To Free a Spy (45 page)

“Hell, no!”
Fullwood yelled.

Then the committee attorney played a video which an FBI agent identified as one found in Abercrombie’s office after his death. The conversation between Fullwood and Abercrombie was played for the committee, and for the world on C-SPAN.

Fullwood’s lawyer requested a recess. Before the hearing resumed the next morning, the lawyer met with the committee chairman and counsel and told them Fullwood was going to submit his resignation to President Cross that day. But if Fullwood thought that would end it he was mistaken. He left Washington in disgrace and returned to his home state, where the next Wednesday federal marshals arrested him at noon at his home. When they marched him out the front door, remote-broadcast trucks from the national and local networks lined the street. A federal grand jury indicted him a week later.

Warfield arranged a memorial service for Leroy Mitchell, the plumbing contractor for whose death he felt responsible. Reporter Roberts was there. He drew on the irony of Leroy’s wife’s attempt to comfort Warfield in his anguish over Leroy’s death. Warfield put an envelope in her hand when he left the service that day. When Mona opened it, the crinkled photo Warfield had taken from Leroy’s truck was inside with a heartfelt letter from Warfield.

Congress soon after passed legislation that recognized Leroy Mitchell for his service to the United States and awarded his widow one million dollars.

* * *

Within a couple of months after Austin Quinn shot himself, the cable news shows removed the sensational
Breaking News
graphics that had used up the lower third of the screen, but even then the 24/7 interviews showed no signs of slacking off. News anchors created endless phrasings of the same questions and the Pentagon brass, politicians, nuclear scientists and psychologists appearing with them looked for different ways to answer. It was as if the two groups, the questioners and the answerers, existed for the sole purpose of supporting each other.

Ana tried to shut it all out—the endless rhetoric, the re-living of it all, the if-onlys—but she wasn’t there yet. She had run the emotional gamut from denial to grief to acceptance of her fate. Now she was free again and in the process of reclaiming her life. She needed the closure that only facing Quinn could bring. She’d asked Warfield to go with her.

“You can see him now,” the desk attendant said. As she and Warfield followed the white-haired assistant down the echoing hallway, Ana thought of the hospital where she had her tonsils out when she was ten—the plaster walls, the white fish-bowl light globes hanging by a wire from the high ceilings, the small once-white tile hexagons that covered the floor. But there the similarities ended. In this place was a potpourri of odors that was more of death than of life. The air was still. The few staff people around didn’t seem to have anything to do next.

The hall widened into a circular sitting area that was vacant except for a man in a wheelchair. A black and white television mounted on the wall ran an old Seinfeld show, its contemporary flavor in stark contrast to the place. The man in the wheelchair gave no indication he knew anyone had joined him. Or that the television was on.

“We told him you were coming but you never know what he understands. You all want me to roll his chair out into the yard?” the attendant asked.

Ana and Warfield glanced at each other as they came to realize this was the man they had come to see. Ana touched the fingers of her right hand to her lips and drew an audible breath. She wanted to excuse herself.
There’s been a mistake. Please forgive me.
But there was enough left of the man she’d known, even with this white hair, the black-ringed eye-sockets, that she couldn’t deny him. She couldn’t just walk away.

“Yes. Yes, please.”

In the courtyard, Warfield remained standing and Ana sat at the lawn table across from Quinn’s wheelchair. The vacant eyes that rose to meet hers may have flickered recognition but she couldn’t be sure. His hair didn’t completely hide the scars and pink flesh left from the gunshot wound and surgery. A thread of drool had stained the white tunic he wore. His left hand, knotted into a misshapen fist, lay still, dead, as if an attendant had brought it out and placed it there. Quinn’s eyes drifted to the hand, perhaps, Ana thought, to question why it failed to reach out as he willed it to. Ana had to force herself to look at this once-proud man who had been her lover; who only a short time ago sat at the table with the world’s most powerful.

