Yes, who else? Let’s go to my office. I have some things to say to you.”

  “Your office? Barrie’s, you mean?”

  “As you wish. It’s one and the same. Please, I’m getting damn well drenched standing here. Not much of a Londoner, forgetting my umbrella this way. Too long in the States, I suppose.”

  He took her arm and led her back toward the entrance of the British Embassy. They passed it and turned left on Observatory Lane, the U.S. Naval Observatory on their right, and walked a hundred yards until reaching a champagne-colored Jaguar. Tolker’s Jaguar. Hotchkiss unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. She became rigid and stared at him.
r />   “Come on, now, let’s go.” His voice was not quite as pleasant as earlier.

  She started to bend to get in, stopped and straightened, took a few steps back, and fixed him in a hard look. “Who are you?”

  His face testified to his exasperation. “I don’t have time to answer your silly questions,” he said harshly. “Get in the car.”

  She backed farther away, her right hand up in a gesture of self-defense. “Why are you here? You have nothing to do with …” He’d been standing with his hands outstretched as he attempted to convince her. Now his right hand slipped into his raincoat pocket.

  “No,” she said. She spun around and ran back toward Massachusetts Avenue. She stumbled; one shoe fell off but she kept going, an increasing wind whipping her face with water. She looked over her shoulder without breaking stride, kicked off her second shoe, and saw that he had started after her but had stopped. He shouted, “Come back here!”

  She kept going, reached the avenue and ran, retracing her route toward the statue of Winston Churchill, passing other embasssies and racing through puddles that soaked her feet. She kept going until she was out of breath, stopped, and looked back. Hotchkiss’s Jaguar came up to the corner and waited for a break in traffic to make a right. A vacant taxi approached her. She leaped into the gutter and frantically waved it down. The driver jammed on his brakes, causing others behind him to do the same. Horns blew and muffled curses filled the air. She got in the back, slammed the door, and said, “The Watergate, please, the hotel, and if a light Jag is behind us, please do everything you can to lose him.”

  “Hey, lady, what’s the matter? What’s going on?” the young driver asked.

  “Just go—please.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said, slapping the gearshift and hitting the accelerator, causing his wheels to spin on the wet pavement.

  Cahill looked through the rear window. Vision was obscured but she could see a dozen car-lengths behind. The Jaguar wasn’t to be seen.

  She turned around and said to the driver, “Get off this street, go through the park.”

  He followed her order and soon drove up to the main entrance to the Watergate Hotel.

  Cahill was drained. Once she was certain that Hotchkiss wasn’t behind them, her energy had abandoned her and she slumped in the back seat, her breath still coming heavily.

  “Lady, you all right?” the driver asked over the seat.

  She’d closed her eyes. She opened them and managed a small smile. “Yes, thank you very much. I know it all seems strange but …” There was no need to explain any further. She handed him a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. He thanked her. She got out and suddenly realized the condition she was in. Her shoeless feet were bleeding from cuts on the soles. The bottoms of her stockings were in shreds.

  “Evening,” the doorman said from beneath the protection of a canopy.

  Cahill mustered all the dignity she could and said, “Messy night,” proudly walked past him and into the lobby, aware that he’d turned and was taking in her every step.

  The lobby was busy as usual which, Cahill reasoned, was to her advantage. People were too engaged in coming and going and in conversations to care about a shoeless, wet woman.

  She went to the elevator bank serving her floor and pushed the “Up” button. Because she was in a hurry, it was a series of eternities as she watched the lights above the elevator door indicate a slow descent from the top of the hotel. “Damn,” she muttered as she glanced left and right to see whether there was any interest in her. There wasn’t. She looked up again; the elevator had stopped at the tenth floor. She thought of Eric Edwards and Suite 1010. Had it stopped to pick him up? Coincidence but …

  She moved away from the door so that she was not in the line of anyone’s vision coming through it. She could still see the lighted numbers. The elevator had stopped at Five, had skipped Four and stopped at Three. A large party of conventioners who’d flooded the center of the lobby ever since Cahill entered moved out en masse, affording her a clear view of a cluster of small tables and stuffed chairs at which well-dressed people enjoyed pre-dinner cocktails. The sight didn’t seem real at first, but it took her only a second to realize that it was. He was sitting at a table by himself, a glass in his hand, legs casually crossed, his attention directed at a woman seated at an adjacent table. Cahill quickly turned her head so that only her back was visible to him.

  The sudden opening of the elevator door startled her. A dozen people filed out. Collette faced the wall and took each of them in with her peripheral vision. No Eric Edwards.

