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 picture 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.