Sooner than she had planned to leave, Ana knew she could stay no longer. There had been so many victims, so much waste since that black day in Atlantic City when it all began, long before she even knew Quinn. Now here she sat before the man responsible. He had betrayed everything precious and loved and held sacred by those who believed in him. She looked once again into the empty eyes and wondered whether the bullet spared any of the brain cells that accounted for memory.

She rose and squeezed his hand in hers, and after a few moments nodded to Warfield. As they walked away she knew she would never return. Warfield glanced back at Quinn as they left, and was almost certain he’d seen Quinn looking directly at him before turning his eyes away.

* * *

Months after Seth’s capture, in the spring when cherry blossoms defined the Washington landscape, Warfield watched from the front row of the courtroom with Joe Morgan as Seth stood before the United States District Judge James Piller for sentencing, a ragged scar on Seth’s neck showing above his shirt collar. The jury had earlier found him guilty on all of the many counts against him and found for the death penalty. The judge could elect to reduce the sentence to life without parole and Seth’s attorneys had fervently pleaded for that.

The court had appointed lawyers of Middle Eastern heritage for Seth to avoid any appearance of prejudice by his attorneys. Warfield figured they had coached Seth on respectful behavior before the court, especially now at sentencing.

“Anything you would like to say to the court before sentencing?” Judge Piller asked Seth, standing between his attorneys before the bench.

Seth had shown no emotion throughout his trial, including when the jury verdicts were read. Now, his hands and feet shackled, Seth stared at the judge with contempt, his head tilted back, his eyes piercing the judge’s. “America is nothing,” he sneered. “This court is nothing. Your jury is nothing. You have no authority over me. Proceed at your own risk. Any punishment I receive, you and your United States will receive one-hundredfold.”

Seth then cleared his throat and spat on the polished mahogany front of the bench without ever taking his eyes off the judge. When the bailiffs threw him to the floor he bit one of them before they got him under control.

Judge Piller, himself shaken, gaveled the alarmed spectators in the courtroom to silence and declared a recess until eight o’clock the next morning.

Seth’s attorneys looked at each other in dismay. There was no chance now that the judge would reduce the sentence.

* * *

That evening, Warfield called Joe Morgan at home.

“Some show today,” Warfield said.

“Can you believe that scum bag? At least he’s cinched the death sentence.”

“I was thinking about that. You got any pull with the judge?”

“No pull. But I can talk to him. Something in mind?”

“Maybe you should get Judge Piller to consider life without parole.”

Morgan seemed stunned. “
You get some sort of brain virus while you were in Tokyo, Warfield?
”

“No, listen…”

They spoke for a few more minutes and said goodnight.

* * *

The following morning, Seth stood before the bench in something resembling a straightjacket that bound his upper body. His feet were in chains and a heavy mask covered his mouth and nose.

Piller looked at Seth and cleared his throat. “In my thirty-one years on the bench, I don’t remember anyone for whom the death sentence was more appropriate. The evidence presented in this court demonstrates your unsuitability, indeed abject incapacity, to live in harmony with the human race. You are a disgrace to humanity. Your behavior before this court has done nothing to improve my view of that.”

Seth’s lawyers stared at the floor. They knew what was coming.

Then Judge Piller handed down life without parole. Seth’s lawyers looked at each other in disbelief. Warfield gave Joe Morgan a jab in the ribs.

That night Warfield called LaRez Sanazaro in Las Vegas to request a favor.

* * *

Ten days after sentencing, Seth sat alone at the table in the mess hall. It was his second day since arriving at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and completing orientation. What caught his eye was the way the other inmates moved out of the way of an older man he noticed trudging across the mess hall.

The old man sat down across from Seth without looking at him and was joined seconds later by a man with a balcony-like forehead that hid his eyes. Soon, a somewhat fragile, studious-looking man sat beside Seth.

Seth finished eating and was about to leave when Doyle Riley spoke.

“Seth. Right?”

Seth glared at Riley without answering, surely wondering how this man knew his name.