  The moment the elevator was empty, she sidestepped into it, her back still to the cocktail area. She pushed Eight, then the “Close Door” button. She kept punching it, silently cursing the fact that it had no effect on what the elevator did. Like “Walk” buttons at intersections, she thought. Placebos.

  A man in a tuxedo and a woman in a gown and furs joined her in the elevator. She ignored their glances at her feet and kept her eyes trained on the control buttons. The doors started to close; a man suddenly reached in and caused them to open again. He stepped in, followed by two teenage girls. One of them looked down at Cahill’s shoeless dishabille, nudged her friend, and they both giggled.

  The doors finally closed and the elevator made its ascent. The teenagers got off first, glancing back, then the man who’d stopped the doors with his arm. At the eighth floor, Cahill hobbled out. The man in the tux and the woman in furs whispered something unintelligible to each other. Oh, to be respectable.

  She went to her door and opened it. A maid had been in and turned down the bed, leaving two small pieces of foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. Cahill locked the door from inside and attached the chain. She quickly got out of her raincoat, which was soaked through, and dropped it on the floor. The rest of her clothes followed. A tiny smear of blood on the carpet from her foot was dissolved by the wet clothing. She turned on the shower and, when it was as hot as she could stand it, stepped in. Ten minutes later she emerged, dried herself, found a Band-Aid in her purse and applied it to the small cut on her foot.

  She hadn’t noticed upon entering her room that her message light was on. She picked up the phone and identified herself. “Yes, Miss Cahill, you have a message from a Dr. Tolker. He said he was anxious to speak with you and would be in the hotel this evening. You can have him paged.”

  “No, I … Yes, thank you very much, I’ll do that later, not now.”

  The message from Tolker was no surprise. Seeing him sitting in the lobby with a glass of wine had been. She’d assumed she’d killed him. Unless his CIA-funded research had resulted in perfect clone development, he was very much alive. She was glad for that. And frightened.

  She picked up the phone again, dialed the number for the Allen Lee Hotel, and asked for Mr. Black’s room. There was no answer. Then the operator asked, “Do you happen to be Miss Collette Cahill?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Mr. Black had to run out but he left a message in case you called. He said he would return at ten. He said he had some urgent business that came up at the last minute.”

  Collette’s sigh of frustration was, she was certain, audible to the operator even without the benefit of a telephone. She closed her eyes and said dejectedly, “Thank you.”

  Naked while on the phone, she suddenly felt cold and vulnerable. She pulled out a pair of jeans from the suitcase that she hadn’t bothered to unpack, and a furry pink sweater. She got into them and slipped her feet into white sneakers.

  She turned on all the lights, looked at the suitcase on the floor, hesitated, then went to it and unlocked an inside compartment. She reached in and came out with the ampules of prussic acid and nitro, and the cigar-shaped detonator. She sat in a chair beneath a lamp and assembled it, then reloaded the small white plastic revolver. She slipped everything into her purse and sat quietly, her fingers playing with the purse’s shoulder strap, her ears cocked for sound, her eyes skating over every i
nch of the large room.

  It was intensely quiet, which unnerved her. She was getting up to turn on the television set when the phone rang. The sound of it froze her in the middle of the room. Should she answer? No. Obviously, Tolker and Mark Hotchkiss knew that she was staying at the Watergate, and she didn’t want to speak to either of them. Vern didn’t know where she was. “How stupid,” she chided herself. Why had she played it so secret with him? He loomed large as the only human being in Washington that she could trust. That was ironic, she realized, considering how deceitful he’d been up until their dinner last night.

  What suddenly imbued him with trustworthiness was that of everyone in her recent life, only Vern was outside the Company. In fact, he was outside trying to break in, dedicated to exposing and harming it. So much of what he’d written was accurate, at least to the best of her knowledge. Although he hadn’t stated it in so many words, the pattern that emerged from his pages gave considerable weight to the idea that it was Jason Tolker who was responsible for Barrie Mayer’s and David Hubler’s deaths. It all seemed so clear to her now, as though a brilliant light illuminated the truth as she stood in the center of the room.

  Árpád Hegedüs had lied in that small bar in Budapest. What he’d told her earlier in their relationship was the truth, and what she’d suggested to Joe Breslin made sense. Hegedüs had come over as a defector in order to spread disinformation to the Americans. Tolker had been selling information to the Soviets about the results of mind-control experimentation in the United States. More than that, according to Wheatley’s manuscript, he’d used various hypnotized subjects to transmit that information.