To Free a Spy (17 page)

* * *

Later that morning in the Oval Office, Cross told Warfield, “I’ve put you in a lousy position. You could’ve gone into politics if you wanted this kind of harassment.”

“It’s my own doing.”

“You mean Habur? I hope I would have had the guts to do what you did.”

“I’m a liability to you now, Mr. President. If I disappear, so will the story. And you can get back to work. You hired me to handle this but you’re having to spend time on it.”

Cross weighed that for a moment. “Let’s hang in there, Cam. Years ago, I was naïve to think I could get into politics and stay above this part of it, but now that I’m in, I can play the game.”

Warfield shook his head. “It’s no good. The advantages I held for you—my anonymity, independence—that’s gone now. And the longer this lives, the worse it’ll get. Congressional hearings, investigations, special prosecutors. There’d be no time left for me to do what you hired me for. I leave, the problem goes away.”

Cross thought it over. “Tell you what, Cam, don’t jump yet. Spend your time at Lone Elm instead of this office, but keep working on this. It’ll be unofficial. We’ll say you’ve resigned the post here at the White House. I’ll keep the followup meet with Fullwood and Reynolds at noon and see what they have to say about their sources.”

* * *

Paula Newnan sat with Warfield while he packed up the personal items he’d brought to the White House. She cursed Fullwood. Warfield put the boxes in his car and headed to Lone Elm.

* * *

Cross called Warfield after his noon meeting with Fullwood and Reynolds.

“Told them you decided to go back to Lone Elm.”

“Made Fullwood a happy man.”

“Looks like the CIA source came through Quinn himself via a former KGB officer he met in Russia when he was in the Senate. Quinn doesn’t want to identify his source—a commitment he made to him.”

“This was direct from the KGB officer to Quinn?”

“So it seems.”

Warfield thought about that. It sounded too much like his own relationship with Antonov. An incredible coincidence. What about Antonov? Could he be Quinn’s source also, playing both ends against the middle? Could Quinn,
the CIA director
, be lying? Not possible.

“You there?” Cross said after a few seconds.

“Just thinking. Now what about Fullwood’s claim that I set up Habur? He tell you how he got that?”

“Nope. He chewed on that cigar and tried to explain but he’s shooting in the dark.”

“What about the
Post
story?”

“Fullwood knows that I think he leaked it,” Cross said.

* * *

Warfield was putting his Lone Elm office in order the next day when Abbas Mozedah called. “This may or may not be important, Cameron, but very interesting. Our friend Seth has a sister in America—right there in Washington.”

“Yeah? Seth, the terrorist?”

“Name is Ana Koronis.”

“Koronis.” Warfield knew the name. “Married to—”

“Spiro Koronis.
Was
. As you know, he is dead now.”

The former U.S. Ambassador to Greece!
Warfield was stunned. Not only was Seth’s sister the widow of the ambassador,
she had been the constant companion of Austin Quinn for some time!
Also a prominent lawyer and high-profile Washington socialite, Ms. Koronis was often in the news.

This woman was the sister of a Middle East terrorist?

“Abbas, you sure about that?”

“It is from Hassan. And what he has told us to now has proved true.”

Hassan again. “What does he have to say about her?”

“He does not know of any communication between Seth and his sister now, but he says she lived with Seth in Iran for six or seven months, then moved back to Washington. That was a few years ago, after her family was killed, but Seth was the same outlaw then.”

“So you’re confident about this.”

“I am, Cameron,” said Abbas in his baritone voice.

Warfield hung up knowing he had a decision to make. Ana Koronis couldn’t be condemned simply because her brother was a terrorist, but it would be flat-out irresponsible to ignore the connection. He searched the Internet for “Ana Koronis” and came up with three-hundred-ninety-eight hits, not an extraordinary number for a person of notoriety, many of which were newspaper and magazine references that included everything he knew of her and much more.

None of the information he found was in-itself damaging but the irony was too great. Talking to the FBI was not an option but he remembered a United States attorney he’d met on a case a couple of years ago and trusted. He dialed Joe Morgan and reintroduced himself.

“Sure,” Morgan said. “The Rattarree case. Been a while. How’s it goin’ Warfield?”

