CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

I WAS FORTY YEARS OLD, married and divorced three times, three kids on the other side of the continent. My track record did not include a finish line. And now here I had eyes for the new blonde analyst at Langley. At least her name wasn’t Mary.

Close friendships rarely happened in the Agency. In fact, they were discouraged. Standard procedure in the operations sector required the use of pseudonyms. It was “Carl” or “Jim” or “Ron Smith.” There were perhaps more “Smiths” and “Joneses” at Langley than there were “O’Haras” in Scotland. Plus, no one talked about his job. Everything was on a “need to know” basis.

Barbara wore no ring; neither did I, of course. Part of standard operating procedure, SOP, was to blend into the background while presenting as little as possible about private lives. Still, I made a point of stopping by her desk whenever I could.

“I’ve never seen you around before, Barbara. Where have you been?”

She laughed, delightfully and openly. “You mean, where have I been all your life?”

The girl had a sense of humor. That was good. She told me she had just returned from Paris.

“Paris? Why did you come back to headquarters?”

She laughed. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

I laughed with her at the old joke. Then she said, half-jokingly, but in a way that let me know she was single and never married and that she might be interested in me, “I was looking for a husband. I’m thirty-five years old and my age is creeping up on me and I couldn’t find the marrying type in Europe.”

I was nothing if not the marrying type. I fumbled for something to say. “Uh—”

“Yes?”

“Uh—gotta go. See you.”

I was not going to fall into that old trap again. I didn’t need any more pretty faces left in my wake. I tried to stay away from her desk, but I kept making excuses to detour into her piece of geography.

One of my men in Maritime was getting married on a Saturday afternoon. I telephoned Barbara at her desk and asked her to go to the wedding with me. I didn’t know her home number; that sort of information was never given out freely at Langley. To my surprise, she said yes.

Call me a fish; I was hooked.

I remained secretive with her, out of long habit. She naturally knew I was in SOD, head of Maritime, but I told her nothing about my experiences in Vietnam, Cuba, Europe, or any of the other hellholes in the world. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want to frighten her off. I had already lost three wives because of there always being “another side of the ocean,” as the last Mary put it.

With me, Barbara was open and candid for someone who had worked inside the Agency since she got out of college. She was living at home with her folks in Pittsburgh, she told me, when she noticed an ad in the newspaper offering recruitment for people who would like to live and work overseas. Since Barbara always wanted to travel, she responded to the ad and soon discovered herself signed up in Washington, D.C., for an unspecified “government agency.”

She had been all over the world since then working as an intelligence analyst for Agency offices in both primary and backwater U.S. embassies. Now she was back in the States on temporary assignment to the Directorate of Operations.

I didn’t want another family. I fled for my life.

Barbara accepted a temporary assignment overseas. We didn’t see each other for three months, which gave me plenty of time to think. This was an exciting, energetic, and accomplished lady. If there was ever going to be a right woman for me, this was she. I was known for taking chances. Why not one more time?

After she returned to Langley, we dated for about a year before driving to Rockville, Maryland, one Saturday afternoon, just the two of us, to get married at the Justice Building. I could almost hear Boehm growling in my ear, “You dunderhead, sir. You went and did it again.”