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ago. I live in the British Virgin Islands but I wondered if …”
The line went dead. He was cut off, and the machine made a series of beeping noises.
    His call set up another set of questions for her. Didn’t he know that
she
would know who he was, that he lived in the British Virgins, was a CIA operative there whose primary mission had to do with Hungary? Was he just being professional? Probably. She couldn’t fault that.
    She made herself a cup of tea, got into her nightgown, and climbed into bed, the tea on a small table beside her. She decided three things: She would request time off immediately to go to London and Washington; she would look up everyone who was close to Barrie and, at least, be able to vent her feelings; and she would, from that moment forward, accept the possibility that her friend Barrie Mayer had died prematurely of a heart attack, at least until there was something tangible to prove otherwise.
    She fell asleep crying silently after asking in a hoarse, low voice, “What happened, Barrie? What
really
happened?”

4
    Collette: Please see me as soon as you come in. Joe
.
    The note was taped to the telephone in her office on the second floor of the embassy. She got a cup of coffee and walked down the hall to Breslin’s office. “Come in,” he said. “Close the door.”
    He took a sip of his coffee which, Cahill knew, contained a healthy shot of akvavit, compliments of a buddy in the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen who always included a bottle in his diplomatic pouch. “What’s up?” she asked.
    “Feel like a walk?”
    “Sure.” He wasn’t suggesting it because he needed exercise. What he had to say was important and private, and Breslin was a notorious paranoiac when it came to holding such conversations inside the embassy.
    They went down a broad staircase with worn red carpeting, through a door tripped electronically by a young woman at the front desk, past a Hungarian Embassy employee who was running a metal detector over a visitor, and out into bright sunshine that bathed Szabadság tėr and Liberation Square.
    A group of schoolchildren gathered at the base of a hugememorial obelisk dedicated to Soviet soldiers who’d liberated the city. The streets were bustling with people on their way to work, or heading for Váci utca and its parallel shopping boulevard from which all vehicles were banned. “Come on,” Breslin said, “let’s go down to Parliament.”
    They walked along the Danube’s shoreline until they reached the domed, neo-Gothic Parliament building with its eighty-eight statues depicting Hungarian monarchs, commanders, and famous warriors. Breslin looked up at it and smiled. “I would have liked being around here when they really did have a Parliament,” he said. Since the Soviets took over, the Parliament continued to function, but in name only. The
real
decisions were made in an ugly, rectangular building farther up the river where the MSZMP—the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party—sat.
    Cahill watched boat traffic on the Danube as she asked, “What do you want to tell me?”
    Breslin pulled his pipe from his jacket, tamped tobacco into its bowl, and put a wooden match to it. “I don’t think you’ll have to ask for time off to chase down what happened to your friend Barrie.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Based upon what Stan told me this morning, you’re going to be asked to do it officially.” Stanley Podgorsky was chief-of-station for the CIA unit operating out of the embassy. Of two hundred Americans assigned there, approximately half were CIA people reporting to him.
    “Why me?” Cahill asked. “I’m not a trained investigator.”
    “Why not? How many Company investigators have you known who were trained?” It caused her to smile. “You know how it works, Collette, somebody knows somebody who’s been compromised and they get the assignment, instant investigator. I think that’s you this time around.”
    “Because I knew