* * *

They met at Louie’s Blue Plate in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, outside the Washington Beltway. It was a retro joint with plastic laminated table tops and chrome chairs, and its reputation for vegetables and chicken fried steak was legendary. Earth Angel by the Penguins was playing on the juke box when they arrived. It was loud enough to assure a private conversation.

Warfield told Morgan what he’d learned from Abbas and the Internet about Ana Koronis. Her life resembled a Greek tragedy as much as it did a spy case. During her courtship with Spiro Koronis, society magazines pictured a beautiful, olive-skinned Ana along with the ambassador week after week, referring to him as one of the most eligible men in the world and describing Ana as a charming, brilliant young attorney who grew up in Chicago and moved to Washington to practice law. It happened that her law firm had ties to the State department, where she met the ambassador.

People photographers had found a way into the palace in Greece where the couple married. They had a child soon, and Ana left her law practice so she and son Nikko could be with the ambassador in Athens.

The press coverage was no less frenetic during the three years after their marriage. There were photos of them aboard their yacht, at the embassy in Athens, on Santorini with friends and always with beloved Nikko, who never failed to favor the cameras with a happy smile. They became America’s Couple. But the fairy tale was cut far too short by a terrorist incident at the airport in Athens. Spiro and little Nikko were taken hostage inside an airport restroom and dragged onto a hijacked passenger jet as the other armed terrorists covered them. The other passengers had been ordered off the plane.

A pair of U.S. warplanes sandwiched the hijacked plane as it crossed the Mediterranean but despite military communications that reached all the way to the Pentagon—and to the White House, some later said—the airliner crossed into Syrian air space before the F-15 Air Force pilots were given authorization to take any action. The U.S. fighter jets impotently turned back at the border.

Months later, after the U.S. had refused to meet the abductors’ demands, photos were released to the international press showing the slain bodies of Spiro and Nikko Koronis. It was never clear what the Air Force fighter pilots could have done even if authorized, but the American press blasted the Pentagon and the White House for allowing the ambassador and little Nikko to be taken to their deaths with impunity.

Warfield found no record of any negative public statements attributed to Ana, but the
New York Times
reported that she had privately expressed bitterness, even to the extent of threatening to find a way to set things straight with the U.S. Government for standing around with their hands in their pockets while her loved ones were taken to their eventual deaths. Ana had denied the story.

In the aftermath, it was revealed that the ambassador had lived beyond his financial means for years and had nothing but debts to leave Ana after his death.

Morgan looked through the magazine and Internet articles Warfield had printed out and made notes while he talked. It was a sensitive matter given Ana Koronis’s high standing in the Washington community but Morgan left the meeting saying he would look into it.

They were out in the parking lot, about to get into their cars to leave when Morgan said, “See much of Stern when you’re at the White House? He’s the national security advisor now, right?”

“In a meeting now and then. You know Stern, though. Doesn’t say a lot.”

“Little surprised Cross put him in the sensitive job he’s in.”

“Never thought much about it. He was cleared after the Ames case,” Warfield said.

Morgan looked as if he wanted to say something, but didn’t.

“Anything I should know about Stern?”

Morgan opened his car door. “Nah. That case is closed.”

* * *

Warfield hadn’t seen Fleming since the morning before, when the
Washington Post
carried the story about Cross and him, and they hadn’t been out to dinner in a week. He parked in the turnaround at Hardscrabble and let himself in through the garage. Fleming was standing in front of her bedroom mirror adjusting the straps on her dress when he walked in. The ivory dress accented her tan and her hair was cut above her shoulders the way he liked it best. Fleming’s look was always fresh, a little different, never routine—even when he was with her every day. His concerns about Fullwood and Ana Koronis and Boris Petrevich moved for the moment to an obscure fold in his brain.

She gave him a light kiss. “That’s all you get,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “I’m all dressed.”

Warfield showered and put on a pair of tan slacks and a Tommy Bahama knit shirt. He was ready in ten minutes.

He put the top down on Fleming’s convertible when they got to the end of the gravel driveway. The orange ball hovering above the western horizon cast long shadows on the winding rural roads as they drove toward Middleburg. Warfield often contrasted the Virginia countryside with the plains of his West Texas heritage—where there were no stone fences and you could drive for hours and never even see a stream. They called them
runs
here in Virginia and you couldn’t go a mile without crossing one. Weathered stone fences still defined what once were thousand-acre estates, but high-paid Washington officials and business types willing and able to pay the asking price for this respite from the Beltway swarmed to Hunt Country with dreams of looking out from their verandas at pastures full of grazing horses. Laser-straight four-board wood fences bordered the new fifteen- or twenty-acre mini-farms.

Some of the newcomers were horse people who knew what they were getting into, but most of them were not. Traditionalists whose families had lived there forever didn’t like the newcomers destroying their once-tranquil countryside but no one could deny the positive economic impact on the area. Blacksmiths got hundreds of dollars to shoe horses, and plumbers, electricians and stonemasons had more work than they could keep up with. It took a trainer a year to get a rider and horse ready for the steeplechases and foxhunts, and this brought on new stables and more jobs for trainers. It was a thriving free-market economy.

Loudoun County had taken on most of the growth in the area and the little town of Middleburg was bursting at the seams. Art galleries, boutiques, quaint restaurants and historic inns lined the town’s few streets, and on weekends when city-dwellers drove out Highway 50 from Washington to see what it was all about, the merchants couldn’t keep the smiles off their faces.

“So what world are you in, Warfield?” Fleming asked after a mile of silence.

“Horses. Land. All the things you natives do around here.”

“I’m not exactly considered a blue-blood since I was raised in Charlottesville. I blend in okay, though, don’t you think?”

“You sit a saddle the right way.”

“Western. I just never got into the hunts.”

“All they do is
chase
the fox. They don’t even want to catch it. Back home we’d consider that a waste of a bunch of good dogs and horses.”

Fleming shook her head and laughed. “No couth, War Man.”

Fleming had called ahead and reserved their favorite table at Ticcio’s, a small Italian place at the edge of town that got most of its business from locals. Fleming and Warfield went there a couple of times a month for a few laid-back minutes and some pretty good food. Fleming once told Warfield that if she ever left him it would be for Ticcio, the restaurant’s owner. His resonant voice and European accent put her in the mood to remove her clothes. Ticcio led them past the bar to a corner table overlooking a courtyard outside the window and took their drink order. A family of ducks played Follow Me in a fountain pool in the garden.

Warfield settled into his drink. Fleming’s charm and beauty, the open-air ride through the country and the serenity outside the window had mellowed him. It was rare. Every second of his life was crammed full and he wouldn’t change it if he could, but he knew he needed to stop for a breather once in a while. Fleming had not been too far off with the couth bit. He’d grown up in Texas on a dairy farm. In time, he came to the realization his family was poor, but poor was a relative thing and no one he knew then was any different. Besides, his family had had what they needed: Clean clothes, a warm house and plenty to eat. Dairy farming wasn’t easy but he never thought much about that either. Milk cows knew no holiday and every day started at four-thirty in the morning. Put feed in the stalls, hook up the milking machines to the cows, save the milk, clean the floor, and do it over and over again until every cow was cycled through. Then he’d prepare the milk for pickup and get ready for school. Repeat the whole thing that evening. Summers meant working in the fields, putting up the hay that would be needed for winter.

Warfield’s father Raymond was a hard driver with no patience for extracurricular diversions that took Warfield away from the farm, but young Cam bargained with him so he could play football and baseball: He would take over the entire milking responsibilities all to himself in return for the time he wanted for sports and the library, which meant he had to get up even earlier for the morning milking, and do the afternoon chores after practice or games.

Warfield’s love for the military began in the ninth grade. After learning in a World War II history class about the Enigma cipher machine used by the German U-boats to communicate with Berlin, and the allies’ successes that came from breaking the code, he was hooked. For the next three years he spent any time not required by the farm or sports at the library. By the end of his senior year he’d read everything there was in the school and county libraries about cryptography and the role of codes and code-breaking from the first world war to the present. His interest expanded to war in general. He memorized the conditions for the use of spies written by a Chinese philosopher named Sun Tzu in a book titled The Art of War two centuries earlier. Every life decision Warfield made after that was in pursuit of a career in military intelligence.