Riley nodded toward Cosmo. “My client, Cosmo here, he welcomes you to Atlanta.”

* * *

On a warm evening in June, Fleming and Warfield went to the home of Ana Koronis for dinner, it being her turn to host. Fleming noticed several travel magazines on the coffee table. “Going somewhere?” she asked Ana.

“Some sort of getaway, to give my writing a kick start. Haven’t decided where to.”

Fleming jumped. “War Man, she’s going with
us!
” she said, then turned to Ana. “We’re going to the Grand Canyon. Got a friend who hosts tours on the Colorado River.”

They spent much of the evening talking about the Canyon and pulling descriptions out of Warfield. By the time it ended Ana had agreed to go with them.

* * *

Warfield gazed out the window of the Boeing 757 airliner at the jagged crests of the Rocky Mountains in the distance. Ana Koronis got up to go to the lavatory.

Fleming looked at Warfield. “Okay, War Man. You’re too serious. You’re wondering why Cross told you to see him when you get back. Well, you’re not back yet. You just left! So quit thinking about it.”

“Taking up mind reading now, are you?”

“Exactly! You’re thinking of the CIA job that’s become vacant.”

Warfield hadn’t thought of that, but he wouldn’t take CIA if Cross offered it to him.
Would he?”

Two Years Later

Patricia Adams stood at
her desk in the Chrysler Building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan as an early winter snow fell silently outside her window. Since her first visit to the city she had loved the old Art Deco skyscraper she was now standing in and vowed that someday she would have an office there. That had been almost nine years ago, and three years ago she had fulfilled her pledge after years of growing her escort business—now sporting more than a hundred beautiful women suitable for all occasions to the well-heeled men who comprised her clientele. The early years, working out of a large old house in Brooklyn, had been rough, but hard work and perseverance had paid off, and here she was now. Patricia not infrequently made the society pages and was no stranger to the mayor, law enforcement agencies including the NYPD and FBI, and other ranking officials, her profession of social disrepute seeming to matter to no one, and in fact they often found her to be a valuable ally because of her connections. Her business savvy, professionalism, stunning beauty, and cheerful personality had made it all possible.

Of course, obligatory was keeping up with all that went on in her town by reading the
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
that were delivered to her offices every morning. Always of primary interest were articles involving high-profile officials and others who might be her clients, as any publicized association between some Fortune 500 executive charged with a white-collar crime and her girls could not only frighten away some of her other clients but also test her valuable connections. An article of interest in today’s
Times
caught her eye: “Former CIA Director Seeks Release.” The story went on to say that Austin Quinn, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had been held in a mental rehabilitation center for the past three years after a failed attempt to take his life by a gunshot to his head, had recently been declared competent to stand trial for the crime of selling official secrets to a foreign government. The
Times
had interviewed a sampling of defense attorneys who agreed that the U.S. Government had no chance of conviction in this case due to the statute of limitations, but government prosecutors said they had found a way around that. A hearing on the matter had been scheduled. Patricia clipped the article and added it to a thick yellow file folder in her desk.

Patricia opened a floor safe inside her utility room, pulled out a large envelope and placed its contents on her desk, and retrieved the letter from old Doc Rivera, whom she—then Karly Amarson—had called the night Austin Quinn had stabbed her in the chest nine years earlier. Doc came to her apartment within minutes that night, stopped her bleeding and secretly rushed her, near death, to the emergency room at Charity Hospital in Atlantic City and admitted her as Patricia Adams. He stuck with her as she recovered over the next few days and they talked about a plan for her. The doctors said it was a miracle that no permanent harm came directly from the knife wound; the real risk was that she would have bled to death had Doc Rivera not acted so quickly. It was too dangerous for Karly to stay in Atlantic City, and they decided in the interest of absolute secrecy to not even let Frank Gallardi know she was alive. Karly, now Patricia Adams, then left Atlantic City for good and headed to New York to start her new life.

Now she opened the letter from Doc and read it again: