To Free a Spy (43 page)

Then Warfield went back to the beginning with what he’d learned from Tom Holden minutes before paying his visit to Quinn: Karly’s murder, Gallardi’s role after her death, Maria Sanchez’s role and Magliacci’s blackmail.

Warfield laid out his theory that Quinn, desperate for money to pay Magliacci, placed a confederate inside the Atlanta prison right after Warfield revealed in the Oval Office meeting that Joplan had a contact with deep pockets. This operative extracted the contact information from Joplan and killed him. Armed with that information, Quinn had Joplan’s contact, Pierre, all to himself. Once Quinn and Pierre exchanged the CIA list and the money, Seth orchestrated the movement of Petrevich and the uranium from Moscow to Tokyo. The crossing into Iraq was a red herring that worked. It was easy to believe Petrevich’s destination was the Middle East. Certainly anywhere other than Tokyo.

Cross was destroyed by it all and when Warfield finished he shook his head. “So Austin did this. I guess I never knew him.”

“He used Ana to lure me to Atlantic City after his hired hands blew it here. By then, he’d killed off everyone who could trip him up but Ana and me. A handful of unsolved murders in Washington is a little blip on the screen, so nobody noticed they were related.”

Cross positioned his chin on a steeple of his fingers. “When you told him the FBI had the stuff from Magliacci’s safe-deposit box…that was the feather that brought the bridge down.”

“The DNA. Nothing else phased him. I tried to convince him to turn himself in, but…”

Cross shook his head. “Proud man, Austin. Self-destruction was easier.”

Warfield nodded. Maybe Quinn never really allowed himself to think about it before. Faced with certain exposure, it all came home. In those few minutes, he morphed from homicidal to suicidal.

Cross had been staring out the window into the Rose Garden. He turned back to Warfield. “Anything else right now, Cam? Guess I need to sit with this for awhile.”

“Nothing that can’t wait, sir.” What Warfield needed was sleep. He’d been up since Friday morning.

* * *

Next morning in the Oval Office, Cross brought Warfield up to date on Quinn. Emergency surgery had kept him alive so far, but more operations would be necessary. He’d be moved to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as soon as the doctors would allow it. Even if he survived, he was not expected to recover his mental faculties.

“So he’ll never stand trial,” said Cross. “In a way, this is worse for him than a trial. This whole damn mess, it’s the hardest thing I’ve had to face here in the presidency. Anywhere.”

Warfield nodded.

“Now I have to deal with the press,” Cross said. “It’ll look worse if we try to keep it quiet much longer. Congress will jump in the middle of it. CIA may as well put their operations files on all the billboards around town when Congress gets through wringing them out.”

After a while, Cross looked at Warfield in resignation. “Anything else?”

“This may not be the best time.”

“What is it?”

“Ana Koronis. She’s gotta be dealt with.” After Damn Right Donaldson delivered Warfield and Quinn to the hospital, his men took Ana to Philadelphia where they held her until federal marshals returned her to the ADC.

“This Helen Swope thing?”

“Right. Take what we know about Quinn, Swope’s apparent false testimony plus what Suri told me, you get some serious doubt about Ana’s guilt.”

“She’ll get a new trial after Quinn has been dealt with, when all his doings have been fleshed out. And she can use those facts for her defense.”

Warfield nodded. “If Ana’s innocent, and I think she probably is, she shouldn’t have to wait around for the system to work, knowing what we know. You’re talking a year, maybe more. Swope’s dead, but at least Joe Morgan survived, and her minister is going to make it.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Some kind of temporary release.”

Cross thought about it for a moment. “Okay, go for it. But it’s your baby, Cam. I can’t help right now. Quinn’s enough, on top of everything else. But you can use my name when you need to. I’ll back you.”

Warfield left the Oval Office knowing he would be tied up in FBI interviews, CIA debriefings and Congressional hearings for some time. Then he’d get Ana out of jail.

