To Free a Spy

by Nick Ganaway

  Cross arranged for a U.S. Air Force plane to return Warfield to Washington. As it climbed out over the North Pacific on the sunny mid-afternoon, Warfield looked out the window at the same blue waters Fumio Yoshida had flown above days earlier. He and his disastrous cargo had been sent to the bottom of the Pacific forty miles from the California coast—less than five minutes away from the mainland at five-hundred miles per hour. The bomb didn’t detonate and the Navy was determining the risk it posed and what needed to be done. Japan was cooperating.

  Warfield had learned more about the 747 from the U.S. ambassador. The MOT had held it in lieu of payment of airport fees and other money owed to the Ministry by a struggling airline. The airline had bankrupted and Yoshida managed to sequester the plane by manipulating reports.

  * * *

  It was around three Wednesday afternoon when Warfield’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. Cross had called him en route and invited him to come to the White House when he arrived. “Nothing urgent,” Cross said, so Warfield begged off until the next morning, but Cross went on to say the media reports were alarming the country and the world. Some speculated the Japanese government was behind Yoshida, and others wondered what dangers the submerged bomb posed at the bottom of the Pacific, yet so close to the mainland. Cross said he was addressing the nation at ten that night to quiet the rumors. When Warfield got off the plane at Andrews, a driver took him to Hardscrabble in an air force limousine reserved for VIPs.

  Warfield saddled Spotlight and rode for a long while, returned to the house and took a steaming hot shower. When Fleming got home they drove to Ticcio’s for dinner and Warfield found himself loosening up. He didn’t say much about Tokyo and she didn’t probe. They had a couple of beers, danced a little and joked around. Fleming ribbed Warfield about the night he got bent out of shape when she came in with another man who happened to be her brother. Warfield winced at the memory but was able to laugh with her.

  They got back to Hardscrabble minutes before ten and Warfield remembered Cross’s speech and flipped on the TV. Cross came on and assured the American people and the world that the Japanese airliner downing was an isolated incident orchestrated by a single, deranged civilian who happened to be Japanese. The Japanese government was never involved. The 747 was believed to be carrying a nuclear bomb but it was never activated and went intact to the bottom of the ocean far from land. The Navy was handling the situation. “Our defense systems worked as intended and there was never any risk to Americans,” Cross said. Warfield raised an eyebrow at that comment but knew the president’s words were carefully edited by Cross’s advisors.

  Cross finished his prepared statement and offered a personal comment. “In addition to our military, I want to express my personal appreciation for my advisors who stood with me when difficult decisions had to be made, and for retired Army Colonel Cameron Warfield, who uncovered this situation in Tokyo and played the key role in bringing it to a successful end.”

  Warfield couldn’t believe his ears. For the first time he could remember, he was embarrassed. Fleming whooped and hollered and grabbed him around the neck. “My hero!” she hooted. “My man saved the world. You’re famous, War Man.”

  “Hey, you act surprised!”

  They were still laughing when Warfield’s line rang. It was Cross. “Hope you didn’t mind me blind-siding you.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, but it was a case of being in the right place at the right time,” Warfield said.

  “Some wise man said luck dwells at the intersection of preparedness and opportunity,” replied the president.

  * * *

  In the Oval Office the next morning, Cross told Warfield he’d done him a disservice by calling his name on national television. “Destroyed your anonymity.”

  Warfield laughed. “Yeah, had a few calls on my voicemail this morning. Friends, army buddies, people from my home town, including the mayor; he wants to do a parade or something. Macc Macclenny. CNN. NBC. Fox News. U.S. News & World Report. Washington Post. No Hollywood producers yet, and that’s the call I stayed up all night waiting for.”

  Cross turned serious. “Look, Cam. I want you to stay on the job. There’s plenty to do.”

  Warfield wasn’t sure he wanted that and it showed on his face.

  “Don’t decide now,” Cross said. “After you get through the debriefings take a few days off and then call me.”