Ana walked out of
the Alexandria Detention Center five weeks after Cross agreed to lend his weight to get her released.

It hadn’t been easy. Warfield had to stretch Cross’s offer of influence to the limit by authorizing Ana’s lawyers to tell the judge and government attorneys the president would grant Ana a pardon if they didn’t find a way to release her until she could get a new trial. With that, the prosecutors gave in and Judge Hartrampf agreed, but imposed a few restrictions. Her travels were limited to the D.C. area and she was required to report to Hartrampf’s clerk every Monday morning.

The press got wind of the pardon threat and published it. Cross called Warfield. “She’d better be squeaky clean. Otherwise, you and I may as well go back to prison with her.”

* * *

Ana’s townhouse was worse than she expected. Water had intruded somehow and ruined a stretch of ceiling and two Persian rugs and permanently stained her wood floors. She spent her first day back arranging for repairs and a cleaning crew. To her relief, the lady who cleaned for her before she moved in with Quinn was still available, and someone was coming out to look at the water damage.

She couldn’t stay there that night and checked into a Holiday Inn a few blocks away. After spending half an hour developing a list of things she had to do, she took a cab across the river the following morning to her old law office in Washington. The reception she got from her former partners was reserved. They sat in a small conference room with her and chatted about nothing for a few minutes, clearly avoiding her ordeal. They didn’t object when she requested the contents from her safe. Her office hadn’t been occupied since she left and she decided no one ever knew the safe was there.

After leaving the law office in another cab, Ana made three quick stops and returned to the hotel. There she made a phone call that took almost half an hour, ordered a Domino’s pizza and spent the next few minutes soaking in a hot shower, the first moments she had taken for herself since she was released. There’d be more of those later, she promised herself, but there was work to do first.

The next day, she took a taxi to the J. W. Marriott Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where she browsed through one of the shops in the lobby for a few minutes. At two-fifty-five she walked over to the bank of phones built into the wall. Each phone had its own four-foot-by-four-foot enclosure with a privacy door. Several of the booths were available but Ana had waited until the second one from the left, of which she’d copied the phone number yesterday, became vacant. She sat down inside. It was two-fifty-seven in the afternoon.

She had gone through reliable channels last night to get a message to Seth. She gave him three phone numbers at various public locations in Washington, and listed the date and time she would be at each. She expected Seth to reach her at one of them. She waited in the phone booth until three-thirty. The phone didn’t ring.

The next day was no better. She hung around a phone near a secluded waiting area at George Washington University hospital but the call never came.

On the third day, at the remaining location, the phone rang at two past ten in the morning.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good. No names,” Seth said. “And be brief.”

She took a deep breath, one of relief, as if it were her first in days. “Of course.”

“You are free now from that prison?” He sounded reserved.

“Gratefully so.”

“Why do you call me now?”

“I think you can imagine.”

“I do not dare to guess, Ana.”

“I’ve paid a heavy price for something I did not do.”

“Perhaps because of your Iranian roots.”

“I would never have been convicted otherwise. My release has done nothing to ease my resentment.”

“But you are free now.”

“Temporarily at least, but that is not the point. I am damaged goods forever. I’ve tried to avoid bitterness but I’m afraid it has taken over my soul.”

There was silence for a moment before Seth said, “Again, why do you call me?”

“I will say I am more sympathetic now to your, uh, activities.”

“You have reversed your position about assisting me?”

“I believe I am ready for that, yes.”

“I do not know you. I must be very careful.”

Ana didn’t say a word. She quietly hung up the phone and sat there for a minute, wondering whether she’d done the right thing. She was walking away when it rang again. It rang five times before she picked it up.

“We can take one step at a time,” Seth said.

Ana was silent for a moment. “What do you want me to do?”

“Provide information to help set up a U.S. operation, but it must have great potential if it is to be of interest to me.”

“I think you’ll find the opportunities to your satisfaction. I have contacts.”

“There are logistical problems.”

“Travel?”

“It is more difficult now.”