  * * *

  Later that morning Warfield listened to the tape made in the Sit Room during the last minutes before Yoshida was shot down. He played a certain passage several times and wrote something in his notebook. Then he met with representatives from several agencies of the intelligence community to give them the details of his time in Tokyo. Their congratulatory comments after the meeting reminded him that before now he wouldn’t have gotten as much as a hello from most of them.

  * * *

  Later that day Warfield got a call from Abbas Mozedah in Paris. He razzed Warfield for being a glory seeker, then congratulated him. Warfield laughed it off.

  “Got an update about Ms. Koronis,” Abbas said. “Her brother Seth’s long-time mistress Suri? She left him. Escaped, I should say. Seth’s group’s now calling her a traitor of God. We’re sheltering her here in Paris. Suri’s talking to us some.”

  Then he dropped a bombshell on Warfield. Suri claimed Ana Koronis didn’t know about Seth’s involvement in terrorism when she first went to stay with him after the deaths of her husband and son. After a few months, Suri clued Ana in. When Ana confronted her brother he acknowledged knowing about the terrorist abduction of her husband and son but tried to justify the attack to Ana, although he said he wasn’t involved himself.

  According to Suri, Ana was depressed and furious. Seth persisted, charging that without America, there would be no turmoil in the Middle East and innocents on both sides wouldn’t have to die. Similar to the prosecutor’s hypothetical scenario in Ana’s trial, Seth told Ana she had a role to play in this war: Return to America, take advantage of her status and position and assist the cause from there. After all, this was her homeland he was fighting for.

  But the similarity ended there. Suri said Ana stormed out of the room and returned to the U.S. days later.

  Warfield was skeptical. “Did Seth know about her trial? That she’s in prison now?”

  “Suri says yes.”

  “He could have saved her from that if all this is true.”

  “He had no use for her after she rejected his agenda. This man has no warm blood, no humanity. He does not meet the definition of a human being, Cameron.”

  “Why did Suri leave him?”

  “Afraid of him. Seth’s brother-in-law Hassan was one of Seth’s henchmen. You remember I told you Hassan believed Seth murdered his wife, who was Hassan’s sister. Suri knew it could happen to her as well.”

  “Yes. You said Hassan was going to kill Seth when he knew for sure.”

  “Seth hasn’t survived this long by chance. One of his bodyguards suckered Hassan into believing the bodyguard was going to betray Seth, so Hassan hooked up with him and told him of his own plan to kill Seth. Soon after that, Seth summoned Hassan to his headquarters on the pretense of a planning meeting. When Hassan sat down at the table, Seth stood up behind him and swung a machete like one of your baseball bats. Lopped his head off clean and had it stuffed and mounted. Suri says it hangs on the wall in the room where he meets with his associates as an example to would-be traitors.”

  Warfield shuddered at the image. After a moment, he said, “Could be a setup, Abbas, this story of Suri’s.”

  “I was able to cross-check some of it after she asked us for protection. I think she is straight. We are trying to get all the information we can about Seth but she is going slow. She is afraid for her life. It comes out in bits and pieces. But I admit I cannot say with certainty she is truthful.”

  “Not much to go on and it won’t get Ana out of prison. Even if Suri’s telling the truth, how cou
ld you prove it?”

  “Listen to this, Cameron. She speaks of a meeting that I think could have been related to Petrevich—his escape from Russia with the uranium. Seth had made his needs known to a CIA source he had been working with but that source fell out of sight.”

  “Hell, that could be Harvey Joplan!” Warfield said

  “Maybe. When someone else came along instead of the CIA source he knew, Seth was skeptical and sent one of his men to meet with this replacement.”

  “When did it happen, this meeting?”

  Abbas checked his notes. “April twenty-two last year.”

  “Prior to Habur gate then, sure.” Warfield thought about it. If the meeting actually was before Habur gate, it could’ve set up the Petrevich transfer. After Joplan was killed, and after prosecutors in Ana’s trial presented evidence she had the opportunity and motivation to be Seth’s accomplice, Warfield had stopped thinking in terms of another mole: He was then satisfied it was Ana who provided the CIA database to Seth. But if Suri’s information was factual, maybe Ana was innocent. That led Warfield back to one of his earlier theories: That Joplan revealed the name of his contact to his killer, who could have been planted in the Atlanta prison by someone who knew there was profit in the information Joplan had agreed to tell the feds.