“I can make those arrangements for you.”

* * *

Ana hung up and called to make a luncheon appointment with an old friend at the State Department, Tot Templeton. Tot worked as a mid-level manager at State in the section that had oversight responsibilities for passports and visas. Tot’s section was one of Ana’s biggest clients when she practiced law. And she was the only one of Ana’s acquaintances who attended her trial.

Tot had worked for State for more than seventeen years and watched co-worker after co-worker, most of whom she considered to have skills inferior to her own, pass over her en route to positions that offered more responsibility and better pay. She had expressed her frustration about it to Ana more than once, and told Ana she was a lifesaver for listening to her. Tot also worked nights and weekends as a volunteer counselor at a legal aid office, where she had come to identify with a certain type of client: Those who felt they had been downtrodden by their employer. Given the Washington setting, those were often employees of the federal government. Tot became known as a more-than-sympathetic ear at legal aid, one who would go the extra mile, perhaps bend the rules if it meant justice for her clients.

At lunch Ana talked and Tot paid close attention. It was an hour past the time for Tot to return to work when they hugged warmly and parted.

* * *

Four weeks later, Seth breezed through customs at Reagan National and called the number Ana provided, gave her an address and told her to wait for him there. She would be watched and if anything looked suspicious he would not show and would call her later with new instructions.

The address was a safe house held by a group in line with Seth’s causes. They were to call him when Ana arrived if everything looked okay. Seth stayed alive by being cautious. He trusted no one but himself and certainly not his Americanized sister, but her contacts and knowledge of Washington might mean the difference between success and failure. Nevertheless, he would tell her only what he needed her to know.

It was unusual for Seth to play such an active role in an operation. He was a broker for information, materials and expertise—as in the Petrevich operation. He was infrastructure, facilitator. The brains. But the opportunity to carry out a high-profile project himself in the capital of his most hated enemy was too great a temptation. It would enhance his reputation among other freedom fighters and pull in new money from sympathizers. It would be near impossible to better the high-water mark left in the United States by his brothers before him but this operation would serve to perpetuate the uncertainty the Americans had lived with for years now and kept them off balance.

Seth’s war would be won a kill at a time. And where he and others like him had it over the rest of the world could be found in their values. Westerners didn’t have the will to kill innocents. To Seth, all Americans were fair game.

Seth got to the safe house ten minutes after Ana. “You look the same,” she said, tugging on his beard as they embraced.

“And you…still beautiful, my sister.” After they made small talk for a minute Seth looked at his watch and turned to the business at hand.

“What is next for you?”

“I may be free for only a short while. I’ll get a new trial and—”

“—and they will find a way to keep you in prison. You are among the enemy, Ana. They would not negotiate with your son and husband’s captors to save them. You were born to Iranian parents and can never be accepted here. And our people will never give up our fight. We cannot beat America in a great war such as might have occurred between Russia and the United States but we can keep their people off balance, take a few at a time. They will come to wish for a decisive battle but there will never be one. We will choose the battlefields in America as we have done in the rest of the world. They will never know where the next one will be. Or when. We will choose our implements of war and we have loyalists who will be the vehicles of delivery. The imbeciles of the United States can never compete with an enemy who believes as fervently as we do, who are willing to die for our beliefs. They can never be prepared for us or find us for retaliation. We are nowhere and we are everywhere.”

Seth went on. “To kill us would be to kill the women and children who harbor us. The Americans will allow their own to be killed rather than do that. We are a perfect war machine, Ana, because we have a perfect enemy. Someday the Great Satan will bow to us.”

Seth paused. The veins in his muscular arms bulged as he looked at Ana. “The name Seth will be revered or feared the world around. Our parents would be proud of both of us.”

Ana wiped a tear from her eye.

“I have heard of your Warfield. Is he a concern?”

“Warfield feels somewhat responsible for my conviction. He got me out of jail.”

“You have a way with men.”

“I don’t wish to talk about that. Tell me what you need me to do.”