  Warfield now believed there was a good probability the mole was still operating in Washington, but he wasn’t quite ready to share this. Chances were too great that this American spy was in the intelligence loop and would be tipped off. “I’m coming over to meet with Suri,” he said.

  “I thought you would.”

  * * *

  Four of Abbas’s men met Warfield at Charles DeGaulle Airport and drove him to their headquarters in the rear of Abbas’s engineering office. Abbas got in the van with them and they headed to the safe house where Suri was kept. Warfield and Abbas rode in the middle row of an old Dodge minivan with darkened windows. Three men in back and the rider at shotgun scanned the street with assault rifles in the ready position. Warfield thought at one point they were being tailed but Abbas told him it was his men.

  The safe house was located in an alley, tucked between buildings that might have been candidates for demolition. The scent of garbage fueled by the August heat filled the air, and the broken concrete pavement, ever sunless, was blackened with permanent mildew and discoloration. Graffiti covered graffiti on the brick walls along the alley, and a blob of paint someone had applied long ago had begun to peel away, partially revealing a stenciled red swastika that was once meant to be out of sight forever. When they stopped, Abbas’s men lined the short walk to the door where a muscular man bearing an assault rifle met them. He was Jalil, Abbas said, who had been at Habur.

  There was not much more light inside the darkened house than in the alley. A bar took shape around to Warfield’s right, and beyond that a pool table with suspended lights above, a grouping of sofas and chairs and a mantle and stone hearth. The place had been a lounge in earlier times. The marble floor was honed to a fine patina by generations of boot leather and was now dotted with Persian rugs. Blue cigarette smoke, only a little less pungent than the stale air it displaced, hung below the ceiling. Jalil and a dozen other armed men stood or sat but were anything but relaxed.

  Suri was upstairs in a small windowless suite they had made for her. A fist-size opening had been chiseled through the brick wall, long ago if the aging grime around the hole was any indication, and no doubt by someone who could no longer bear the absence of light, or perhaps wanted a breath of fresh air. Suri’s eyes reflected her level of caution when Abbas introduced Warfield. “He’s a friend,” Abbas told Suri in English. “He knows why you are here.”

  Warfield interpreted the slight change in her quivering lips as an attempted smile.

  “You’re doing all right, Suri?”

  “Scared. Very scared,” she said quietly. Her eyes searched his as if to judge whether he was a friend as billed. Just as Warfield had come to Paris so that he could read hers.

  Warfield considered this woman for a moment. She might be frightened but she was strong. “Of Seth. Of course.”

  “He will send someone to kill me. I trust no one now.”

  “You’re safe here, Suri.”

  She nodded. “Maybe.”

  They talked for two hours, Suri slowly growing less cautious and referring to a secret diary she had kept for dates and specifics. As Abbas had reported, Suri said Seth had sent one of his trusted lieutenants to meet with the American contact and assess the risk in dealing with him. They had met in Paris.

  “Who was Seth’s man who met with the American?” Warfield asked.

  “Pierre?…Philippe?…one of those. I can’t remember his name,” Suri said.

  When he felt he had all the information she had to give him, Warfield expressed his appreciation and told her she was safe with Abbas. On the way back to DeGaulle Warfield mulled over everything Suri had said, including the date of the meeting, April 22nd last year. When Warfield’s plane was airborne he called Paula at the White House and asked her to get in touch with Judge Hartrampf from the Ana Koronis trial and request permission for him to meet alone with Ana. Someone in Justice could have arranged it but Warfield wasn’t ready to involve Justice in this.

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible. After you get the judge’s approval, set the meeting up for me.”

  “You’re pretty confident Hartrampf will agree to it.”

  “You can do it. If it starts to look impossible, get the president involved. If anyone requires reasons, say I have new information about Ana.”

  * * *

  Ana Koronis read the form a second time. Cameron Warfield had obtained approval from a judge to visit her. No reason was given but she knew it was no social call. Without Warfield’s role in her ordeal, she might still be on the outside.

  Even given Warfield’s involvement, Ana had been surprised at her jury’s verdict, but she had no doubt that ethnic prejudice played a role. A big role. She might have understood a guilty verdict if there had been some hard evidence for the prosecutor to point to, say, the tapes in the safe under her desk at the law firm. Those would have been hard for her to explain to a jury. But there was nothing like that. Everything prosecutor Harriman gave the jury was circumstantial except the testimony of Helen Swope, Austin Quinn’s housekeeper, and that was one person’s word against Ana’s.

  She thought of the first time she met Colonel Warfield. What was it now? Seven, eight years ago? The U.S. Ambassador to Greece, Spiro Koronis, had invited Ana’s senior partner Roy Addler of her law firm to join him at a roast for Austin Quinn in Atlantic City. Addler and Ana were friends as well as law partners and he asked Ana to accompany him. She agreed, even though she would know no one at the table and wasn’t particularly political. And it had been awkward at first, that night. Ana, Roy Addler and Warfield had been seated at the Spiro Koronis table long before their host arrived. The Ambassador finally showed up muttering apologies for his tardiness. Some diplomatic matter had come up as he was about to leave his room, he told them. Garrison Cross, the current president of the United States, who was head of CIA back then, was even later, muttering something about never having all the parts to his tux in one place.

  Warfield was still in the army back then and Ana thought he was a friend of Cross’s. At any rate, she remembered that Warfield saved the evening. She liked Addler but he could be as boring as watching paint dry, and Warfield made the time fly by with some wit and a couple of colorful war stories. Ana recalled that Frank Gallardi, the emcee for the event, and some of the others seated at the dais were late getting there, too. The whole thing was off schedule all evening and Gallardi was in a foul mood. But thanks to an abundance of food and booze—and, in Ana’s case, Cam Warfield—no one seemed to mind.

  Ana remembered trying to discreetly scope out the guests in the ballroom. She’d never been in the presence of so many important people. Just about every person who ever had his pictu
re in The Washington Post was there. To top it off, then-president McNabb made a brief appearance.

  When Quinn’s friends, including Cross and Spiro Koronis, were finished stinging him with mock insults from the stage, he dropped by Spiro Koronis’s table and talked with everyone for a minute or two. Quinn held Ana’s eyes with his own during that brief meeting. Years later, after her marriage to Spiro and his death, Ana and Quinn began seeing each other.

  Ana stared out the tiny window of her cell now and shook her head. She never could have guessed in a million years that three men she met that night—Spiro Koronis, Austin Quinn and Cameron Warfield—would in turn have such a major impact on her life.

  And she was certain the Cam Warfield who was coming to visit her in jail would not be so full of good humor and cheer as on that night in Atlantic City. Neither was she.

  * * *

  Warfield had to drag himself out of bed after the Paris round-trip but felt better after a run and shower. He wasn’t back up to five miles yet but increased his distance with each run. Paula had left a message on his voicemail that Judge Hartrampf approved a meeting with Ana, and she had arranged it for one o’clock that afternoon. The Bureau of Prisons still kept Ana Koronis at Alexandria Detention Center under a special arrangement pending availability of space at a suitable federal facility that housed females.

  Warfield arrived at the ADC at twelve-forty that afternoon and was greeted by Aubrey Holden, the lieutenant he’d met when he had visited Joplan. As they walked to the interview room, Holden, now a captain, mentioned his brother again. “Tom’s here in D.C. now, the FBI Building.”

  “Maybe I’ll run into him one of these days.”

  Warfield didn’t know Ana on any personal level, but he knew she wouldn’t view him as a friend. Although he hadn’t testified at her trial, Ana knew he had been the impetus for her ordeal. And when reporters contacted him after the trial, Warfield had voiced contempt for her. “Ana Koronis did what spies do. Get the trust of somebody that’s got access to useful information and betray him. In Ana Koronis’s case, she got to the director of CIA.” Ana wouldn’t have missed that on TV, and she wouldn’t have forgotten it was Warfield who said it. He remembered how she stared at the jurors on the day of closing arguments and wondered if she was still as angry.